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US writer Sally Hoedel claims Elvis died young because of incestuous relatives

A writer has claimed Elvis Presley’s tragic death at the age of 42 was not caused by self-destruction and drug abuse but was instead a tragic inevitability spurred by bad genes in the singer’s family tree.

Myths and misconceptions have continued to swirl around Elvis’ death in the 45 years since the legendary performer was found unresponsive in the bathroom of his Graceland mansion on August 16, 1977, reported The US Sun.

His official cause of death was ruled a heart attack, a tragic fate that has long been attributed to The King’s excessive indulgence in prescription drugs and unhealthy foods.

Those attributions can be traced back to news coverage from the time, with reports painting the star as a bloated, forlorn drug addict — a rock’n’roll cliche who popped one too many pills and died long before his time.

But for author and lifelong fan Sally Hoedel, the cause of Elvis’ premature demise is not so clear-cut.

Hoedel claimed that Elvis was always destined to die young. She attributed this to her belief that he may have had a series of defective genes possibly passed down to him by his maternal grandparents, Bob Smith and Doll Mansell, who were his first cousins.

Hoedel argued that those alleged faulty genes were aggravating factors behind his various health issues, which he in turn treated with a cocktail of prescription drugs.

“That first cousin marriage obviously causes a lot of issues,” Hoedel theorized to The US Sun in a phone interview from her home in Michigan.

“Elvis’ mum Gladys died very young at 46 and she had three brothers who all died at similar ages from heart and lung-related issues. So it stops being a coincidence by the time it gets to Elvis,” she claimed, “because there’s so much going on in that family tree.”

For her book, Elvis: Destined to Die YoungHoedel researched the medical history of the Presley family and unearthed never-before-reported information.

His interest in the topic was piqued after noticing a series of similarities in the deaths of Elvis and his much-beloved mother Gladys, who died almost exactly 19 years before him on August 14, 1958.

Gladys, like her superstar son, died of heart failure. She was 46, just four years older than Elvis when he passed away.

Additionally, both Elvis and Gladys suffered a “similar four-year period of degenerative health” in the lead-up to their deaths, according to Hoedel, “which is interesting because they weren’t taking the same kinds of medication.”

Research conducted by Hoedel found that Gladys had been seeing a cardiologist since at least 1956, and was also hospitalized for two weeks that same year with a mystery illness.

Shortly before her death, Gladys was also diagnosed with hepatitis, the origins of which baffled her doctors at the time. The condition, which targets the lungs and liver, was thought to have been related to Gladys’ alcoholism.

Born and raised in extreme poverty in the deep south, Gladys’ struggles to cope with her son’s meteoric ascension to fame and fortune are well documented, with the self-described “most miserable woman in the world” reportedly once telling a friend over the phone , “I wish we were poor again, I really do.”

Growing increasingly isolated and depressed as Elvis became a global sensation, Gladys began drinking excessively and taking diet pills – a downward spiral that many believe led to her hepatitis diagnosis and ultimately contributed to her death.

Gladys fell seriously ill just a few months after Elvis enlisted in the US Army. The timing of her downturn in her health spurred theories that Gladys drank herself to death, wracked with worry and suffering from a broken heart while her son was serving overseas in Germany.

Hoedel believes that narrative is baseless “romanticism.”

“Gladys has always been painted as this woman whose son became famous, bought her a big house and she just struggled to deal with it all and essentially died of a broken heart,” the author and historian contended.

“But that’s not how it works. I think Elvis and Vernon [Elvis’ dad] both knew who knew how sick she was before he left for the army.

“They were all so sad because I believe for sure that they knew they didn’t have a lot of time left with her.”

Hoedel argued – like Elvis – the causes of Gladys’ death and ill-health lie further up the family tree.

“The Presleys were incredibly secretive about their health,” Hoedel said, “but I managed to interview people like Nancy Clarke, the daughter of Gladys’ cardiologist, who used to go on house calls with her dad to the Presley home.

“And she told me before her dad passed away, he said there was more to Gladys’ death than what he understood because he’s long been quoted as saying it looked like hepatitis, but it wasn’t, and he couldn’t work out what was wrong with her.”

Hoedel believed that Gladys was actually suffering from Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, an inherited and rarely diagnosed disorder that can cause lung and liver disease.

