Warning: this post contains references to trauma and abuse
Elvis with his parents Vernon and Gladys
On 9th September 1956, the Ed Sullivan talk show hosted the performance of a singer which “ripped the 1950s in half, and America was never [again] the same”1. Composer Leonard Bernstein described Elvis Presley as “the greatest cultural force of the 20th Century”1 and he has been called “the greatest entertainer in the world”1. Elvis recorded over 700 songs and released 57 albums – covering gospel, hillbilly, rhythm and blues and rock n roll. He appeared in 33 feature films, including Love Me Tender and Viva Las Vegas. In 1971 he was given a Grammy lifetime achievement award.
“Elvis was the spark of light that lit up the dark room of our adolescence”2 (Beatles singer/songwriter Paul McCartney)
In part A, I explored the unusual relationship Elvis had with his parents – one in which his own emotional vulnerability may have become invisible as adults wrestled with past emotional poverty, a lost child, and the condemnation of society. At the same time, Gladys appears to have seen in Elvis a performer - something she nurtured. In part B, I will look at Elvis’s adult relationships with women and see if they might link back to these childhood experiences.
Elvis and women
If we were to go back to 1959, and Bremerhaven, in West Germany, we would find a US military base. On a particular night, in the Eagle Club, where families would socialise, we would find a teenage girl – the daughter of a captain who had landed three weeks before. She is talking to a friendly soldier called Currie whom she has not met before. After a while the soldier asks her, “Do you want to meet Elvis Presley?”2 The girl’s name is Priscilla Beaulieu and she is 14. Sergeant Presley is 22.
A teenage Priscilla waves goodbye to Elvis as he leaves Germany
Before reading about his life, I did not have an impression of Elvis as exploitative. But today this invitation to a 14-year-old sets off alarms for obvious reasons. So, what is happening here? A pattern of Elvis getting friends to arrange dates for him had started long before Priscilla. Perhaps the man whose persona oozed sexuality struggled to own or take responsibility for his own attraction to girls at times. Priscilla’s mother and stepfather were uncomfortable but let her visit the famous 22-year-old regularly. This was without knowing that there were a number of women in his life and that within weeks, Elvis would be offering the 14-year-old amphetamines – stimulants that by this time he was obtaining in bulk – to help Priscilla cope with school after late nights.
Biographer Ray Connolly emphasises Elvis’s perception of amphetamines as harmless – as if this separates him from other drug users. From my experience, most drug users have a way of viewing their favoured substance as less harmful than it is. No one says “yes, I’m killing myself one tablet at a time”. It seems in any case that both Elvis’s exploitation of women and his drug use got steadily out of hand. Elvis had already started employing girls he was attracted to, such as Secretary Elizabeth Stefaniak, and some of them he slept with, (going into a rage if they dated other men). His later marriage to Priscilla had little effect on his reliance on one-night stands, uppers and later pain killers. He was observed to be “sexually promiscuous, a hopelessly unfaithful lover, frequently jealous.” 2
In narcissism, sexual exploitation and drug use are sometimes themselves bedfellows. On the map of narcissism3, these are two strategies for maintaining maximum distance from shame or vulnerability. A strategy of performing an idealised role (far from an experience of shame) may be maintained or switched on and off using substances. And sexual relationships have to be characterised by emotional distance (far from an experience of dependency).
The map of narcissism3*
Elvis returned to the US after his military service in Germany telling the press about a “little girl that I was seeing…but it was no big romance”. Elvis was struck though, by this perfect doll-like girl. He was often taken with authentic innocence, but with Priscilla, there was also her lack of intimidation in his company – her confidence.
Once Priscilla was allowed to visit Elvis at Graceland, he immediately went about moulding the innocent doll he had been so taken with, into something else.
“He wanted my skirts shorter, my eyeliner darker, my make up thicker, my hair dyed jet-black…I was his doll whom he loved to dress.”2 (Priscilla)
In some ways he was making Priscilla less real. From a narcissism perspective the man who has developed a façade has been trained from an early age to pay attention to and invest his energies in the external (appearance, performance, power) and become blind to the internal – the feelings of the ‘self’. Such a man will in turn struggle to relate to anything other than a façade in others4. Although there was something authentic from the start, that Elvis was attracted to – something life-giving - this gradually began to slip through his fingers. In narcissism, this is a familiar story, and the causes lie well before the arrival of fame and power.
