Elvis After Elvis

The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend

Gilbert B. Rodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136155130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

'For a dead man, Elvis Presley is awfully noisy. His body may have failed him in 1977, but today his spirit, his image, and his myths do more than live on: they flourish, they thrive, they multiply.'
Why is Elvis Presley so ubiquitous a presence in US culture? Why does he continue to enjoy a cultural prominence that would be the envy of the most heavily publicized living celebrities?
In Elvis after Elvis Gil Rodman traces the myriad manifestations of The King in popular and not-so-popular culture. He asks why Elvis continues to defy our expectations of how dead stars are supposed to behave: Elvis not only refuses to go away, he keeps showing up in places where he seemingly doesn't belong.
Rodman draws upon an extensive and eclectic body of Elvis 'sightings', from Elvis's appearances at the heart of the 1992 Presidential campaign to the debate over his worthiness as a subject for a postage stamp, and from Elvis's central role in furious debates about racism and the appropriation of African-American music to the world of Elvis impersonators and the importance of Graceland as a place of pilgrimage for Elvis fans and followers.
Rodman shows how Elvis has become inseparable from many of the defining myths of US culture, enmeshed with the American dream and the very idea of the 'United States', caught up in debates about race, gender and sexuality and in the wars over what constitutes a national culture.

1

ELVIS STUDIES

This is the nature of modern death.… It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. It has a sweep it never had before.… It continues to grow, to acquire breadth and scope, new outlets, new passages and means.… I sense that the dead are closer to us than ever. I sense that we inhabit the same air as the dead. Remember Lao Tse. “There is no difference between the quick and the dead. They are one channel of vitality.” He said this six hundred years before Christ. It is true once again, perhaps more true than ever.

(DeLillo, 1985: 150)

WHEN IT RAINS, IT REALLY POURS

For a dead man, Elvis Presley is awfully noisy.

His body may have failed him in 1977, but today his spirit, his image, and his myths do more than live on: they flourish, they thrive, they multiply. As the musical duo of Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper (1987) has observed, “Elvis is everywhere,” sneaking out of songs, movies, television shows, advertisements, newspapers, magazines, comic strips, comic books, greeting cards, trading cards, T-shirts, poems, plays, short stories, novels, children’s books, academic journals, university courses, art exhibits, home computer software, cookbooks, political campaigns, postage stamps, and innumerable other corners of the cultural terrain in ways that defy common-sense notions of how dead stars are supposed to behave. Elvis’s current ubiquity is particularly noteworthy, not just because he refuses to go away, but because he keeps showing up in places where he seemingly doesn’t belong.

Take, for example, Elvis’s appearance in a New York Times story on the 1991 National Hardware Show in Chicago. Given that this is a straight news story on a trade convention and the products on display there, one wouldn’t expect Elvis to receive even a passing mention. Heated birdbaths, electronic pet feeders, dehydrated potting soil: all these items belong here, insofar as their appearance in such a context seems perfectly in keeping with the subject of the story; Elvis, on the other hand, is not a figure with any obvious connection to hardware or home improvement goods. Nevertheless, the article concludes with a discussion of Vegiforms,

plastic molds that are placed over growing vegetables. The vegetables then grow into the shape of celebrities and cartoon characters.… [Vegiforms company president Richard] Tweddell’s favorite mold was a bust of Elvis Presley, which he had to stop making after being pressured by the Presley estate. “They indicated that they have had bad experiences with licensed Elvis food,” said Mr. Tweddell, holding up summer squash bearing a striking resemblance to the king of rock-and-roll.

(Shulruff, 1991: 4)¹

As is the case with so many of his recent manifestations, Elvis’s presence here seems unnatural, but there he is anyway: a particularly boorish and persistent gate-crasher, one who not only shows up where he doesn’t belong, but who does so in a loud and unsubtle fashion.

