The Sheila Variations

Following the tour of Graceland, and the planes and cars, I was still only halfway done with my tour. Over on the ticket pavilion side of the street is basically a little Elvis village. There are gift shops, and a restaurant, and also different exhibit rooms. The exhibits are not static. They swap them out, choosing different topics and “ways in” for different shows. While I was there, there were three exhibits: one in the “Sincerely Elvis” museum space which focused on Elvis’ impact on the world through the media. There was also an exhibit devoted to the 1968 NBC special, and one called “Elvis On Tour”, which was all about Elvis’ final years of nonstop touring and Vegas appearances. The exhibits were all spread out through the pavilion and one was down the block aways, past the planes. There were a lot of people milling about, but it’s a spacious area so it never felt cramped.

The Sincerely Elvis exhibit was wonderful in that there were so many CLOTHES. (Not sure if I have mentioned my love of seeing his clothes?)

There was fan memorabilia, and video clips – of his earliest shows, of his induction into the Army, of him racing past throngs of vans into a waiting limo – footage from throughout his life in the spotlight. There were posters of his films in every language under the sun. Movie magazines. Elvis purses, Elvis lipsticks. Elvis buttons. Elvis matches. And excuse me, but “Oy Gevalt Elvis?”

Later, when I hooked up with Jen again, she murmured to me, “I saw a pin that said OY GEVALT ELVIS …”

There was so much stuff in each display case and I loved that Oy Gevalt Elvis caught both of our eyes.

The exhibit was a winding path through a dark and specifically lit place, with big glass display cases on both sides. It was an overwhelming amount of STUFF. I tried to not just skim. I did want to see everything. Sometimes in museums I go on “auto-pilot”. I refer to it as “museum-itis”, when a saturation level is reached and although your body continues to move forward through the exhibit, your mind is not processing what you see, and your eyeballs are barely seeing! There was a lot of stuff in this exhibit that I have seen in pictures, or at least heard about, so to see it in the flesh was really exciting. There were suede shoes monogrammed with EP. There were outfits he wore at different events, or shows, or interviews. Periodically, throughout the exhibit, a TV screen hanging from the ceiling broadcast a small documentary about whatever Era in Elvis’ life we were focusing on.

In this exhibit were all of Elvis’ police badges (one of his obsessions during the 70s, which led him to the White House door). We also saw multiple costume sketches from Bill Belew, who designed some of Elvis’ most famous costumes in his later years. There was Elvis’ 6 page scrawled letter to Nixon, with an entire page devoted to all of the phone numbers where Elvis could be reached at different times. There were other famous clothes and objects.

I caught my breath when I saw the gold suit. It was designed for Elvis in 1957 by Nudie Rodeo Tailors in Hollywood. Colonel Tom Parker signed off on it. It cost $10,000.

Elvis only wore the entire suit a couple of times (and of course it is immortalized forever on the 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong album cover, with Elvis standing in that confident open stance). It is a tuxedo. It is head to toe gold. It has glittering silver beaded cuffs and lapels. Elvis wore gold shoes. He became an Oscar statue, basically.

Elvis always had flashy tastes (onstage anyway – offstage, at least in the 50s, he wore dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties, like a Jehovah’s Witness almost), and he had seen Liberace in Vegas and had been blown away and inspired by how FAR Liberace took his persona. Elvis was already going far at that time, but kept pushing the limits, and the gold suit became notorious. It was a big deal. At one show, Elvis had fallen to his knees during a song and some of the gold leaf flaked off onto the stage, and the Colonel had warned Elvis that he needed to modify his movements to save the suit. Elvis didn’t reply, didn’t argue, but he DID stop wearing the pants. He only wore the jacket from then on. Modify my movements to keep the suit safe? You have got to be out of your mind, Colonel. Thanks for sharing, but I’ll just not wear the damn $10,000 pants and keep rolling around like I want to.

Elvis, March 1957, at his famous controversial Pan Pacific Auditorium concert when he rolled around on the ground with the RCA Victor dog. Gold jacket, black pants. Take THAT, Colonel.

The gold suit announced Elvis as another kind of performer entirely. He already was ahead of the pack, but the gold suit put him into strange unchartered territory. It was a finger pointed upwards: “I’m going up THERE.”

To see the gold suit was such a pleasure.

Along with the American Eagle jumpsuit from 1973, this is probably Elvis’ most famous onstage costume.

Private Presley’s army uniform was also in a display case, with all kinds of memorabilia devoted to his years in the Army. Pictures of him in Germany, newsreel footage, his duffel bag, everything. It’s just odd to see the actual clothes that you have seen so many times in footage. It gives the event a reality, it grounds it. This happened. Elvis can be tough that way. The Myth has won over the Man. In many ways, that is right. It’s the music and the work that matters. Lester Bangs knew that. He knew there was something “otherworldly” going on with this guy. The Army was so much a part of that myth-making machine, so much so that I, who wasn’t even alive, don’t even remember how I first learned that Elvis had left his career to go into the Army. I just have always known it. It’s a part of our cultural history and it bleeds down into us through osmosis. Even if you don’t know the details, you know that it happened. Elvis is weird that way. Seeing the objects and clothes that were part of that Myth-Making was invaluable to me.

All along the bottom of the display cases were the Bill Belew sketches which were fascinating. Elvis trusted Bill Belew with his image. Bell Belew thought in a mythical way. He knew what Elvis was after in the 70s and he was Elvis’ go-to guy when he needed a special outfit. He also designed the skintight black leather outfit Elvis wore in the 68 special. He was clicked into a really over-the-top version of Elvis, the Elvis that Elvis himself wanted to portray onstage.

Here is the humble conservative outfit Elvis wore to go meet President Nixon.

Nice to know that Elvis could blend in with regular people if he wanted to. Doesn’t that look like just what you would choose to wear if you wanted to meet the President at 6 o’clock in the morning?

Police badges gleamed along the display case. Pictures of Elvis with cops in different departments in all the cities he visited. Elvis with his arms around policemen, Elvis displaying his badges. Elvis loved cops.

One thing I would have loved to see: an exhibit devoted to Elvis’ vast arsenal of weapons. The gun factor was not mentioned on the tour itself, and wasn’t acknowledged in any of the exhibits (with the exception of the short-lived firing range in the wellhouse). The guns would have been as thrilling and as sexy as the cars. I wonder if Graceland has ever done such an exhibit or if it would make Elvis look too violent. But it’s another piece of the Elvis puzzle: the guns.

