Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [80]
On January 8, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday, flying home to Memphis from a Hayride appearance in Shreveport, and then insuring his 1955 pink-and-black Cadillac Fleetwood. He was taking care of business and being responsible. No one could have known it, but he was precisely through the first half of his short life, destined to die at forty-two.
Though he was now officially a man, a grown-up, he would never reach an adult’s maturity in his relationships with women. His fun-loving pranks of handcuffing and wrestling would evolve into more acceptable forms of physical teasing, and he would begin to have more complex relationships. But he would remain the puer aeternus, a Latin term for “eternal boy,” seen in mythology as a child-god of divine youth, an Adonis who stays forever young.
In pop psychology, the puer is seen as being a socially immature adult and suffers from what has entered the lexicon as the Peter Pan Syndrome. The reference is to J. M. Barrie’s much-loved novel and play, as well as to Dan Kiley’s 1983 book, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. But in analytical, or Jungian, psychology, the puer is defined as an older man whose emotional life remains arrested at the level of adolescence, and who is almost always enmeshed in too great a dependence on his mother.
The life of the puer is provisional, since he fears being caught in a situation from which he cannot escape, whether it is with a woman or a job. He fantasizes that he is simply marking time, and that in the future, the real woman, or the right career opportunity, will come along. What he dreads most is to be bound to anything at all, and so he refuses to grow up and face the challenges of life head-on. Instead, he waits for others or divine providence to do it for him.
“He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable,” writes Daryl Sharp in Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts. “Common symptoms of puer psychology are dreams of imprisonment and similar imagery: chains, bars, cages, entrapment, bondage. Life itself . . . is experienced as a prison.”
On January 10, 1956, Elvis arrived at the RCA recording studio in Nashville, a small building at 1525 McGavock Street, not far from downtown. The label had not yet established its own Nashville facilities, and so the company built the studio with the Methodist TV, Radio and Film Commission. Chet Atkins, the country guitarist who was also RCA’s Nashville studio chief, sat behind the console as Elvis recorded his first RCA sides. Yet some of the players were already familiar to Elvis. Both drummer D. J. Fontana and piano virtuoso Floyd Cramer from the Hayride were on the sessions. And among the three songs they cut that day was “Heartbreak Hotel,” the morbid and oddly unsettling blues tune that Mae Axton had written with her friend Tommy Durden about a dwelling place for the lost and lovelorn. By April, the single, both eerie and menacing, would sell one million copies, earning Elvis his first gold record.
The song found its genesis when Durden, who followed the ponies, picked up a copy of the Miami Herald. He looked at the horse-race entries, and then scanned the rest of the paper. “I just happened to catch a little small thing in there about a man who killed himself. I don’t recall any names, but the only thing he left in the way of a suicide note was a sentence, ‘I walk a lonely street.’ ”
Atkins recalled that on one of the livelier songs they recorded that day—either Ray Charles’s rhythm-and-blues classic “I Got a Woman,” or the Drifters’ “Money, Honey”—Elvis “started jumping around, and he split his pants right in the seat. I’ll never forget them. They were pink with black piping on the sides. He asked somebody to go back to the motel and get him another pair, and