Heartbreak Hotel
So lonely I could die...
You know how, on Google Earth, you start out seeing the whole planet—literally everywhere is an option—before zooming in, and zooming in, down, down, right to one particular spot?
In 1959, Priscilla Beaulieu was just one in a zillion fourteen year old girls on the planet:
She’s a good girl, loves her mama/she’s a good girl, is crazy ‘bout Elvis1.
Heartbreak Hotel is her favourite.
And Elvis—the global superstar, who could have picked any girl on the planet—picks her.
Why, you’re just a baby, he says, when she tells him she’s still at school (he’s ten years older). Nevertheless—neck minnit2—she’s still at school, but living at Graceland. Taking Speed to stay awake in class, the morning after the night before. I don’t know how to tell the nuns that every night I’m picking which handgun goes with which outfit.
I don’t imagine it would ever occur to a bloke to make this movie: hey, Elvis, man: what other perspective could there possibly be? Even Sofia Coppola admits, She’s always been perceived as this symbol of American glamour and perfection and I had no idea how much she struggled3.
However, as Guardian reviewer Wendy Ide, describes, Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything, and nothing4.
It’s one of those movies that you’ll talk about afterwards. What about her parents? What were they thinking? Note, though, that (real life) Priscilla5 says My parents were really beside themselves. I basically threatened them and told them, If you don’t let me go, I’ll find my way.
That image of her driving off to find herself and start a new life was always the final frame, says Sofia. And, on the soundtrack, a song by Dolly Parton—a song inspired by Dolly’s decision to leave her partner, Porter Wagoner, and pursue a solo career—a song that she famously refused to sell to Elvis6.
If I should stay I’ll always be in your way So I'll go, but I know I'll think about you every step of the way
Go to the movie. See another perspective.
Tom Petty, Free Fallin’
Well, two years later
Vogue, November 2023
Sunday 31 December 2023
Quoted in The Hollywood Reporter August 23 2023
I Will Always Love You. Dolly did allow Whitney Houston to sing it, and made over $10 million in royalties.
And … oh so lonely, I could die …