June Juanico’s mother’s boyfriend gave Elvis a rifle in 1956

By slowing down, I came across a gem of an object. Elvis fans will require no setup but here goes: Elvis made Viva Las Vegas in 1963 with Ann-Margret. I wrote a couple of posts about their intense onscreen chemistry (which translated to offscreen: they hit it off from Second One). Ann-Margret has described Elvis as a “soulmate” and even in her book, which devotes two chapters to Elvis, she keeps it classy. She has never spoken about their relationship in detail, never given the dirt, and only speaks of him with the highest of praise. She protects him. She is angry at those who come forward who didn’t even know him to tell horrible stories about him. The Elvis she knew was young, idealistic, passionate, hilarious, kind and thoughtful. She is one of the carriers of that flame. The speculation about their relationship is, of course, intense, but in my opinion all you need to do is watch what is going on in that second clip above to see their entire relationship. It’s one of the reasons why the movie has such a spark that some of the others lack. It features at the heart of it a real and urgent romance, and the screen captures it. I don’t need to go into their bedroom. There is their bond, right there.

But there are a couple of things that are common knowledge, either based on Ann-Margret’s book, Elvis’ somewhat unique behavior (unique to him, I mean) during their year-long romance, and the testimony of trusted friends, who all loved Ann, and loved Elvis with Ann, and saw something different brought out in him during their romance. They were similar creatures: well-raised, with protective parents, who believed in God, and loved to wiggle to music. Explosive sexual creatures. She was becoming a star at that very moment, and Elvis, of course, was a giant star already – but from the first rehearsal of a song, when they found that they were actually moving the same way on the same notes, they knew they were kindred spirits.

By that point, Elvis had moved out of traditional dating. He would have one of his guys call up a girl he was interested in, and then have one of the guys pick her up and drive her back to his house. Elvis basically didn’t do his own courting anymore. He didn’t have to. But maybe … it was all a bit too … easy? Uninteresting? Elvis had also stopped going out on one-on-one dates. Maybe because he felt he couldn’t go outside anymore, couldn’t just go to the movies, or dinner … or maybe it was that he had had so much sex thrown at him that he wanted to cut to the chase … who knows. But he wanted to be alone with Ann. Ann-Margret said she knew it was getting serious when Elvis would start taking her out alone. They would take drives, and sit up on Mulholland looking down on all of Hollywood, and talk about their dreams. She was living with her parents. He approved of that, and befriended them. He befriended her landlord.

He was overwhelmed by his feelings for her. He wondered if their ambition for their own careers would wreck a marriage (should they get married). He never dated ambitious people. He didn’t really date show business people. He wondered if that would be a problem.

There were lots of forces going on keeping them apart. But here is a fact. Ann-Margret revealed it in her book, although it just gets a brief line, and not even in the Elvis chapter – it comes much later. While they were dating, Elvis gave her a custom-made round bed.

Everyone knew about the bed, and his friends snickered behind his back about why he gave her the bed, and what it meant, and wakka wakka, and all that, but Elvis kept his counsel. He always kept his counsel about stuff like this. His good friends, the inner circle, sensed how overwhelmed Elvis was in his feelings for Ann – and obviously that had translated into the bedroom, but again, all of that is sheer speculation.

The fact remains he bought her a giant ROUND bed as a gift.

He didn’t buy her a car. He bought her a BED.

Speculate as you will.

In one of the display cases, a couple of Elvis’ personal checks were on the wall. 5 or 6 of them. I could have just scanned them and moved on. But I didn’t. And there was the check for the bed, in Elvis’ handwriting, with a note along the side of the check: “PERSONAL GIFT FOR HOME OF MISS ANN MARGRET”.

The bed cost $780.

I peered at his handwriting like a crazy person trying to squint between the lines back to that time. I had to laugh at myself as I did so. I was imagining that I saw a subtext in his handwriting: “I am in love with this woman and the sex we are having is blowing my mind, even though I have already had so much sex in my life I can’t even remember it all. But this? SEX WITH LOVE INVOLVED? OMG IT’S AWESOME. HERE’S A ROUND BED, ANN. KTHXBYE”

I absolutely loved coming across that check.

I then moved on to the Elvis on Tour exhibit. It was a small corridor only, with some of the jumpsuits on display, and some of the clothes that you can see him rehearsing in in the documentaries of the 70s. The flashy silk shirts. I ran into Jen there. She was sitting on a bench watching a documentary made about the documentary Elvis on Tour (archival footage section headed up by a young Martin Scorsese). It’s an incredible documentary anyway, but it was wonderful to sit there, surrounded by intimidating jumpsuits and jeweled capes and Austin Powers-ish velvet coats, and hear his friends and family talk about why Elvis on Tour (the documentary) was so special. Interestingly enough, there was a whole section on the moment I have already written about, of Elvis listening to the Stamps onstage, the Stamps that Jen and I had just seen. Jerry Schilling talks about the use of the split screen in the documentary, and how it is the best example of the split screen he had ever seen, and if you’re going to use the split screen then it’s for moments like THIS. Schilling said that it was one of the most powerful and personal examples of who Elvis actually was ever captured on film, and I completely agree. Jen and I sat quietly watching the documentary (that last shot, of Elvis quiet in the limo, lost in thought, vulnerable, is killer … one of the most almost fragile moments ever caught of this giant superstar). The Polk Salad Annie suit was there. Outrageous.

The bell bottoms on the jumpsuits were, at times, wider than the shoulders.

I then moved on the 68 Special exhibit, which was pretty small and basically an excuse to shuffle people into the 68 special giftshop. But they did have some excellent items. First of all, I walked into the space (which was just a side of the gift shop, not an elaborate museum like the other exhibits), and immediately saw the back wall which had the red neon ELVIS sign, one of the set pieces of the special. And standing in front of it was the head-to-toe white suit Elvis wore during the famous “If I Can Dream” finale.

Again, when you see some of these clothes in the “flesh”, you realize that Elvis (despite his later years of bloat) was not only lean, but thin. Tall and thin. That was a hot hot suit.

A documentary about the special was playing on a screen above the exhibit and people were seated in the couple of benches placed there. There were 4 or 5 glass cases placed around with different objects in them. Like I said, it was not an extensive exhibit, but there were some cool finds.

The dangerously sexy leather armbands he wore during different parts of the special, along with the leather suit. It made him look tough. Radical. Subversive.

Elvis’ copy of the gold embossed script of the special, which was then just called “Elvis”.

There were other outfits he wore as well, plus the small blue leather chair he sat in during the informal sessions section of the special. It was a small blue chair, like any office chair, except with NBC embossed in the back.

