Re: Elvis
When TCU played in the Independence Bowl, the Princess insisted that we visit Graceland. I went under mild protest but I have to admit from the moment we entered the house to the moment we left the museum I was more and more fascinated. I really got a feel for how Elvis the human became Elvis Incorporated and all of the attendant pressure and responsibility that followed.
When we got home, I dived into the Peter Guralnick biography. I recommend it to anyone interested in further study. I have yet to see the movie…reviews are all over the board but I intend to give it a look.
I'm a lifelong Elvis fan and a former concert promoter and emcee. I once "discovered" a teenaged singer who would go on to play Elvis in various musicals on the Vegas Strip and throughout the country and who became personal friends with several of the key players in Elvis's life. I compared notes with him on the movie and he agrees with me that the flick is: a) wildly inaccurate; b) grossly unfair to the Colonel and others; c) was intended to please Elvis's Estate (meaning, Priscilla) for cross-promotional purposes; and d) fails to leave audiences with an understanding of who Elvis really was as a person.
1. Contrary to the movie, the Colonel never told Elvis what to do on stage and he didn't maneuver Elvis into the Army for p.r. purposes. Elvis was drafted and neither Elvis nor the Colonel wanted that. Now, the Colonel did convince Elvis to serve his stint as an ordinary grunt instead of joining an entertainment wing. And that was a fatal decision: while the movie falsely portrays Elvis popping pills in his pre-Army days, the truth is that Elvis became a drug addict in the Army when his platoon sergeant gave him uppers to keep him from falling asleep and catching frostbite while on guard duty in wintry Germany. Elvis returned to Memphis with a suitcase full of pills and the die was cast.
2. The movie fails to mention that Priscilla, an Air Force brat, was only 14 when Elvis met her in Germany. The movie also doesn't explain that her father only agreed to let Priscilla move into Graceland when Elvis was discharged on the tacit understanding that he would marry her when she turned 21 and keep her pure in the meantime. Elvis sent her to an all-girls high school and the fact that she was being "kept" by Elvis during those years was fairly well-known in Memphis but not elsewhere. But then Elvis fell in love with Ann Margret, his co-star in "Viva Las Vegas." The two were a perfect match but they didn't get married, partly because Elvis was committed to Priscilla. Elvis and Ann would remain close friends but the movie doesn't even mention her. She was the true love of his life.
3. When Priscilla turned 21, she and her father began to pressure Elvis to marry her as promised. And he did so but only with great reluctance. Their only child, Lisa Marie, was born 9 months later. However, when Elvis went back on the road, he started seeing other women. This didn't surprise Priscilla but what the movie doesn't show is that she had an adulterous affair with one of his karate instructors to get back at him. Still, Elvis didn't want a divorce but she insisted on it. While the movie shows her, post-divorce, begging Elvis to go into rehab, that never happened. In sum, the movie portrays Priscilla in a hagiographic light but she was no saint. After the divorce, Elvis had a four-year relationship with Linda Thompson but Linda isn't even in the movie! She's pissed about that but I'll bet Priscilla isn't. Also, Elvis's best friend and road manager, the late Joe Esposito, is also conspicuously absent from the movie. Probably because Esposito never viewed the Colonel as a villain, but the movie sure does.
4. With his fat suit, prosthetics, and an accent which sounds nothing like the real Colonel's, Tom Hanks hams it up in the movie like he's playing the Joker in a show-business setting. But the real Colonel was a complex man and, contrary to the film, neither Elvis nor anyone else knew about his sketchy background as an illegal alien until long after Elvis died. And, no, Elvis didn't fire him on stage in Vegas, as the movie falsely portrays. In reality, Barron Hilton bought the hotel where Elvis performed and established a rule banning fraternization between hotel employees and entertainers; Elvis was already friends with an employee whose wife was dying with cancer and so he made a charitable visit to see her, prompting Hilton to fire the man for breaking his rule. Elvis then denounced Hilton on stage during a concert and the Colonel chewed out Elvis after the show for doing so. Elvis then fired the Colonel but, fairly quickly, took him back. Loyalty meant everything to Elvis and he never forgot that the Colonel had made him the star that he was.
