Long Time Leaving (36 page)

Southern culture vis-à-vis America needs clarification. What's called for is a grand, gallant gesture. Not on The Nashville Network—the only message TNN conveys is that Southerners have some kind of plastic hair. Maybe on CNN. A big production number. Lyle Lovett in the Bing role?

Let me just toss this out. If I were a civil rights organization, I wouldn't demand that the government apologize for slavery. I would put on a big festival whose theme
is forgiving
America for slavery. For spice, I would single out certain Americans for special forgiveness: George Bush (either one), Clarence Thomas, Trent Lott, Terrell Owens, Bill O'Reilly. And let them figure it out.

The day after this review of Albert Goldman's Elvis appeared in
The New York Times Book Review,
in 1981, I walked past a New York magazine editor's office as he was saying, “You know those Southern boys, they won't hear anything bad about Elvis.” In fact, I had been at some pains not to overreact—had, indeed, maybe underreacted—to the book's contempt for white Southern culture. When, in the
Village Voice,
Greil Marcus, a northern Californian, denounced Goldman's book for reeking of that prejudice, I felt bad that I hadn't come down harder. Over the years, I would brood from time to time about having let an enemy of my people off the hook, especially after Greil, with whom I have cordially performed, sort of, in an authors’ rock and roll band, informed me that I had actually
liked
Goldman's book.

Did I fail Elvis's memory, in the clutch, and was ethnic self-hatred a factor? If so, I forgive myself now. At the time the book came out, maybe it needed to be pissed on harder in the newspaper of record, but since then Peter Guralnick's biography of Elvis, in two magisterial volumes, has blotted out Goldman's, blind spots and all, and nobody who knows anything about American music belittles the Southern white working-class contribution to it. Can we be certain that Elvis himself would have abhorred sufficiently the juicy stuff in Goldman's book, if it had been about somebody else? Elvis died, reportedly, reading a book about the discovery of Christ's skeleton. From my ethnic standpoint, Elvis could have been a little less adorable and sharper.

But then he wouldn't have been Elvis. I saw him in the coffin, you know. Slick Lawson, photographer, and I were right there. Elvis looked bad in the coffin. He didn't look like he'd gone to heaven. He looked like—maybe this is just my bias talking, but he looked to me like he wished he'd gone to college.

I know my parents wished they could have. They weren't entirely thrilled about how college affected me, but—but this is about Elvis.

Then, too, Elvis is about each of us. One last note: “Mr. Fike” is
Times
style, not me being snide.

E
lvis Presley, the paragon of something nobody had been a paragon of before, whose motto was “Taking Care of Business,” who turned white America on to undulation, was completely out to lunch. Didn't have a clue. Frittered away his talent, let his manager shortchange him and shuffle him off to the Third Armored Division, saw himself as a Master in the line of Christ and Madame Blavatsky, ate a hundred dollars’ worth of Popsicles in one night,
became an abject “medication” junkie while carrying Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs credentials and denouncing dope smokers, wore mascara and eventually diapers (because he was frequently incontinent from taking drugs), relished snuggly quasi-orgies with teenage girls who were enjoined to keep white panties on, pettishly threw a knife and a watermelon and a pool cue at various women (injuring one for life with never an apology), paid a stripper to wrestle his chimpanzee, was ashamed of his penis (“Little Elvis”), spoke icky baby talk to his mother's corpse, lost his wife because he couldn't stand to have sex with a mother, liked to shoot off pistols in his bedroom, got disgustingly fat and didn't even have the sense to pay his toadies and strong-arm boys enough to keep them quiet.

These are among the affirmations—many of them new, and all of them fleshed out more fully than could have been expected, much less desired—of Albert Goldman's morbidly fascinating biography. It does no disservice to the book's substance or tone, I think, to say that it renders history's most popular singer as an enormously babied creep.

Mommie Dearest,
next to
Elvis,
is an encomium. Indeed, Christina Crawford's memoir makes her mother, Joan, more interesting. Goldman's book makes “Love Me Tender” or even “That's All Right, Mama”— hard to listen to without queasiness. After
Elvis,
can we reclaim our pleasure in the curled-lip insouciance of all those old
(old!)
photographs, or in what Peter Guralnick calls the “pure joyousness,” the “sense of soaring release,” that still bubbles out of this monstrosity's early songs?