“We know Elvis had it because he was found to be a carrier for Alpha-1 after his death, so it had to come from somewhere” she added.

“And it all leads back to Gladys’ parents,” she claimed.

In her book, Hoedel examined the health issues of Elvis’ grandmother, Doll Smith, who is believed to have suffered from Tuberculosis for more than 30 years.

“Again, something that doesn’t make sense, but continued to be passed down the family tree and then throughout recorded Elvis history as well,” Hoedel argued. “This book explains how Tuberculosis was most certainly a misdiagnosis in the early 1900s.

“From there, with the first-cousin marriage, Gladys [may have] inherited two damaged genes and a more serious version of the disease.”

All of Gladys’ brothers died of heart and liver-related issues in their forties and early fifties too.

Faulty and defective genes were also passed down to Elvis, Hoedel suggested.

The legendary crooner was suffering from diseases in nine of the 11 bodily systems, including his heart, his lungs, and his bowels. It was Hoedel’s contention that five of those disease processes were present from birth. Hoedel believed Elvis was a man who struggled every day to survive.

His prescription drug problem, she theorized, may have been the result of Elvis and his infamous physician, George “Nick” Nichopolous, attempting to treat his various congenital illnesses, rather than just mindless overconsumption.

“Elvis had various health issues but he hid them so well that the over-medication is what we remember now,” Hoedel claimed.

“He often took too much, and there are issues there, but you have to ask why he was taking those pills in the first place.

“One of the reasons Elvis turned to the medication was pain, he was also a lifelong insomniac, but the reason he was self-medicating was that he was trying to find a way to be Elvis Presley.”

The more he toured, the more medication he would need to function through his various ailments, Hoedel suggested.

But Elvis – a devoted son, husband, father, and friend – couldn’t simply stop performing. He had more than 100 people on his payroll from him, relying on him to keep bringing the money in to keep them all afloat.

Memphis Mafia member Lamar Fike told Hoedel he begged Elvis to quit touring after the singer complained of fatigue and pain.

“I have to make payroll,” The King replied.

Speaking of the eleven electric performer’s ailing health during his final years, Elvis’ bodyguard Ed Parker described him as a “battery that had been drained too many times.”

“His body could no longer hold a charge,” Parker said.

Still, on Elvis soldiered, until his life came to an abrupt end on August 16, 1977.

Ultimately, as her book title suggests, Hoedel argued that Elvis was always destined to die young, and nothing could’ve saved The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll from the unfavorable genetic hand she believed he was dealt with.

For the author, examining Elvis’ supposedly faulty genetic make-up was an effort to re-humanize the mythical figure of Presley, who she feels in the years since his death has been reduced to a rock star cliche who simply died alone on the bathroom floor.

“There are so many myths and misconceptions about how Elvis lived, not just in how he died, and it isn’t fair on Elvis,” Hoedel said.

“I think Elvis is the greatest victim of sensationalism and romanticism, and both have kind of plagued and haunted his legacy and prevented him from being remembered as the incredibly important historical figure he is.

“Elvis shifted our universe culturally like no one has before and he deserves to be treated like a Henry Ford or Thomas Edison of pop culture.

“But the sex drugs and rock’n’roll narrative has held him back – he’s a bigger place in American history.”

This article was originally published on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission

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Sports

Sad milestone in Princess Charlotte video

I’m going to make an argument that might make you scoff: To be born a prince or princess in

the British royal family would be a rotten fate.

Oh yes, I know about the castles, the family’s $645 million wealth and the just under $3 billion trusts which only some members hav access to, not to mention the indescribably vast collection of jewels including questionable Romanov pieces, rubies the size of quail’s eggs and that their Gan Gan owns the world’s largest private collection.

To live life, from your first squalling breath, as an HRH means nearly unthinkable privilege, far too much venison and always getting to board a RyanAir flight first.

But, it would still be a rubbish life.

Exhibit A) the video released by William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Instagram and Twitter accounts on Sunday night ahead of England’s Lioness soccer team playing in the Euro 2022 final. There the duke sat in some bucolic garden somewhere in England of the sort that Beatrix Potter would have given her best bonnet to sketch. On his knee he sat Princess Charlotte, age seven-years-old, with what looked like a plastered-on, slightly forced smile.