Elvis couldn’t let Priscilla go to college because she would then become more educated than him. But she was allowed to take up karate as Elvis was advanced at this. He would later regret this. When Priscilla tactfully criticised a song he had recorded Elvis raged: “don’t tell me how to do my job!”2 She was, it seems, not allowed to have a separate mind that saw things, or felt things, in its own way. In such relationships, the narcissistic partner is attracted to the authenticity and the separateness of the other and longs for a connection that is sustainable. But they cannot resist either trying to fuse the other’s mind into their own, or otherwise they push the person away. To be anywhere in the middle feels unsafe. Why? Narcissism theory points back to that time when the infant was one with its caregiver – when its own wishes and needs seemed to completely control the provision of comfort (see part A). This role, with its illusion of there being only one mind - is a powerful role to be in – but it is one that must in time be let go of.
If the child cannot transition into a situation in which he is aware he is dependent and can tolerate this, then he will have to make a choice. The vulnerability of being separate but dependent feels unsafe. He can either turn back – to oneness – or reject dependence and try to be self-sufficient. I think we see in Elvis the adult someone doing both at different times. In part A, I looked at the traumatised and complicated relationship he had with his mother.
In the run up to Priscilla visiting Elvis at his home, Graceland, he was seeing various other women but keeping this from her. When he eventually persuaded Priscilla’s parents to let her stay with him, he made promises to look after her. Still under the age of consent, the 17-year-old spent only the first night in her own bed. When she arrived at Christmas and complained of jet lag, he gave her two Placidyls and she slept for two days, missing Christmas day. Vernon wanted to call an ambulance but was stopped. At Graceland, Priscilla would quickly be using amphetamines and sedatives.2 Elvis continued to see Anita Wood after Priscilla’s arrival, until Anita gave up competing with Priscilla and left him.
As with a number of his actual girlfriends, Elvis apparently insisted on stopping short of full sex with Priscilla before marriage. He was ready though to take sexy polaroids of her in her school uniform. They married in 1967 when Elvis was 32 and Priscilla 21. At the ceremony, Elvis said of the person officiating,
“Ed Sullivan didn’t scare me like this”2.
Elvis soon seemed to have a problem with his sexual attraction to Priscilla once she had given birth to a child. Did this mean that she was no longer herself like a child? No longer vulnerable enough to make him feel invulnerable? Or did it mean that he could no longer be the only child, fused with a mother figure he called his wife? After all, he would come to call a future girlfriend, Linda Thompson, by the pet-name “Mommy”2. And Priscilla would always have to cut his meat for him at dinner.
Elvis and Priscilla on their wedding day
As a child, it seems Elvis had found one particular task intolerable. This was the task of facing and bringing to others his own emotional vulnerability. To do so led to him having a devastating experience of needing comfort and finding his need invisible. As an adult, it seems that he could not, in the closest of relationships, find it in himself to be vulnerable and dependent. There had to be distance. Elvis had to see other women – visiting one in Texas under the pseudonym Colonel Jon Burrows2. It would be nearly five years before Priscilla told Elvis she was finished. But the marriage did not take long to sour.
Fire power
On the map of narcissism, when the person feels condemned, humiliated or emotionally vulnerable, they have three places to go, in order to find distance from something that feels unsafe: they can be idealised, they can make others emotionally vulnerable, or they can condemn. What did Elvis ultimately do when Priscilla left him? In part A, we started with a scene in a hotel with Elvis ordering the murder of a man called Mike Stone. Who was this man whom Elvis wanted dead? He was Elvis’s karate teacher. And Priscilla’s too. When Priscilla finally gave up on Elvis and asked for a divorce, she told him she had been seeing Mike Stone. Elvis’s relationship with his wife had taken on the inevitable features of his relationships with die-hard fans: emotionally distant, controlled and inseparable. This was the only kind of relationship he could have. But now, she was separating. The humiliation would be public, but his intolerable vulnerability was now exposed even to himself.
In narcissism, power is discovered as a way to “transcend feelings of helplessness and dependency”4. And even in their smallest doses, these feelings have to be avoided. In extreme narcissism, guns become appealing. Elvis was now collecting them and carrying a pistol in his boot on stage. Turning to the use of condemnation and murder, when being confronted with vulnerability in himself, would have made him feel something very different. If his bodyguard had been quicker to go through with this plan, there would of course, have been consequences to this desperately powerful strategy.