Jen said to me later, “It seems to me that the 68 special is still very avant garde and ahead of its time.”

For someone who had just learned about the 68 special that morning, to come to that very correct conclusion tells me that the exhibit had done its work.

You watch that special now and it is still unlike anything else, before or since.

Just like Elvis.

The cumulative effect of the entire day at Graceland was awe-inspiring. You see the house. You see where he lived. You see the gold records and you see the racquet-ball court which puts the “normalcy” you just saw in the house into daunting perspective. The racquet-ball court says, “Don’t be fooled. This was NOT a normal guy.” Then you go and see the two planes. Then you go to the car museum (which was probably my favorite part of the tour. I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown with those cars.) The sheer amount of cars starts to sink in. You start to get another level of understanding. It is difficult to comprehend the wealth. I mean, you know he was rich and you know he spent money like he knew it wouldn’t last. That is obvious. But to see it all … to see the results of his spending … that whole other side of his career, the money-side, the side that some people seem to find distasteful but is really the key to the whole thing, the key to Elvis in general … gives a deeper level of understanding of his success. It’s an onslaught. Graceland is not like the Spelling mansion in Beverly Hills which actually looks like a castle from the air. It’s a house, yo. Yeah, it has some columns which makes it look kind of fancy, but it’s not insanely huge, like the Breakers in Newport. It’s not conspicuous in its consumption, although everything inside is obviously beautiful. But the conspicuous consumption was certainly a factor, and that’s what you get to see in the next part of the tour, as you walk through the two airplanes, and as you walk through the cars Elvis owned throughout his life. WOW, is all I had to say when I first walked through the door of the car museum. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven.

But first up was my tour of the Lisa Marie. Again, for some reason, I was alone on my tour. There was one other guy on the plane with me. I saw pictures of later that same day on the Graceland website, and there was a long line of waiting people snaking around the plane, waiting to go up the steps and go in. It was astonishing because it wasn’t like that for me at all. I wasn’t in a line at all. I was by myself. So I didn’t even go into the Lisa Marie at all at first. I just walked around the plane, looking up at it. I walked under the damn plane. I stood off to the side and stared at the ranks of windows. The thing is enormous. I walked around to the tail, to look up at the TCB logo.

Oh, Elvis. You and your dorky lightning bolt.

Elvis bought the plane in 1975. He was flying back and forth from Vegas so much, and touring the rest of the country, that he needed to have a private plane. You know, when you’re famous your “needs” become much different. It was a retired Delta Airlanes Convair 880 Jet. Elvis bought it for $200,000. In 1975 terms that was a shitload of money. He called it The Lisa Marie and immediately began decorating it like a madman. This was typical of Graceland as well: the purchase price was one thing, but Elvis sunk far more money into redecorating than the house was even worth. This was his style. Everything – from sunglasses to jets – had to have his personal stamp. I mean, he was having his name stencilled on his cars back in the 50s. Before “branding” became common (and so common now as to be disgusting), Elvis treated himself like a brand. He just WAS a brand. And he was 20 years old, and everyone was loving him, and dressing like him, and growing sideburns, and he had a lot of money, so it was fun to make everything he owned a personal statement in some way. Elvis and Priscilla had divorced in 1973 and although Elvis had never been faithful to Priscilla he was devastated by it. He never wanted to get divorced. There’s a picture of the two of them coming out of the Santa Monica courthouse the day the divorce was final, and they are walking side by side, holding onto each other.

Priscilla has said she saw him even more often after the divorce than when they were married. They talked on the phone every day. He would come over late at night to look at Lisa in her bed sleeping. Elvis wasn’t a deadbeat dad. Lisa was his whole life.

So of course he would name his jet after his daughter, and sink hundreds of thousands (literally) of dollars into redecorating it. Nothing but the best for Lisa’s namesake.

Elvis also bought a smaller Lockheed JetStar which he named Hound Dog, and that was used for more local trips. Both planes are in the big lot opposite Graceland.

Elvis had the whole Lisa Marie gutted and created different rooms. He wanted a bedroom, a conference room, a hangout room. He wanted brass fittings in the bathroom. He had Priscilla involved in some of the decisions, too. He wanted her to check out the designs, and would call her up in the middle of the night and fly her to some airplane hangar somewhere so she could see what he was doing. She gave her input. Elvis was insane. There is something charming about him.

The Lisa Marie is set up, then, like a railroad flat, where you walk from front to back, through all of the different rooms. You can see from front to back, but there are dividers in between rooms so you could certainly close them and get some privacy. And once you tour the Lisa Marie, you can see why Elvis often chose to sleep on the plane when they’d fly into some city for a tour date. Just less hassle. No hustling into cars surrounded by bodyguards. He could just stay in bed, watching TV, in his own private space.

I still think it’s weird that it was just me and this one other guy on that plane. No rush. I didn’t have a throng of people clambering up behind me. I could linger. I went at my own pace. I could stand and stare at one chair for 10 minutes if I felt like it. I wonder where all the other people were. It was probably around 1 p.m. at that point. Maybe that was when all the big throngs were just starting their tour of the house, so they were a couple of hours behind me? Regardless, I am very grateful. I was by myself in that plane. IT WAS SO COOL.

You climb up the steps into the jet. Right there, in the small hallway, is a little closet. You could see Elvis’ clothes hanging in there, the loud silk shirts he loved in the 70s, and on a little shelf above a pair of giant – GIANT – Converse hi-top sneakers. I believe I have made it clear my love of seeing the clothes. Elvis wasn’t a casual guy, he always dressed up, and it’s rare to see him in those hi-tops (I love when he plays touch football in Change of Habit and he’s wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and hi-tops. It’s a good look for him.) Opposite the hallway is the tiny bathroom. You couldn’t go into it, but you could see the sink with the gleaming brass fittings and the little red and blue hand towels, obviously hand-picked by Elvis. He was all about colors. He was obsessed with colors. This also had to do with his whole New Age discovery trip that he was on for almost 20 years. Certain colors evoked certain moods, and had certain correspondences to certain spiritual hoo-hah, I don’t even understand it, but Elvis was really into it.

I walked forward into the main sitting room. The plane’s decorating scheme was mostly green, dark greens and sea-greens, and the entire thing ends up having an almost underwater feel. It’s peaceful. Elvis hated flying. He had a terrifying experience in a plane in 1956 when it ran out of gas in the air and they had to make an emergency landing. He promised his mother he wouldn’t fly after that, and, except in emergencies, he kept his word. Until the 70s, when it just became more practical to get over his fear of flying and buy a damn jet. But the interior of the plane is extremely peaceful, nothing too bright, everything green and dark. Designed for relaxation and peace.

