The Tales of Two Women
What the Stories of Rural Kentucky and America’s Greatest Svengali have In Common
A Salon with Authors, Alanna Nash & Lucinda Dixon Sullivan
It is the destination to which writers aspire — that special place where their written words soar past the confluence of fact and fiction. To the spot where that created from imagination and that kindled from life experience coalesce.
It is a lofty perch.
For two local women, it is a summer of that elevation.
Lucinda Dixon Sullivan’s novel, “It Was the Goodness of the Place,” hearkens to a simpler era, small-town Kentucky in the mid-19th century, when and where life’s urgency resonated as the call of the tobacco auctioneer.
Alanna Nash’s revelatory biography, “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story Of Colonel Tom Parker And Elvis Presley,” unmasks completely, for the first time, the mysterious presence behind popular culture’s greatest icon.
Lucinda Sullivan recreates a more languid time, one more emotional than its stolid exterior would suggest. Her novel lyrically relates how family reacts to separation, happenstance; how community copes with the imposition of wickedness. It is an endearing bow to an epoch less frenetic, if no less complicated, than today.
After decades of curiosity and years of intense research that spanned continents, Alanna Nash uncovered the sordid tale of Presley’s manager, Tom Parker, the ultimate Svengali. He was, we now know for a fact, a man more maniacal, more manipulative than even Elvisphile’s could have imagined. It is a stranger-than-fiction biography impeccably presented, the missing link in the story of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
At first blush, these ladies’ creations would seem to have little in common.
One author, single, a recognized authority, adds to her heralded canon. The other, married with adult children and a husband she affectionately calls her “patron,” makes her debut in the world of letters.
One seeks truth from the creation of fiction. The other unravels historical factuality as exotic as fantasy.
One writes, “knees shaking,” in a dark room, lit only by her monitor’s screen. The other, as a youngster, found solace journaling in a basement corner, cordoned off by a fireplace screen. On the wall of her workspace now hangs a painting of Elvis — by John Wayne Gacy.
One book evolved from an observation 10 years ago, an image the writer couldn’t escape. The other was sown decades ago, when a 6-year- old enthralled by a musical lothario on a grainy black and white television was unbound from her starched organdy childhood.
Despite the dissimilarities — between the authors, their personalities and their styles, and between novel and biography — the books reveal a sympathetic coincidence of focus.
So it seemed a winning idea to get these writers — who had never previously met — together for a salon of sorts, to discuss their works and their processes. The efficacy of that proposal was soon made clearer when Sullivan advised of her e-mail handle: return2cinda. Nash revealed that she also heard those as the lyrics Elvis was singing in “Return To Sender.”
Skeptical at first, the erudite ladies agreed to meet. We gathered several weeks back in a private upstairs room at the Bardstown Road Bristol Café. Any wariness they might have felt about the caucus beforehand yielded to the immediate comfort of their company.
* * * * *
One thematic coincidence between the two books is the consideration of evil. I asked Alanna Nash if she considered her subject, Colonel Tom Parker, evil?
Nash: This is the question I really wrestled with. Was he evil? I wrestled with the notion of evil when I got into the heavy duty research. Saw my minister, my associate pastor, took her to lunch, and said I wanted to talk about the notion of evil.
Ira Truitt, lonely and demented, is an addled character in Sullivan’s novel. At first he seems peripheral to the plot. Eventually, he figures prominently in the denouement. He utters a line told to him by his father that he does not realize applies to himself: “Some humans are no better than the beasts of the fields.” I asked Nash if that could apply to Elvis’ mentor.
Nash: Well, this is what I was wrestling with. And I’m not sure that I’ve reconciled my thoughts about this — the difference in evil and mental illness. I’m very proud that I found Parker’s army records. I have proof now that he was in a constitutional psychopathic state. Which is the language they used in 1933. Now called anti-social personality disorder.
The line certainly can apply to him — when you look at what he did or did not do when he saw his client deteriorating emotionally and physically. It’s not fair to say he did nothing. He did speak with Vernon (Elvis’ father). He did consult with a lawyer and a friend from Texas about getting him in a hospital. But he never took it any farther.
Parker’s own demons were such … and this is speculation on my part, the idea of putting Elvis into a place that was some kind of facility, which would have been some kind of mental health facility in the ’70s, was so abhorrent to him, because of his own experience, that he couldn’t face it.
I think (Parker) was a man who had a tremendous amount of emotion, and when he allowed emotion to rise to the top he got into trouble.
Sullivan: I was really interested in evil, too. At the time I was thinking of writing the book, Dick (Sullivan’s husband) and I were at Grand Cayman. Then it was a small island with a close population, non-existent serious crime. There was a drug killing. The town was full of talk about it. We had a cab driver, a man of great physical dignity. I asked him about it. He said, “Some humans are no better than the beasts in the fields.”
I was so fascinated with that and how so far above them he considered himself that I wanted a character to say that. … The way I use it would actually be the evil. (The character, Ira Truitt) was going to put himself above other people. The character came directly from that very quote. I wanted the other things he said to sound like that. He has a confrontation with the sheriff and I could hear that voice in my ear. It’s sort of a suppressing-the-emotion thing. It allowed him to consider himself not evil even though he might do evil things to other people, because they were no better than beasts of the fields.
In fact, the devil duped him.
* * * * *
During our conversation, another theme surfaced as a common undercurrent — that of reconciliation. I asked Sullivan whether the novel provided a way to deal with things that happened when she was a child. I asked Nash if her biography helped assemble the pieces for a clearer sense of Elvis.
