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In the early Seventies Elvis Presley’s record label, RCA, released an album of unreleased outtakes called A Legendary Performer. When it outsold his new album of maudlin country ballads the singer must have felt he had begun to lose the battle with his own myth. Trapped inside Graceland, the Memphis mansion that was half home, half prison, the humble country boy who had done more than anyone to invent teen culture became overweight and suffered severe depression. To the outside world, though, he was still the ultimate superstar, the invincible King of Rock‘n’Roll.

Eighteen months before he died Elvis told his producer, Felton Jarvis: “I’m so tired of being Elvis Presley.” Thirty years after the death of the man, the icon remains as strong as a crucifix.

The person behind the curling lip, the real Elvis, remains nothing as straightforward as the image. In innumerous books, he is variously described as generous, charming, sensitive, narcissistic, self-destructive and paranoid. Sam Phillips, the producer at Sun Records who first recorded him in 1954, remembered Elvis, even at the outset, as having “the greatest inferiority complex of any person, black or white, that I had worked with. He was a total loner. He kind of felt locked out.”

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The fact that he survived his stillborn twin brother may have led to feelings of guilt and incompleteness from the beginning. It could also explain the strong ties Elvis had to his mother (who almost died giving birth) and his pack of surrogate brothers – the Memphis Mafia – who lived with him at Graceland even after he married. When his mother died at 42, just as Elvis was set to do a stint in the Army that he was convinced would destroy his career, the sense of isolation grew.

One of his Memphis brethren was Jerry Schilling, who met Elvis playing football when he was just 12 in 1954. By 1965 Schilling was in his hero’s employ, at a time when Elvis had been eclipsed by the Beatles and Bob Dylan and was rapidly becoming an anachronism who churned out vapid movies. “He wanted to grow like any of us,” says Schilling, “but the machinery wasn’t built that way.”

Trapped by his manager Colonel Tom Parker into a Hollywood contract that required three movies a year, there was barely time to sing enough songs for the soundtracks, let alone anything worthwhile. In the year of Rubber Soul and Like a Rolling Stone, the King Rocker was singing Do the Clamand Petunia the Gardener’s Daughter. No wonder he was looking for a way out.

That option arrived in the unlikely guise of a hairdresser called Larry Geller. “We were just good old boys,” says Schilling of the Memphis Mafia. “We talked about girls, football, but Elvis was a real thinker.

Larry gave him an outlet. He could explore his spiritual side.” Soon Geller and Elvis were investigating astrologyand philosophy. “Most of the guys didn’t want to read a book. They gave Larry a rough time.”

One day in 1966, staring at clouds, Elvis became overcome with emotion – a cloud had begun looking like Joseph Stalin, then mutated into Jesus. How could he carry on making those dumb movies, he asked Geller, after seeing the face of God? When the story got back to Colonel Parker, he told Elvis to get off his religious kick. A hurt Elvis snarled back: “My life is not a kick.” The Colonel’s response was to oust Geller and force his singer to perform the demeaning Yoga is as Yoga Does in his next movie.

While girls fell at his feet, Elvis was unlucky in love. He thought he had found the real thing with a young teenager called Priscilla Beaulieu but, just as he promised himself to her, met the actress Ann-Margret on the set of Viva Las Vegas in 1964 and, according to many, discovered what true love was all about. They even discussed marriage.

“Elvis wanted the Colonel to manage Ann-Margret,” says Ernst Jorgenson, sleevenote writer and the man entrusted with the Elvis tape vaults. “But when the Colonel explained that his time would be split 50-50 between them, Elvis thought it was not such a good idea.”

Elvis and Priscilla married in 1967 and divorced in ’72. A biographer, Paul Simpson, calls this the “golden age of Elvisness”. It included his first (and only significant) refusal to bow to the Colonel’s demands, when he made the electrifying 1968 “comeback special” rather than sing a bunch of corny Christmas songs, as well as his return to Memphis to record such classics as In the Ghetto and Suspicious Minds.

The divorce, though, seemed to be a tipping point. He began to immerse himself in autobiographical ballads ( Always on my Mind, Separate Ways) and self-pity. At one of his Vegas shows the spotlight fell on Ann-Margret in the audience. “Leave the light on her, man,” mumbled Elvis, “I just want to look at her.”

While the songs of these twilight years are often dismissed as schmaltz, they are just as much a part of the real Elvis as Jailhouse Rock or Hound Dog. Elvis’s taste in music extended way beyond the R&B/hillbilly fusion that made his name. His record collection stretched from Eddy Arnold, Mario Lanza and Judy Garland to the Animals and Otis Redding. But-gospel remained his music of choice and often brought out his best performances – the fire he poured into mid-Seventies renditions of Hurt and Unchained Melody was normally reserved for numbers such as How Great Thou Art and the show-stopping American Trilogy.

Something first touched upon in Albert Goldman’s scurrilous biography Elviswas the King’s odd relationship with women. In Peter Guralnick’s Careless Lovea queue of women tell similar stories of arrested development, openness and naivety. He tells Barbara Leigh “his entire life story, from the first time he wrestled with a girl in the yard and saw her little white panties”; he calls Linda Thompson “Mommy”. Sheila Carter tells Guralnick: “He was into the romance. We would go out onto the balcony and he would sing songs to me. We had sex, but what he liked best was the petting, the kissing. It was adolescent.”

Priscilla undoubtedly would have received the same treatment. When she left her husband in 1971 for Mike Stone she said publicly that her new beau was “a real man” who treated her “like a woman”. Elvis – who gave her the pet name Little – unsurprisingly freaked, and toyed with the idea of taking out a contract on Stone. Maybe this public humiliation explains his distaste for performing one of his biggest latterday hits, I’m just a hunka hunka burning love. Teddy Bear would have seemed more appropriate.

By the Seventies, his obsession with philosophy had morphed into one with karate. He had leading practitioner, Kang Rhee, flown in to Las Vegas for round-the-clock instruction. As the possibility of touring outside the States was continually thwarted by Colonel Parker (an illegal immigrant, as Elvis discovered very late in his career), his frequent Vegas shows became punctuated by weird monologues, karate exhibitions and comedy. Once he rode on stage on the back of the Mafia man Lamar Fike with a toy monkey attached to his neck and sang an X-rated version of Love Me Tender. In 1970 he even forced a meeting at the White House with Nixon, in which he ranted about the Beatles and gave the President a Colt .45 pistol as a gift. Such incidents laid bare the medication abuse that insiders had known about for years. After the Aloha From Hawaii show, his last real success, broadcast live by satellite to more than a billion people, a combination of pain pills, liquid Demerol and heavy-duty depressants, caused a reaction that led to throat and lung congestion, and so to further medication.

Red West once asked: “How do you protect a man from himself? The wonder was not when he died, but the fact that Elvis could die at all. Only the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, has caused such shock and bewilderment since. Looking at the reissued documentary This is Elvis, his later performances are almost physically painful to watch. The only explanation for why he is performing in public rather than lying in a hospital bed is that no one could entertain the idea of Elvis ever dying. As you hear him struggle through My Way, it seems that Elvis Presley was the only person in the world who was aware of his mortality.

— Jerry Schilling’s Me and a Guy Named Elvis is published by Viking. The single Heartbreak Hotel is reissued on August 13 (SonyBMG)

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