Elvis Presley Had a ‘Superman’ Complex, Said His Bodyguard 

Elvis Presley did not have a normal life in any sense of the word. He rose to unprecedented levels of fame in his twenties and maintained an army of dedicated fans for the entirety of his life. While this sometimes felt uncomfortable for him — he struggled to find any amount of privacy — Elvis thought of himself as greater than most people. His bodyguard said Elvis saw himself as superhuman.

Elvis Presley tried to elevate himself above normal humans

Elvis long claimed an ability to heal with his touch. While his bodyguard, Dave Hebler, thought Elvis genuinely wanted to help people, he thought the singer also wanted to think of himself as special.

“I think he sincerely wanted to heal someone’s pain. But at the same time he was trying to elevate himself above ordinary humans,” Hebler said in the book Elvis: What Happened? by Steve Dunleavy. “He sort of had this superman complex.”

Elvis even tried to alter the meaning of religious texts so that they applied to him.

“There is a passage somewhere in the Bible which mentions that a rich man, if he is only rich, cannot get into heaven,” bodyguard Sonny West said. “Well, Elvis turned that around and would tell us, ‘The Bible says that a rich man’s chance of getting into heaven is like a camel’s a** trying to get through the eye of the needle.’ Now that wasn’t meant to be funny. We weren’t supposed to laugh at that. Then he would say, ‘Well, the Bible didn’t mean it that way, because I’m rich and I’m going into heaven.’ We would always nod our heads and agree with him.”

Elvis Presley frequently gave sermons

Elvis’ entourage grew familiar with the singer’s interpretation of the Bible because he read it to them often. He often gave lengthy sermons to his captive audience.

“There was a time, in one of his homes — it might have been down in Palm Springs,” West said. “Anyway, Elvis was all dressed up, and there was a period where he would carry a cane. Actually they were sword canes, and some of them had daggers in the bottom of them. Anyway, we’re all gathered around, and Elvis with this damn cane jumps up on a coffee table and he starts giving us the Sermon on the Mount.”

He altered some of the wording, though. Elvis’ bodyguards struggled through these sermons because they had to hold in their laughter the whole time.

“But the way he gave it was a little different from the Bible,” West said. “He stood up there and held his hands up for silence, and in a loud preacher’s voice he yelled down to us as we sat around with our faces turned up to him, ‘Whoa, all ye motherf***ers, of kind thoughts and good deeds …’”

His religious studies aggravated Priscilla Presley

Though Elvis’ entourage stifled their laughter through these sermons, Priscilla Presley gritted her teeth through them. Often, the audience was full of young women looking at him flirtatiously.

“By the mid-sixties he was holding Bible readings in the den of our Bel Air home,” she wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “I sat next to him one evening as he read passages with great force. Facing us were several of his young female admirers wearing the lowest-cut blouses and the shortest miniskirts. They all listened attentively, disciples enraptured in the presence of ‘their’ lord.”

His fascination with religion and spirituality aggravated her for years.