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that Wayne is any tougher than the Presley who sings “Blue Suede Shoes”? Presley’s stamina, the sense of raw feeling uncoiled into action, made his emotionalism, gentleness, and exuberance more acceptable, more of a piece with his manhood. Presley didn’t contrast to Wayne as a weaker man but more as a completely different kind of man, more complex, more open to change, less fixed on a single idea or attitude. Presley’s was an idea of man large enough to embrace many more moods and modes, and eager to experience all of them.
    Wayne’s restraint only puzzled Presley. If Wayne’s credo was “No wasted motion,” Presley’s might have been “What’s a few wasted motions between lovers—for the sake of fun?” Presley heaved his Adonis frame into the beat so thoroughly it was as if the music was in possession of his body—much like the Holy Spirit possessed the congregations of the Pentacostal churches he first sang in as a boy. That Presley was invoking a decidedly secular spirit was only half the point—that he did so while reanimating male physical space and energy often gets overlooked. Perhaps because a lot of Wayne’s physical grace was so invisible, it came to seem like defensiveness, an unwillingness to cut loose and have fun, a reserve of anger and tension that wanted some kind of outlet other than violence. Elvis turned the male physique into a dynamic sexual object that trumped both Wayne and Sinatra.
    In James Carroll’s memoir of father-son relations during this period, An American Requiem, he remembers Presley’s influence as all-consuming:
    â€¦ Lewd Elvis embodied the opposite of all that I’d been raised to be. The showy sexlessness of my parents’ relationship and the aggressive Puritanism of my parish and monastery schools had established a standard of repression that we called morality. I was dying to fall short of it. I had been conditioned, like every parochial Catholic, to an exquisite vigilance against “impure thoughts” and “illicit pleasures.”
    â€¦ Until Elvis, “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” I was a boy with four brothers and no sisters. Elvis, like a fifth, did nothing to dispel the haze that mystified my every notion of what a girl was, but he taught me how to dance with one, how to touch her hip, and how to take the wild disapproval of parents and church, teachers and chaperones as a signal that these feelings, as much erotic as rhythmic, were rightly ours. Because of Elvis, I found myself belonging to a new group—not Catholics, the parish, school, or even family, not the military either, but “youth.”
    â€¦ Eventually he would be called The King, but he was already king to me, my truest lord, the one in whom … I found my first identity, not as my father’s kind of Catholic or my mother’s kind of son or my siblings’ kind of brother, but simply as me.
    If Presley’s early records can seem deliciously coy in the wake of what followed, it’s only because the ensuing sexual frankness makes them seem innocent. After all, the beach scene with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr from From Here to Eternity (1953) was the Last Tango in Paris (1973) of its day. Where Wayne used restraint and inhibition, Presley exuded confidence through extroversion, reveled in the confusion about his own vulnerability, and delighted in the idea of himself as a sexual plaything. “That’s All Right,” his Crudup cover, was a gauntlet tossed at the whole idea of Wayne’s persona: Greil Marcus in Mystery Train wrote how Presley “turns Crudup’s lament for a lost love into a satisfied declaration of independence, the personal statement of a boy claiming his manhood.”
    One of the mainstays of John Wayne’s code was how a man—whether he’s a gentleman or a cattle rustler—was supposed to behave in front of a woman, an