The sitting room had a green couch all along one wall (all of the furniture was shrink-wrapped). There were a couple of first-class seats on the other side, big and plush and dark blue-green. There was a television at one end of the room. (Every room had a television, what a shock).

Looking back up at the cockpit

You can see how alone I was. There was one other guy on the plane and he was two rooms ahead of me, and then there was one other person who came up the stairs just as I moved on to the next room, so he was one room behind me. Thank you, Jesus.

Then I moved on into the conference room. It had a long gleaming table, with a bouquet of flowers in the middle (everything color-coordinated. Elvis, you dork.)

Leather chairs were placed around the table. At one end of the room (with a television, of course), was a console area, with a giant dark green swivel chair (Elvis’ favorite chair on the plane). He could sit there and control everything on the plane: music, lights, TV stations.

Then I moved back into Elvis’ sanctuary. There was a queen-size bed (with a seatbelt on it, gleaming gold from beneath the shrink-wrapped pillows: the FAA requires seatbelts on beds in airplanes), with a seafoam-green (almost blue) covering. It took up almost the entire room. The room was dark and cozy. A television was on the wall opposite the bed, and underneath that was a huge storage area where Elvis would stash the veritable library of books he always traveled with.

The upstairs of Graceland is closed off. It is where Elvis died. Not allowing us to see it is a brilliant PR move, I have to say.

The Colonel always managed Elvis by holding him back, by withholding product to up its value. This worked for almost the entirety of Elvis’ career (although things were shifting at the end, and would have gotten even more interesting had Elvis lived). So I like that something is still “held back” at Graceland. I know it’s also a personal issue for Priscilla and Lisa (Lisa, who was there when her father died). But in a PR sense, it’s brilliant. We still don’t get to have all of him. And so that makes us want him even more.

My friend Allison, who worked for TV Guide, told me a hilarious story about her official trip to Graceland with a TV Guide team. They were given a private tour. They saw things nobody on the regular tours saw: private papers and photo albums. They all had to wear special gloves when handling this stuff. Allison was so curious about the closed-off upstairs and kept standing at the bottom of the stairs, staring up. The two tour guides were like, “Allison. Don’t do it. Seriously. Don’t do it.” hahaha They could sense that she wanted to burst over the railing and race upstairs. She kept wandering off from the official tour, and the guides would be like, “Oh shit – where’s Allison? ALLISON??” Meanwhile, she was in another room staring at everything like a maniac. She actually DIDN’T run upstairs but the guides seemed to fear she would throughout the tour. So then when she got home to New York, she went onto Google and found a picture of Elvis’ bedroom upstairs at Graceland. (There actually isn’t a lot out there, but leave it to Allison to find a good shot). In the photo was one of Elvis’ girlfriends, smiling at the camera, with the room clearly visible in the background. So mischievous Allison went to work, and Photoshopped herself into the picture, removing Elvis’ girlfriend, so it looked like Allison was seated in Elvis’ bedroom, smiling at the camera. She then sent it to the Graceland tour guides, saying, “Thank you so much for the great tour! I had a great time!” She told me this story and I was in tears of laughter. She said the two guides were emailing her back like, “You are so insane and that is the funniest thing I have ever seen.”

I had no idea that I actually wanted to see where Elvis slept. That’s not the kind of thing that normally matters to me. I’m all about the clothes and the books. But suddenly, looking down at that bed, I did have a moment. “Holy shit. He slept here.”

I don’t have any more to say than that. “Holy shit. He slept here” pretty much covers it.

At the back of the plane, sort of attached to Elvis’ bedroom, is a makeup mirror that looks like something out of All That Jazz. He could get ready in peace. It was kind of beautiful. The back exit to the plane was right there, but this area was its own little haven.

There’s another bathroom back there, and I believe it has a shower. We couldn’t go in it. But you could peek through the glass. The colors back there were warmer, golds and browns. I wonder about Elvis’ philosophy with that. It was where he showered, got his hair done, whatever else he did to get ready for a show. The feeling I got from peeking through the glass was that it was a warm enveloping space. There were two plush stools back there. One for Elvis and one for the hairdresser?

Then it was time to leave and go check out the Hound Dog which was right off to the side.

You got to that plane by walking up a wooden walkway and only one person was allowed in the plane at one time. I was the only one there so I didn’t feel rushed or nervous about the people behind me.

Hound Dog is small, with a rounded snout, and about 8 seats. You can’t go into the body of the plane. You stand in the entranceway and stare at it through glass. The cockpit is right behind you. I loved looking at the cockpit. The chairs in the Hound Dog are all crazy bright, in direct contrast to the underwater greens of the Lisa Marie. Bright yellows and greens. Chairs face each other over little tables, and then there are some which are stand-alones.

The cockpit

I left the Hound Dog and then it was time to go off and find the Car Museum. It was back beyond the ticket pavilion, still on the main road, so I walked back there, stopping on occasion to look at the Elvis graffiti that covered every surface, every telephone pole, fence post, fire hydrant. Messages to Elvis everywhere. It was a grey day. Graceland was bustling, the vans going across the street, but I was alone walking on Elvis Presley Boulevard to get to the car museum.

The museum is its own separate building. It feels gigantic inside. It’s dark with special lights highlighting different cars. You walk a winding path through all of the cars. There are little signs that explain the significance of each car, its history. I should have taken notes. I tried to remember as much as I could. Some of these cars are already famous to me, and I knew them on sight. “Oh, that’s the Stutz Blackhawk!” “Oh! That’s Gladys’ pink Cadillac!” “Hey, there’s the purple Cadillac.” Others were new to me. They also had all of Elvis’ toys: the motor bikes, and the motorized golf carts, and the little go-carts, and all of the things Elvis loved. Anything with a motor, boy wanted to own it.

In the center of the museum is a wide-open space where a documentary about Elvis and his cars is playing on a loop. Tons of clips from the movies. And a soundtrack of a remix of “Blue Suede Shoes” that was so awesome (I’m not usually a fan of re-mixes) that I actually tried to find out what it was when I got back home. It was nearly impossible not to dance to it. People sat in chairs in that big space staring up at the screen. Behind them, was a neon sign saying HWY 51 DRIVEIN – and beneath it was Elvis’ famous purple Cadillac Eldorado. (It had been white when he bought it. He decided to paint it purple, and have a white leather interior. He was 21 when he got that car. He was the kind of person who would buy a white car and have it painted dark purple.)

