The King Is Dead. Long Live the King
Nearly three decades after his death, Elvis not only lives, he reigns supreme.

Reviewed by Joe Heim
Sunday, August 20, 2006

FORTUNATE SON

The Life of Elvis Presley

By Charles L. Ponce De Leon

Hill and Wang. 242 pp. $26

ME AND A GUY NAMED ELVIS

My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley

By Jerry Schilling with Chuck Crisafulli

Gotham. 351 pp. $26

Eclipsing presidents and pop stars alike, Elvis Presley is arguably the most recognizable figure in American history. So it really should not have surprised anyone that when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi traveled to the United States in June, he chose to visit not Monticello, Mount Vernon or Hyde Park, but Graceland, the Memphis mansion where Presley spent the majority of his adult life. It was, Koizumi said, "a dream come true." Still think the King's impression isn't a lasting one?

Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of Presley's death on Aug. 16, 1977, and two new, very different books kick off what will certainly be an extended period of reflection, remembrance and, perhaps, reevaluation of an artist at once intensely familiar and yet so laminated in legend and lore that the truth of who he was can seem almost beyond knowing.

Charles Ponce De Leon takes a half-hearted crack at unraveling the Presley myth in Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley , a heavily footnoted biography that reads less as a compelling new take on the superstar than an overlong Wikipedia entry. Cribbing much of its material from the two volumes of Peter Guralnik's seminal biography ( Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley ), the book is a synthesis of turf that has already been covered in countless other publications.

Despite a somewhat scholarly tone (the word "eschew" is used no fewer than six times, by my count), it seems to lack any central thesis, and Ponce De Leon tends to make grand statements of the all-too-obvious variety: "Elvis Presley may have been a singular individual. But he was also a product of history, of a specific time and place."

But perhaps the book's more serious failing is that it is almost without passion. You never get the sense that Ponce De Leon grasps Presley's importance in any kind of visceral way. He simply covers all the bases, laying out the major events of the singer's life, including his early days in Tupelo, Miss., the economic hardships that brought his parents to Memphis, the early Elvis mania, the Army years, the mostly lousy movies, the loads of women, the prescription drugs, the profligate spending and, ultimately, the sorry, sorry end. If you know nothing about Presley, this cobbled-together but evenhanded bio is not the worst place to start. But Guralnik has already done it much better -- and with feeling.

A much more satisfying read is Me and a Guy Named Elvis. Its author, Jerry Schilling, was a longtime confidant of the King and a member of the Memphis Mafia, the name attached to the group of Presley's closest and oldest male friends.

Just 12 when he met a barely known, 19-year-old Presley playing football in a Memphis park, Schilling was along for the King's meteoric rise and his troubled, painful descent. At the beginning, he's there to recall, with startling intensity, hearing Presley's cover of Arthur Crudup's "That's Alright Mama," played for the first time on the radio: "He sounded tough at times, and sang with unbelievable confidence, but there was also a little tremble in his voice that kind of pulled you in. The way he sang, you could feel both a little smile and an ache."

And at the end, watching the thousands of people from all walks of life standing in line to pay their respects to Presley, Schilling is there to realize that "his music had pulled together gospel, blues, country and R&B into one sound. . . . In death, Elvis had done what he always sought to do in life -- he'd brought us together."

Schilling has lots of reasons to be grateful to Presley. After all, the star bought him the house he still lives in and dropped more jewelry and cars on the guy than he knew what to do with. But Schilling is a reliable storyteller and readily acknowledges throughout the book that, in addition to being incredibly generous, polite and full of laughs, his greatest friend was also moody, hyper-competitive and occasionally unreasonable. In a touching series of stories he brings Presley to life with an intimate portrait that puts readers in the room with the singer at moments high (rushing Priscilla to the hospital in time to deliver Lisa Marie, meeting the Beatles, teaching karate to Liza Minnelli) and low (a contrite Elvis admitting to Schilling that he had had a fling with Schilling's girlfriend, a drug-addled Elvis calling him to help pick him up off of the floor, an enraged Elvis trying to order a hit on Priscilla's boyfriend).

Certainly the strangest story, though, is of the fabled "lost weekend" in 1970 when Presley slunk away from Graceland without telling anyone, met up with Schilling in Los Angeles and then flew with him to Washington, where by sheer resolve Presley finagled an Oval Office meeting with President Nixon. (The photo of the pair is now legendary, but as Schilling points out in his book, the story of Elvis meeting Nixon remarkably never came to light until nearly a year later when it appeared in a column in this newspaper.)

More than anything, this moving and elegantly told memoir resonates with the spirit of a true friendship, albeit one beleaguered by the pressures of 20th-century stardom and the frustration of what might have been. Presley may have been undone by his excesses, but the author makes a strong case that his friend resorted to drugs because his aspirations as an artist went unfulfilled. "The pills he took were only Band-Aids," Schilling writes. "What was sucking the life out of Elvis Presley was creative disappointment." ·

Joe Heim is the assistant editor of The Post's Sunday Source section.