Spectator, The: In search of the perfect hamburger

The second volume of this authorised biography of Elvis Presley is a masterpiece of black comedy, though Peter Guralnick probably didn't intend this. The author of Sweet Soul Music and Nighthawk Blues wanted to portray the greatest pop icon of them all, to use words like 'riffs' and 'jams', and to convince us that the man and his music were worthy of serious academic study. All this, gloriously, got swept aside by eccentricity at its flood tide.

Few things are as depressing as the biography of a pop star, for what have you got? A small talent and the amplifiers, and the amplification does not end with the sound system. Once past that small talent you encounter the cynicism. and the suits, the massed ranks of agents, publicists, accountants and lawyers engaged in the manufacture and the marketing of what until then had been a very ordinary human being. But two things make Careless Love unique.

The first is that this talent did not need amplifiers, it did not even need a musical accompaniment: the subject of this biography, virtually alone among pop stars, could sing. He could sing anything and you would have listened. The second is that in these pages you meet a supporting cast which includes a man with a pet anaconda he used to take swimming in the condominium pool, but even he and the snake get pushed to one side, for here they come, a tall, beautiful young man in dark glasses and a pop-eyed old con artist.

Elvis Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, were two of the strangest human beings ever to walk the earth. For all practical purposes they were astronauts, each occupying his own dream world, Elvis in reaction to fame and money and pills, the Colonel because he had had so much to make up, chiefly himself. Their own time, as for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, was a mere backdrop to their curious adventures.

The Colonel wasn't a colonel at all, he wasn't even Tom Parker; he was a Dutch seaman called Andreas van Kuijk who had jumped ship and was thus an illegal immigrant, which would explain why Elvis never went on an international tour. Had he come along, the Colonel wouldn't have got back into the country again. He had been so many things, a seaman, a municipal dogcatcher, a showman travelling with a dancing chicken act (the Colonel heating up a metal plate on which he then placed the chickens), and, having flown over all these, had finally settled into showbiz management, when he met Elvis.

He had little or no interest in music. All that was left to `the boy'. The Colonel was interested in only three things: roulette, sunbathing and putting one over on as many people as he could, including the boy, getting him to appear in those embarrassing films and creaming off over 50 per cent of the take, which he then gambled away. A shameless cheapskate, he sold souvenirs outside concerts and, even though Presley was appearing on Frank Sinatra's show, charged one of Sinatra's friends a dollar for his autograph. He cultivated shabbiness, wearing a baseball cap, a loosefitting short-sleeve shirt and seersucker pants, which, he said, saved time (`the big shots are afraid to be seen with me').

And then there was Elvis, who was fiercely against drugs, but carried the prescribable variety like Codeine around with him in half-gallon containers so that he had daily visions in which he took off in spaceships and believed that his thoughts could turn off the sprinklers in the Bel Air country club. He then got religion (from his barber), but saw the face of Stalin in the clouds over Arizona. He was fascinated by embalming and by childbirth, dropping in on funeral parlours and on delivery wards, where he cheered on the straining mothersto-be. He was allowed to do this because he was Elvis, who, when he wanted a particular hamburger, summoned his private airliner and took off into the night. When the whim took him he bought Cadillacs for passers-by in the street he had never seen before.

He was a great patriot and cultivated police officers, though the laws of his country he never did understand. He set up house with a 14-year-old schoolgirl, whose father, a serving army officer, raised no objections, being assured that his daughter's honour was safe. So it was, though the underage girl who later became Mrs Presley noisily pestered the pop icon in bed to get on with it. But Elvis believed in virginity, sleeping with hundreds of women and in the morning congratulating those who had withstood his attentions.

He spent most of his time, when not on tour, behind closed curtains in his room, watching television and reading. Apart from the girls, his only companions were bodyguards recruited from old childhood friends, whom he equipped with guns, dark glasses and briefcases (one kept a single hairbrush in his). But the pills got him in the end. The doctors kept supplying them and he kept shovelling them in. He died taking a crap, and the doctors panicked. When the police got there they found nothing but teddy bears in his room.

But I remember where I was, and what I was doing, the night of his death, something I do not remember about anyone else, with the exception of immediate members of my family. Sad really. Only one letter from Elvis survives, that to a startled President Nixon, offering to help him solve the drugs problem. That Mr Guralnick has managed to assemble over 750 pages of biography from oral material is a tribute to his industry.