I’m sitting in Elvis Presley’s seat in his silver 1963 Rolls-Royce, sinking into its faded but still sumptuous upholstery as we ride south on the New Jersey turnpike towards the car’s final resting place. From these windows Elvis would have watched throngs of fans on Hollywood Boulevard and gazed out across the vast deserts of Nevada. At my feet is his eight-track audiocassette, and a red telephone with speed dial buttons bearing mysterious initials: JL, YL, JP, YP – who were they, and what did Elvis want with them? The armrest folds down to reveal his lead shot glass and crystal bourbon decanter.
This custom-built Phantom V was Presley’s plaything throughout his Hollywood years in the 60s. It went with him to Las Vegas where the image of Elvis at his nadir – Fat Elvis – was spawned: two performances a day, 40 shows at a go, a bloated organ-grinder in a white sequined jumpsuit pouring sweat, slurring with prescription drugs, barely able to recall the lyrics.
Now it’s being sold to a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the gambling mecca of America’s east coast, where it will rest indefinitely as the centrepiece of a new Hard Rock hotel and casino. The vehicle is the star of a new documentary, The King, that tells the story of Elvis Presley in the form of a road trip across the US. The movie is about to be released in cinemas, and so the purpose of the Rolls for the film’s director, Eugene Jarecki, is done and he’s on his way to hand it to new owners.
The Rolls was no longer in the possession of Elvis Presley when he ended up dead at 42. But there’s still something haunting about being in this space where Elvis Presley’s dreams came to die. The singer-songwriter John Hiatt felt it when he sat where I’m sitting now when they were shooting the documentary. In the film, he makes a strange grunting noise as he lowers himself into the seat, and then begins to weep. “Sitting in this car and getting the sense, you know, just of how trapped he was. He was just a poor mama’s boy from Mississippi.”
The King is far more ambitious than a straight narrative of Presley’s life. It seeks to show the demise of the American dream: to relate how America’s boundless talent and appetite for hope as personified by young Elvis plummeted into the modern catastrophe of grotesque inequality, money-grabbing and addiction as personified by Fat Elvis.
Jarecki is sitting next to me in the back of the Rolls. He is feeling maudlin. For more than three years a large part of his life has been played out in this car, which he fondly calls Gladys after Elvis’s mother. For the film, he invited musicians, actors and political pundits to sit in its plush seats to sing songs and talk about Presley. Jarecki took the Rolls some 12,000 miles across the States. After all that, he’s preparing to say goodbye and it’s choking him up.
As a documentary-maker Jarecki has spent his career exposing the brutality of American capitalism in works such as Why We Fight (2006) on the US war machine, and The House I Live In (2012), a film about systemic racism in the “war on drugs” . So to grieve over the sale of a Rolls-Royce Phantom V, the epitome of opulence, is not exactly in character. “The idea that I’d feel any attachment to a Rolls is laughable,” he says. “I’m not somebody who worships symbols of wealth. The ostentatious imperial wealth of this car is precisely what I feel has gone wrong for America.”
The King traces the familiar narrative arc of the Elvis story and combines it with that of America’s present-day malaise. It’s striking how closely the two storylines match as Jarecki weaves them into a single braided whole.
Presley’s humble beginnings echo the position of the United States as it came out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Then came his translation of blues for a white audience that speaks to the enduring wound of racism – Presley garnered huge riches from the crossover yet made no effort to repay the figurative debt. “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me,” in the words of Chuck D of Public Enemy.
Presley’s time in the army in Germany in the late 1950s marked the rise of American imperialism around the world. Later in Las Vegas he heralded the advent of rightwing super-donors as casino owners started pumping their gambling fortunes into politics (think Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson). Finally, his death at a time when his body was found to have 14 different prescription medicines in the system foreshadowed today’s opioid epidemic.
To which might be appended the thought that as one of the first truly global superstars, Presley helped usher in the age of celebrity that has culminated with the first reality TV star in the White House.
