Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit
Read Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit Online
Authors: Carole Nelson Douglas
Foreword
Dead Man Walking
He was born during the Depression in a two-room shack,
in Tupelo, Mississippi, a surviving twin and a hillbilly,
into a family lineage of poverty,
alcoholism, and little
more than barely getting by.
He became the world's most well-known, wealthy,
and
successful entertainer.
An eternal adolescent reared by a passive father and
a mother both doting and domineering, he was a lonely
mama's boy who believed in work and the golden rule,
who
dreamed of performing but had been conditioned to expect pampering.
He was the first in his family to graduate from high
school, a hyperactive, nervous outsider, a boy whose
love of religion and music would lead him to identify
with black culture in a segregated South before the six
ties'
Civil Rights movement.
He was a shrewd, intelligent, magnetic performer,
who created his own image as an international singing
star
and sex symbol by blending two socially segregated traditions of music, black
and white, into the worldwide phenomenon of rock 'n' roll.
He was modest, polite, generous, and even tender, a
young man who won the eternal loyalty of men and
women
who knew him, and millions who didn't.
From the outset, his meteoric career defied all odds,
and
accelerated his utter destruction on all fronts.
From the outset, the seeds of addiction were sown in
his dysfunctional upbringing and a borrowed fistful of
his mother's diet pills, then a handful of Dexedrine tab
lets
in the Army, then the live performer's night-is-day
Draculian lifestyle, and finally pills by the literal gallon
from
an array of "feel-good" doctors.
In his early twenties, death would separate him from his
adored mother Gladys, leaving in her place Colonel
Tom Parker, the controlling personal manager and ex-
carnival hustler who would indenture his young property
into servitude in low-grade films, confine him to songs
that enriched the pockets but not the soul, and finally
send him sick and sick at heart into years of relentless
touring, all to underwrite the Colonel's elephantine ego
and
eventual million-dollar gambling debts.
His
performing career became a manic-depressive's
endurance
contest as his obsessive personality dove into
toys, girls, and pills in the face of boredom and fatigue.
The
Colonel quashed all attempts by him and others to revitalize his career. After
the entertainer's death, estate
lawyers would
strip Parker of control, but the estate
didn't have the deep pockets to
reclaim millions from a manager who shamelessly took the lion's share of his
financially unsophisticated sole client's enormous
in
come.
Dogged by Parker's soulless management, drugged by the
side-effects of fame and prescribed uppers and down
ers,
pursued and isolated by fans, he became an egocen
tric monster who indulged in spasms of compulsive
generosity and grandiose mysticism behind a
protective
circle of flunkies and
thugs, within a rotating harem of dozens of young, pliable women from whom he
craved
cuddles rather than sex.
By many accounts, he was the most charismatic performer
ever to take the stage, a singer whose moves to
the music mesmerized his audiences into an orgasmic
love feast. By all accounts, during the last two of his
forty-two
years on earth, he was a dead man walking,
self-medicated
into a stumbling parody of himself, lost
in a self-destructive stupor.
Finally, shortly after three of his once-loyal inner
cir¬cle published a tell-all book revealing his eccentricities and drug abuse,
enter ignominious death. He was found dead in 1977, age forty-two, in his
bathroom, autopsied
(drug abuse was
denied as a cause of death then), and
buried in Cadillac state amid a fan outpouring of hys
terical
grief.
He left everything to his only daughter, but on his
father's death two years later, his ex-wife became ex
ecutor and tried to redeem the careless losses of the past
with post-mortem merchandising. Under
her manage
ment team, the home
he'd bought in the first fever of
success,
Graceland in
became a
mélange of
unofficial national monument, tourist
and shrine that attracted fans from all over the world.
His fans never deserted him. His genuine talent, cha
risma,
and generosity outweighed his tragic flaws. The
contradictions he embodied in larger-than-life fashion
are the
common mysteries of life, death, and human per
sonality,
but to conventional society, he had always been
a threat and a joke, from his rural rocker beginnings to
his overblown
music like Bob Dylan and John Lennon had always
cred
ited him for the birth of rock 'n'
roll even while many
black musical artists accused him of co-opting
their mu-
sical thunder. Now revisionist rock history has enhanced
his performing reputation. A video and book industry
memorializes him to this day, for good or ill. Super
market tabloids report people sighting him here and
there. His songs have sold millions and millions and
continue
to sell.