After losing Priscilla, Elvis’s life continued in steady decline. But the songs he recorded began to contain more regret. In Pieces of My Heart, he sang:
“I’m looking back on my life…But I guess I threw the best parts away”2
Elvis’s strategies for managing vulnerability, though, were established. He flew Ginger Alden (19) out to his hotel in San Francisco on the plane named after his daughter. Ginger was booked into a room on the floor below Elvis where she had to wait for nearly 24 hours. Elvis’s plane also waited on the runway. At the end of that 24 hours, just before Ginger was invited up to his room, Elvis was putting Linda Thompson on the plane back to Graceland. The last thing he ever said to Linda was “No matter what you hear, there’s no one else. It’s you I love”2. In narcissism, truth becomes just another whimsical slave to strategies for finding emotional distance, invulnerability and power. Before they headed to the Cow Palace for the night’s performance, Dr Nick arrived with Elvis’s injection.
Elvis with Linda Thompson
Elvis Presley Boulevard
Elvis reminds me of Marlon Brando, whose life I explored in a previous post. There is his treatment of women, a ‘vulnerable side’ that I initially found confusing, his poor upbringing, an odd out-of-place school persona and his ‘wild animal’ stage presence. Elvis idolized Brando since childhood. But he would only have known the persona and some screen characters. So, he didn’t know how much he and Brando had in common. But there are links to other icons. We think of Elvis as so different to Tupac, but Elvis had more guns than Tupac could dream of. We think of Elvis as so different to Michael Jackson (despite Jackson becoming his son-in-law). But accusations of the seduction of young people invited to stay in his mansion, were more substantiated with Presley, 30 years before Jackson. These icons do seem to run into similar problems.
Elvis was a performer. We try to avoid thinking of him as a perpetrator. We turn to the well-worn narrative that fame and stress and drugs eventually created a ‘narcissist’. After all, fame and its accessories are the one thing these people appear to have in common. But Elvis’s relationship to emotional connection and intimacy, like his persona, started before drugs and before fame (and the drugs started before the fame). A murderous response to losing his wife, on whom he had cheated compulsively, is text-book narcissism. Was it the drugs affecting him? Or was it narcissism? I think the drugs and the sex and the hitman can all be explained by narcissism alone. But they don’t combine well.
If we were to go back to Easter of 1957, well before the peak of his fame, we would find Elvis confiding in the pastor of his local church:
“I’m the most miserable man you’ve ever seen. I’ve got more money than I can ever spend, I have thousands of fans out there, and I have a lot of people who call themselves my friends. But I’m miserable.”2
I have heard similar quotes from other famous people. But explaining these away I have thought one of two things: they are saying this just to make us poor ordinary people feel better, or fame and success is temporarily putting them under pressure. It’s a nice problem to have, and you have the choice to close the tap a little and take a break. But after reading the biographies of icons, I think something else. I think that they were always struggling, and they hoped that fame would take away the struggle. Instead, it complicated the struggle and made them look invincible.
Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen also disagrees with this idea that fame, or power corrupts and causes narcissism. He points back to early emotional neglect:
“It would be easy to say that power goes to one’s head, inflating one’s ego and turning one into a narcissist. But that is not how narcissism develops. It grows out of the denial of feeling, the loss of self, and the projection of an image to compensate for the loss.”4
As if in agreement, Elvis biographer Connolly concludes:
“In the midst of the adoration he was alone, as he always had been. And in 1972 the strain was beginning to tell.”2
You may by now be thinking that I am, perhaps out of jealousy, devaluing a man who has risen above a difficult start in life to leave a powerful legacy in music and performance. Perhaps I am jealous. And his legacy is incredible. But there is something else: We are given an idealised view of the icon – someone who may in reality be fleeing vulnerability and shame towards an early death. Implicitly, are we left thinking of our own existence as a kind of failure in comparison? I think we devalue elements of our own existence, ‘ordinary’ as they may appear, whilst we busy ourselves mourning a kind of success we will never have. Jackson was inspired by the Elvis persona, and Elvis had been inspired by the Brando persona. All three died incredibly lonely, having run from their ordinary humanness with its need for connection and dependency. Do we ordinary folk do something similar, on a smaller scale, inspired by our icons – who themselves were all along just fleeing emotional trauma?
On his 40th birthday in 1975, Elvis did not leave his bedroom with its gold-plated door, overlooking a road that was now named after him. The drugs were starting to cause their own health problems that required further drugs. Within three years, aged 42, he would die of an overdose, on his bathroom floor. It was hours before he was found. 14 drugs were found in his body. The Memphis Press-Scimitar read:
“A lonely life ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard.”
*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.
References
1. Clarke Keogh, A. (2010). The Man Behind The Legend. Atria.
2. Connolly, R. (2016) Being Elvis: A Lonely Life. Weidenfeld & Nicholson
3. Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.
4. Lowen, A. (1997). Narcissism. Denial of the True Self. Touchstone.