“People in America at this point in history are stunned deer with what has gone wrong,” says Jarecki as we settle in for the long ride in the Rolls. “Nothing in the American experience is like they thought it would be growing up, the promise of the American dream has come a cropper for so many people.” He looks back on how he came to make The King and thinks, yes, he could have chosen a different tragic protagonist. Marilyn Monroe, perhaps, or Prince. But they would have supported a more partial look at the “American carnage”, to use Trump’s memorable phrase. What drew him to Presley was the totality of the experience.
“Elvis encapsulates it all. Elvis did it all, and he did it by 42.” That age, 42, is significant for Jarecki. He was 42 six years ago when he began to ponder a Presley documentary. “I was entering what felt like a midlife crisis and I discovered Elvis had died my age. I’d already thought he had meaning for America, and now he had meaning for me.”
The eureka moment came as Jarecki was publicising The House I Live In through screenings in 130 prisons and churches. At Lexington correctional centre in Oklahoma he struggled to find a metaphor for the condition of America that would speak to his audience of prisoners and guards.
“And I found myself saying, ‘It’s like we all woke up one day and discovered we were Fat Elvis. We had been young and beautiful once, but now we were addicted to all manner of quick fixes – consumption, carbohydrates, drugs, vanity, violence. Elvis did all of that, and look where it got him.’” Jarecki was struck by the powerful response. His next movie had been born.
We’re halfway to our destination now and Jarecki is in full flow. Sitting beside him for three hours is like having a private screening of a docudrama delving into his inner psyche. He converses much as he edits movies, frenetically, making lateral connections, plucking references from the air. One moment he’s citing Schopenhauer, the next Herman Melville, WC Fields, Thomas Jefferson, John Lennon …
“I have a level of attention deficit disorder,” he admits. “I’m the most fraught control freak I have ever met. And that gave me a special window into the crisis of Elvis Presley – I have no superiority to this story, it’s also about myself.”
He brought that same energy to The King. At its finest, the film is spellbinding. The final sequence, lasting barely a couple of minutes, is a masterclass in editing. It presents a collage of disturbing images of the corruption of American values – OJ and his gloves, Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky, the start of the Iraq invasion – set against Presley’s jaw-dropping performance of Unchained Melody in Rapid City, South Dakota, weeks before his death. The combination is explosive.
Jarecki didn’t want to make a conventional documentary of talking heads intercut with archive footage. He hankered after something more evocative that would channel the dual narratives of Presley and the stupor of America. One of his producers noticed that Presley’s Rolls was up for auction in California, and he leapt at it. “All of a sudden it was: ‘Road trip! We can get in that car and hit the open road.’” Which is what they did, breaking down at least 20 times along the way.
He took some flak for his choice of automobile. David Simon, creator of The Wire, tells Jarecki on camera that a Rolls-Royce is a bad Elvis metaphor: it should have been an American-made Cadillac. Mike Myers, who is revealed to be a stellar social critic on all things American, even though he’s Canadian, reflects on how weird it was that Presley even owned a Rolls-Royce. It’s “very English, very royal. America made such a point of not having a king, I never understood Burger King, Muffler King, Elvis the King.”
It was that discord – an American icon parading himself within a symbol of British monarchy, the country that prided itself on its dream of equal opportunity embracing vast inequality – that drew Jarecki to the Rolls. “There is something profoundly tragic in what this car represents in the American and global story. If I’d chosen a Cadillac it would have suggested a return to America’s glory days in the 50s; with the Rolls-Royce there’s no doubt that this story doesn’t end well.”
And how badly it does end.
Presley took his overwhelming talent and squandered it on lucrative deals and easy fixes. As Ethan Hawke memorably puts it in the film: “Elvis at every turn picked money. You know, ‘Should I stay at Sun records? Well, there’s more money at RCA, I’ll go to RCA. Should I take this big, giant movie contract, even though I don’t have any creative control? Well, it’s the biggest movie deal ever, let’s take it. Should I go on tour like I want to or should I take the biggest offer a live performer’s ever had in Vegas?’ Every chance he prioritized money, and where did it put him? Dead and fat on the toilet at 42.”
