by Peter Millar
By now though I think I’m beginning to. I recognise it straight away when he deposits me outside a bleak five-storey block next to the freeway and what appears to be a derelict school. The room is at least clean and comfortable and five storeys up, with a soft-drink vending machine – out of order but humming menacingly – in the corridor. And a panoramic view of the freeway. And the derelict school. But standing on the balcony looking out at the bleak landscape in the rainy night, I feel a mild sense of elation. After all tomorrow morning, I’m going to Graceland.
Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee. I’m going to Graceland. Paul Simon sings me to sleep.
It’s still raining the next morning, however. And I’m still in the Super 8, neither downtown nor anywhere near Graceland. And with not much idea of how to get there other than by taxi, until the Asian hotel manager suggests that for little more than the price of the cab and the entrance fee he can get me on the list for a local tour company whose fee includes a collection service.
Forty minutes later, after a circuitous tour of other Memphis hotels, we’re bouncing off the tarmac onto a piece of concrete hard-standing by a small office building with a sign that reads ‘Blues City Tours’, then below, as if an afterthought, ‘and Hand Car Wash’, which makes me wonder how good the tour business is. But the driver is drawling: ‘Right next door, folks, is the showroom of Madison Automobiles, where Elvis bought his first Cadillac back in 1956.’ We’re obediently getting our cameras out when he adds, ‘Obviously they’re not here no more. They moved out east.’ And not recently either. The building he’s referring to is an empty shell with peeling paint and a ‘To Let’ sign that might well have been there ever since Elvis left the building.
As we pile off one bus and wait to get on to another, I notice one young woman complaining vocally about ‘being flipping messed about’ in the unmistakable tones of ‘estuary English’. Wholly atypically I find myself doing that very American thing: asking where she was from. Before long we’re discussing – as you only do on distant neutral ground – whether supporting Charlton Athletic or West Ham requires the most blind devotion, not to mention in her case, the unspeakable awfulness of having a boyfriend who supports Manchester United. ‘He’s from Trinidad,’ she adds by way of mitigation. I nod; not many Manchester United supporters actually come from Manchester.
‘Y’know, though,’ she continues, staring into what looks like the middle distance, ‘Trinidad, like, that’s a Third World country an’ all, but you never get nuffin’ like that.’ And I follow the direction of her gaze and notice that opposite the shuttered shell that had once been Madison Automobiles is a line of derelict buildings with graffiti scars and broken windows. ‘It’s a bit grim round ’ere,’ she says. This is a girl from the East End of London. She knows what she’s talking about. But she’s got a point. From what I’ve seen of Memphis so far – which admittedly isn’t much – beyond Beale Street’s bars it’s not exactly as vibrant as I’d been expecting.
Never mind, I tell myself. Graceland will be different.
It is, but only just. And it takes rather longer than I expect to get there, partly because we’ve gone via the airport where the driver gets out and starts unloading baggage. At this point I notice that the woman fussing about getting off the bus in a hurry has a ticket in her hand marked ‘Blues City Tours – and Hand Car Wash – and Airport Shuttle’. Enterprising folks, clearly, but it’s not pleasing another woman, middle-aged with hennaed hair who has been broadcasting at some volume that she’s from Denver, Colorado, and this is her seventh visit to Graceland. She’s complaining that this detour – which, to be frank, is what back in England we’d call ‘taking the piss’ – will mean she will only have three and a half hours to spend at the shrine. For wholly different reasons, I’m also a bit peeved by her revelation: three and a half hours seems way more than enough time to spend on the memorabilia of a dead rock star. Even the ‘King’s’.
The ‘Graceland Visitor Center’ is on the opposite side of the road to the mansion itself. In the snaking queue through the cinema-style entrance lobby I make up my mind to opt for the ‘Platinum Tour’ which is going to give me access not just to the mansion but also Elvis’s two custom airplanes and Elvis’s Automobile Museum and something mysteriously called Elvis After Dark. Only now I realise I could even have stayed at Heartbreak Hotel, a ‘fashionable boutique hotel’ according to the brochure but right now, on a damp autumn day, it looks as concrete and boxlike as the Super 8.
