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Pedophilia

The article should mention how Elvis was sexually abusing Priscilla from the time she was 14. He is listed as a pedophile at www.amiannoying.com and many other sites.

Thrilling stuff! Have you got any hard evidence, or is this just innuendo? -- Hoary 08:43, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this is well known. Presley could not marry Priscilla until she was 21 because he didn't want to get caught like Jerry Lee Lewis. What a pedophile.

Please sign your comments (by typing "~~~~"). Whether some factoid is "well known" -- to whom? the denizens of gossip websites? -- is beside the point. Was there a criminal conviction? Or is there any other evidence? -- Hoary 05:35, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Also understand what pedophilia is before you make a comment about it, pedophilia is not sexual abuse, it can be a state of sexual preference, or you might be called a pedophile for having feelings for someone under 18, even if it is not a sexual desire in nature but a true love. Elvis obviously did have a preference for Priscilla at a young age, but is this obvious enough reason to make him a pedophile? What did Elvis really want? The person or the age of the person? A person may be called a pedophile because they have feelings for someone under 18 while they are them self over 18, but if the feelings of love are feelings of true love then no harm is done. It is the sexual predators like the ones you see at pervertedjustice which give pedophilia a bad name, and make it seem evil. It is my belief that there is nothing wrong with a person who is a pedophile who truly loves their partner, so long as they respect them and obey the laws which prohibit any type of sexual relationship untill they are of legal age, and in my own personal preference, married. 71.112.224.112

Military service

We read:

Presley sailed to Europe on the USS General George M. Randall (AP-115) and served in Germany, attaining the rank of sergeant. During his service, he met many people in the US Army bases he was trained at, and abroad, both in Germany and in France, where he travelled on leave on at least three different occasions. Years later, many still recall with much admiration and affection their time together with Presley, no matter how casual or short-lived the encounter may have been. [. . .] In 1992, a book was published about Presley's time in Germany titled Soldier Boy Elvis, written by his Sergeant Ira Jones.

For anybody who's desperately interested in the "Elvis-was-gay!" angle, note how the third sentence makes Presley sound like a queen!

Um, back to the subject. Yes, this somewhat gushing description is unsourced. And at the end there's a seemingly pointless plug for a book. Or is mention of this book meant to imply that it's the source of the material on his military service? (I really don't know as I'm not a Presley fan.) -- Hoary 08:47, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Nick Adams fondly recalled his encounters with Presley. ... added at 19:23, 23 April 2006 by 195.93.21.65

The "shocking truth" of what may have happened

I'm removing the following chunk from "Mama's boy":

In his book, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000), reputed author Greil Marcus cites some reactions to the "shocking truth" that Gladys may have had "years of bliss with Elvis in her bed, or she in his": " 'It makes sense,' said Adrian Sibley of the BBC's The Late Show. 'America has brought Elvis up to date: now he needs therapy just like everybody else. Don't they have twelve-step programs for incest survivors?' 'It makes sense,' said Jip Golsteijn, pop critic for the Amsterdam Telegraaf. 'It's what I heard again and again in Tupelo, years ago. Nobody meant it as a condemnation. Given the way Elvis and Gladys were about each other, it was simply the conclusion everyone drew.' " (p. 6) Be that as it may,

Even by Wikipedia fancruft standards of prolixity, listing reactions to the "shocking truth" of what may have happened seems tertiary barrel-scraping. (Yes, yes, Greil Marcus is a reputed author. I infer that the reputation was made earlier.) -- Hoary 14:01, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

The fact is that you have removed a paragraph based on a book by reputed Presley expert Greil Marcus. This material shows that the claims by Elvis's stepmother Dee Presley were widely discussed not only in America but also in Europe. You may also remember that, in addition, Professor David S. Wall has demonstrated that the world-wide Elvis fan clubs refused to endorse Dee Presley's claims. See [1]. The problem is that there are a few Elvis fans who endeavor to suppress critical voices from the Wikipedia article, although the material has been published in books and articles on Elvis. Interestingly, another user wrote concerning this problem in October last year:
what I find weird is that whenever someone writes something "bad" about Elvis (be it drug abuse, derogatory nicknames, sexual orientation or the way he died ), somehow the "system" prevents those things from staying there for too long. See [2].
One of these people who prevented critical remarks from staying in the article was User:Ted Wilkes who is now blocked for one year. Count Chocula and another anonymous user (see [3], [4], [5]) seem to follow his footsteps, as they are deleting well-sourced references which are not in line with their personal opinion. A Wikipedia article is not a fan site. It should give a balanced view of the star, his life, his personal relationships and his music. Remember that Professor Wall says that one of the strategies of the worldwide Elvis industry is " 'community policing' to achieve governance at a distance and typically effected through the various fan clubs and appreciation societies to which the bulk of Elvis fans belong. These organisations have, through their membership magazines, activities and sales operations, created a powerful moral majority that can be influenced in order to exercise its considerable economic power." To my mind, a similar strategy seems to be at work concerning the Wikipedia article. Significantly, User:Hoary makes personal attacks against me calling me "dread 141" on the User talk:DropDeadGorgias page. There he claims, without evidence, that he has "a hunch that a lot of the quoting by 141 is highly selective (or worse)" (although I have given the exact page numbers for my quotes) and that he "can't assume good faith" (see [6]), simply because my contributions are not in line with his positive view of Elvis. This strongly suggests that this user may have a personal agenda. Be that as it may, I am happy to see that another user now seems to share my view, though I am not satisfied with the quality of his/her contributions. Perhaps this user can add some direct quotes from the sources he/she has used. Onefortyone 17:13, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