It’s striking that since Presley died in 1977 the gulf between America’s super-wealthy and its struggling masses has grown dramatically. Graceland is a small suburban cottage compared with modern executive mansions. At the height of his fame, Presley earned $1.2m in a year; today Amazon’s Jeff Bezos makes more than that every hour.
Enter the second major theme of the film: Donald Trump. Jarecki and crew began their road trip from Tupelo in Mississippi to Memphis, Nashville and beyond long before Trump had announced his bid for the White House. But then, as the filming progressed in tandem with the presidential campaign, the crosscurrents became irresistible.
“We were driving across America as the election was taking shape. At that point Trump seemed a joke, a macabre clown who could never be president,” Jarecki says. Poor Alec Baldwin is in the movie saying: “I don’t know when this film is going to come out, but Trump is not going to win.” And then Trump does win, just months before Jarecki’s documentary – Promised Land, as it was then called – was shown at Cannes. In the pithy summation of the political commentator James Carville: “We are so fucked, you have no idea.” Cut to Presley in his final performance in Indianapolis, less than two months before he died, slobbering into the microphone and flailing around like a beached whale.
You would have thought that the fortuitous confluence of Trump’s victory and the culmination of Jarecki’s movie would have been a massive boon. His friends thought so. On election night they called him up in droves lamenting the result but congratulating him on his windfall – as they saw it, the arrival of Trump was vindication of his central thesis about the demise of America.
But at Cannes, amid the aftershocks of the election, he said he was overcome by a profound forlornness. He didn’t want to be a merchant of despair. As a born idealist – an “apocalyptic optimist” as he calls himself – he wanted to uplift. “There I was presenting an autopsy of the American dream, and that was not my intention.”
In the past year he has substantially re-edited the film, inspired by the anti-Trump resistance that has sprung up including #MeToo, NFL players taking a knee, the anti-gun youth revolt of the Parkland students, and more. “Trump is such a grotesque rapacious morally bankrupt soulless monster that he has awakened the first serious set of social movements I have seen in my lifetime,” Jarecki says.
The new edit also accentuates the positive, elevating the healing power of music. The final cut now includes a series of rousing performances recorded inside the Rolls, which they rigged up into a sound studio replete with 16 mics and five cameras. The recordings feature classics from the Mississippi bluesman Leo Bud Welch, M Ward singing Sad, Sad Song, the then 11-year-old EmiSunshine giving an astounding rendition of Blue Yodel No 6, and an entire troupe of all-stars from Memphis’s Stax music academy who cram into Gladys’s back seats to pound out a spine-tingling gospel version of Chain of Fools. John Hiatt even manages to dry his eyes to perform Wind Don’t Have to Hurry.
“The music I hope captures a counterintuitive zeitgeist,” Jarecki says. “America is more hopeful today because of Donald Trump, in direct countering to a monstrous inhumane person.”
That’s a positive note on which to say goodbye to Gladys. We draw up outside the Hard Rock casino in Atlantic City and the car’s new home. Jarecki got a good deal for the Rolls – he will recoup what the film invested in the vehicle, and Hard Rock will make an additional $25,000 donation to the Stax academy as a gesture towards repaying Elvis’s debt to black music.
Atlantic City also offers a pleasing end to the narrative arc of his film. When this casino opened in 1990, it bore the name Trump Taj Mahal. Then the world’s largest casino-hotel complex, it was built by Trump for $1.2bn largely from junk bonds. Trump boasted it would be one of the greatest business successes ever. It entered bankruptcy the following year. “You couldn’t have scripted this,” Jarecki says, sounding boyishly happy. “The great screenwriting office in the sky intervened on our behalf, and the poetry is overwhelming.”
The King was released in the US on Friday and will be in UK cinemas in the autumn
