WHAT IF THEY LIVED?

Elvis
Elvis He would have probably have died sometime in mid-2006. In 2004, he'd have released, That's All Right: 50 Years On, his first album in 20 years. It would have been produced by Rick Rubin, and, like Rubin's work with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, would have been bare, stripped down and minimal. It would have been hailed as one of the best albums of the year, Elvis best work since his Aloha from Hawaii concert and a shoo-in for a Grammy. It would have been the high point of a career that had gone seriously downhill since he narrowly cheated death in August 1977. Fans around the world watched with sadness as the King of Rock n' Roll's drug-fuelled lifestyle led to a downhill slope he never fully recovered from. His battle against the bulge was as well documented as his various aborted comeback attempts. The newer generations wondered what it was their parents saw in the foolish old man arthritically flailing about the stage, clearly doped up to his eyeballs and struggling to remember the words to his signature numbers. The only things that went worse than his music careers was his film work and his family life. Never the greatest of actors, his releases in the 80s were so bad they couldn't even be called B-grade movies. Bleary-eyed and paunchy, his romantic loverboy roles would have been hilarious if the lecherous pairings of Elvis with women young enough to be his granddaughters were not so paedophilic. Friends said he lost interest in his music, and in life itself, after Priscilla left him, taking Lisa Marie with her. A succession of incresingly vapid and hollow-eyed girlfriends did nothing to bring him out of his funk. At his funeral, his fans - the legion of once screaming teenyboppers now in their dotage - ruefully said said That's All Right was too little too late. They couldn't reconcile the bald and stooped old man, flabby gut hanging obscenely over his belt garter, to their memories of the sleek, gyrating Adonis of their sepia toned memories. They said it would have been better if the 1977 overdose had killed him.


James Dean
James Dean It was ironic that Dean cheated death while driving his Porsche Spyder only to die a few years later in the same car while playing the part of a stock-car driver.The first accident, in 1955, came as he had just burst on to the scene as a devilishly handsome movie star who seemed destined to be Hollywood's torch bearer for the next decade. For a while it seemed as if the car crash had smashed his future as gruesomely as it smashed his legs. But, with a determination that became the stuff of countless articles, anecdotes and stories, Dean fought his way back from the brink.In a coma for two months, and his legs mangled in the wreck, nobody expected him to pull through. But pull through he did. When asked in interviews later how he managed to steel himself for the 9 months of intense physiotherapy, Dean would always have a perplexed look in his eyes."What would you have expected me to do? Lie back and let the accident lick me? Stay an invalid for the rest of my life?" was his stock answer.He did admit that the crash made him reassess his life and throw himself more frenetically behind his work.In the decade that followed, he amassed a body of work that became legendary. Anything and everything he touched immediately turned to gold. The critics loved him, but the audiences loved him more. Drama, action, westerns, epics, comedies, horror - he did them all. Good guys, bad guys, fathers, sons, priests and playboys - he played them all. His romances became the stuff of legend, the most memorable being his courting of young Tina Turner. Their interracial relationship became the talk of the town and played as important a part in ending segregation as did Rosa Parks refusal to give up her seat on the bus. Even though the relationship eventually ended, Turner always referred to him after that as "the great love of my life".His second accident - this one fatal - occurred in 1967. His directoral debut, the movie was about an aging race car driver who is killed in the race that would have won him his first championship. Poignant and touching, with gripping race squences, the movie won Dean an unprecendented posthumous double Oscar - for best director and best actor. He won a five minute standing ovation at the ceremony. The scene of his crash was used in the movie, as was the actual footage of the desperate attempts to save his life. The tears were real.




Kurt Cobain
Everybody always predicted that Cobain was just crazy enough to one day take a gun to his head. Nobody would have ever, in a million years, thought he would end up as the quintessential suburban dad, complete with the minivan and white picket fence.It was on Oprah, in 2004, a full decade after he had left the music scene once and for all that he revealed how close the predictions came to coming true. He broke down - as everybody but Tom Cruise does on Oprah - and admitted that he had gone so far as to write out his suicide note and point a shotgun at his chin."I hadn't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing for too many years," he said, sobbing like a new-born babe."I was so high on heroin and valium that I had no idea what was going on around me. I just needed to escape. "And then I pulled the trigger. And nothing happened. I pulled the trigger over and over and nothing happened. So, I just went to sleep hoping I would never wake up again."I woke up the next day and found that the only reason my brains were not all over my wall was because I had forgotten to load the gun. It was then that I decided that it was either my music or my life," he said.That same day, Cobain held a press conference to announce his immediate retirement from music. He sold everything he had, bought a mid-sized house in a leafy Atlanta suburb and all but disappeared from the public eye.Rolling Stone called it "music's greatest loss since Lennon was killed". Time magazine put him on the front cover. CNN had an hour-long special report on him and his work with Nirvana. Everbody mourned his exit as leaving the industry so much the poorer, but Cobain himself has no regrets.As he told Oprah - "I'd rather be a live, ordinary man anytime over being a dead legend."