The Day the King Died
2018; University of Missouri; Volume: 41; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mis.2018.0044
ISSN1548-9930
Autores Tópico(s)Media Studies and Communication
ResumoThe Day the King Died Susan Kellam (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 50] On the day we lost Elvis Presley, I had to consider—even just for a moment—the fact that the king of rock and roll had collapsed off the toilet while attempting to take a shit. The official cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia. In truth, he'd had a cocktail of prescribed drugs that included morphine, Demerol, Valium, codeine, and quaaludes. [End Page 51] I was working at Rolling Stone magazine when the news broke on August 16, 1977, just weeks after magazine founder Jann Wenner ditched the Bay Area music scene for the gold in Manhattan's skyline. Moving a cultural icon from San Francisco to New York City proved as transformative to the magazine as a sex-change operation. Rolling Stone lost its in-your-face cocky demeanor when the West Coast contingent got stripped down, packed up, and shipped cross-country in a brigade of slow-moving vans. The sanitized white environment created by a team of award-winning architects and designers stifled much of the magazine's notably outrageous personality. We were nearing deadline on a lackluster issue when someone yelled, "Elvis is dead." And the newsroom came alive. Resuscitated voices rose high in the instant huddle to discuss what would be written, and by whom. All I could see was Elvis's oiled hair in the '61 film Blue Hawaii, when his swaying hips did nothing more than make me quietly laugh into my hands at age eight. I'd been mortified only an hour earlier, during my eighth birthday party, when my father came to pick us up for ice cream and the movies. None of my friends knew what divorce even was until the moment that my father knocked on our door with his car motor still running. My fabricated stories of a normal family life, exposed. With trepidation, I'd walked into the bathroom the night before as my mother lay in the tub relaxing and finally admitted that I'd been lying to my friends. I pleaded with her to help me out by allowing my father in the house before my friends arrived. She'd flatly refused, given me a lecture on lying, and allowed my father's awkward arrival to raise the dreaded question. "He doesn't live here?" a young friend asked, eyes like dartboards. "No, dear," my mother answered. "Susie's father and I are divorced." She said it so matter-of-factly. Forever after, Elvis's music recalled for me that horrible moment of humiliation. I'd been found out as a blatant liar; worse, as a kid different from the others, with parents split apart like chicken splayed for the fryer. Funny that Elvis fought so hard to be different, provocative; his swaying hips on the big screen should have shown me that. But at age eight, I couldn't see the bigger picture. ________ Elvis's death proved untimely in many ways. His too-young demise fell on the eve of Rolling Stone's first issue to be produced in New York. As [End Page 52] planned for months, it contained many pieces celebrating the city. So those famous hips and rhythmic swing killed the Bella Abzug/Andy Warhol cover as surely as they'd killed Elvis. Instead of New York's famously hatted Bella, "the king of rock 'n' roll" would be forever memorialized on the Rolling Stone cover, looking much as he had in Blue Hawaii. We had exactly five and a half days to replace the articles on Manhattan with pieces that depicted Elvis in his mythic life and crashing death. Country music editor Chet Flippo rushed off to the funeral in Memphis and filed his article from there. Writer Joe Klein visited the two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis had grown up, and interviewed people who knew the Presley family. They were poor all right, but they weren't trash. Jann Wenner was thrilled when Caroline Kennedy agreed to view the body at Graceland and write two hundred and fifty words describing how "his face seemed swollen and his...
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