5. Yes, it's true that the Colonel took 50% of all of Elvis's merchandise sales and 25% of all of Elvis's other income but Elvis was also the Colonel's only client. Plus, the Colonel turned down several well-known stars who wanted him to be their manager while working for Elvis. No, the Colonel wasn't perfect and his gambling addiction caused Elvis to play in Vegas way too much and was probably behind a bad decision to cash out Elvis's pre-1973 RCA royalty rights that year and split the proceeds on a 50-50 basis. But the Colonel never enabled Elvis's drug addiction as the movie falsely portrays. Frankly, the Colonel didn't know anything about music, movies, or drugs, for that matter. He just knew how to negotiate contracts and make big money for Elvis and himself. While the movie emphasizes his propensity for "snow jobs," the Colonel was actually known in the business as a straight shooter who never broke a contract.
6. And it was the Colonel who negotiated the deal to make the seminal 1968 NBC TV special. Sure, the Colonel envisioned a lip-synched Christmas show but NBC's producer had a much different idea and Elvis went along with the producer. But there certainly weren't two different stages on the set at the same time, as the movie ridiculously shows! In truth, it was the Colonel who rearranged the studio audience to get all the pretty young girls sitting in the front near Elvis before taping of the live segments began. Yes, the assassinations of MLK and RFK that preceded the show's taping led to the song, "If I Can Dream," being sung by Elvis in the show but it wasn't a "protest song," as the movie wrongly claims; it's actually a fairly innocuous, inspirational tune. A year later, Elvis did "In the Ghetto," but even that song wasn't really controversial. The Colonel always told Elvis to avoid commenting on issues of the day and to stay out of politics and Elvis followed that advice. In private, Elvis held conservative political beliefs, as best expressed in a letter he wrote to President Nixon before their legendary meeting at the White House, in which he trashed the Beatles, the Black Panthers, the SDS, and other anti-establishment types. Naturally, the movie doesn't even mention that letter or that meeting since it would be politically incorrect these days to do so.
7. When Elvis met the Colonel, he wanted to become a national recording star. So, the Colonel got him on RCA Records, put him on national TV, and the rest is history. Elvis also wanted to become a big movie star and the Colonel made that happen as well. Later, when Elvis wanted to stop making movies and go back on the road, the Colonel arranged all the tours. They were a team, a true partnership. Elvis's motto was TCB, Take Care of Business, and business was what the Colonel was all about as well. What Elvis wanted, the Colonel invariably provided for him. So, contrary to the movie, if Elvis had wanted to tour internationally, he would've done so. If Elvis had really wanted to accept Barbra Streisand's offer to co-star with her in "A Star is Born," it would've happened. Elvis had a lot more "agency," as they call it these days, than the movie suggests. He insisted on hiring the very best sidemen, backup vocalists, orchestra and orchestra leader in the land and he paid them all very well. And the Colonel never objected to that. In the end, Elvis was his own worst enemy and the cause of his own demise.
8. While Elvis's mother had a drinking problem, she was a "sneak-drinker" and it's unlikely that Elvis even realized that she had a problem. So, there's no evidence that Elvis ever cussed her out about her drinking, as shown in the movie. That scene is incredibly disrespectful to her as is the movie's implication that Elvis's father was merely a toady for the Colonel who also enabled his son's drug addiction. The truth is that nobody could stop Elvis from popping pills but Elvis himself.
8. Finally, the film utterly fails to reveal Elvis as the kind, caring, unbelievably charitable soul that he was. He never forget his humble roots and always treated everyone with the utmost respect. Elvis used to buy Cadillacs for complete strangers not to mention his friends. Whenever he heard about someone in need, he sprang into action to help them. Elvis gave away so much money that his estate was only worth $5 million when he died. Today, his Estate is worth about $500 million. Perhaps he'd be proud that his Estate is still taking care of business, printing money, and providing jobs to so many people. But I don't think he'd be pleased with how Baz Luhrmann (with a $95 million budget to work with!) portrayed his life.
9. Lastly, I agree with Prince of Purpoole that the two-volume biography of Elvis by Peter Guralnick is must reading. I was introduced to Guralnick by a mutual friend, the late Sleepy LaBeef in the early 1980s, long before he wrote his Elvis books and Sleepy told me that Guralnick was all aces when it came to music writers and he was right.