A Wikipedia article is indeed not a fansite. It's also not a bottomless pit into which one shovels as much "information" as possible, especially when that "information" is the reactions of people to stories of what "may have happened" (dressed up as the "shocking truth"). An encyclopedia article needs to be moderately concise, or so I'd thought.

I'm interested by the claim that an article on someone like Presley "should give a balanced view of the star, his life, his personal relationships and his music": I'd have put music first (though I realize that more dollars were made off the movies), and his "personal relationships" last (if anywhere), but I notice that 141 puts music last.

I can't speak of the motivation of "Elvis fans" as I know next to nothing about them and certainly am not one of them: I've never seen any of Presley's movies and don't much want to, and while I enjoy some of his earliest music I'm bored or repelled by the rest. (Actually my favorite Presley song is the Bonzos' "Canyons of Your Mind".) I have no positive view of Presley and no negative one: I have fairly clear views about his music and a general idea (quite possibly mistaken) about his movies, and I derive considerable and presumably unintended amusement from photos of him in some of his stage outfits.

Calling Onefortyone "dread 141" is a direct expression of my PoV: I dread the way 141 shovels quantities of sensationalist tittle-tattle into the articles on celebs of the past, as clearing up the result takes so much time. I appreciate the way 141 is now clarifying sources, so the dread is abating very slightly; for it to abate more, all 141 has to do is share my notion that such matters as what Presley did or didn't do (and did and didn't want to do) with his dick are of negligible importance; their full, lip-smacking descriptions better left for Playboy (on occasion a good magazine, of course), National Enquirer, etc. -- Hoary 00:17, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I removed the section alleging that Presley had an incestous relationship with his mother. User Onefortyone sources are utterly uncredible and include an unpublished manuscript by Presley's step-mother who bare knew Presley. Furhter, Goldman is considerd, at best, a hack and while it's important to note his book it is not appropriate to give it such credence as User Onefortyone would have us give it. Again, the man's life has been utterly serialized and this article should not include every crackport theory as "fact". Lochdale

I recently picked up Greil Marcus' book, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2001), and it simply does not support what User OnefortyOne has added to the text regarding Presley's relationship with his mother. Marcus dismisses any notion that Presley had incestual relations with his mother and makes it quite clear in Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991), that Goldman's research is third-rate and fundamentally unreliable. As such, I have removed the section added by User Onefortyone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.148.51.62 (talk • contribs)

