Someone Turned the Lights Out There in Memphis

 

I've read several biographies of Elvis Presley, and one thing that all these books make clear is that at some point the King of Rock and Roll eventually came to see his throng of admirers as something of a burden. Oh, sure, he liked that they loved him--who doesn't like being loved? --but he found himself overwhelmed by fans whenever he went out in public, a situation he could only rectify by turning day into night, renting movie theaters and even amusement parks after closing hours, when the regular patrons of such places were at home in bed. Elvis' daughter Lisa-Marie, a celebrity in her own right but not so much so that she couldn't go out when the sun was still up, never felt she had to run away from her father's fans, at least not on what would have been his 88th birthday, telling the crowd at Graceland "you're the only people that can get me out of my house," and, after the official ceremony was done with, staying to mingle a bit. Two days later she was back in Hollywood at the Golden Globes, flanked by her mother Priscella and Jerry Schilling, a member of her father's fabled Memphis Mafia, i.e., his entourage. Two days after that she died of what's being reported in the media as a cardiac arrest. I remember seeing Lisa-Marie on talk shows some fifteen years ago promoting her first album, and thinking she had a kind of melancholic air about her. Call me weird, but that actually made me like this young woman when I was prepared not to, as it had seemed like she may had made this particular career choice only because, well, because she was Elvis Presley's daughter (in fact, the song I heard on the radio turned out to be pretty good.) Nevertheless, you may wonder exactly what someone born in the lap of luxury would have to feel melancholic about. Well, Lisa-Marie took a few nasty falls from that lap. The first came when she was nine years old and saw her cardiac-arrested father face down on the bathroom floor. That's the melancholy that informed those talk show appearances I spoke of. The second fall came just two years ago when Lisa-Marie's 28-year-old son, Benjamin Keough (who, had he died his hair black and combed it into a ducktail, would have looked just like his grandfather), put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, it would seem depression runs in this family (it runs even in the extended family, as an ex-husband of Lisa-Marie's, one Michael Jackson, died from too much chemicals in his system, just like the posthumous father-in-law he often emulated.) Of course, these kinds of things happen to poor and working- and middle-class people too. But because they're not celebrities, it happens anonymously, lending a cloak of invisibility to a mental health crisis. I wish Lisa-Marie and Elvis and Benjamin and Michael hadn't died at the young ages they did, but at least it removes, however temporarily, that cloak.