Description

Reduced price due to damage on the spine on the dust cover (see picture)

Published by: Wahlströms Förlag 1990
335 pages written in Swedish
Written by: Larry Geller

Swedish first edition with dust cover

Not the best written of the many Elvis books but still a must read as it was written by one of his closest friends, spiritual guide, and long-time hairdresser, Larry Geller. Some things will be stuck in your mind after reading this one. For example; Elvis slept around mostly in his younger years but then he pretty much cut that out. He wanted and needed to have a true spiritual connection with a woman to have sex with her. Many times, later on, he wouldn’t even have sex with the women; he would just read to them from his spiritual books for hours upon hours and have them sleep in his bed because he hated to sleep alone. He stopped having sex with Priscilla because he told Larry that he started to see her more as a little sister. He also didn’t have a spiritual connection with her. Apparently, Elvis told Larry that he was impotent at the end. Another thing is that Elvis was actually really in love/infatuated with with 20-year old Ginger Alden (he said she had his mother’s eyes) but put off having sex with her for many months—it’s unclear whether they ever did have sex—and was getting fed up with her clinging to her family so much and not wanting to go on tour with him, so he told Larry that he was unsure whether he would end up marrying her. He was in love with Ann Margret at the same time as Priscilla, but Priscilla won out because he preferred a demure, passive, well-mannered, soft-spoken woman who never used profanity and would stay home to raise his children and not have or want a career. Ann Margret was already famous, had an established career, and wasn’t a pushover. It appears the Memphis Mafia (his friends and bodyguards) all preferred Ann Margret over Priscilla because she was more friendly, liked hanging out with the guys, and enjoyed having them around, whereas Priscilla never did. Larry Geller introduced Elvis to some heavy-duty New Age spiritualism, with which he became obsessed. Elvis read over 1,000 books on this topic and carried about 300 of them with him whenever he travelled. Elvis believed that he had seen a vision of Jesus Christ up in the sky and that Christ “exploded” within him, but Priscilla poo-pooed all his spiritualism and, while Larry encouraged him, Priscilla was dismissive of it, and of Larry himself. Priscilla even made him burn all his New Age books at one point. But he later just bought them all again. Elvis maternal grandmother was Jewish, so he was actually Jewish, although his mother hid it and told him not to speak to his father about it since his father and the rest of his family were highly church-going, Bible-thumping, God-fearing, tongue-speaking Christians. I’ve also previously read that there was Native American (Cherokee) on his mother’s side, so how that works out I’m not quite sure. Elvis (and some others in his group) believed that he had healing hands and there were those who believed he had healed them, Jerry Schilling for one. Elvis loved to give more than to receive. He was extremely generous to those he loved, and even to strangers, buying them cars and homes and paying his entourage’s and their families’ hospital bills. His generosity is legendary. He also was known to be very appreciative and loving towards his fans, and never turned down a request for an autograph or a photo. There were other tidbits of information here that were eye-opening, but the final one that stands out in my mind is that two days after his death (after the medical examiner pronounced his official cause of death to be “cardiac arrhythmia [erratic heartbeat] possibly precipitated by mild hypertension and coronary-artery disease”), they discovered that Elvis had cancer of the bone marrow, leukemia, which would have been a very painful death, and which explained why he complained that his body was always in pain, he was exhausted all the time, and he was covered in bruises for years before his death. He also had an enlarged and twisted colon, high sugar content (he once ate 5 sundaes in a row—each with 3 scoops of ice-cream, a banana, whipped cream, and chocolate syrup with a cherry on top—in front of Larry), hypertension, extensive liver damage, and glaucoma. So I guess that also explains, at least to some extent, why he took so many prescription drugs. Elvis was interred in a 900-pound copper casket (no wonder his pall bearers seemed to be struggling under its weight) in the mausoleum at Forest Hills Cemetery in Memphis; however, less than 2 weeks later, he ended up having to be moved to the Meditation Garden that he had had built behind Graceland after there was a foiled kidnapping attempt by two men who were planning to ask for $10 million to release his body. These are just some of the interesting facts revealed in this book.