Exit the man who was born to be Fate's most famous
dead
man walking. Still walking.
Enter the fabulously flawed legend that won't die.
Enter
the King.
Prologue
The
King of
Rock 'n' Roll
The
King was getting a bad feeling, the way his mama used to sometimes.
She'd
been right about the Colonel.
Beware the blue-eyed woman.
Huh!
She'd been
damn
right about that one.
Look at Cilla, running the whole shootin' match at Grace-
land now. Who'da thought that pretty little thing
would turn
out to be tougher than 'em
all, in the end? 'Course, he'd raised
her up. And if there was a lot
he'd sheltered her from
bein',
there
was a lot he didn't shelter her from
seein',
maybe just
to learn
what not to do.
Taking Care of Business
was an okay
motto, but all Cilla
had wanted then was
TLC. That's what all the King's men and women got: gold bracelets and necklaces
reading TCB for the
guys, TLC for the girls. He was good at handing out
the trin
kets. But the fact was he'd never
been any damn good at TCB,
anyway. He just let his father
run things, and let the Colonel take over. Anybody walking in off the street
wantin' to do-for him was welcome, then they'd take-from ... hell, if he'da
known, he should have given Cilla
the TCB
job. Woulda given her something to do at
'Course
she had something to work with when she took
over.
Bein' dead does a lot to raise certain people's stock. Look at JFK. Or Marilyn.
Man, he never met her, and she was a little
old for him and a little fat (look who's talkin'). Didja see her
in
Let's Make
Love,
where they were
spoofing his sudden fame in a musical routine? One hot number. Not the
delicate, dark-
haired type he loved. Still,
that woulda been something. But
it ain't over till it's over, you know? Lookin'
back does no damn good. The tell-all books and
coffee-table picture books and the movies and videotapes and miniseries
and the special edition watches and the pink, white,
and blue trinkets;
they do the talkin' nowadays. TCB.
Only
one who hasn't been heard from on the grand glory
days and sad last nights of Elvis Aaron Presley is the King his
own
self. And even that isn't impossible. Heck, all the King's men had mostly used
ghost writers to get their side of things down on paper.
And here he
was
one.
The King laughed, staring at the two silent-running TV
sets
tilted like gaming
consoles into the green Naugahyde ceiling
above
him in the blacked-out bedroom. He shot the remote
at them in turn, revving up the sound, speeding
through chan
nels, past reruns of old movies featuring dead pals and
girlfriends. But some of them were still alive and kicking, his ex-buddies,
ex-babes, ex-hangers-on.
Just like him.
The
King is dead. Long live the King.
Live and in person!
News flash:
It lives! Even the word "lives" is just a mixed-up Elvis.
He
laughed, and hummed a few bars of "It's Now or Never"while surfing
the babbling channels over and over and over.
The
place was dark as a tomb, and freezing cold. He
couldn't tell day from
night.
He had always liked it that way.
Chapter 1
The King
of
Rock
and Roll
'em!
I am taking my ease in the living room of Miss Temple
Barr's flat at the Circle Ritz apartments and condomini
ums, a snazzy fifties joint built like a four-story
black-
marble hockey puck. In
other words, it is round, and therefore definitely not square.
You
could say the same about me.
chamber,
and is now cursing the darkness because the
VCR is not working and she cannot see to correct the
problem.
I myself have never troubled to keep up with these
new-(angled devices. Remote controls and answering
machines are as much as I care to deal with. So although
she is invoking my name—along with those of others often
employed in such circumstances, such as "for Pete's
sake, for the love of Mike" etc.—I know that she
expects
no
more help from my quarter than she does from the
ever-absent
Pete and Mike.
“
Two stars in the building is one too many,"
she grumbles, punching buttons that punch right back by refusing
to stay depressed. "The Mystifying Max's
greatest sleight-
of-hand trick on or
off stage was making this zippety-doo
dah
machine work! Where is the man of the house when
you really need him?”
I am right here, where I always am—when I am not off
on my investigations—ready to absorb all gripes. But op
erating VCRs is not in my contract, not even when I am
the partial reason for the technological trials I see
unfold
ing before me.
`There!"
parquet floor with a satisfied sigh. "Better watch, Louie. You are up
first!”
That is only the natural order of things, so I stretch,
yawn, manicure my nails, and scratch behind my ears.