You can see her eyes dart off to the side, possibly to her mother the duchess who, as we know, is a dab hand with a camera. William wishes the team luck before Charlotte gets to deliver her line from Ella at the end, saying “Good luck, I hope you win, bye,” and offering a cheery wave.

It’s short, sweet and should be nothing more than a source of a few million more likes.

Except that, watching the video, something occurred to me. Here we have the future king delivering his lines with genuine warmth and enthusiasm and a small child staring down the barrel of a totally new sort of royal childhood, one where she and brothers Prince George and Prince Louis won’t just be obliged to occasionally appear. in public but will be required to help churn out the social content needed to keep the monarchy afloat.

Sure, all royal kidlets, including a cherubic Queen in the 1920s, have been rolled out to charm and delight the masses, tiny curiosities, waving gamely, that the press could slap on their front pages with glee abandon.

However, what sets the youngest Cambridges totally apart is that they are now also required to help their parents keep the pipeline of photos and videos for social media purposes coming.

Not only are George, Charlotte and Louis already expected to take part in key ceremonial family moments but on top of that, their childhoods are going to be intruded upon in an unprecedented way in the royal annals all in the name of likes, retweets and views .

You can already, clearly, see this pattern emerging if you contrast William and Charlotte at seven.

The year the prince was that age, he took part in the carriage procession for Trooping the Color and the later Buckingham Palace balcony waving session, appeared at the Beating Retreat military parade, and was photographed attending two weddings (his uncle, now the Earl Spencer , and that of the Duke of Hussey’s daughter) and alongside his brother Prince Harry on the younger boy’s first day at school.

Contrast that with the 12-months to date for Charlotte. In August last year she appeared in a Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Instagram post about a conservation effort called the Big Butterfly Count; there was the family’s Christmas card image, snapped during a private holiday to Jordan, that was shared widely; she attended the memorial service for her de ella Great Grandfather Prince Philip in March and the royal easter service in April, before the usual birthday shots of her were released in May.

Come June, Charlotte and her siblings took part in their first Trooping the Colour, did the balcony waving thing, undertook her first official engagement with her parents and George in Cardiff where she participated in an official walkabout, before taking center stage with her family during the Platinum Jubilee Pageant, along with filming a video baking cakes with Kate, George and Louis.

Also in June, the Cambridge Three appeared in a sweet family shot, taken in Jordan, that was posted to mark UK Father’s Day.

Sure, the young Cambridges may never know the hell of being chased by the paparazzi, but often in the coming months and years we are very likely only going to more regularly see their small faces popping up on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook feeds. (A gambling woman would put money on William and Kate making a foray onto TikTok soon too.)

For the duke and duchess, being on most of the major platforms means they have agreed to a post-industrialist Faustian bargain. They can plug their brand of royalty – an accessible, warm and relatable one – directly to Britons via the most powerful marketing platforms ever created. The cost? They have to energetically and regularly generate the sort of personal and intimate photos and videos that are expected in these environments, that is, they are going to have to serve up their children at times.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, about 160 years ago, had the canny idea of ​​remaking the monarchy’s image by marketing their own family unit (and all nine children). This they did by releasing photos of what had hitherto been entirely personal moments such as christenings and the family on holiday. (In the 1860s, tens of thousands of copies of souvenir photos called carte-de-visites of the family were sold in the UK.)

This is a very similar strategy to the one that William and Kate are pursuing now, with their Happy Normal Family routine one of the building blocks of Cambridge Inc.

Cast your mind back to April last year when the duo released a totally unexpected departure of a video of the family gambolling on a beach, playing in a pristine garden and roasting marshmallows, to mark the duke and duchess’ tenth wedding anniversary.

The whole thing looked and felt like a commercial for a luxury station wagon, complete with atmospheric guitar music.

That was not an accident because fundamentally, William and Kate’s job comes down to the same thing a German car brand does: selling. In their case, selling the UK on a hereditary monarchy again and again to ensure it survives well into the 21st and 22nd centuries.

And, while every generation of royal parents have made their children accessible to the world via whatever the new technology of the day is, before now there was at least some sort of line between their private and public selves.

What sets George, Charlotte and Louis apart is that that distinction, that line, has quietly blurred in the last couple of years. We have seen content shot during family holidays, while ensconced on their private estates and after school in the Kensington Palace garden, shared on social media by their parents.