Not all of this book's unpleasantness is Elvis's fault. Goldman has done an extraordinary job of breaking down the secrecy that surrounded (and no wonder) the King of rock and roll and his legendary manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Too often, however, Goldman is irritatingly unforth-coming about his information's provenance.

It seems clear that many of the dismaying private-life revelations come from former Elvis flunky Lamar Fike. “Poor Lamar,” or “the fat boy,” as he is called in the text, shares the copyright with Goldman and someone named Kevin Eggers (“who first conceived this project”). Goldman also adduces a host of other sources, from whom he has gathered an imposing lot of goods. But he, too, seldom cites Mr. Fike or any other witness in connection with particular details of portraiture.

The only part of Goldman's account that he concedes to be “a rough reconstruction” is one of the few scenes that may some day be checked against hard evidence: “Future generations will howl with laughter
when the tape-recorded [White House] interview of [President] Nixon and Presley is finally released as the comedy album of the year. Meantime, we have to make do…” with Goldman's imagination.

Elvis
would be far less off-putting if more chapters were as good as the one on Colonel Parker, which entertainingly recounts how Goldman established that this supposed West Virginian mastermind is, in fact, a Dutchman (original name, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), who not only took too much of Elvis's money and mired him in schlocky projects but also kept him out of tax shelters and foreign countries (except for the army duty in Germany, which damaged Elvis's spirit and from which a manager with fewer apprehensions could have saved him) for fear, most likely, of attracting federal attention to his own murky provenance. “Myth,” says Goldman, “is what we believe naturally. History is what we must painfully learn and struggle to remember.” History is also what we need sources for.

Documentation is not Mr. Goldman's only vulnerable suit. When a writer has no real grasp of the subjunctive
were,
would rather use two adjectives (“ugliest and most repulsive”) than one and takes evident pride in his ability to refer heavily, at the oddest moments, to Zarathus-tra and “Eliot's Fisher King,” it ill behooves him to dwell gravely on anyone else's vulgarity.

From such previous books as
Freakshow; Grass Roots: Marijuana in America Today; Ladies and Gentlemen—LENNY BRUCE!!
and a study of Thomas De Quincey, Goldman brings to
Elvis
what should be an ideally cross-fertilized background in the study of music, show biz, drugs, and degenerate personality. And he can write well about all four things. (For instance, his reconstruction of the sort of gospel show that inspired the young Elvis is, if somewhat condescending, vivid and pointed.)

But Goldman has an unsettling fixation on words like
nausea, horror, disgust,
and
putz.
His way with hippicisms like
dude
and
you'd have yeseff sumpin, wouldncha?
and
can you dig it?
is less than felicitous. And he is not the ideal chronicler of a career that began and ended in the Deep South.

Goldman tends to take a gratingly anthropological tone toward “southern men.” (“He would experience what southerners have always been best at experiencing: the ecstasy of self-destruction. They call it ‘Going to Jesus.’ ”) He thinks buttermilk and corn pone (probably the healthiest thing Elvis ate) is “soggy, infantile food.” He seems to think that anything he didn't grow up with himself—the song “Bye Baby Bunting,” for instance—is peculiarly Southern. He says Elvis's tacky
funeral “was about right for some cornball country yodeler destined for the Hall of Fame in Nashville.” The truth is that most members of the Country Music Hall of Fame are considerably more adroit stylistically than either Goldman or Elvis.

Goldman is out to debunk the Presley myth, which he says derives from American mass culture's “deep atavistic yearning for royalty.” But there can be few literate Americans who take the myth as seriously as Goldman does. Goldman provides evidence that Elvis himself, when not besotted by pills, money, and readily exploitable or exploitative people, knew that his life/career/art was a profound, astounding American joke.

Within one year, 1956, as Goldman points out, a twenty-one-year-old kid, recently scorned in high school, was transformed from an obscure country singer into the king of a new, culture-shaking music, a king who had already done his best work. He wasn't as good as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, or, God knows, Ray Charles, but he never wanted to be a great singer. He wanted to be the new Valentino. Maybe in another time he would have been.