Sullivan: I can see clearly why it would for Alanna because it is her life’s work.
Nash: My first rock ’n’ roll moment was coincidental with Elvis. Absolutely. I was total Elvis. … I remember seeing very clearly a picture of the Colonel handing out Elvis pictures to little girls. And they were just like me. They were blonde. They were curly haired. They looked just like me. There was something about him, his physical make-up, his physique that was entrancing. There’s a romantic Spear picture of Elvis on Beale Street, and everything about it was completely hypnotizing.
I do feel actually that everything in my life was preparation for writing this book. Things just fell in line. Just being a free-lance pop person at (The Courier-Journal) at the time he died, just standing at the edge of that press pool when they were picking press to go in to view the body. (Nash was the first reporter to view Elvis lying in state.) It just seems like things were already written on the wall. It all goes back. It all started seeing that guy on the Ed Sullivan Show at six years and a month old.
Sullivan: For me it is where the child (a character, Clara) says it had become the bible of her life. I use the phrase, ‘fiction of fiction.’ I always find things in books that I do think grow, and I think people are interested in knowing what comes out of a writer’s life.
Although this book is almost totally a fictional treatment, there were events that went on, and people in my family, even tragic events, that I lent to the characters. Ninety percent of the characters didn’t exist. Ninety percent of what happened — there was no sheriff — I mean it’s fiction. A fictionalized version.
I do think I grew up in such awe, really, of these people, and had such respect for people who did try to make a living with their hands in the tobacco business. I wanted to celebrate that and — I call it ‘saving lives’ — bring back to life some of these people who had died. And in a tragic way.
I wanted to give the reader an experience of something. I wanted them to feel. The world is hard. I wanted them to be able to sit down and spend hours and not be aware of what was going on in the rest of their lives. I wanted to take them away.
There’s a line in there where a woman says ‘she never allowed her soul and heart to empty of its feelings.’ I think that’s the way I felt about the book. It’s all full of that kind of affection, emotion and respect for all that’s happened.
* * * * *
Wondering whether the women saw the totality of their work at the start, I asked if they conceived of their conclusions at the beginning?
Sullivan: Yes, I did. I saw the beginning, what I thought was the beginning, and I saw the end very clearly. I had no idea what the middle was. I saw the couple dancing, fighting for the gun. I knew if they were going to fight for the gun, something dramatic had to happen to balance that. I had a real dilemma after I started it that way — what on earth would keep people going? There has to be something of equal weight on the other end. I was working toward that and knew something like that was going to happen, but I didn’t know exactly what.
Then I realized I didn’t have any middle. It was the hardest thing for me to come up with. Finally, when you relax, you say, I’ve got these people, what would they do? And then I just started following them through the book.
Nash: It’s amazing how a book will write itself if you sit in a chair long enough.
Sullivan: Well, it was really hard for me. But I did sit in the chair. Every time I would think about quitting it, that I’m missing life, I would just despair.
Nash: I did not want to do a book about the Colonel. When I was doing the Memphis Mafia book (“Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia”), my agent said, “The Colonel is your next book.” I said absolutely not. I just thought nobody could get that story. I thought it was too hard. But absolutely I wanted to know him. There was intellectual fascination.
When he died I had tears in my eyes and I thought — we’ll never know.
I had three meetings with him. The first was when the Memphis Mafia was saying just awful things about him. I thought he should have a chance to respond. And I also thought it would be a great coup if we could get him on the record. I went to Vegas not even knowing how to find him. Quirk of fate, I did find him. He wouldn’t tell me anything but he (did) invite me back. And I would go and he would kind of play with me.
I thought it was the impossible rock ’n’ roll book, that nobody could get the story. Too much happened in Holland and who knows Dutch and …
I had no sense of where it was going at the beginning, no.
When I was in Holland, it became very apparent very quickly that there was something in his background, that there was something more ominous than illegal residency here. Because he knew every important politician in Tennessee and California and was a personal friend of Lyndon Johnson. He could have literally picked up the phone and solved that problem of no passport and no citizenship. With one call. But he didn’t. When he was dogcatcher in Tampa, the Alien Registration Act was passed. He could have been made a citizen. But he didn’t do it.
Why didn’t he become a citizen? That’s the question that kept nagging me.
* * * * *
It is logical that when writing fiction, an author hopes to expose reality, even though the story is created from imagination. And when writing of a person’s life, a biographer seeks mythos. I asked the writers if, with their books, they felt they had unraveled greater truths?
Sullivan: When I read biography, what comes out it, out of the good ones, is the person, the character. Comes right off the page. Dickens has a quote, he wants “people standing before him on the ground.” It’s what I said about saving lives. People are gone. We want to re-create them. We want them to breathe.
One thing I wanted to do was to have some characters standing on the ground in front of me. And I know (Alanna) did that with Jessica Savitch. (Nash previously published a biography, “Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch.”) And (with her) other books. That’s the thing that fiction and biography can have in common if they’re lucky. Get those people up off the pages and start breathing. And then you’ve got them to keep.
Nash: They do move in with you. They take on a life of their own. I think that happens both in fiction and in non-fiction. Certainly for me with Savitch and the Colonel. They move into the house. And have their own presence.
The Colonel has been there. I’m about ready to be glad to see him pack up and go. They get in the refrigerator. They get in the bedroom They leave their clothes around. They take up a lot of space.
There’s a William Carlos Williams poem that I always think about in terms of Elvis. The title is “The pure products of America go crazy.” The other title is “To Elsie.” The question for me is why the pure products of America go crazy?
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
