Word: presleys
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...home in Memphis the blue-suede revolutionary was a pussycat with a distinctly warped psyche. His father Vernon Presley was convicted in 1938 of altering a check and sent to prison. The three-year-old Elvis was fiercely coddled by "the Hillbilly Cassandra," his mother Gladys. Until he was eleven, he slept in the same bed with "Satnin'," his baby-talk name for the mother he stroked and petted until her death. Gladys did not let the boy play out of her sight until he was 15 and still walked him to school in ninth grade. At 16, Elvis...
Other adults mesmerized Elvis as well. With a gravel-voiced, paunchy old carnival huckster, Colonel Thomas Parker, Presley zoomed from white gospel singalongs to gold-record celebrity. The Colonel, claims Goldman, was actually an illegal Dutch immigrant, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. According to Goldman, the manager's alien status would explain why Presley never played Europe or Japan...
When the commitment to rock faded, however, Elvis romped in the Hills of Beverly. Like much of Presley's life, this ordinary greed offends Goldman. It is "What makes him so ... echt Amerikan...
...Monty Python and Dr. Strangelove, Elvis began to kid his early songs. Near the end, in the kind of Bible Belt town where he had first gained fame, Elvis even gave away expensive jewelry to win over an audience that failed to appreciate the 255-lb. monster parading as Presley...
...compelling case history, an exploited talent with a wasted, truncated life. But that is not enough for Goldman. The biographer insists that each kink in his subject's psyche represents a tremor in the nation's collective unconscious. When Goldman finishes his juicy recounting of Elvis Presley's life, however, the mystery of the King's fascination remains. For that, fans and readers should rejoice. As Elvis always insisted, "You don't come back for an encore...