by Dave Barry
This is a recurring theme with Elvis fans: They’re tired of explaining themselves. If you don’t hear what they hear, feel what they feel, that’s your misfortune. If you want, they’ll talk to you about it, but they don’t expect you to understand.
Shirley Connell, 39, was one of the early gate people, back in the ‘60s. She had two big advantages:
1. Her family’s backyard adjoins Graceland’s.
2. Her mama loved Elvis, too.
Which meant young Shirley was allowed to spend virtually all her waking time, except for school, at the gates. And, like other regulars, she
sometimes got invited along on the outings Elvis organized. Which is how it happened that one year she and her mama went to the movies all night, almost every night, from November through March.
Elvis regularly rented a downtown Memphis movie theater so he and his entourage could watch first-run movies (never his own, most of which embarrassed him). For years, his fans, the regulars, were allowed to join him. They weren’t exactly with him, but they were in the same room with him, and that was enough.
“The schedule was,” Connell recalls, “he’d come in, and we’d watch anywhere from three to five movies, and he’d leave. Then I’d go home, and if given enough time, I’d catch a nap, and if not, I’d go straight to school. Then I’d come home from school at 2:30 in the afternoon, do my homework, and go straight to bed. Then I’d get up at 10 o’clock and find out what time the movie was.
“We saw The Nutty Professor 14 times. The Great Escape was 10. Doctor Strangelove was 12. Mama would go to sleep. ... I went out and ate one time, during The Nutty Professor, I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I was just gone long enough to eat. I didn’t dare leave.”
if you ask her why, it shows you could never understand.
Connell still lives in the same modest ranch house. She has pictures of Elvis on the walls, and a lot of souvenirs, including one of Elvis’s custom-made silk shirts and an RCA portable radio Elvis gave her for Christmas in 1963. She has the box, the wrapping paper, the original long-dead battery.
She took me out to her backyard one evening and dragged out a rickety old ladder so I could climb up and look over the wooden fence into the manicured grounds of Graceland. Two of Elvis’s horses were grazing there. She hasn’t looked over that fence in years.
Graceland today is a business, a tourist attraction operated by the Presley estate. The mansion, built in 1939, sits on a small hill overlooking Route 51, which in Memphis is Elvis Presley Boulevard. When Elvis, then 22, bought Graceland in 1957 for $100,000 the area was mostly country; now the boulevard is a semi-sleazy strip, lined with car dealerships and fast-food places. (Not that this is inappropriate, cars and fast food being two things Elvis consumed in vast quantities.)
Half a million people visit Graceland each year, but most of them are tourists, as opposed to True Fans. Most go for the same reason they would go
to see a man wrestle an alligator: curiosity. Sure, they like Elvis, or they wouldn’t be there. But when they go through the house, stand where he stood, look at the things he owned and touched, they’re not moved. Some are even amused.
And, Lord knows, there is plenty to be amused about. The decor is stunningly, at times hilariously, tacky, representing the Let’s-Not-Leave-a-Single-Square-Inch-Anywhere-Including-the-Ceiling-Undecorated school of interior design, featuring electric-blue drapes, veined wall mirrors, carpeting on the ceiling, etc. And it’s hard not to laugh at the earnest speeches of the clean-cut, relentlessly perky young guides, describing, say, Elvis’s collection of police badges, as though these were artifacts at Monticello.
Scene from the tour: We’re in the TV room, which has mirrors on the ceiling and a squint-inducing navy-blue-with-bright-yellow color scheme. “You’ll notice the three TVs in front of you,” the guide says. “This is an idea Elvis got from Lyndon Johnson.”
Now we’re in an outbuilding, originally built for Elvis’s extensive model-racing-car layout (which he quickly got bored with and gave away) and now housing a memorabilia display. We pause before a display of extravagantly over-decorated jumpsuit costumes. “Elvis found the fringe to be a problem onstage,” the guide is saying, “so he moved on to outfits that were more studded.”
The tour ends when, in a bizarre juxtaposition, we move from Elvis’s racquetball court to his grave, out by the swimming pool. This is where the True Fans often break down.
