“If we can strip away the negative connotations, and then look at the consequences, there’s a lot of truth to be uncovered,” Hoedel says. Presley’s forebears may have made marriage choices because of poverty and proximity, but Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt married to keep wealth in the family. While some have sought to portray the family as hillbillies, the author points out that inter-marriage was not at the time unusual across society. “Elvis shifted our universe culturally like no one has before and he deserves to be treated like an historical figure, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, but instead he gets weighed down by sensationalism, and that keep us from the truth,” she says. Hoedel, a lifelong fan, believes that much of the reams of literature about the singer, starting with Albert Goldman’s 1981 Elvis, have distorted his image, and she believes that a revision is overdue. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Two-year-old Elvis with his parents Vernon and Gladys Presley in 1937 in Tupelo, Mississippi. By examining his flaws and health issues, maybe we can start to see his humanity again.” Elvis was a sick man who hid a lot of his weakness to fill concert venues and support his family. “That’s not enough for a man who culturally shifted our universe. “Elvis is seen as less or more than human, like an image, and he’s been reduced to this rock’n’roll guy who died in his bathroom from taking too many pills,” Hoedel told the Observer. Examining them, she believes, is a way to “humanise” the mythical figure of Presley, who in later life was known for his corpulence and indulgent appetite. Five of those disease processes, she says, were present from birth.
Hoedel writes that Presley’s health problems were intertwined with his life story, and he suffered from disease in nine of 11 bodily systems. “They had a similar four-year period of degenerative health, and that’s interesting because she did not take the same medication as he took.” Hoedel, an historian, claims it was not a coincidence, that Presley’s mother, Gladys, died at 46 and Presley at 42.
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