The most notorious of Elvis’s recent newspaper appearances, of course, take place not in mainstream papers such as the New York Times but in the less well-respected realm of the supermarket tabloids, where hardly a month goes by without at least one banner headline announcing newsflashes such as “WOMAN CURED OF THROAT CANCER – BY LICKING ELVIS’ STAMP” (Fontaine, 1993) or the not-yet-dead Elvis’s advice to his daughter (“DIVORCE MICHAEL!” (Dexter, 1994))² to millions of shoppers waiting to pay for their groceries. While these stories are often sufficiently outrageous to merit attention themselves,³ perhaps more surprising is the fact that they have inspired a sizable number of Elvis sightings⁴ outside the pages of the tabloids. For example, in 1990, a San Jose software firm capitalized on the tabloid-fueled “Elvis is alive” rumors by introducing Search for the King, a graphic adventure computer game in which the goal was to discover the true whereabouts of the supposedly dead “King,” a singing star partial to white jumpsuits and performing in Las Vegas showrooms.⁵ Underscoring the supermarket papers’ inspirational role here, the original release of the game came with a copy of a fictional tabloid containing appropriate “King”-related headlines (Himowitz, 1990).

Response to the tabloids’ tales of Elvis, however, hasn’t been limited to good-natured parody. For example, both the New York Times (Schmidt, 1988) and the Washington Post (Harrington, 1991) have taken Elvis items first reported in the tabloids and followed up on them without any hint that they might have been doing so satirically. Other major dailies have even gone so far as to run their own outrageous Elvis stories before the tabloids’ reports could make it to press: the Scripps Howard News Service (Saavedra, 1991a, 1991b), for instance, beat the Sun (Shaw, 1991) into print on the story of an Arizona conference investigating the possibility that Elvis might still be alive.

In fact, recent years have found a surprising number of people responding to the tales of Elvis’s continued good health by explicitly stating that “Elvis is dead” (e.g., Barth, 1991: vii; Carlson, 1992; Dominick, 1990: 116; Guterman and O’Donnell, 1991: 13; Olson and Crase, 1990: 277; Quain, 1992: xx; Sammon, 1994; Wombacher, 1991). These days, when Joe Esposito and other former members of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia are interviewed (as they not infrequently are) on radio and television talk shows, their hosts almost always ask them to verify that Elvis is, in fact, dead. Taken as a collective statement, these affirmations of Elvis’s demise come across less as simple expressions of fact than as urgent proclamations intended to put an ongoing debate to rest once and for all, as if the question of Elvis’s current health (or lack thereof) were still in serious doubt.

Perhaps the oddest example of the moves to reaffirm Elvis’s status as a corpse is The Elvis Conspiracy: a 1992 television special, hosted by Bill Bixby and broadcast live from a Las Vegas hotel showroom, that took two hours in the midst of prime time to demonstrate that Elvis Presley did indeed die in 1977. What makes this program particularly odd is not just the fact that it didn’t present evidence supporting the official account of Elvis’s demise (statements from eyewitnesses, hospital records, the coroner’s report, etc.) – instead, it focused on debunking a series of tales of post-1977 encounters with a living, breathing, perfectly healthy Elvis – but that it was actually a sequel to The Elvis Files, an almost identical live broadcast from 1991 created by virtually the same team of writers and producers.⁶ The only major difference between the two shows was that the August 1991 broadcast (Files) preempted two hours of prime time programming around the anniversary of Elvis’s death in order to convince its audience that he was still alive, while the January 1992 broadcast (Conspiracy) preempted two hours of prime time programming around the anniversary of Elvis’s birth in order to convince its audience that he was still dead. In other words, the makers of Conspiracy not only took the trouble, fifteen years after the fact, to prove that Elvis was no longer living, but they did so as a rebuttal to their own barely five-month-old claims to the contrary.

What makes these “Elvis is dead” sightings especially noteworthy is the surprising amount of respect they have for both the tabloids’ reports of Elvis’s non-death and the wave of rumors concerning Elvis’s current whereabouts that have circulated in the wake of the tabloids’ claims. Under the best of conditions, after all, the tabloids’ reputation as reliable sources for believable (much less accurate) news is sufficiently poor that even their most conventional news stories are regularly ignored.⁷ That the tabloid-fueled tales of Elvis encounters have been taken seriously enough to generate any response – even when that response takes the form of derisive parody and disbelief – is highly unusual. Tellingly enough, when the tabloids finally managed to attract “mainstream” media attention⁸ for one of their stories – the January 1992 Star feature on Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers – many commentators found that Elvis provided the best point of reference by which to judge the Star’s scoop. As one anonymous Star staffer aptly described it, the Flowers/Clinton story “is bigger than Elvis because for the first time, the rest of the press has to come to us. They think we’re trash, but they do the same things we do all the time. They just hate to admit it” (Savan, 1992, emphasis added).