The cars were so beautiful, silent and gleaming. Intimidating and aggressive. They say WEALTH WEALTH WEALTH and they also say SEX SEX SEX (as I mentioned when I saw Isaac Hayes’ Cadillac at Stax). I looked at that purple Cadillac and all I could see was the amount of petting that had gone on in that car. You still can feel it. 1950s teenage sex is the aura that car emanates. Elvis had joked to June Juanico, his girlfriend in 1956, that some of his boys referred to Elvis’ cars as “the cherry busters”. When the whole TCB thing started in the 70s, June Juanico heard about it in the news, and knew there was a double meaning to that acronym. Elvis loved puns and double meanings. It made her smile. Lots of sexual negotiation went on in that car. I mean, can’t you feel it?

Even with the crappy iPhone pictures – it was dark in there – you can get a feel for the magnificence of that car

Speaking of that car, he bought it in the summer of 1956. He had had it ordered special from a dealer in Houston. He paid $10,000 for it. He was dating June Juanico, and hanging out with her in Memphis when he got word that the car was ready. He had been driving her crazy with standing right by the phone waiting for the call. He couldn’t wait. He had to fly to Houston IMMEDIATELY to pick up the car. He convinced June’s mother to allow June to accompany him on the overnight journey. They had only been dating for a week or so, maybe two. He assured Mrs. Juanico that June would be safe with him. They would get separate hotel rooms. Amazingly, Mrs. Juanico said Yes. It was June’s first time on an airplane. She had nervously packed babydoll pajamas. They flew to Houston and went and picked up the car.

Elvis took this pic of June, standing by his newly purchased baby

It was a gleaming beautiful machine. It was white. Elvis apparently was eating purple grapes at the visit to the customizer for the car, and he squashed some of the grapes, rubbed it on the hood, and said, “Can you paint it that color?” They drove the car to the hotel, where they checked into separate rooms, but then of course slept in the same room. June debuted her baby doll pajamas. Elvis whistled and made her walk to the dresser to get his watch so he could see her from behind. Despite the honeymoon-vibe of the whole thing, no cherry-busting went on that night (and, as June informed Elvis, she wasn’t merely a cherry, she was “the whole damn pie”). They slept curled up in each others’ arms, and on occasion Elvis would wake up, get out of bed, and go to the window to stare down at the beautiful car parked on the curb. (He could still do so at this time in his life. Two months later it would be impossible. Fans ruined his cars wherever he went.) Elvis would wake June up, saying to her, “Baby, come look at the car. Just come look at it.”

He sold it in 1957. But there are a lot of great stories associated with that car.

The car museum was so awesome I wanted to hide in a bathroom so that I could sleep over amongst those beautiful machines.

Elvis famously bought his mother a Cadillac in 1955. She couldn’t even drive. It was blue but Elvis had a friend come up with a special pink color (named “Elvis Rose” – again, with the branding) and painted the whole thing pink. Gladys rarely drove it. Elvis and his band used it for the majority of 1955, traveling around to shows. Picture the excitement in those little towns when that pink Cadillac came swooping in. Elvis was as flashy as possible, as attention-getting as possible. It is the only car he never sold. It stayed out in the carport at Graceland for 20 years, and it was kept in mint condition.

Elvis had a fleet of Stutz Blackhawks and these cars were out of this world. In 1970, Elvis was presented with a Stutz Blackhawk in Vegas, as a gift for opening at the International Hotel. It was the first Stutz Blackhawk in the United States.

Here’s another one.

And here’s one of the famous golf carts which he used to take careening through the grounds of Graceland at all hours of the night.

Even his John Deere tractor was there.

I could have stayed there for hours. I think I was in there for an hour, at least. It’s a great space. The darkness, the Blue Suede shoes remix, the displays – all designed to showcase Elvis’ crazy fleet of cars through the years. Yet another piece of the puzzle. You can’t talk about Elvis without talking about cars.

He was an American boy.

When he played his first show at the Overton Park Shell in 1954, he was driving a second-hand car. His parents had to come to the show in a relative’s car.

The first thing Elvis bought when he had the cash was an automobile.

His first car burned up on the highway in 1955. Elvis and the boys had to drag the instruments off the top to save them from burning up and then had to wire for help to get out of there. I think they were in Texas. Elvis was so sad. His first car! How could it burn up? He bought another one. Of course. But years later he was still talking about that damn car that had the gall to burst into flames on the highway. Cars were not just cars to Elvis, although they always had their practical uses. They were status symbols and beautiful objects. He loved beautiful objects. He loved owning beautiful objects. But, equally, he loved giving objects away. Maybe he just liked the purchasing part of it best. Once he had the objects, whatever, he would give them away. There is the famous story of him overhearing a black woman admiring a Cadillac through a store window in Memphis. The next day she came home and found that very car sitting in her driveway. Elvis had had it delivered.

There are many more stories like that. He certainly kept the car dealers in Memphis and elsewhere busy. He was their primary client. Who else puts in an order for 10 Cadillacs at one given moment in time? He gave away Cadillacs at the drop of a hat.

Here is a funny story which I will close with.

A good friend of mine came up in show business with Jerry Seinfeld. They both were Long Island boys, they ran with the same crowd, and they both were starting out doing standup at the same time. Jerry, of course, passed my friend (who is still an actor), and they have remained friends, although Jerry’s fame makes it difficult to have a normal life. When Jerry first got his show on NBC, he took out all his old buddies for a lavish dinner. It was about 20 or 30 people. All of Jerry’s good friends, his co-conspirators in the early days. Jerry paid for the whole dinner, which had to come to thousands and thousands of dollars.

One of the guys at the table joked, “You know, this is all nice and everything, and it’s nice of Jerry to pick up the tab, but if he were Elvis Presley, we’d all have brand-new Cadillacs right now.”

