Book Review: Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, by Ray Connolly (2016)

Paperback cover of Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, by Ray Connolly, 2016. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Simply put, Elvis Presley was one of the most significant figures in the history of 20th century music. Elvis has become such an icon that it’s hard to separate his work from the celebrity surrounding him. British writer and journalist Ray Connolly examined Presley’s life in the excellent 2016 biography Being Elvis: A Lonely Life. Connolly’s book doesn’t attempt to be the definitive Elvis biography; rather, it presents us with an examination of Elvis’s personality in a relatively brief 320 pages.  

Connolly has clearly done his homework—to write such a tight biography of Presley means that he has a thorough command of his sources and the narrative that he crafts. Like Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis, Connolly places much of the blame for Elvis’s decline on his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Unlike Luhrmann, Connolly fully dissects Elvis Presley’s personality, in an attempt to try to illuminate Elvis’s actions. Elvis is a tricky subject for a biographer—on the one hand, there’s too much information to wade through, as seemingly everyone who ever met Elvis has written a book. Serving Royalty: How I Made a Cheeseburger for Elvis at McDonald’s, by Mark Taylor. (That book doesn’t actually exist.) And yet at the same time, Elvis gave very few interviews after 1960, so there isn’t a ton of material where Elvis describes his own thoughts and feelings.  

For someone at his level of fame, Elvis Presley was at times curiously passive about his own career. That’s a bit of an overstatement, as he was often tenacious in the recording studio to achieve the sound he wanted on a record. But if you think of people at Elvis’s level of fame, say, Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand, the picture that emerges is of powerful people who might border on control freaks. That wasn’t Elvis Presley. For all his dissatisfaction with the movies he made, Elvis did little to take control of his Hollywood career. I also think that Elvis was often hindered by his enormous fame—it was a burden sometimes. Elvis was so famous, on such a different level than just about anyone else, that he couldn’t blend into a movie: his movies aren’t just movies that Elvis happens to be in, they are ELVIS MOVIES.  

I’d argue that Elvis did make some good movies, like Jailhouse Rock and King Creole, but when you compare his movie career to Bobby Darin’s, you see a stark difference. Bobby Darin was a very successful entertainer, but he wasn’t burdened by the same level of fame that Elvis was. When Darin broke into movies, he didn’t have to just play Bobby Darin in every movie he made. Darin’s first movie role was in 1961’s Come September, where he starred alongside Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sandra Dee. Darin didn’t have to carry the whole movie himself, as Elvis so often had to. Darin also made several movies where he didn’t sing, something Elvis always wanted to do. Darin’s other films include Too Late Blues, directed by John Cassavetes, State Fair with Pat Boone and Ann-Margret, Hell is for Heroes, with Steve McQueen, Pressure Point, with Sidney Poitier, and a supporting role in Captain Newman, M.D., with Gregory Peck, Tony Curtis, and Angie Dickinson. Because Colonel Parker was risk-adverse in the extreme, there was no way that Elvis was going to be in a John Cassavetes movie, or appear with stars like Steve McQueen and Gregory Peck, who might overshadow Elvis.  

Reading Being Elvis reminded me of what an instant phenomenon Elvis Presley was. The recording session on July 5, 1954 that produced Elvis’s first record, “That’s All Right,” was the first time that Presley had ever sung or played with other musicians. (p.32) Not bad for a debut. By July 5, 1956, Elvis Presley was the hottest thing in show business.  

Connolly unearths tantalizing nuggets, like the Colonel’s negotiations with RCA for a proposed 43-city tour in 1963. RCA balked when Parker demanded a guaranteed advance of $1 million, and so the deal came to nothing. Since his release from the Army in 1960, Elvis had only performed 3 live concerts in 1961—he hadn’t toured since 1957, and I’m sure the demand for tickets would have been huge. Another opportunity lost.  

While the 1960’s had been a decade of making movies and not touring, the 1970’s were the opposite, as Elvis appeared in Las Vegas and toured extensively throughout the United States. Connolly hits the reader with the astonishing fact that, besides Elvis’s 2-year stint in the US Army, the longest break of his career was a four-month hiatus in 1975. (p.280) At that point, Elvis was in obvious need of a rest, for his health and to regain his enthusiasm for his career.  

Being Elvis, the 2018 documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher, and Luhrmann’s 2022 movie all make the point that singing in Las Vegas was not good for Elvis’s voice. I’d be interested to hear someone explain more about this. Is singing in Las Vegas generally detrimental to singer’s voices? If so, how did Vegas staples like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin thrive for decades in the desert? Or was there something specific about Elvis’s voice that the dry desert air damaged?  

1973 was a key year in Elvis’s career. The year began on a high note, with a huge global audience viewing Presley’s satellite TV special Aloha from Hawaii. It was a huge milestone for Elvis. But by the time Elvis opened his August shows at the Las Vegas Hilton, a Hollywood Reporter critic wrote “It is tragic, disheartening and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.” (p.269) 1973 was also when Elvis should have finally broken free from Colonel Parker’s unimaginative management of his career. Elvis fired the Colonel but made no move to contact anyone to replace Parker. Parker correctly gambled that Elvis would eventually come back, and so he did. Instead of touring the world, as he should have done, Elvis performed 180 concerts in 1973, all within the USA.  

Elvis needed a break, but his finances were in such poor shape that he would have had to plan ahead, and curb some of his famously generous spending, in order to take some time off. Elvis also needed someone other than his father, Vernon, handling his money. Vernon was honest, often criticized Elvis’s lavish spending, and he did the best job he could, but he was not financially sophisticated. It’s rather shocking that one of the most famous entertainers in the world handed his finances off to his father, who hadn’t even graduated from high school. That might have worked fine in 1955, when Elvis was basically just making money from touring, but by 1975, his finances needed outside help.  

Being Elvis is a sympathetic portrait of a gifted artist who was adored by millions of people around the world, and yet his life was a lonely one indeed. The Elvis I like to think of is the one who lives forever inside the music he left us. I love hearing Elvis get lost in a song, the way he did when he was jamming on songs. Listen to the joy in his voice as he tears into songs like “Reconsider Baby,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “Stranger in My Own Home Town,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “Merry Christmas Baby.” That’s Elvis the way I want to remember him, not the jumpsuited icon, not hidden away inside the gates of Graceland, but singing for the sheer joy of it.