Author: By Joan Anderman

Date: SUNDAY, January 10, 1999

Page: D1

Section: Books

The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
By Peter Guralnick. Little, Brown. 766 pp. Illustrated. $27.95.
.

Careless Love

Like all epic tragedies, this one involves a magnificent central character -- a king, no less -- and a terrible fall from grace. The fall, as in the most compelling tragedies, is uniquely human -- as maddeningly preventable as it is, finally, inevitable. And just as the truest tragedies, no matter how thoroughly analyzed, are somehow unfathomable, in this one there is no moment of truth, no defining act of undoing, but rather a convoluted tangle of needs and neglect, aspirations and acrimony, brilliant possibilities and rampant misunderstanding that combine into a decline of unparalleled proportion.

That the hero was Elvis Presley, and his kingdom rock 'n' roll, imbues the story with the sheer potency of music. There is no difference, after all, between the feeling Elvis's music inspired and the way people felt about Elvis. With an intoxicating pump of the pelvis and a guileless feel for how gospel and rhythm 'n' blues and rock could collide, he reshaped the popular culture. Suddenly, the astonishingly intimate and grandly mythic merged in the space of a song; it was, like all truly monumental events, delirious and irreversible. And although his shining moment was brief compared with the painfully protracted descent into self-medication and self-caricature and just about every other form of self-obliteration, Elvis changed the world.

But it was the bloated spectacle that Elvis became during the last years of his life that stuck like an overstuffed jumpsuit, and that has colored the spectacular way he has been remembered since his death in 1977. For every academic paper there have been a dozen tell-alls. For every thoughtful essay, a hundred references to the gold pajamas around Elvis's ankles as he lay lifeless on the bathroom floor. In a pool of vomit. Fourteen pharmaceutical drugs in his blood stream. Yes, we have a hearty appetite for dirt.

Peter Guralnick, however, has an appetite for something altogether different: the truth. ``Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley'' is the second volume of Guralnick's two-part biography; ``Last Train To Memphis'' (1994) chronicled young Presley's remarkable rise to fame. ``Careless Love'' recounts the downhill slide, beginning in 1958, in equally painstaking, clear-eyed detail. And while there's little to celebrate, artistically or otherwise, in Elvis's post-tour-of-duty decades, Guralnick tells the grim tale with abiding respect -- and with a fullness of heart and seriousness of purpose that his subject sadly lost along the way.

The book's subtitle encapsulates Guralnick's astute, measured perspective. Elvis wasn't destroyed by his huckster manager, Colonel Tom Parker, or the indiscriminate doctors who prescribed endless supplies of drugs, or the coterie of yes-men who enabled him by virtue of their silent indulgence. One can't even lay blame on the fallout of stupendous celebrity -- although the impossible task of reconciling his public image with his personal life took an incalculable toll. Rather, Guralnick, in the simple and compassionate retelling, recognizes a more fundamental human condition at play in the unmaking of Elvis.

What possessed this innovative, passionate musician to sell his creative soul for a string of cheesy Hollywood movies and bargain-basement recordings? Guralnick, to his credit, offers no pat psychological interpretations; a life as complex and oversized as Elvis's offers up its own explanations. Elvis's love for the music -- the thing that sustained him in the deepest sense -- was overshadowed by the fearful, insecure boy whose desire to please and fear of failure paralyzed him, personally and professionally. The death in 1958 of his beloved mother, Gladys, when Elvis was 23, left a void that couldn't be filled with an endless stream of lovers or spiritual literature. His isolation was profound, and the ensuing alienation complete.

Guralnick's narrative remains faithful to Elvis's extraordinary self-absorption and mounting insulation, and as a result the book is short on cultural context. The rare references to the Beatles, or Led Zeppelin, come as a shock in the thick of Elvis's padded existence -- much as the swift evolution of pop music must have shocked Elvis himself. The world increasingly went on outside of him, and more important, without him. While the myth of Elvis thrived, however grotesquely, on a steady diet of base merchandising, the man himself grew dimmer and dimmer. By telling the story as much as possible from Elvis's point of view, Guralnick conveys a palpable sense of ``the vanishing of Elvis Presley,'' as he puts it.

For all of his bravado and charisma, in spite of -- or perhaps in reaction to -- his phenomenal popularity, Elvis let go the rudder of his own ship early on. It's startling to remember that he peaked at 23. The pills, the girls, the vapid movies, and wretchedness in Vegas that followed were all part-and-parcel of Elvis's absurd mission: to simultaneously preserve and escape the legend he had become. The very duality that ignited his musical fire -- the tension between sweetness and sexuality, convention and rebellion, piety and profanity -- seems to have set him adrift in a sea of self-doubt, then paranoia, and what would surely be diagnosed today as a life-threatening depression.

Everybody knows how the tragic tale ends. By the end of Guralnick's nearly 800-page chronicle of Elvis's ugly decline, we're frankly ready for the king to topple off his porcelain throne. And that's when Guralnick exits the evenhanded narrative, and reminds us to pack up our cynicism and moral judgment and remember the young maverick who touched people with ``the proclamation of emotions long suppressed, the embrace of a vulnerability culturally denied, the unabashed striving for freedom. . . . for all his doubt, for all his disappointment, for all of the self-loathing that he frequently felt, and all of the disillusionment and fear, he continued to believe in a democratic ideal of redemptive transformation, he continued to seek out a connection with a public that embraced him not for what he was but for what he sought to be.''

That's the great triumph of ``Careless Love.'' It celebrates, amid an unflinching portrait of personal and creative deterioration, the immutable innocence of Elvis's aspiration. The music, after all, won't be dashed by human frailty. And our memory of the force of nature that was Elvis won't, if Guralnick has anything to say about it -- be colored by anything other than the truth.