Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (64 page)

Nor do I have a raft of former associates eager to leak
every detail of my life and times. Miss CND is bad enough
with the occasional personal
eccentricity she will detail in

my
fan publication,
Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-
lntelligencer.
Did the world really need to know that Mid
night Louie Jr. was taken for a girl when he first came to
the shelter? This is a sore point
with Elvis and me: we are both such gorgeous dudes that some envious types
would
use it to impugn our virility. This is nonsense!
We also
have been dogged by paternity suits and
death threats.

I, of
course, am completely innocent and still kicking.
As for Elvis, anything is possible.

Very best fishes,

Carole
Nelson Douglas
 
Takes the
E Train

Midnight Louie, Esq.

Have an Elvis sighting to report, or merely wish in
formation about Midnight Louie's newsletter and/or
T-shirt?
Contact him at
Midnight Louie's Scratching
Post-Intelligencer,

L-or me, Elvis was always
inevitable.

His past presence hangs over the
Las Vegas
landscape
like a ghost moon, visible day and night, night and day.
He
first peeked from behind the curtain when Elvis im
personators contributed to the climax of
Cat in a Crim
son
Haze,
the fourth Midnight Louie novel.

I was never an Elvis fan. My grade-school best friend
and I swore that we'd never join the screaming hordes
of
teenyboppers making him such a sensation. Our Mid
western upbringing ensured that we'd disdain dangerous icons of sexiness
(or sexual excess, or sexual liberation,
pick your point of view) such as Marilyn Monroe and
Elvis Presley.

Later I realized that Elvis's musical influence had
been truly extraordinary, but I still didn't care for or
about
Elvis, though I knew I needed to know more about him to fully portray Midnight
Louie's
Las Vegas
.

In 1996, while on a Midnight Louie Adopt-a-Cat book
tour of the Southeast, I had just enough down time in
Memphis
to race to
Graceland
via
Gray Line tours. I
joined the milling
throngs in the souvenir plaza and
donned
headphones for a self-guided tour, feeling like a
fraud
among the faithful. The fabled house and grounds
surprised me; so ordinary, really. I most vividly remem
ber a painfully thin horse in the pasture behind
the
grounds; very old or ill, for no
tourist attraction would
abuse an
animal. Was this some frail survivor or de
scendent of Elvis's horse-riding kick of '66? A last wit
ness to his final spurt of happy (and expensive)
enthusiasm before he turned totally inward into a
para
noid kingdom of obsessive karate,
mysticism, megalo
mania, prescription drugs, guns, and badges?
At the Meditation Garden Elvis loved, filled with
flowery floral and written tributes, I was
impressed de
spite myself by the
numbed silence of fans who filed
past
the engraved tombstones set into the ground. Here
lay Elvis, his beloved mother, his ineffective
father, and
his ever-present paternal
grandmother. He called her
Dodger. As
a kid he once threw something at her and
she ducked so it missed. No doubt that Elvis inherited
his mother, Gladys's, notorious temper. Even there,
though, I remained an unbeliever in
the temple of an
other faith. Not even
the sober contemplation of death
could make me a pilgrim to
Graceland
.

In 1994, I was asked to edit a collection of stories
about Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn left me as cold as Elvis,
but I dutifully delved into the mountains of Marilyn
books.
I even included my take on M. M., a dramatic
monologue
about what Marilyn would be doing at age
seventy if she had survived: debuting on Broadway.
Soon I found myself dusting off my long-shelved per
forming skills (theater was my college major) to
don
M. M. "drag." I not only delivered the monologue but
on occasion answered questions and related to
crowds
in the M. M. persona.
Moonlighting as a Marilyn im
personator
enlightened me enough to finally confront El
vis impersonators, the Elvis phenomenon, and the even
greater
mountain of books on them both.

Every
writer becomes an actor, getting into characters'
heads, thinking like them, feeling for them. Any writer who deals with
historical personalities becomes a kind
of psychic channeler. Eerie how much you come to
know about that person beyond mere fact. It
happened
to me with Oscar Wilde. In a
short story, I named his
favorite
painting, my pure invention. A new, exhaustive
Wilde biography was published soon after (as they are
every couple
years). Two of his favorite paintings were
pictured,
including the one I'd cited. My prescience was no mystery; the painting was of
a religious subject with
latent
homosexual erotic appeal. I knew my time period,
my art history, human
psychology, Wilde's writings and biography, and therefore my man.

