By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!
“Welcome to Elvis’s world, I thought again. One simply had to be there to understand.”
-Ginger Alden
My mother, brother and I were spending the summer in Greece when on August 16, 1977, it was announced that Elvis Presley had passed away. I was seven years old. Growing up in our house the world stopped whenever one of his old flicks was on the CFCF-12 TV midnight movie or rerun on a Saturday afternoon. We grew up listening to his music (my mother made sure of that…in fact she is such a fan that she gets angry whenever she sees and Elvis impersonator, her belief being they are mocking him, rather than paying homage). And even if I do say so myself, I do a great Don’t Be Cruel at karaoke. To many he was an icon; to others he exemplified the trappings of fame. But to Ginger Alden, Elvis was her first real love; and she was his last. After almost forty years she finally recounts the tale of her time with the one they called “The King” in her book Elvis & Ginger.
Elvis & Ginger is neither a tell-all nor a tribute. It is simply Alden’s account of the nine months she spent with the legendary entertainer, proudly told in her own words (part of her reason for penning it was to set a few things straight). And that’s the problem. First of all, why did she call the book Elvis & Ginger and not Elvis & Me, seeing as how the narrative was in the first person? Did an editor not notice that? Probably not, because then said editor would have also noticed how the effort was bogged down in unnecessary, redundant details, and generally poor writing. Maybe she would have benefitted from a ghostwriter, or perhaps made it an “as told to” piece. There was a lot of potential for something greater that was sadly not realized.
Her story would not even be worth documenting were it not for the time she spent with Elvis. Before he arrives and after he exits her life, the book is painfully dull and woefully uninteresting. And Alden herself at times comes off as a class-one airhead (although to be fair she never seems bad or ill-intentioned; in fact quite the opposite), but seriously, who would stay with someone who shot up a toilet bowl with an automatic rifle because it made too much noise?
That being said the bulk of the book that did involve Elvis directly was quite fascinating. It was fun to get a glimpse of the infinitely intriguing singer’s personal habits and idiosyncrasies, and experience life inside his inner circle. While to get to the interesting parts I had to trudge through pages of atrocious writing, it was worth it to see how he lived and spent that last year of his life. Alden, with the benefit of a viewpoint only time and distance can offer, neither praises him as perfect nor condemns him for his faults. She simply, and I feel honestly, tells the story of a man she truly loved and cared about, so at least on that level Elvis & Ginger does have a certain degree of class and respectability.
Although artistically Elvis & Ginger is the equivalent of a black velvet painting of “The King” in a rhinestone studded, high collared white jumpsuit and oversized belt, I can recommend it for die-hard fans looking for a fresh perspective on Elvis’s life.