I had been warned. “Wait until you see the gold record hallway.” “Wait until you see the planes.” These photos below will not be news to anyone who has been there, and they may be tiresome if you have no interest in it (although I imagine those who have no interest in Elvis have long since decamped to greener pastures – they’re no dummies!), but touring Graceland was of course my main reason for going to Memphis. Our trip ended up being so much more than that. We did so much! But to be taking a tour of this famous place, on Elvis’ birthday, was very exciting. I have seen pictures. I have heard the stories. Everyone is so funny: “The house isn’t huge … ” “You’ll be surprised at how modest it is.” Humorously, when I interviewed Ron Eldard over the phone for my piece on Capital New York about Roadie (and I interviewed him the night before we left for Memphis), I ended up saying to him, “I know the film opens this Friday in New York so I was eager to talk to you before then – I realize this is ridiculous but I am going to Memphis tomorrow for Elvis’ birthday celebrations …” We had been talking about Roadie for two hours at that point, and I felt comfortable with him. He just flipped out, “Are you kidding me? That is gonna be SO GREAT.” We ended up talking about Elvis for about half an hour. It was hilarious and awesome. I ended up transcribing the Eldard piece while we were on the road, as well as writing that thing up from the hotel room in Memphis. Crazy. But it had to go up! Anyway, Eldard hadn’t been to Graceland but even he said, “My friends who have been tell me that the house is surprisingly modest -” I interrupted and said, “Yeah, humble”, and Eldard basically burst out laughing in my face (over the phone). “HUMBLE??” Hahaha. “Yes, I suppose the Jungle Room can’t be called humble.” “You have to take so many picture and you have to talk to EVERYONE,” he told me. But it was so funny how the commentary about Graceland all have similar themes. “It’s a big house – but not huge.” “The house is actually really normal.”

It’s all true. But being a tactile person, I have to experience it for myself.

There were a couple of special things about our tour. Despite the fact that it was Elvis’ birthday, it was not a madhouse. I had bought the VIP tour, and there were only three people on my tour. Yes, there were other tours licking at our heels, but in general, the house was sparsely populated while we were there. I had plenty of time to linger. I could set my own pace. I could hang around in the billiard room for 20 minutes if I wanted to (and believe me, I wanted to). I did not have to keep up with a tour guide pushing me on before I was ready. I could just stand there. And, there were multiple times when I was completely alone in whatever room I was in. Completely. Like, for 5 or 10 minutes. The other two people on my tour were elderly women, and one walked with a cane, so I soon left them in the dust. You are given little headsets and a voice guides you through each room. You can press Pause if you want to take more time. It’s a very humane and relaxed tour.

The VIP Tour encompassed a tour of the house and the surrounding buildings. Then we took a drive on one of the shuttle busses out to the barn and to the back area where Elvis had all the trailer homes set up for guests and all his buddies and their wives, not to mention the private back drive where Elvis could slip out undetected by the fans congregating at the gate at all times. We went to a small building where a replica of Elvis’ office was set up, and displays of all of his books (drooling Sheila had to be told to stop leaning over the railing). Then there were the planes and the cars across the street. There are also special exhibits in the Graceland ticket pavilion and other areas and I did all of those too. One about Elvis’ worldwide fan base and all of the memorabilia, one about the 1968 comeback special, and one about his touring/Vegas years in the 70s. We were there for HOURS. But because it had such a relaxed go-at-your-own-pace feel, there was none of that normal stress that sometimes comes along with going on tours, especially really crowded tours.

It was CHILL.

Which, to me, seems appropriate. Because life at Graceland was probably intense, and all focused around one man, and everyone was dictated by his moods, but it was also chill. Priscilla said life there felt timeless. They would eat lunch in the middle of the night. They would all sit out on the lawn for hours, playing football, riding horses, nowhere to go (and nowhere they could go, because of Famous Elvis being a prisoner in his own home), and nothing to do but whatever pleased them. A juvenile existence in many ways, but set up as a haven where Elvis could relax and let the troubles of the world slip away.

So it was nice to have the tour be quiet, nearly uninhabited at times, and relaxed. It was one of my favorite parts about it.

I did take a lot of pictures. But more often than not, I was just standing still, looking around. The tour is one of the most generous and well-organized tours I have ever been on. I congratulate the Graceland team for figuring out the best way to manage it.

Jen and I woke up on Sunday. We had breakfast. We had time to linger, no rush. Our tours were at 11:30. Jen was not familiar with the phenomenon of the 1968 special and had asked me about it, so I gave her a full run-down, including showing her some key clips. (We ended up being so glad we did that. It would be hard to get a grasp on just how monumental that special was just by the exhibit at Graceland. I was happy to provide some context. Jen had some interesting observations about Elvis’ use of his sexuality – which I will share eventually. It’s important because although, of course, she knows Elvis and knows his main songs, she really didn’t know that much about him. By our ride home the following day, she would hear one Elvis song come out of my iPod and look at me, tentatively, asking, “Is this a Sun recording?” She was always right. It was a very exciting moment. You really get how distinctive that sound is, but it was cool to see her pick up on it so quickly. And her observation about Elvis’ use of his sexuality, and why it is so distinct, was VERY interesting, because she was coming to him TOTALLY fresh.) We then got into the car to head into Memphis. By this time, we had been to Graceland twice, so we knew the way. We felt awesome about ourselves for that. Look at us, not even needing to look at a map!

The Graceland ticket pavilion was a bustle of activity, with the little shuttle vans that take you across the street to the mansion lined up in the drive. We picked up our tickets. We were going to be on different tours. So we said farewell to one another and went off to our respective shuttles. Of course we were texting one another throughout, and occasionally met up when our tours coincided. I got a little VIP badge to wear around my neck, which basically meant I was waved into any space I walked into, which was nice since I kept losing my giant ticket. And I was given a headset with a little controller on it. You would “start” the tour by pressing the Play button and at any time during the tour you could press Pause. If you got “lost” in the tour, or if your tape somehow didn’t end up on the right spot, each room, each display, had its own corresponding number which you could then press into the keypad and get you back on track. It always worked. This is a high-end operation. It was so smooth, so well-done. You are guaranteed to get a lot out of it.

Like I said, there were only three people on the little van, and then the driver. We all loaded up, and then headed across the street, through the gates of Graceland.

We drove up the winding drive, past the life-size nativity, and were dropped off in the side drive, by the carport in the back. Our tour guide met us there, and gave us a run-down on how the tour worked, and how our headsets worked. He walked us around to the front door. I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown. My eyes weren’t working fast enough to see everything. I wanted to examine every window, every bush. This place was Elvis’ baby. He cultivated it, he planned everything, he designed everything, he was so proud of it. There were trees in the front circled in Christmas lights. Nobody else was out there. It was just the four of us. We stood on the front steps, with the columns all around us, and the tour guide said he would meet us back out front whenever we were done. He then opened the door to Graceland and let us all walk in.

