“Each of them was aware of the other’s addiction, the other’s failures, and neither one of them was going to bring up the other’s failure for fear that the other would then bring up his own – and they were stuck,” explained Guralnick.
“The colonel became in a sense not a tragic figure, because he was a life force overall, so full of vitality and creativity,” added the author, “but I came to see those last years with Elvis as a linked tragedy, in which each of them has their own addictions, and I just didn’t see that before.”
Priscilla Presley saw a lot.
On the 45th anniversary of Elvis’ death, she said the hardest part of watching Baz Luhrmann‘s biopic Elvis was reliving his relationship with Parker. She believes Elvis wanted to take his career further than music.
She added: “He wanted to do movies, serious movies, and Colonel Parker probably should have stayed a publicist. He didn’t take Elvis where he wanted to be, and that was hard because I lived it. I lived the arguments that they had,
“I lived Elvis trying to explain he didn’t want to do the movies with all the girls and the beaches and everything, that he really wanted to do serious things. So living that, with him, and watching the movie, it brought back a lot of memories.”
