Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [361]
His symptoms—a preoccupation with his losses, an intense yearning for the departed, persistent thoughts about death, guilt, and unmanageable sieges of sadness—fit what is clinically known as complicated grief, or prolonged grief disorder. Psychiatrists formerly called it “stuck grief,” and link it to higher incidences of substance abuse, suicide attempts, and social problems. For Elvis specifically, his debilitating trauma compounded his heightened need for human contact, and stunted his ability to cope and deal emotionally with adult problems and responsibilities. His normal grief symptoms gradually faded, but in time, his prolonged grief grew worse, particularly in the wake of his divorce.
Complicated grief is still being researched, but mental health professionals estimate that it affects more than a million people a year, or 15 percent of the bereaved. It is currently under consideration for addition to the DSM-V, the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook, which is used in diagnosing mental disorders.
“Simply put,” Dr. M. Katherine Shear, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, told the New York Times, “complicated grief can wreck a person’s life.”
Elvis would demonstrate varying degrees of prolonged grief throughout his life, but perhaps the most constant manifestation was his interaction with women. Because he could not separate or individuate from his twin and then from his mother, his ability to relate intimately with others was already intricately, neurologically, psychologically, and inexorably established. No room was left for others.
Even when he attempted to replicate his level of intimacy with Gladys and Jessie Garon, as he did with scores of women throughout his life, he could never find a long-lasting, romantic, sexual bond. In looking to one or even two concurrent women or adolescent girls as substitutes who might make him feel complete, Elvis put himself—and his female friends—in an impossible situation.
Still, there were times, particularly with Ann-Margret and Linda Thompson, when he broke through his psychological chains and got close to realizing an ideal relationship. But his extreme addiction to drugs and rampant sexual conquests—grounded in the promiscuous behavior of his father and grandfather, though escalating far beyond what either of those two men could have imagined—amounted to self-sabotage of the first order, and further set him up for romantic failure and continued emotional disappointment. Yet he never seemed to learn from his mistakes, which remained unexamined as he moved on immediately to the next woman, just as he went from doctor to doctor for another supply of pills without investigating ways to quell his urges or take control of his life.
Finally, his parents’ directive that he was “special,” having survived when Jessie Garon did not, gave him license to indulge in increasingly dangerous behavior without fear of repercussion or death, and encouraged his messianic tendencies as a conduit of a higher power. In allowing him to compartmentalize and build walls, it also left him with no real boundaries as to how to treat other individuals, especially monogamous women who expected a faithful mate, and lovers who he insisted share his drug protocol.
However, Elvis knew full well how to deal with the masses, for it was the unconditionally adoring fans who shored up his fragile sense of greatness, and allowed him the fleeting perception of fulfilling his psychological imperative to “live for two.” With this once-in-a-lifetime system of support, Elvis, a once-in-a-lifetime performer, was propelled to feel as he thought he should. But only while onstage.
“One time in Las Vegas,” reports über-fan Robin Rosaaen, “it was so funny. This woman threw her bra and Elvis put it on his head and pretended he was an airline pilot and it was his helmet. He liked that spontaneity with the fans, because he felt that if he was pleasing them