The tourists, though, usually just take pictures, then head back across the street to the plaza of stores selling licensed souvenirs. This is a place where good taste never even tries to rear its head. Just about anything they can put a likeness of Elvis on and sell, they do. You can get, for $2.95, a decanter shaped like Elvis wearing a karate uniform. You can get some Love Me Tender Conditioning Rinse. If you like to read, you can get a copy of I Called Him Babe—Elvis Presley’s Nurse Remembers, You can get sick.
But here’s the thing: the True Fans don’t much like this, either. Most of them accept it, because they know that without the tourists and the souvenir dollars Graceland would have to close, and they’d lose a strong link with him. But they don’t like it. They don’t want a souvenir manufactured in Taiwan 10 years after Elvis died; they want something real.
Like Elvis’s cigar butt. Tom Kirby got one. His friend and fellow gate regular, Debbie Brown, recalls how this came about:
“We were good friends with Jo Smith, who was married to Elvis’s cousin, and she had always been real thoughtful, especially as far as Tom was concerned, because he had always been such a good fan. ... So they were playing racquetball or something, and [Elvis] laid his cigar down, half smoked, and then he walked out. So she picked it up, and she thought it would be a real neat souvenir for Tom. So she brings this cigar to Tom—she wrapped it up in a little tinfoil paper—and Tom is so excited, he runs over in the middle of the night, pounds on the door, and I go, ‘What,’ and he says, ‘look
what Jo’s given me.’ And he unwraps the precious little tinfoil holding his cigar, and he goes, ‘God, Elvis’s cigar. It’s just fresh, she got it to night.’ And I go, ‘God, let me see it.’ And I grab it and stick it right in my mouth, because I know it’s been in his mouth. And Tom goes, ‘But I haven’t even put it in my mouth yet!’”
An even more wonderful thing happened in Atlanta, where Brown, Kirby, and some other gate people went to see Elvis in concert, and where they managed to get into his actual hotel room, after he had left for his last show.
“The keys were hanging in the presidential suite, in the door,” Brown recalls. “We instantly took the keys out, went inside, and shut the door. We went through the wastepaper cans. ... We were running around, jerking open cabinets. There was a cart there, and it had a big giant urn of the most horrible black coffee—that’s the way he liked his coffee—and the bacon there was on a large platter, and it was burned to a crisp—that’s the way he ate his bacon. Instantly we knew we had success, and we just grabbed this bacon—Elvis had this!—and we went [she makes gobbling sounds]. You know, so we can say we ate with him. He just wasn’t there, but we ate off his tray.
“Then my girlfriend and I looked at each other, and we thought—the bed! So I ripped the sheets back, and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m looking!’ And she said, ‘For what?’ I said, ‘A pubic hair!’
“You’d have to be a die-hard fan to appreciate that. I mean, I know it sounds sick, but wouldn’t that be the ultimate, for a female?”
I’m driving the 93 miles down Highway 78 from Memphis to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born and lived for 13 years, to see if maybe I can get a clue as to what this is all about.
The drive feels very Rural Southern. Kudzu vines swarm everywhere. Corn is $1 a dozen. A preacher is talking on the radio.
“I’ve been down that Long Road of Sin,” he says. “I went out and just ate the world.”
Election campaigns are under way, in the form of signs in people’s yards.
R
E-ELECT ZACK STEWART
HIGHWAY COMMISSIONER
Jimmy Dale Green Sheriff
“Sometimes,” the preacher says, “we all get in that old carnality way.”
The Birthplace is at the end of a short street lined with extremely modest homes. Shacks, really. The Birthplace is a shack, too, only it has been fixed up nice and moved a short distance to a little park, which also has a modern building where you can buy souvenirs.
The Birthplace has only two rooms, furnished with donated items. The most authentic item there is Laverne Clayton, who sits in the bedroom and charges you $1 admission. She was born in 1935, same as Elvis; she lived next door to him for 10 years, went to school with him.