A joke is at least as hard to live as a myth, especially when your life is as full of real grief and hardship as Elvis's was. One of the many peculiar things Goldman turns up is a “fatal hereditary disposition” on the maternal side of Elvis's family tree. Bad genes aside, there is something moving, as well as pathological, about the raw feeling that mother Gladys pumped into Elvis, and about the way he mourned her and twisted his sexuality around her memory. I would like to read a book about Elvis by someone who writes more venturesomely than Mr. Goldman does about mother-son love. Something about Elvis's grin appeals to the mother and the kid in us (Goldman, apparently, excepted), in a strange, mortifying but highly ponderable way.

Rotten as Elvis's forms of recreation could be, I think Goldman misses the humor in some of them. Foolish it was, to be sure, that Elvis and a couple of his boys flew from Memphis to Denver on the spur of the moment to get a certain kind of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, at a cost of sixteen thousand dollars. But I don't know why Goldman feels compelled to call it “a self-destructive stunt.” It sounds like the kind of thing a person ought to do when a certain kind of sandwich means more to him than a certain amount of money.

Surely any manner of sandwich seeking is more of a contribution to society than tax sheltering is. The Colonel ill served the eventual Presley estate (Elvis himself was able to buy ninety-seven thousand dollars
worth of trucks when he felt like it, so why should he complain?) by diverting so much of the King's money to the IRS, not to mention himself and Las Vegas casinos. But better Elvis should pay those multimil-lions in taxes (thereby doing as much for the “War on Poverty as anyone except Lyndon Johnson, who was also, as they say, no bargain) than you or I. The Colonel remains—all the more so after Mr. Goldman's exposure—a hell of a character. “If he had sheltered his income from the taxman and invested it intelligently,” sniffs Goldman, “Elvis Presley could have been as wealthy as Bob Hope.” Well, I ask you.

Elvis
is an ill-focused but undismissable book, which even such fullblown appreciators as Greil Marcus (see his
Mystery Train
for an altogether kindlier slant on the man who did so much with the words “Don't Be Cruel”) will have to read. But I think we can still be grateful to Elvis— if more sadly so, after this book—for his grin, his pelvis, his leap, and for the callow, punky, awful, presumptuously biracial, engaging, ineluctably erotic, still mysterious “specious tenor” (as Goldman describes it on its first professionally recorded take) of his voice.

This was an
Oxford American
column that came out on the cusp of 1999/ 2000, before I finished the brief biography of Lee that took me, off and on, longer than the Civil War lasted.

I
shouldn't be doing this, I should be writing my biography of Robert E. Lee. But narrower concerns keep crowding in. I've spent six weeks on and around the Mississippi River working on a documentary film, and this question nags at me:

Since a towboat pushes barges rather than pulling them, why do we call it a towboat? No one seems to know. A retired riverboat captain told me that it's because the barges that a given towboat is pushing are called, collectively, a tow. But why are they called a tow? He didn't know. It didn't bother him. It bothers me.

I have talked to several active and retired towboat captains who didn't know either. One of them told me he used to keep a pet pig on his tow-
boat, and when I asked him what the pig ate, he said, “If we were towing grain, he'd eat grain.”

“What if you weren't towing grain?” I asked him.

“A pig'll eat coal,” he said.

That satisfied me. As long as it satisfied the pig. But I don't see how a man can spend a lifetime on towboats without worrying about why they're called towboats. I should drop it, I know, I know.

From the
Oxford English Dictionary,
I gather that the verb
to tow,
meaning pull, derives from the noun
tow,
meaning flax (as in towheaded), from which ropes were made, which makes sense, but…

“Wait a minute! Talk about synchronicity! I hear Elvis singing about tows right now on my stereo! Something about “the two-tow connected to the three-tow and the three-tow connected…”

Oh. Never mind.

What I just now did, I ran into the next room and rewound…

Hmm. In fact, a compact disc doesn't unwind, rightly speaking, so it's an anachronism to say that we rewind it. Maybe barges were originally pulled….