Not all of the press attention given to Elvis recently, however, has been tabloidesque in nature … though even the straight news items that play the Elvis card don’t always do so in predictable ways. Take, for example, a Washington Post article (Pressley, 1991) about a Charlottesville, Virginia, woman who legally changed her name to Elvis Aron Presley. At first glance, this appears to be a fairly conventional tale of the unconventional and obsessive fandom that Elvis inspired. But closer examination reveals that the former Lilly May Painter made her unusual name change back in 1981 (so the Post wasn’t exactly jumping on a fresh piece of news), that she had no intentions of changing her name anytime soon (so there’s no change in the old news to report), and that the story ran in late May (well outside the usual time frame for the waves of Elvis stories that regularly crop up around the anniversary of his birth (8 January) and his death (16 August)). Ms Presley is no longer even an obsessive fan of her namesake, as a 1983 car accident convinced her that God was a more important figure than Elvis. What makes this article particularly unusual, however, is not only its placement in the news-oriented “Metro” (as opposed to the features-oriented “Style”) section of the Post, but that it dominated the front page of the section, featuring two photos above the fold that (combined) took up more space than any other single story on the page. On this day, all the section’s “hard news” articles (including stories on a local university’s hunt for a new president, growing tensions between Hispanics and suburban police, and Memorial Day ceremonies involving then Vice President Dan Quayle and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell) took a back seat to the quirky feature on Ms Presley. While the notion of a “slow news day” might explain the appearance of Elvis-related stories in the dark recesses of a paper (e.g., buried somewhere in a corner between the obituaries and the classifieds), it’s a wholly inadequate explanation for the way that Elvis effectively hijacks the Post’s “Metro” section here. (Further discussion of this sighting can be found in chapter 2.)

Yet another example of Elvis’s ability to intrude upon the mainstream press in abnormal ways comes from a Wall Street Journal story on an alleged “voodoo plot” to murder a Mississippi judge (McCoy, 1989). The story ran as front page news, it dealt with a very real and very serious felony case, it took up over thirty column inches of text, and the alleged crime had nothing whatsoever to do with Elvis. Yet since the events in question took place in Tupelo – Presley’s birthplace – Elvis was accorded a place of prominence not only in the article’s title (“Mississippi Town All Shook up over Voodoo Plot” (emphasis added)) but within the body of the story as well, where Elvis allusions in the opening and closing paragraphs framed the piece. The article’s conclusion makes the gratuitous nature of Elvis’s appearance here especially clear:

The case isn’t likely to come to trial before May. In Tupelo, some people remain curious about the whole affair. “I’m glad the judge didn’t come to harm, but I’d like to see someone get cursed, just to find out if it works,” muses Laverne Clayton, sitting next to the actual bed in which Elvis supposedly was born at the cramped two-room Presley family home, where Mrs. Clayton works as a guide. “That’s a mystery I’d like to see cleared up.” Incidentally, as to that other mystery with which Tupelo is connected, Mrs. Clayton’s expert opinion is that “Elvis is dead as a doornail.”

(McCoy, 1989: 4)

Not only is Elvis not directly relevant to the impending trial that prompted the Journal to send McCoy to Tupelo in the first place, but Laverne Clayton has nothing to do with the case either: her only connection to the story is that she holds a job relevant to Elvis’s unusual presence here.

