Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [3]
Including, to some degree, the perception of male beauty and the acceptance of androgyny, since Elvis crossed the sex barrier just as he had the race barrier. From the first, he wore eye shadow and mascara to accentuate his likeness to his mother, Gladys (and to emulate Rudolph Valentino, the silent screen star once accused of the “effeminization of the American male”). And by his early Las Vegas incarnation, Elvis personified the glam rock movement that was then burgeoning in the United Kingdom, blending the sex appeal of men and women in his choice of flowing stage wear.
Perhaps not surprising, Elvis’s contemporary appeal does not stop with heterosexual women. Female Elvis impersonator Leigh Crow, aka Elvis Herselvis, who identifies as a drag king, predicts that Elvis will become a lesbian icon just as Marilyn Monroe is for gay men. “Like k.d. lang,” she says, “the whole image that she’s got . . . that’s where it came from.” And lang bears it out: “He was the total androgynous beauty. I would practice Elvis in front of the mirror when I was twelve or thirteen years old.”
For so many reasons, then, “Elvis swims in our minds, and in the emotions, all through time,” offers film director David Lynch. “There’s the word icon, and I don’t think anybody has topped that . . . not one single person has ever topped Elvis.” Except financially. In 2006, Kurt Cobain bested him on the Forbes “Top-Earning Dead Celebrities” list, only to have Elvis take back his crown in 2007, the thirtieth-year anniversary of his death, hauling in $52 million. But in 2009, he slipped to fourth place, with $55 million, dwarfed by Yves Saint Laurent ($350 million), Rodgers and Hammerstein ($235 million), and Michael Jackson ($90 million). Still, $55 million is more than many of the music industry’s most popular living acts command. “For a dead man,” writes author Rodman, “Elvis Presley is awfully noisy.”
In the spring of 2007, I received a call from an editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, who wanted an Elvis story for the August issue to mark the anniversary. But exactly what kind of article she didn’t know. Since it was a women’s magazine, I suggested what I thought was the obvious—an oral history of some of the women in Elvis’s life, both platonic and romantic, from girlfriends to family members to actresses to backup singers. I wanted to know how his status as one of the greatest sex symbols of the twentieth century informed his stage act and his interactions with the opposite sex.
The resulting article, “The Women Who Loved Elvis,” was one of the best-read features in the magazine, and spawned a segment on The Early Show on CBS. Not long after, I was in Memphis, writing a story about Graceland for another publication. Staying in the Heartbreak Hotel across the street from the mansion’s sprawl, I stared at the photos on the wall of my suite. In each of them, Elvis held the luminous gaze of one of his Hollywood costars. I thought of the millions of women who had loved him from afar, the hundreds who had physically known that embrace, and how he had died alone at home on the bathroom floor, a woman sleeping in his bed as the life ebbed out of him at the age of forty-two.
How could Elvis Presley, one of the most romantic icons of his time, never have enjoyed a long-lasting, meaningful relationship with a woman?
That was the question I pondered as the idea for this book took shape. It was particularly puzzling since, for all his maleness, Elvis was a very woman-centered man. It was women he could really talk with, and from whom he drew much of his strength.
The answer, of course, is that it was simply easier for a man as complex as Elvis to have a relationship with the masses, who asked nothing of him and provided unconditional positive regard.
“Bottom line,” says Kay Wheeler, who headed Presley’s first national fan club, “the most successful love affair was