First there’s the queue for the shuttle bus. It only goes across the road, but then the road is a 10-lane highway, and if you’re not on the shuttle, you don’t get past the gates. Before we even board, there’s a photographer inviting us to queue up to get our ‘souvenir’ picture taken against them: the famous Graceland image with their wrought iron motifs in the shape of Elvis with guitar and music notes spinning off from it, all set against a blue sky with the word Graceland dancing in the clouds. Which is a hell of a lot different from the reality; the sky is grey and the gates are small, small enough to climb over easily were it not for the 24-hour security men patrolling the grounds, and the paintwork has dulled with age, while the brickwork of the walls on either side has been defaced by adulation: 10 thousand scrawled, chalked and scraped signatures. All intended as homage, but collectively like so much urban graffiti. We pass straight through, onto hallowed ground and the home of the King rises to meet us.
To call Graceland ‘tacky’ would be a cheap remark, in the same way as to call it ‘cosy’ would be missing the mark in an altogether different dimension. As rock stars’ homes go, it really is sui generis, a one-off, very much a product of its time, place and the boy who bought it. For Elvis Presley was still very much a boy, just turned 22 and already a global icon but still a kid from Hicksville, USA when he bought the ‘mansion’ that would become his lifelong home and indeed pass into legend after his death. Graceland is as famous as Elvis, an icon in its own right, sung about almost as much as Memphis. (Even as I write this I come across yet another incidental proof of its iconic status: Microsoft Word spellcheck doesn’t even query ‘Graceland’. Try adding ‘land’ to almost any other girl’s name!) Elvis Presley’s home is the second most frequently visited residence in the United States, and rising up the charts; the first is the White House. Security concerns that have forced stricter controls on fewer visitors there mean that the King’s palace is well on the way to becoming number one.
And yet the word ‘palace’ hardly fits. Indeed, I use inverted commas around the word ‘mansion’ deliberately. The house isn’t exactly modest but as rock star retreats go, it is really rather small. Madonna wouldn’t house her servants in it. There are stockbroker homes all over Surrey that are grander by far than the most famous house in rock and roll history. In fact, there are a couple of places just across the road behind the Visitor Center, that are bigger and better-looking, albeit with less land. Even so, the Elvis spread isn’t exactly George Bush’s Texas ranch: just 14 acres south of Memphis in an area that was a lot less developed in 1957 when he moved in. That’s another thing I hadn’t quite expected either: ‘moved in’ is exactly what he did. Unlike the palatial homes of many another rock star, Graceland wasn’t built to order or even substantially altered to the great man’s requirements. And then there’s the killer: for all the magical resonance just the word ‘Graceland’ has acquired over half a century of legendary status – a state of grace, a tranquil haven, an island of domesticity amidst the storm-tossed ocean of rock’n’roll celebrity – the name wasn’t even chosen by Elvis. In fact, he didn’t bother to give his home a name at all. For all the King was concerned, it might have remained No. 3245 Acacia Avenue or whatever it was called before it became Elvis Presley Boulevard. The previous owner, a Mrs Ruth Moore, gave her house the name that was to become a global icon. She named it after her favourite aunt. Aunt Grace. Elvis never even knew her.
Walking up to the front door, it’s hard not to notice that you are forced to look
up at the house simply because it’s built on a small hill. Even on Elvis’s doorstep, the house is distinctly unprepossessing: an exaggeratedly large white stucco portico attached to what in Surrey would be considered an unremarkable, slightly pretentious, ‘detached home’. The walls on either side of the portico are covered with stone cladding, the sort you see on those 1960s bungalows that squat like scabs on the outskirts of attractive English villages. When the house was built in 1931, it was all the rage. It occurred to me that the walls behind it might even be wooden. I was not allowed to check. It would be easy to call it vulgar, but it’s really just embarrassing.