Obviously William and Kate are deeply protective of their children but they also have a responsibility to the monarchy too and that means embracing whatever new marketing weapons they can add to their arsenal.

Social media is a beast that must be fed and in recent years William and Kate have seriously upped their game on this front, hiring David Wakins, who formerly ran the Sussex Royal social media accounts, and launching a YouTube channel with a charming sizzle reel of sorts.

We are now served up, via the various Cambridge accounts, made-for-social content to promote their good works or news, such as when Kate was named as the Patron of the Rugby Football League and Rugby Football Union in February, with Kensington Palace putting out a sweet 30 second video starring the duchess amongst others.

These days it is hours, at the very most, after they attend any sort of engagement or event that videos and/or multiple images taken by the Cambridge team are posted, chirpily informing the world of what they have been up to and increasingly offering behind -the-scenes access.

Take their recent, somewhat disastrous tour of the Caribbean where they paid for their own photographer Matt Porteous to record their trip and where the couple’s digital team put out daily videos and photo montages.

A video of them scuba diving, shot by Porteous, to view marine conservation work was an interesting first – an official engagement conducted while the credentialed press pack were nowhere in sight and which was exclusively shared with the world via social media.

Clearly, William and Kate are devoting time, energy and budgetary resources to building up their social media presence as they inch ever closer to the throne but that is a path that involves their kids, whether any of them like it or not. (I’d wager it’s the latter.)

To be seven-years-old and on school holidays, and yet to be expected to take a break from your childhood to record a video in service of an ancient, stultifying institution? I’m not sure there are enough emeralds in the world to make up for that.

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

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Categories
Entertainment

The Queen needs Kate Middleton needs to take less holidays

There is a strange schism when it comes to the royal family and holidays: The royals love taking lengthy stretches off from the business of the monarchy… but their holiday homes are pretty grim.

Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk estate where Christmas is spent, looks like the setting of a gothic horror story while Balmoral, Her Majesty’s Scottish home, was partially modeled after a Bavarian schloss. All that forbidding gray stone and all those mock medieval turrets are enough to give even the bravest of young HRHs lifelong nightmares.

And yet when it comes to holidaying, the House of Windsor are nonpareils. Princess Margaret used to jet off to Mustique and crisp herself in the Caribbean sun with egregious regularity (you could probably still catch a whiff of coconut oil long after she was back demanding whiskey in the some London drawing room) while the Queen Mother promptly bought herself a holiday castle – the Castle of Mey – and would decamp there for generous stints, far away from anything so bourgeois as work.

And unfortunately this royal tradition of holidaying like it was a competitive sport is one that William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambrdige, are eagerly carrying on. In the last 18 months they have taken nearly four months off and are currently in the middle of their roughly two month-long annual summer holiday.

While the duke and duchess are set to roll up to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham this week to wave the Union Jack and prove how good they are at cheering, in a normal year, once the final Wimbledon trophy is handed over in July, it’s time to get out the Ambre Solaire, with the duo not returning to their posts until early autumn.

This year, sure June was a busy month for the Cambridges given all that Platinum Jubilee waving they had to do, but as is usually normal, in July we have only seen Kate at a charity polo match and in the Royal Box at Wimbledon, hardly a demonstration of regal elbow grease. (Any sort of ‘work’ that can be done while holding a chilled glass of Pimms hardly counts as hard graft now does it?)

August, as unusual, will see Kate disappear off the radar completely, usually only popping back up around mid-September.

Likewise, in 2021, the only official engagements that Kate undertook in July involved watching tennis and soccer, after which she proceeded to take nearly nine weeks off, meaning that from the end of June until mid-September her out-of-office was essentially on.

The same schedule also held for William, apart from two meetings about the Earthshot Prize he managed to squeeze in and one church service. Gosh, however does he manage to get so much done?

The couple have, in roughly the last year, been to France twice (for Kate’s brother’s wedding and for a skiing holiday) and to Jordan, not to mention spending time in Scotland and Norfolk.

There’s no way around it: William and Kate have a holiday problem.

And, as we all know, the first step is admitting it.

At issue here is that just because they can take months of the year off and that traditionally members of the royal family have, does not mean they should.