I kept myself together because I didn’t want to miss anything. The front hall is famous for its chandelier, and Elvis portrait on the wall, and the stairway upstairs. Because of the season, the stairs were decorated with poinsettia leaves. The chandeliers (the one below and the next story up) were both ablaze. The red curtain at the top of the stairs demarcating Elvis’ Private Space was closed (as it always is). The entire scene was a picture in white and red. Beautiful, and a little bit cheesy. Which, to me, says ELVIS.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Dolly Parton strolling down those stairs singing, “It’s just a little-bitty pissant country place …” with all the prostitutes hanging over the railing.

Each room had a different feel. The rooms certainly evolved over the years, as Elvis’ taste evolved (the billiard room, for example, was the most over-the-top room I saw, but in the beginning years it was just a basic room on the bottom floor with a pool table in it … but Elvis went nuts in his later years with decorating as a psychological expression. You can feel those transformations in the rooms).

To the right is the big living room with the 15-foot white couch, and beyond that is the music room, with the grand piano. There was a white Christmas tree up with white lights and red balls. (Red and white. What a shock). There were the famous blue peacock stained glass windows, the huge mirror over the fireplace, and beautiful vases and glass objects everywhere. It was a beautiful room, but beautiful in the way a high-end bordello would be.

I can just see Elvis back there playing the piano, with his crowd of friends standing around harmonizing.

At the back of the hall next to the stairway is Vernon and Gladys’ bedroom, which Elvis had ordered to remain unchanged in any way while he was away in Germany from 1968-60. Of course Vernon remarried soon after that, and Elvis was upset about it, it seemed way too soon, and he got a bad feeling about Vernon’s new wife. He felt that she just wanted to get close to HIM. (He was semi-right.) The room is intimidatingly decorated: all plum-purple and white, and feels like a hotel room where it would be impossible to relax. But you can feel Elvis’ love in that decoration. Only the best for his mama. Elegance and beauty. That room had its own bathroom and you get a glimpse of it through the doorway. There is also a glass closet with what looked like housedresses hanging there.

That’s one of the eeriest things about Graceland. You feel at any second that the space-time continuum is going to fold and you are going to see all of the people who once lived there strolling in and out of the rooms. I think that’s why people say the house doesn’t feel outrageously huge, although it is a big house. It’s that it actually still feels like a HOME. A home with something called “The Jungle Room”, granted, but still a home.

Across the front hall from the living room is the dining room. Yet another Christmas tree was set up in there (with all of Elvis’ personal ornaments on it), and this Christmas tree was a more homey Christmas tree, all different colors, and lights blazing. The table was set for a full dinner. While everything was exquisite – the table, the china, the silver – the room is still quite small, no bigger than my parents’ dining room, or maybe just a tiny bit bigger. Certainly not a vast cavernous space or anything like that. Richly furnished, but on a human scale. One entire wall was a mirror (very 70s-ish), with a big portrait of Priscilla and Lisa Marie hanging on it. There was a big china cabinet, and also a glass case with a crazy silver bowl on display. I do not know the story of the bowl. It can’t have been an heirloom. The Presleys wouldn’t have had an heirloom. It clearly goes with the silver set, the soup tureen on the table. But this bowl is set aside.

From the dining room you walk into the kitchen which might have been my favorite room of all, because of its total ordinariness. Jen and I agreed on this later. She said to me, “I LOVED the kitchen. I LOVED that it was carpeted.” Except for the carpet, it looked like my kitchen growing up. The stove had a couple burners, there was a fridge, a small television (every room had a television except the dining room and the billiard room), some cabinets, and colored glass lamps. It feels strange to take a tour of something so ordinary, but it is my favorite kind of tour – and why things like Colonial Williamsburg or Monticello are so awesome to see. While, yes, they are historically significant (and far more so than Graceland), what you are looking at is private property. You’re not looking at a court house or the Library of Congress, which is built to not only intimidate but be symbolic and important in its structure. When you stroll through Graceland, you are basically spying on the people who once lived there. They, while they were living their lives there, had no idea that one day you would be strolling through with headsets on. It is mindblowing, but, as I mentioned, my favorite kind of tour.

Many of the rooms in Graceland (the main living room, the TV room downstairs, the pool room, the Jungle Room) are designed to be display rooms. Elvis was a flashy guy. He had outrageous taste (from the start). He was dressing in chartreuse colored suits in high school. But that kitchen?

That’s a family room, a casual room, you can feel life going on there. You expect Elvis’ grandmother to enter, oven mitts on, to take a sheet of cookies out of the oven. That’s how lived-in it looks.

I knew that the Jungle Room (also referred to as “the den” before Elvis went all jungley in there) was beyond. I could see it, the green shag carpet, but first, the tour led me down a stairway into the bottom floor. Elvis bought Graceland in 1957. When he moved in, the basement was a rough open space with a dirt floor. Well, that had to go. He had the floor laid down almost immediately and paneling put in. The basement rooms continued to develop over the years and the re-decorating process was something that never really stopped for the next 20 years. The limestone and wood house was always a work in progress. The downstairs went through many phases before it ended up as the over-the-top Man Cave, essentially, that it is. There is the TV room and the billiard room. Elvis always had that area as a place to hang out, in a more casual way than upstairs in the living room. He had a bar installed with a soda fountain, there were TVs, and in the 70s, he had three TVs installed in the one room, so he could watch all of the different football games on different channels at the same time. When the TCB thing started obsessing him, he and Priscilla designed the lightning bolt and the logo during a plane ride, and after that, it started appearing everywhere. Elvis had medallions made up and gave them to everyone. He had it painted on the wall in the TV room. The TV Room is a decadent space, all yellow and black, with mirrored ceilings and one mirrored wall over the fireplace. There’s a giant wrap-around couch. Against the back wall, by the TVs, is Elvis’ stereo system and his favorite records lined up (Mario Lanza fully visible). The lights are dim, but the yellow is blinding. It looks like a total drug trip that room. It also reeks of testosterone.

Across the hall is the room with the pool table which kind of has to be seen to be believed. I hung out there for quite some time. I touched everything. I was alone in that room. It’s a very small room and it seems even smaller because Elvis had both the walls and the ceiling covered in a busy Paisley fabric, undulating in little folds all across every surface. God forbid you light a cigarette in there. You could be engulfed in flames if that fabric caught fire. The pool table takes up most of the space (and you can see the tear in the green surface at the end of it). It’s such a small space that it must have been a challenge to actually, you know, play a game of pool in there. Your cue would always be jamming back into the Paisley fabric walls. It’s a psychedelic space. Elvis was obviously creative. Who else would ask to have a fabric-draped room? The lights are low. I looked at everything. There were little framed pictures on the wall, old-fashioned drawings of hot-air balloons, which added to the Weird Factor. I loved that room. I don’t understand it at all.