“He liked K-Aro syrup and butter and biscuits,” she says. “He liked to play Roy Rogers. I was in the schoolroom, third grade, when he sang “Old Shep.” We thought he was silly. We didn’t pay him no mind.”
And now she collects money from people who come from Japan just to see where he was born. And she doesn’t understand, any more than I do, why.
“A lot of the people don’t believe Elvis is dead,” she says, shaking her head. “They tell me he’s on an island somewhere.”
“You don’t argue with real Elvis fans. You just let them talk.”
At the Birthplace I buy a book called Elvis Now—Ours Forever, a collection of reminiscences from True Fans edited by Bob Olmetti and Sue McCasland, who was a gate person in the mid-’70s. The book almost throbs in your hands with the intensity of the fans’ devotion.
Jan Lancaster, Tupelo, Mississippi: “Every time I went to Memphis, I went by [Graceland]. ... Like I was eight months pregnant, and my girlfriend and I went up there with our husbands. They went to a skin flick, dropped us off, and I had a coat on so if ELvis sees me he won’t know I’m pregnant. We sat all night long—it was 22 degrees. ...”
Linda Horr, Richmond, Indiana: “I don’t think any fan could love Elvis as much as I do, except maybe, to the fans who have actually met him, the hurt is worse. If that is so, then I thank God for sparing me that kind of pain—for the loss I feel is bad enough.”
Part of it, of course, is his music. He really could sing, and except for a sterile period in the ‘60s when he was acting in mostly awful movies with mostly awful soundtracks, he made a whole lot of good records—”Jailhouse Rock,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Suspicious Minds” ... “Burnin’ Love,” and many more that don’t get played much on the radio. Elvis croons continuously over the P.A. system at the souvenir-store plaza across from Graceland, and as you wander around you often find yourself thinking when a new song comes on, Yeah, that was a pretty good one, too.
Part of it was his lack of pretense. I realize that seems like an odd way to talk about a pampered, insulated superstar who performed in spangled jumpsuits, but if you watch tapes of him in concert, what strikes you—what strikes me, anyway—is that, unlike his preening, pouting, self-important impersonators, the real Elvis never seemed to take himself particularly seriously. He laughed a lot, and most of his jokes were at his own expense—muttered throwaway lines about the legendary Pelvis, the Leer, and (near the end) the Paunch. He seemed to find the adulation as inexplicable as many of the rest of us do. Watching him, I found it hard not to like him.
“Elvis,” says Linda Cullum, veteran of many years at the gates, “was always a regular person.”
And indeed he was, in some ways. He got very famous, and he got very rich, but he didn’t move to Monaco, didn’t collect Mausse, didn’t hang out with Society. He was a boy from the South, and he stayed in the South, and when he made it, he brought his daddy and mama and relatives and friends to live with him in and around his mansion. To the end, he hung out with good old boys, and he did the things a good old boy does, only more so.
There’s a long-standing tradition in the American South in which getting drunk and/or stoned and chasing women and shooting off pistols and racing cars around for the sheer hell of it are normal, everyday male activities, generally accepted with a resigned or amused shrug by much of Southern society. In the show business part of this society they called this “roarin’ with the ‘billies [hillbillies].” In country music, tradition practically dictated that as soon as you got a little money, you went out and spent it on cars, clothes, rings and women, all flashy. Many in rock and roll adhered to this self-indulgent philosophy.
Elvis was a product of this culture and when you traveled with Elvis, you were roarin’ with the No. 1 Billy.—Elvis: the final Years, by Jerry Hopkins
The cars, the guns, the jewelry, the wild parties, the binges, the famous plane trip from Memphis to Denver in the dead of night solely to buy peanut butter sandwiches—none of this bothers the fans. Hey, it was his money. He earned it.
Another part of it—a big part, the shrinks say—is sexual: repressed longings released by this exotic, sensual stud who dared to thrust his hips at the Wonder Bread world that was white American pop culture in the ‘50s. But that was a long time ago, and there have been plenty of sex symbols since. Why do these people remain so loyal to Elvis? Why does it seem as though their ardor has intensified, rather than cooled, since his death?
