Putting on Airs

This past spring I went to Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, again. Like millions of other Americans, I've got a thing about Elvis. To me, Elvis was not just one of the greatest vocalists of his time but also a man who helped open the cultural door between black and white, first in my native Southland and then in America at large.

It's an important, if rarely recalled, fact that in 1956 Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel" was the first record ever to be number one on the pop, country, and rhythm & blues charts at the same time. He was an instinctively visionary artist who changed the world, or at least enlarged it. And, oh yeah, he was one of us--a white Southerner of working-class origins who still had to put up with people mocking his accent and manners.

Most of my fellow pilgrims to Graceland don't think much about Elvis in terms of cultural politics and racial history, not explicitly anyhow. But, by and large, they share my other impulses. They love the noise he made. And they love the story of a so-called "redneck" who was born on the wrong side of town, drove a truck when he got out of high school, rose to worldwide fame and untold wealth, and with it all remained a good old boy true to his origins and utterly without airs.

For those folk Elvis was a symbolic affirmation of their own value and the value of their lives, customs, and beliefs. His private plane, custom-made cars, and the very plush and flashy decor sneered at by urban sophisticates are, for Elvis' fans, emblems of power and respect. Those, of course, are the two things that are most lacking in the lives of most working-class Americans--Southern, white, and otherwise. The lucky ones may accumulate commodities such as skiboats and Winnebagos. But ultimately those are poor substitutes for power and respect, or for being somebody, perhaps even being your own boss. Elvis was somebody. He was "the King."

The irony, of course, is that the King himself, from the time he achieved worldwide fame, had little power over his own life and career. His conniving manager, Col. Tom Parker, called all the shots, putting him in that series of dreadful movies and skimming half the proceeds off the top instead of the customary 20 percent maximum. And outside of his own people, the King got less respect than Rodney Dangerfield. In his early days, he was ridiculed by mainstream cultural pundits as a sex-crazed savage and in his later years as merely a bloated purveyor of Vegas kitsch.

When Elvis died 10 years ago this August, he died of the classic white American disease--too much money and not enough meaning. As Little Richard put it, "He got what he wanted but lost what he had."

THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY of Elvis' lonely death is a good time for thinking about the trials that have befallen Jim and Tammy Bakker. For one thing the Bakkers come from a world where the line between religion and show biz has never been all that clear-cut, and they blurred it more than most. And over the years, their PTL ministry, like the other TV churches, appealed to a constituency similar in demographics to the one that gathers at the gates of Graceland each August, and for some of the same reasons.

Jim and Tammy were clearly backwater folk from a religious tradition, Pentecostalism, that gets as much respect from the religious establishment as rock and roll did from the cultural one. They didn't have Pat Robertson's camera-ready cool, Jerry Falwell's sharp-tongued political savvy, or Jimmy Swaggart's fire. Jim and Tammy's appeal wasn't their wisdom and learning or their preaching and singing skills. It was the (ultimately fake) humility with which they insisted that they were just like their audience. And they proved it by parading their commonplace trials and sorrows--from marital trouble to the death of a family pet--across the screen.

For many of their viewers, Jim and Tammy "were somebody." They started out preaching and singing in a tent and ultimately built an amusement park and a resort hotel ("just as good as anybody's"), and they met with the president and other important people. They had vacation homes and fancy cars and traveled the world. But they were still just plain old Jim and Tammy. Their Carolina empire drew from their fans the same "this-is-ours" admiration that Graceland does.

As we now know, Jim and Tammy also got what they wanted but lost what they had. But here the comparison becomes unfair to even the drug-addled and profligate Elvis. Col. Parker may have been a crook, but Elvis wasn't. He didn't build his commodity kingdom by cajoling widows into donating their pension checks. People bought Elvis' records and went to his shows and generally got their money's worth. And while the King may have lost his moorings, his figure, and even part of his sanity, he never lost his all-important sincerity. He really did worship his late mother and pass the lonely hours singing hymns and spirituals.

For Jim and Tammy, sincerity seems to have been the first thing to go. Their fatal sin isn't found in Falwell's litany of sexual and fiscal accusations. It is, finally, the breach of trust with the people who believed in them and gained a vicarious sense of stature from them. They were frauds. They claimed to be something they weren't. They put on airs.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.