Elvis’s ability to take over the news, however, is not limited to the odd story here and there (which could conceivably be explained by the playful self-indulgence of a few editors and journalists who also happen to be Elvis fans): taken as a whole, the US media seem more than willing to give prominent play to Elvis-related stories, even at the cost of neglecting more serious hard news items. For example, the trade journal Advertising Age runs a monthly column called “Cover Story,” a ranking of celebrities’ popularity as determined by their appearances on the covers of major national magazines; for June 1989 the “Cover Story” champ was Danielle Riley Keough (Donaton, 1989). Who is this Keough person? And how did she manage to beat out such luminaries as Oprah Winfrey, Rob Lowe, Roseanne Barr, Madonna, and even the then newly deceased Gilda Radner by comfortable margins for this honor? The answer is simple: on 29 May 1989, Keough was born, becoming Elvis’s first grandchild. Two things make the “Cover Story” coronation of “the newest Presley” (as the infant was often incorrectly referred to) so remarkable: (1) the fact that she was probably the youngest person ever to be accorded this honor, and (2) the only “accomplishment” that allowed her to command such overwhelming media attention was her kinship with Elvis. In other words, twelve years after his death and across two generations, Elvis is still important enough in the eyes of a majority of editors and journalists to make headlines and cover photos simply by having a grandchild.

Perhaps a more clear-cut indicator of Elvis’s unusual posthumous newsworthiness, however, is the massive media attention given to the Elvis postage stamp. After months of news stories, feature articles, public opinion polls, op/ed columns, letters to the editor, and political cartoons on the subject, on 4 June 1992 the US Postal Service announced the results of the public election (the first of its kind) to determine the stamp’s design. All four of the major broadcast television networks (including Fox) provided live coverage of the early morning press conference in which “the young Elvis” design was declared the winner. That very same evening, however, when President Bush scheduled a rare press conference of his own, only CNN carried it live: the broadcast networks refused to disrupt their prime time schedules to do the same. Even during an election year, a dead Elvis managed to attract more press attention than an incumbent president running for office, lending an unexpected credence to a favorite punchline of cartoonists and columnists (political and otherwise) that the real election in the US in 1992 was not the one to choose a president, but the one to choose a stamp. (The Elvis stamp is discussed further in chapter 2.)

Another prominent site where Elvis lives on today is in the thriving phenomenon of Elvis impersonators: by some estimates, there are 3,000 such performers working in the US alone (Hinerman, 1992: 119). And, like Elvis, impersonators are showing up more and more in places where neither they nor Elvis would seem to belong. For instance, recent years have found ersatz Elvises cropping up in a variety of advertisements,⁹ on network television news stories,¹⁰ as part of successful recording acts that don’t record Elvis songs,¹¹ and even on the presidential campaign trail.¹² Moreover, the “will to imitate” that characterizes Elvis impersonators is no longer limited to attempts to duplicate his look and sound: one can find a scale replica of Graceland in Roanoke, Virginia (Clauson-Wicker, 1994; DeNight et al., 1991: 309; Rosenfeld, 1992) and a full-sized re-creation of the mansion in Australia (“Long Live the King,” 1991). There are even women who have found work (at least fleetingly) as Priscilla impersonators (“Elvis Is Everywhere,” 1992; “Long Live the King,” 1991), one of whom has even gone so far as to marry an Elvis impersonator (Joe Berger, 1995), though it’s not yet clear whether the couple will make their re-creation of the original Presley marriage complete by divorcing after five years.

Recent years have also seen the publication of a vast number of books devoted to Elvis, ranging from efforts to (re)tell the story of Elvis’s life (e.g., Greenwood and Tracy, 1990; Guralnick, 1994) and death (e.g., Goldman, 1991; Thompson and Cole, 1991) to collections of Elvis-centered fiction and poetry (e.g., Peabody and Ebersole, 1994; Sammon, 1994; Sloan and Pierce, 1993); from cookbooks filled with his favorite recipes (e.g., Adler, 1993; Butler, 1992) to collections of quotes by and about him (e.g., Choron and Oskam, 1991; Rovin, 1992); from thinly veiled fictionalized accounts of his career (e.g., Charters, 1992; Childress, 1990) to semi-scholarly collections of writings on his art and his cultural significance (e.g., DePaoli, 1994; Marcus, 1991; Quain, 1992). Some of the most unusual of Elvis’s recent book appearances, however, have occurred in the unlikely realms of science fiction stories and children’s books. In 1992 alone, for inst...