As, of course, is everything inside. Although it is perhaps fair to debate how much of that you can blame on Elvis and how much on the seventies as a decade. The King succumbed like the rest of us to leather sofas in unsuitable pastel shades, polystyrene ceiling tiles and shag pile carpet. It is the shag pile carpet in particular – taken to the rock star extreme of being laid not just across the floor but across the ceiling too – that gave Elvis’s ‘den’ its nickname, ‘the Jungle Room’. But there’s no ‘pretty little thing waiting for the King’, just some dated furniture: exotic hardwood, South Pacific-style stuff that you might find in a Polynesian-themed restaurant. Americans today call this sort of style ‘Tiki’. It looks like something the set builder for Peter Jackson’s King Kong might produce if he ever went into interior design.
The Jungle Room is in the basement, however. The ground floor layout immediately through Elvis’s front door, I was surprised to note, almost exactly mirrored that in the much more modest Crosby family home in Spokane: dining area one side, ‘lounge’ on the other, with stained-glass lights above the broad double doorways. The tour is mercifully ‘self-guided’ which means you get an audio guide to hold to your ear and press set buttons when you get to specific locations. Standing between the two front rooms, for instance, with the formal table set for six beneath the ballroom-sized chandelier on one side and the battery of white brocade sofas next to the glass, knick-knack-covered coffee table on the other, we have Elvis’s daughter Lisa-Marie telling us how when they had guests in, her father would spend hours upstairs in front of the mirror before making a grand entrance in some outrageous costume bedecked with jewellery: ‘You’d hear clanking.’
I know, of course, this is sort of a ‘rhinestone cowboy’ thing – it goes with the spangled capes and the jewel-encrusted jumpsuits and such – but then Lisa Marie adds that upstairs was ‘special’ and the Graceland commentary cuts in to say that that is why the upper storey is closed to the public, because it was Elvis’s ‘private’ area. And I’m thinking, what could be up there that’s more private than everything else on display down here: is there some secret that the world must never know about Elvis? Could it possibly be that ‘the Pelvis’ was gay? Not on the evidence of his overt enthusiasm for women, though his wife Priscilla would later claim he was not particularly sexually active during the five years of their marriage. Bisexual maybe? Don’t even go there: there are enough conspiracy theories about Elvis to fill several books many times longer than this one. That’s the thing about Elvis: the legend not only lives on, it has a life of its own.
All the same I’m still bemused by how unawesome Graceland is. The kitchen could be my mother’s, circa 1982 (she was always a bit behind the times) and actually looks as if people used to cook in it, which given the Presley family’s down home eating habits, maybe Elvis himself would rustle up one of his special treats, even if most meals were left to the chef, Mary Jenkins. When he was in hospital with colon problems, she brought him sandwiches made with sauerkraut and ‘wiener’ sausages (that must have flushed him out!).
Bizarrely it is the pool room alone that might aspire to taste, providing that is, if you like the style made famous by Liberty of London – all brightly coloured leaded lights hanging over the pool table and tightly ruffled swathes of drapery covering every inch of the walls and ceiling, as if it were an art nouveau attempt to recreate the fabulous tent of some oriental despot. By contrast the ‘media room’ may have been cutting edge when it was assembled but today looks like it could have been put together from a second-rate jumble sale: the three CRT televisions installed across one wall, a mere 30 years on, look about as modern as a butter churn. Elvis had three because he had heard that President Lyndon Johnson prided himself on watching all three of the then main US network news programmes at once. It is an interesting definition of the level of intellectual sophistication both men aspired to.
Outside the house the four-car garage has been turned into an exhibition of personal items, including a grotesque, greying white fur bed (what is there upstairs that could be more embarrassing than that?!), guitars, and the great man’s reading desk. Elvis was, the audio commentary is keen to tell us, a voracious reader, whose taste was both wide-ranging and intellectual. As proof, laid open on his desk is a copy of the Warren Report into the assassination of President Kennedy. And German writer Hermann Hesse’s heavyweight allegorical novel Siddhartha, open at Chapter 8: ‘The Coming Aquarian Age and the Emancipation of Women’. Yeah right, I bet Elvis the Pelvis read it every day! There are scribbles in the margin that you can’t get quite close enough to read properly; call me a cynic, but I can’t help feeling that if I could they would say ‘who you kiddin’?’