Good edit, but I'm not sure that we need to insist that no book says it. It sounds as if we're belabouring a point. Jkelly 17:28, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, user Lochdale alias IP 24.148.51.62 has deleted direct quotes from Greil Marcus's book about a possible incestuous relationship between Elvis and his mother. The author has cited Elvis's stepmother, Dee Presley, and two other sources dealing with the claims. Here are again the quotes from Chapter One of Marcus's book:
  • Newsbreaks included the National Enquirer's Dee Presley explosion: HIS OWN STEPMOM REVEALS SHOCKING TRUTH AT LAST-ELVIS AND HIS MOM WERE LOVERS. (p.3)
  • About his mother, it's said "—Gladys Presley, who died in 1958, at forty-six, after, if Dee Presley is right, years of bliss with Elvis in her bed, or she in his. "It makes sense," said Adrian Sibley of the BBC's The Late Show. "America has brought Elvis up to date: now he needs therapy just like everybody else. Don't they have twelve-step programs for incest survivors?" (p.6)
  • It makes sense," said Jip Golsteijn, pop critic for the Amsterdam Telegraaf. "It's what I heard again and again in Tupelo, years ago. Nobody meant it as a condemnation. Given the way Elvis and Gladys were about each other, it was simply the conclusion everyone drew." (p.6)
According to Marcus, "Jip Golsteijn had met Presley after being ushered up to his Las Vegas suite with presidents of various international fan clubs." Dee Presley's claims were also discussed by David S. Wall in his essay on the activities of the world-wide Elvis industry. See David S. Wall, "Policing Elvis: Legal Action and the Shaping of Post-Mortem Celebrity Culture as Contested Space" [7]. Professor Wall writes that
Dee Presley, nee Stanley, Elvis’s former step-mother, wrote a supposedly whistle blowing account of Elvis’s last years. The fan clubs refused to endorse the book and condemned it in their editorials. The combined effect of this economic action and negative publicity was ... the apparent withdrawal of the book. With a combined membership of millions, the fans form a formidable constituency of consumer power. Dee Presley subsequently wrote an article in the National Enquirer about Elvis’s alleged incestuous relationship with his mother. This action invoked an angry reaction from the fans; for example, the T.C.B. Gazette, journal of the Looking for Elvis Fan Club in Mobile, Alabama, published an open letter by Midge Smith to encourage all fans to boycott the Star, a US tabloid: ‘[a]s Elvis fans, we all feel compelled to protect Elvis from those that profit from his name and image, only to turn the truth into trash’. Smith’s stance was supported by the fan club, which appealed to ‘‘‘Elvis’’ fans world-wide not to purchase the Star magazine any more’.
By the way, in Chapter One of his book, Marcus also mentions "the revelation that Elvis, too, was a drug addict, like Charlie Parker or Chet Baker..." This is very similar to what Albert Goldman says in his book on Elvis's death. Interestingly, user Lochdale has provided no direct quotes from Marcus's book which supports his false claim that the author "dismisses any notion that Presley had incestual relations with his mother." Onefortyone 17:50, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
Firstly, it was a simple mistake that I didn't signature my last comment. You'll note that I have used a signature for all my other comments. Marcus does dismiss the notion because he questions and then rejects the credibility of those making the comments. For example, his devastating critique of Goldman's research methodology in the Village Voice is, in an of itself, one massive quote to Goldman's lack of credibiltiy. Again, user Onefortyone has to rely on the fringe of works on Elvis to push his agenda. The fact remains that reputable biographers and jornalists from Marcus to Guralnik simply do not support the notion that Elvis had an incestous relationship with his mother or that he was gay. The "evidence" unearthed by user Onefortyone was, of course, all published after Presley's death. Greenwood uses sources who may not have even known Presley to support his contentions and his book has more to do with creating a salcious hook in order to sell any copies. He, like user Onefortyone, lacks credibiltiy. Lochdale
As everybody can see, the quotes above show that Lochdale is wrong. He didn't provide a quote from Marcus's book, Double Trouble in order to prove his claim that the author "questions and then rejects the credibility of those making the comments." Onefortyone 00:10, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

So what's significant about Presley, anyway?

My fellow-editor Onefortyone is keen to inform the world of various accounts (by "reputed" writers!) of Presley's "relationships". I thought the guy was a singer. Didn't he do "Heartbreak Hotel", "Hound Dog", and "Blue Suede Shoes"? Maybe I mistyped one or more of "heartbreak", "hound" and "suede", or maybe the find function in my browser isn't working, but I don't see any of these mentioned in the article. Am I wrong -- is Presley primarily significant for such matters as his "relationships"? -- Hoary 03:54, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Jkelly 04:08, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Presley is famous for stealing black music. ... added at 15:42, 24 April 2006 by 195.93.21.65

Thank you Mr/Ms IP number. "Stole"? I dunno about that. But certainly his version of "Hound Dog" isn't up to that by Big Mama Thornton.

Hmm, hours have passed, but nobody beside Jkelly has agreed with me yet. Jkelly, perhaps you and me are in a minority. OK, let's put aside such, uh, trivia as "Hound Dog" and concentrate on what seems to fascinate Onefortyone, the Really Big Question: Was Elvis a Good Lay? I read the section of the article that's about Patricia Presley and her rivals with mounting excitement (Not!), and at the end concluded that the tell-all books disagree over the monumentally important (to some of us, though not me) questions of: (i) Did Elvis fuck Patricia before they got married? and (ii) Did he fuck all those other girls too? So as long as the tittle-tattlers disagree (and until Mouton De Gruyter or similar brings out a definitive, peer-reviewed, scholarly monograph on the subject), I suggest that all of this he-said she-said merits a footnote at best. And indeed I chucked most of this crap (aka "information") into footnotes.