I never knew Elvis or wanted to. It's not a pleasant process,
investigating stunted lives and early deaths.
Like
a forensic psychologist, a writer reading about such
icons' hyperbolic lives can't help wondering what, if
anything, would have made a difference to the
tragic
decline that followed fame.
What would have saved El
vis (or
Marilyn)? Who killed Elvis (or Marilyn)? I
wasn't intrigued in a literal sense, because I concluded
neither death was murder, but by the paradox that
suc
cess so often breeds self-destruction.

Elvis'
life and death is an object lesson in the perils
of peaking early.
Before he was eighteen, he experienced
two intensely
emotional elements in his life that nothing
else could ever
duplicate: a singular connection to his
mother, an extended
and symbiotic twinship, and the ar
tistic and erotic euphoria of a
performing charisma that
drove his audiences to frenzy. His mother died when he
was
twenty-three. Nine years of movie-making surgi
cally separated him from his live
audiences. Fame and
fortune forced him into
isolation from overwhelming fan adulation and death threats. Nine years of a
return to the
manic-depressive performer's
emotional seesaw brought
him from career rebirth and comeback triumph to
a drug-assisted decline and death.

Compare
how Elvis and Marilyn were alike:
Both were self-made blue-collar heroes
Both stuttered Both
scorned underwear Both had birth certificate misspellings of their middle names
(Norma Jeane/Jean; Elvis Aron/Aaron) Both were overmedicated by doctors
Both created iconic personas that were perpet
uated
by impersonators and massive merchandising
Both
rebelled against the sexual hypocrisy of
the fifties
Both sought to be taken "seriously" as actors;
Marilyn fought for and got better films
Both
were dominated by soulless money men
who stifled their potential and
careers

The best book about Elvis is Peter Guralnick's two-
volume biography.
The Last Train to Memphis
relates
Elvis's phenomenal rise up till 1958, when his mother
died
and the draft interrupted his career, sending him to
Germany
as an army private. John Lennon later said that
Elvis
died when he went to
Germany
.
Careless Love
is
subtitled "The
Unmaking of Elvis Presley" and covers
the twenty-year period after Elvis returned to the United
States
until his shocking death at the age of forty-two.

Guralnick's books cite the few useful parts of the
many
memoirs that focus on Elvis's failings and extreme
behaviors, and also convey the inborn personal charm
and the performance charisma that Elvis cultivated
shrewdly before the sheer weight of his popularity (and
therefore power) overcame even his remarkable
gifts.
The Inner Elvis
by Peter Whitmer, Ph.D., explores the
pathology of a surviving twin and identifies Elvis
as an
abused child whose "lethal
enmeshment" by a doting
and
domineering parent, his mother Gladys, doomed him
to the fate he found. P. F. Kluge's novel,
Biggest
Elvis,
about Elvis impersonators
in
Guam
, is moving and in
sightful.
Gilbert B. Rodman's
Elvis After Elvis
makes a
scholarly case for Elvis single-handedly creating the cli
mate for
the sixties' social revolution: youth culture, the
protest movement for civil rights and against
Vietnam
,
the sexual
revolution and gay rights, and ultimately, the
resurgence of feminism that resulted from all the pre
ceding.

Reading many of the dozens of books about a pop
icon like Elvis is like listening to conflicting yet but
tressing testimony from an endless parade of witnesses
in a legal case. You must strain fact from self-serving
faction. You read details about the prescription medi
cation dosages, the autopsy, and the theoretical causes
of death; you consider forensic psychology and testi
mony of interested and disinterested parties. You even
tually distill the flood of facts and opinions into a
theory
of your own.

Here's mine: both nature and nurture created and de
stroyed Elvis Presley. His extended family of aunts,
uncles, and cousins had what is now recognized as a
genetic disposition to the disease of alcoholism. His
mother was never autopsied, and her death at age forty-
six was attributed to liver disease, but it is thought to
have been cirrhosis of the liver. She certainly drank in
her last years. The headstone Elvis put on her grave
reads "She was the Sunshine of our Home," and
during
Elvis's youth she
was described as musical and fun-
loving, although possessed
of a frying-pan-throwing
temperament. Photos
of Elvis with his parents as his
fame
grew show a somber, tender symbiosis: Elvis and
Gladys always focusing
on and touching each other;
Vernon
a tangential figure on the fringe of this consuming
bond. But Gladys's eyes are ringed with unhealthy black,
her expression is dead (or dazed by alcohol). She
is not a well or happy woman. Her cherished son's meteoric rise,
her
loss of contact and control as he was swept away in a
fever of touring and publicity and screaming girl group
ies,
coincided with her decline and death.