And why are their feelings so personal, for a man some of them never saw in person, and many of them never met? Talk to a True Fan, and odds are she won’t talk about Elvis’s art, his genius, the way fans of, say, Bob Dylan will talk. Odds are she’ll tell you how, when he performed, he always seemed to be looking at her, singing to her. The True Fans really believe that Elvis loved them,just as much as they love him. They talk about how much he cared for them, how much he gave them, how, in a way, he died for them. He was under so much pressure, the True Fans say; he worked so hard to meet the demands of his public. No wonder he was sick. No wonder he turned to drugs. In some fans you sense a distinct undercurrent of guilt: If only he hadn’t kept his pain so private, if only I had known, maybe I could have helped. ...
This devotion gets more and more confusing the longer I try to understand it. I’ve been reading books, listening to records, watching tapes, talking to fans, talking to Graceland officials. I have two notebooks full of quotes from people trying to explain the Elvis Thing. They can’t, and neither can I.
But I’m not laughing at it, the way I used to.
There’s a painful scene near the end of the documentary “This Is Elvis” showing Elvis in one of his final concerts, six weeks before he died. His appearance is shocking: This is a bloated, obviously sick man, his belly hanging out over the gaudy belt of his jumpsuit. He sings “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and when he gets to the talking part in the middle, he forgets the words; forgets the words to a song he must have sung a thousand times. He keeps going, stumbling and slurring, not looking at the audience, giggling to himself as he blows line after line, finally giving up.
When, mercifully, the song ends, Elvis introduces his father, Vernon, who looks only slightly older than his son, and much healthier. And then Elvis sings “My Way,” holding a piece of paper, in case he forgets the words.
“Sometimes,” says Debbie Brown, “I’ll drive by the gates at about 3 in the morning—that was his time—and I’ll turn my back on all the souvenir stores, and just look at the house, and it reminds me a little bit of what it was like. But I don’t really like to do that too much, because it reminds me of how empty it is now. It’s over. The fantasy’s over.
“But just for a little time, I was part of something special. And I was special.”
After Shirley Connell let me look over her back fence at Elvis’s horses, she showed me her photo album. It’s thick with snapshots of Elvis, many taken at the gates. Sometimes it’s just Elvis; sometimes she’s in the background; sometimes he has his arm around her. The two of them change, as you flip through the pages, he from bad-ass motorcycle rocker to Vegas headliner, she from girl to woman, the two of them growing older together.
“I try not to even drive by the gates anymore,” she says.
Now That’s Scary
Recently I played lead guitar in a rock band, and the rhythm guitarist was—not that I wish to drop names—Stephen King. This actually happened. It was the idea of a woman named Thi Goldmark, who formed a band consisting mostly of writers to raise money for literacy by putting on a concert at the American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, California.
So she called a bunch of writers who were sincerely interested in literacy and making an unbelievable amount of noise. Among the others who agreed to be in the band were Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groaning, Barbara Kingsolver, Ridley Pearson, and Amy Tan.
I think we all said yes for the same reason. If you’re a writer, you sit all day alone in a quiet room trying to craft sentences on a word processor, which makes weenie little clickety-click sounds. After years and years of crafting and clicking, you are naturally attracted to the idea of arming yourself with an amplified instrument powerful enough to be used for building demolition, then getting up on a stage with other authors and screaming out songs such as “Land of 1,000 Dances,” the lyrics to which express the following literary theme:
Na, na na na na, na na na na Na na na, na na na, na na na na
So we all met in Anaheim, and for three days we rehearsed in a Secret Location under the strict supervision of our musical director, the legendary rock musician Al Kooper. This was a major thrill for me, because Kooper had been my idol when I was at Haverford College in the late 1960s. Back then I played guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, and we tried very hard to sound like a band Al Kooper was in called The Blues Project. Eventually The Federal Duck actually made a record album, which was so bad that many stereo systems chose to explode rather than play it.