I think you chucked too much of this stuff into footnotes. Therefore I have rewritten the relationships section, adding some material and shortening the mama's boy paragraph a bit. Onefortyone 22:10, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

And now a sanity check, please. Didn't Presley record something called "Heartbreak Hotel", and if so, isn't it worth a mention in this article? -- Hoary 15:49, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

You are right. Perhaps there are experts who can write some additional paragraphs on Elvis's music. Last year I started the Alphabetical list of all of Elvis Presley's songs, including some errors, of course, as I attributed a few songs by Elvis impersonators to Presley. But in the meantime, others also contributed to this section and may have corrected most of these errors (I hope). I also added some notes to the gospel section. Furthermore, I started the section on Colonel Tom Parker and on Elvis's drug abuse. You can see that I am not only interested in Elvis's relationships. However, I still think that the singer's relationships are an important part of his life. Many people are interested in these matters and many books have been written on the subject. Onefortyone 22:10, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

So bad it's good

It's with a touch of regret that I've rewritten what was previously:

By that measure, and according to Gregory Sandows, Music Professor at Columbia University, Elvis was all at once a bass, a baritone and a tenor, a most unique attribute amongst singers of any gender, both in the classical and popular music fields.

(Emphasis added.) I'm used to the mealy-mouthed use of the linguistic term "gender" to stand for sex. OK. But for humans (as opposed to, say, bees), how many "genders" are there? For the record, yes, I would agree that being "all at once a bass, a baritone and a tenor" would be "a most unique attribute" amongst singers of the female "gender". -- Hoary 09:08, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Autopsy report (which we don't have)

Presley died. That meant that he couldn't make any more records (or continue to be "an American phenomenon"). Why or how he died seems of little importance to me, but clearly it's of huge importance to the simple souls who consume tabloids, etc.

An autopsy did its best to determine how he died. The results won't be available for more than a decade.

In the meantime, journalists and others are welcome to speculate, and to recycle stories. Is this encyclopedic? I think it isn't, which is why I chucked it into a footnote. (It was that, or a move into "Trivia", or deletion.) Without any edit summary, let alone any explanation here, some person has pulled it all back.

What should be done? -- Hoary 04:36, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Here is Peter Guralnick on Elvis's death:
Warlick found a stain on the bathroom carpeting, too, that seemed to indicate where Elvis had thrown up after being stricken, apparently while seated on the toilet. It looked to the medical investigator as if he had "stumbled or crawled several feet before he died." ... nine pathologists from Baptist cond acted the examination in full knowledge that the world was watching but that the results would be released to Elvis' father alone. ... Francisco announced the results of the autopsy, even as the autopsy was still going on. Death, he said, was "due to cardiac arrhythmia due to undetermined heartbeat." ... But there were in fact at that time no results to report. The autopsy proper went on for another couple of hours. Specimens were collected and carefully preserved, the internal organs were examined and the heart found to be enlarged, a significant amount of coronary atherosclerosis was observed, the liver showed considerable damage, and the large intestine was clogged with fecal matter, indicating a painful and longstanding bowel condition. The bowel condition alone would have strongly suggested to the doctors what by now they had every reason to suspect from Elvis' hospital history, the observed liver damage, and abundant anecdotal evidence: that drug use was heavily implicated in this unanticipated death of a middle-aged man with no known history of heart disease who had been "mobile and functional within eight hours of his death." It was certainly possible that he had been taken while "straining at stool," and no one ruled out the possibility of anaphylactic shock brought on by the codeine pills he had gotten from his dentist, to which he was known to have had a mild allergy of long standing. The pathologists, however, were satisfied to wait for the lab results, which they were confident would overrule Dr. Francisco's precipitate, and somewhat meaningless, announcement, as indeed they eventually did. There was little disagreement in fact between the two principal laboratory reports and analyses filed two months later, with each stating a strong belief that the primary cause of death was polypharmacy, and the BioScience Laboratories report, initially filed under the patient name of "Ethel Moore," indicating the detection of fourteen drugs in Elvis' system, ten in significant quantity. Codeine appeared at ten times the therapeutic level, methaqualone (Quaalude) in an arguably toxic amount, three other drugs appeared to be on the borderline of toxicity taken in and of themselves, and "the combined effect of the central nervous system depressants and the codeine" had to be given heavy consideration. See Peter Guralnick, Careless Love:The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999), pp.651-2.
This is certainly one of the best sources. We do have laboratories reports which strongly suggest that the excessive consumption of drugs caused the singer's death. This must be mentioned in the article. Onefortyone 23:43, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

He committed suicide because his career was over, he was mentally ill, feared he had bone cancer, and was going blind from glaucoma. ... added at 19:27, 26 April 2006 by 195.93.21.65

Thanks for the comment. Next time, please sign your comment: you do this with "~~~~". Whether it was suicide is something that was presumably determined as reliably as possible by the autopsy report. That won't be available for more than a decade. The allegation that he was mentally ill is a new one to the article. (Speaking as a layman -- and one whose appreciation of fashion is very amateurish -- I find mental illness compatible with his taste in shirts. But I'm not qualified to judge.) Your IP number has already been used to say that Presley was a Nazi. A Nazi, mentally ill ... what ever are you going to allege next? Whatever it is, do please try to provide some evidence. -- Hoary 02:20, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

SEE NEXT: Talk:Elvis Presley/archive11

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