“Lady Blessington called [Lord Byron’s] face “peculiarly pale”, set off by curling hair of “very dark brown”: “He uses a good deal of oil in it, which makes it look still darker.” White skin, dark oiled hair: Elvis Presley. In homage to singer Roy Orbison, Presley dyed his brown-blonde hair black and continued to do so to the end, despite friends’ urging to let the natural colour return. Presley, a mythmaker, understood the essence of his archetypal beauty. Byron and Elvis look alike, especially in strong-nosed Greek profile. In Glenarvon, a roman à clef about her affair with Byron, Caroline Lamb says of her heroine’s first glimpse of him, “The proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt.” Presley’s sneer was so emblematic that he joked about it. In a 1968 television special, he twitched his mouth and murmured, to audience laughter, “I’ve got something on my lip.” The Romantic curling lip is aristocratic disdain: Presley is still called “the King”, testimony to the ritual needs of a democratic populace. As revolutionary sexual personae, Byron and Presley had early and late styles: brooding menace, then urbane magnanimity. Their everyday manners were manly and gentle. Presley had a captivating soft-spoken charm. The Byronic hero, says Peter Thorsley, is “invariably courteous towards women". Byron and Presley were world-shapers, conduits of titanic force, yet they were deeply emotional and sentimental in a feminine sense … Energy and beauty together are burning, godlike, destructive. Byron created the youth-cult that would sweep Elvis Presley to uncomfortable fame.”
/ From the chapter “Speed and Space: Byron” in the book 1991 Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia. Later, in the chapter “Romantic Shadows”, she also likens Byron and Presley to Emily Bronte’s anti-hero Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights /
All hail The King (8 January 1935 - 16 August 1977) on the anniversary of his death. Here’s Elvis in my favourite medium: painted on black velvet by artist Alfredo Rodriguez.