Outside is another memento of Elvis’s leisure time activities that seems more in keeping with the man: his firing range with a human silhouette peppered with holes and a collection of hand guns and rifles. I’m not suggesting Elvis was some kind of homicidal maniac, at least not any more than any of his peer group pals. Owning a gun and indulging in regular target practice go with the territory in which this typically ‘white trash’ southern poor boy grew up. That was part of the potency of the Presley magic: only someone from his background could have fused black and white music so successfully. This is no place for a detailed analysis of the Elvis phenomenon – God knows there are enough of them out there – but even three decades after his death Elvis remains a huge force for popularising American culture on a global scale. Think of the impersonators: Chinese Elvis, Indian Elvis. Back then, in the late 1950s at the height of his fame, his conscription into the army and service in occupied Germany only serving to seal the most enduring image post-war Europe already had of the US GI: ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here.’
The Trophy Room next door is the predictable floor to ceiling collection of gold, silver and platinum discs, enough to put poor old Bing’s impressive display to shame. There are also posters and mementos of the 31 – mostly lamentable – movies he appeared in and a poignant quotation: ‘I wanted to do drama but ended up in light comedy.’ The truth was, of course, that there was no way Hollywood was going to let him do anything but sing, though it is tempting to wonder how he would have compared given a real chance to compete with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. On the face of his actual movie performances the answer is badly, but then he was never really given a chance. All Hollywood wanted was endless repeats of the song-packed light-hearted formula that had made millions in Blue Hawaii. The last chance came in 1976, a year before his death, when Barbra Streisand wanted him to play the role eventually taken by Kris Kristofferson opposite her in A Star is Born. Elvis was interested but a deal fell through because his greedy agent Col. Tom Parker demanded he get top billing over Streisand. It was asking too much too late. A shame, really.
For all the tat, with Graceland’s modesty comes the indisputable impression that compared to many trophy homes owned by global icons, this really was a family home, albeit a family home for a wild boy who made it good and indulged himself and his family. Amongst the more moving ‘exhibits’ are the swings in the garden, untouched since his daughter Lisa Marie used to play on them, as she testifies in your ear when you push the relevant button on the audio guide. There is also the tragedy of the fact she was just nine and her parents already divorced when her father died. But until the end she sti
ll came to stay with him frequently. Elvis kept ponies for her in the paddock behind the house. The little kidney-shaped pool – far removed from the grand swimming pools of movie stars, or even the exercise pools of the modern middle classes – has a shallow end suitable for a small child.
Presley was just 42 when he died, a victim of success and excess in equal measure, addicted to junk food and prescription medication. His tomb, forever festooned with flowers and wreaths from his bizarrely ever-growing legion of fans, is one of the chief draws at Graceland. I had imagined the so-called ‘Meditation Garden’ to be a little grave in a wooded glade in a quiet corner of the estate, a place perhaps with a headstone and maybe a solitary cherub, smothered of course in flowers, where fans would go and stand silently, their heads bowed, and then move on. It would be a bit crowded, of course – this is Elvis – but it would be a place of quiet reflection, a last resting place. Marc Cohn may suggest he hovers around his tomb. I don’t think so.
For a start, Elvis wasn’t buried at Graceland at all. Not first time around anyhow. He was buried next to his mother, who had died 17 years earlier during his spell serving in the army in Germany, in Memphis’s Forest Hill cemetery. But within weeks of Elvis’s death – and after an apparent attempt to disinter and steal the body – his father Vernon decided that in the interests of the above-mentioned security, mother and son should both be reinterred at Graceland. Next to the swimming pool!
Why Vernon chose a spot on a patio next to a circular fountain just a few feet away from the pool I do not know. I suppose he was getting on and didn’t want to walk far – the grave is only a few yards from his ‘office’. Vernon himself would later be buried there, as would Elvis’s grandmother, while a small plaque commemorates the star’s twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, who died at birth, and is buried in their home town of Tupelo. What the world would have done with a duplicate Elvis Presley is hard to imagine, but we conspiracy theorists can’t help believing his manipulative manager would have been at least sorely tempted to keep ‘Elvis’ alive a while longer.