A King's Death in Gory Detail

CARELESS LOVE: THE UNMAKING OF ELVIS PRESLEY

by Peter Guralnick

Little, Brown

266 pp., $27.95

Elvis Presley is lucky to have a biographer so dedicated and caring as Peter Gurlanick. In his determination to depict a human Elvis he leaves no stone unturned, as the voluminous Notes, Bibliography and Acknowledgements attest. The result is a thorough account of the last 19 years of Elvis' life, in which the lithe, rebellious rocker who snarled "Hound Dog" while swiveling his hips turned into a pill-popping, sickly wreck. Although the reader may not exactly agree with the author's assessment that there is "no sadder story," the tale contained within Careless Love is certainly a tragedy, of "the price that is paid for dreams" and their fulfillment beyond any person's expectations. The only problem with this book is that although it is meant for the general reader, its scope is too expansive and there is too much detail to hold the interest of those who are not rabid Elvis fans or scholars.

There are several factors in Elvis' "inexorable decline," none of which, as Guralnick emphasizes in his introduction, provides a "simple or monolithic" explanation but which make his death seem all but inevitable. His life is presented as a round of silly escapades with his seemingly ever-present "Memphis Mafia," a group of employees/syncophants/friends whose main purpose was to indulge Elvis' whims, trysts with multiple girlfriends and performances in movies and concerts of varying quality. This was all fueled by a constant stream of drugs, mainly amphetamines, to which he became addicted in Germany while serving in the Army and which eventually led to the physical causes for his death: "the two principal laboratory reports...state(d) a strong belief that the primary cause of death was polypharmacy." His wild lifestyle is described in excruciatingly boring detail in Guralnick's book, giving the reader a fairly good idea of how Elvis must have felt sometimes while engaged in some time-wasting exploit or other. In frustration he turned to such occupations as reading spiritual books, learning karate and running a ranch, but none of it was enough to stop or save him: "he was going to go ahead and slowly kill himself, no matter what I did," Linda Thompson, one of Elvis' girlfriends, noted.

Elvis himself is convincingly presented as a Jekyll-and-Hyde type character, capable of both shocking brutality and lavish generosity, who expected his every whim to be fulfilled but who struck many as gentle and insecure. The gift that seemed to compel many of the people who surrounded him to stay around even after he had treated them cruelly many times was an intensity which, when applied to his personal relationships, manifested itself as an ability to make the other person feel as if she or he were the most important person in the world to him. In the studio, it took the form of a consistent professionalism in which he "seemed to live every word of (a song)," according to the musician Jake Hess, who also accounted for his "communicat(ing) with the audience so well" to this trait.

Bob Dylan, a legend himself, declared that Elvis "steps from the pages" of the predecessor to this book, Last Train to Memphis, and much the same can be said of this one. The most impressive quality of this book is Guralnick's ability to depict Elvis' life and detach the real person, a flawed yet well-intentioned human being, from the frozen images that make up his legend. The main flaw of this book is not one of flawed research but of excessive enthusiasm; he tells the reader more of Elvis' "sad story" than he or she may want to know.