For years now, the couple and their team have been focused on building Brand Cambridge, that of them as a hardworking and oh-so-normal couple. Look at them, out there boldly taking the most pressing issues of the day, including mental health and climate change, and then getting home for bath time!

This is the formula that has been cooked up to try and ensure that the monarchy survives yet. The idea seems to be to let Prince Charles be, well, Prince Charles, rabbiting on about hedgerow preservation and delivering the occasional barnstorming speech about the environment and his Aston Martin that runs on white wine (really) and Britons will grudgingly tolerate him.

Meanwhile, alongside all that we have William and Kate pioneering a much pluckier, more engaged and more proactive version of royalty that also features quite the cult of personality.

Central to the nascence of Cambridge Inc. is the couple’s relatability and willingness to be vulnerable. We’ve heard Kate talk about the loneliness of new motherhood and appear on a parenting podcast while William has regularly opened up about the emotional toll that his years of him as an air ambulance pilot took on him and his grief over the loss of his mother.

These touchy-feely outings are not one-offs but a core part of their public personae, all about transforming them into the first senior members of the royal family who are viewed as genuinely human and who are in touch with the real world; who have done more than just spy the hoi polloi when peering out at the world through the window of a golden carriage. (They have one of those of course, but it’s terribly unwieldy for the school run.)

But for all the H&M dresses Kate wears, they are not a normal middle-class family, no matter how many Audi station wagons they add to their fleet and how many times young Prince George is taught how to use the self-checkout at Waitrose.

The duke and duchess can take vast swathes of time off whenever they fancy because they have complete control over their schedules, aside from key events like Trooping the Color and Remembrance Day, meaning they can spend a week on the beach, even if it is in the Cornish Isles of Scilly, rather than at their 19th century mahogany desks whenever the mood strikes.

Nor do they have, as the vast majority of the world does, have a very finite amount of leave to be carefully husbanded and can instead beetle off for some more quality time in famille, Harrods buckets and spades in tow, whenever they fancy.

But, it’s time for the Cambridges to give up this royal perk. They can’t have their nearly one hundred days of holiday per year and still go about trying to sell themselves as the Duke and Duchess of Relatability.

Every time William and Kate accidentally remind the world just how fundamentally not normal their lives are it jeopardises all the work they do the rest of the year to sell themselves as the approachable faces of the modern royal family.

There is also the fact that this pesky bad habit also serves to revive the Lazy Kate narrative that haunted her for years. Prior to their wedding, in 2008, the Daily Mail reported that the Queen thought Kate needed to get a job.

“The Queen has admitted she has no idea what Kate actually does,” a senior aide said at the time and that Her Majesty is “of the opinion that Kate should be working. She believes in a modern Monarchy and feels very strongly that the Royals should be leading by example.”

A source close to Kate said back then, “Mostly she just waits for William to come home so that they can go on another holiday.” (Ouch.)

Then there is the fact that the duo only began full-time royal duties in 2017. Diana, Princess of Wales, by contrast, was chucked in the deep end and shunted off to charm the masses in regional town centers before she had even gotten all the wedding confetti out of her hair.

What anyone worth their Walter Bagehot knows is that the British monarchy, in the coming years, is in for its greatest test since Oliver Cromwell started getting ideas. The next king is a man who garners tepid, at best, support, at a time when the royal house has suffered a series of body blows in recent years it has yet to recover from, thanks to Prince Andrew’s horrifying behavior and the seismic eruptions of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Things for the Crown are not exactly looking tickety-boo, hence why so much is resting on William and Kate.

And yet, they seem willing to gamble all the gains they have made to take time off from their duties with the sort of enthusiasm that Margraret probably reserved for the arrival of every new 20-something barman at her favorite Mustique watering hole.

Of course the duke and duchess should get a holiday and of course they should not have to apply for leave from their manager (though the image of the 96-year-old Queen spending part of her day green lighting holiday requests from HRHs is fun) . But those crazy kids have to find some sort of middle ground between the extreme privilege of royalty and the image of them as hardworking, ordinary parents who just happen to have the keys to the Tower of London. (Yes, I know, they don’t actually have them but they could certainly get their hands on them they couldn’t they?)

It’s time for William and Kate to channel less Princess Margaret and more Princess Anne. And when it comes to the Princess Royal, the swimsuit industry’s loss has only been the monarchy’s gain …

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

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