Goldman's critical 1981 biography Elvis was much more controversial. In this book, Goldman drew on more than four years' research into Elvis Presley's life. But for many fans and some critics, his research was undermined by his intense personal dislike of Presley.[citation needed] Goldman dismissed the performer as a plagiarist who never did anything of note after his first records at Sun Records, insisting that he was inferior as an artist to Little Richard and other contemporaries. He also portrayed Presley as nearly insane, using stories that some might see as innocuous (such as Presley taking his friends halfway across the country to buy them peanut-butter sandwiches) to "prove" that the singer had lost his grip on reality. On the other hand, the book does include several newly discovered facts. For instance, in the course of his research, Goldman discovered that Presley's manager, Colonel Thomas Parker, was not a true Southerner, but instead a native of the Netherlands, and probably in the United States illegally. Parker had successfully covered this up to the degree that Presley himself allegedly never learned of it.[citation needed] (The book is harshest on Parker himself out of all the figures in Presley's life with whom it deals, with the probate attorney Blanchard E. Tual, "guardian ad litem" of Lisa Marie Presley in 1981, being identified as Goldman's primary informant on the subject of Parker as a manager.) Furthermore, the book critically deals with the singer's weight problems, his diet, his choice of performing costumes, and his sexual appetites and peculiarities. Goldman even suggests that Presley's promiscuity masked latent homosexuality. Discussing Presley's personal life, Goldman concludes: "Elvis was a pervert, a voyeur." Some critics found comments like these overly biased and judgmental.[citation needed] In his review of the book in the Village Voice, rock critic and Elvis Presley scholar Greil Marcus wrote: "The real significance of Goldman's 'Elvis' is its attempt at cultural genocide. The torrents of hate that drive this book are unrelieved." He particularly objected to Goldman's constant slurs against Presley's background, including his characterisation of Presley's parents as "the original Beverly Hillbillies" without bothering to include the explanatory context that the situation comedy was actually the story of suddenly rich innocents, as Presley's parents themselves were, who were trying to cope with the fear that even money and social access would never be enough to enable them to belong. "It is Goldman's purpose to entirely discredit Elvis Presley, the culture that produced him, and the culture he helped create – to altogether dismiss and condemn, in other words, not just Elvis Presley, but the white working-class South from which he came, and the pop world which emerged in his wake." However, Marcus also admits that Goldman has significantly shown that "Elvis Presley built his own world...where the promise was that every fear, pain, doubt, and wish could be washed away with money, sex, drugs, and the bought approval of yes-men..." He notes regretfully that it "as no book on Elvis Presley before it, has been taken seriously. Despite some partially negative or carping notices, the reviewing media has accepted the book as it presents itself—as the last book we will need about Elvis Presley."[5] In The Boston Phoenix, rock critic Peter Guralnick declared the book "not worth reading." Guralnick said that "even given factual accuracy, scholarly integrity (a large concession), and thematic core, nothing about this book is true. It misses the point of Elvis’s life, of Elvis’s music, and of our response. It misses the humor, it misses the complexity, it misses the excitement, it misses the awfulness; and it offers as a substitute - what? The rhetoric of loathing. A single unvarying note of contempt."[6] In 2006, Blender called Elvis a "muckraking biography",[citation needed] stating that Goldman dealt with everything about Elvis Presley but his music. Other critics liked the book. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called it a "nasty book, written in spectacularly execrable prose, but the view of Presley that it expressed dovetailed in many instances with my own, and in spite of itself I found things in it to admire."[7] According to Rolling Stone, October 21, 1981, Elvis "is a poignant book, the result of Goldman's winning the trust and confidence of hundreds of sources, including many of Elvis' closest friends. It is also an intimate look at a side of Elvis that few even suspected existed. Many people will find some of the revelations unpleasant and view them as a needless and harmful invasion of privacy. Yet, such revelations comprise a truth about modern American heroism and success. The fact is that somehow inherent in Elvis' great fame as an American ideal and idol is a contradiction that was the seed of destruction."[citation needed] Lamar Fike, the Presley insider and former member of the Memphis Mafia, who introduced Goldman to many of his sources, recalled: "The problem was Albert's personality. At first, he liked Elvis. But later, he started disliking him. And by the end of (writing) the book, I think he hated him. I said, 'Albert, you can't do this.' But I couldn't stop him."[8] Defending himself against his critics, Goldman told an interviewer: "People were scandalized by my use of humor and ridicule in [the Elvis biography]. Elvis was someone they were accustomed to taking in a very sentimental way. But I feel he was a figure of the most bizarre and grotesque character... The humor is a mode of perception. Of making things vivid."[9]
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