Elvis at 90: Aubrey Malone on the King of Rock 'n' Roll's Life, Legacy and Lasting Shadow

Elvis Aaron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, which makes today his 90th birthday. To mark it, the Irish Mirror asked Aubrey Malone, author of The Elvis Diaries: A Glimpse Into The Life Of A Rock and Roll King, published in 2018, to look back on the man and what he left behind. What follows is Malone's personal view, an opinion piece rather than new reporting.

Malone opens by noting how hard it is to picture a 90-year-old pop idol sitting on the porch at Graceland listening to crickets. Some people, he suggests, are born not to last. In his telling, Presley's final years were a parody of the early promise: audiences watched a man who was still standing, let alone singing, despite the drugs in his system. Twelve different types were found at his autopsy. Malone does not think they were the immediate cause of death.

His own theory is stress. Presley died on August 16, 1977, the day he was due to face the public in a concert in Portland for the first time since Elvis: What Happened? was published. The book was written by his former bodyguards, the West brothers and Dave Hebler, who had been fired by Vernon Presley, Elvis's father, not long before. Malone says they sought revenge and that Presley's pride was at an all-time low. He quotes John Lennon: "It's always the courtiers who kill the king."

Malone grew up with the music as the soundtrack of his youth, and saw Presley as a rebel in the mould of James Dean. Presley reportedly slept with 1,000 women, he writes, but only one mattered to him, his mother Gladys. He was one of twins, and his brother Jesse Garon died at birth. Gladys held her surviving son closer, and he grew up a mother's boy. Malone says Presley felt he had to do everything twice as well to make up for Jesse, and carried a lifelong guilt at being somehow responsible. It made him more of a perfectionist.

Then came the Army. Malone says Presley owned the 1950s but went to sleep in the 1960s, and again cites Lennon: "Elvis died the day he went into the army." He entered in 1958. On his return two years later he made more than 30 mediocre films, many shot in little more than a fortnight, for a million dollars and more, feeding appetites for food, sex and much else. In 1968, in a famous suit on a famous TV special, he broke out of that routine and reinvented himself in Las Vegas.

The reinvention, Malone argues, cost him his marriage to Priscilla and his health. Films had not required stimulants, but the concerts did. His manager, Colonel Parker, had him perform often twice a day, for up to 200 days a year. He grew bloated, and a 1975 newspaper headline called him "Fat and forty." Malone says the label tortured him. The decline ended in a bathroom, where, in Malone's account, Presley died alone of a massive coronary, his teeth biting into the carpet. His partner, Ginger Alden, had not stayed awake while he went in to read a book about the Turin Shroud. He was 43, by Malone's count; editorial notes elsewhere give 42.

Malone nearly saw him perform while in America in 1972. He later met Dee Maher, an Irishwoman who ran the Elvis Social Club in Dublin and attended more than 30 of his concerts; she showed him a letter she had received from Presley. Malone visited Graceland in 1980, though he says there was little point, since Presley was gone.

The family story did not end happily either. Malone recently bought a book by Presley's granddaughter, Riley Keough, about Lisa-Marie growing up in the presence of a legend. Presley once sang to his daughter in American Trilogy: "Hush little baby, don't you cry." Lisa-Marie died in 2023, aged 54. Malone's verdict is that she was born with everything and ended with nothing, while her father was born with nothing and died with everything.

What remains, he concludes, is the memory of the charisma, the electric presence in any room, and a voice that moved from gospel to rock to rockabilly in a heartbeat.