I then walked through a little downstairs hallway which led to the stairway upstairs (another stairway, there were two that led down into the basement). This little downstairs hallway was covered in wood paneling, just like every house I grew up in, every house I knew in the 70s. Crappy wooden paneling. There was a Thermostat on the wall, and a nautical picture hanging there. It was a cramped hallway, probably closets behind some of those panels. Graceland is strange that way: opulent bordello tastes beside totally normal 1970s paneling.

Across this tiny cramped hall is the open doorway to the stairs. You already know you are going to be ascending into some weird world because there is green shag carpeting on the walls (as well as the stairs up). It’s a strange image, the green carpeting peeking around the doorway from the walls.

I climbed the narrow stairway, literally engulfed in green shag on every side. I ran my hands across it. God, member shag carpet? What a pain in the ass it is. And to have so MUCH of it. It had to be a bitch to keep clean and fresh. The stairway that leads up into the Jungle Room is a nothing space. Just a stairway, bounded in by walls on both sides. It was probably just a wooden stairway before Elvis came along. Putting green shag carpet everywhere made it something else entirely.

Then I emerged into the famous Jungle Room. I have imagined this room in my mind, and have heard the stories about all that happened in that room. (Near the end, when Elvis retreated into his solitude even more, they would record songs in the Jungle Room. Some of my favorite songs were recorded there, and I felt emotional about imagining those recording sessions going down. Dark days. But the creativity was still there.) The Jungle Room (or “den”) stretches across the back of the house and was the biggest room. It has many different spaces in it. The furniture is dark and evocative of high-end safaris, with a giant round chair in one corner that Lisa Marie loved. A teddy bear and a guitar sit there now. I drooled looking at that round chair. If you sat in it, you would never want to leave. At the far end of the room is a stand-alone bar with two stools, everything in a dark polished wood. The TV Room downstairs was so modern that it almost looked ridiculous. It was a place of technology and the future, with the TVs glimmering endlessly in all of the mirrored reflections. The Jungle Room is old-fashioned, with a couple of tweaks thrown in. The green carpet is everywhere. It’s on the ceiling. There’s a giant swooping dark couch that splits up the room. At the other end of the room is a custom-designed fountain that Elvis had put in, with little lights and plants placed around it. There is so much in the Jungle Room that I didn’t want to leave. I stayed there for about 20, 25 minutes. And another tour came up the stairs, and lo and behold, there was Jen! We were so excited to see each other, even though it had only been about an hour since we parted. We hugged, still listening to our little headsets, and whispered to each other, “This is fucking incredible.”

It was hard to leave the Jungle Room, I won’t lie.

My headset then led me out the side door into the side yard. I was going to go see the office now, Vernon Presley’s office, where all the secretaries worked as well, answering fan mail, dealing with requests, paying the monumental bills, all that. But I wasn’t ready to go into the office yet so I Paused my headset tour and wandered around the side yard for a while. It was a misty grey day, and the Graceland grounds looked absolutely beautiful. The house sits on a little hill and you cannot tell at all from the road how far it goes back. That must have felt good to Elvis, looking for a little privacy. You could run naked across that yard and no one down on the street could see you. The barn is back on a corner of the property but there are criss-crossed white fences breaking up the grounds, and it’s real country. High-end country, but you know you’re on a farm. It’s not like a mini-Versailles back there with exquisite pampered gardens and symmetrical flower beds. It’s a farm. It’s meant to have horses galloping around. The fields are perfect for touch football games. You can set off firecrackers (as Elvis loved to do). The corrals are beautiful.

No one was around. I wasn’t looking out on that landscape and seeing long lines of tourists ruining my view. There were people coming up behind me from the Jungle Room, but it was a sparse crowd. Being alone in that landscape was awesome. It was quiet and grey. It felt like a working farm (and it still is. There are 4 horses in the barn, one of which is a descendant of Elvis’ horse – and I believe his cousin is still the groundskeeper.)

Then I walked across the little walkway to the small building off the main house where the office was. It was a no-bones building. In the tiny front yard of the office was Lisa’s swingset, which took up all the space. The office itself was behind glass, and it’s a funny thing: it’s an office. There’s nothing special about it. There are filing cabinets against the wall and two ratty desks. An adding machine is on one of them with a roll of paper coming out of it, and various Rolodexes. There are portraits of Elvis on the floor, leaning up against the desks. But other than that clue, the space is not remarkable at all. Yet there it is: behind glass.

I loved looking at the office because that is where Elvis gave his press conference after getting out of the Army, sitting at the desk to the left, against the filing cabinets. Elvis didn’t give a press conference seated on the long white couch in his main room, surrounded by opulence. He was cramped up against filing cabinets with a desk and a bunch of phones in front of him. A screen showing that 1960 press conference was hanging in the office.

Attached to the office was a small clapboard structure inside of which was a stone wellhouse where Elvis had the idea to set up a firing range. You would stand outside the door of the building and shoot INTO the wellhouse at the target. There was a blue target there, and a couple of bicycles were hanging from the ceiling. Setting up a firing range in a tiny structure directly beside an office where a bunch of people were working was not, how you say, a good idea, and the secretaries were terrified that a ricocheting bullet would pierce them while they were on the toilet right through one of those walls. Setting up a firing range right beside your daughter’s swingset is also not a good idea. So after a couple of weeks, Elvis abandoned the whole thing. “Okay, fine, this was a terrible idea. Leave me alone.” When Graceland the tour was set up, bullet casings were found in the ground all around the wellhouse, and they now sit under glass like precious gems.

I was now on to the Hall of Gold. I had to gear up for it. The house was great, a personal private space, and the ghost of Elvis and all of his friends and family still stroll around there. You can feel them. But Elvis’ accomplishments are the name of the game for me, his impact, his success, and as I said, I had been warned. Multiple times. I had been warned about how overwhelming the next part of the tour would be.

The “trophy room” was set up by Elvis in one of the out-buildings while he lived there. He had to have a place to store all of his trophies and gold records and everything else. Originally, he had had a slot-car track in this particular building, but – like a lot of his obsessions – the slot-car track thing faded, and so he decided to put all of his stuff back there under glass. Occasionally, he would allow fans he recognized to come take a look at Graceland, and look at his cars, and all that. He was fine with letting people into his space, on his terms. But fans occasionally would swipe things from the house when they were looking around, and this hurt Elvis. It hurt him not because he was attached to the thing itself (he wasn’t attached to things at all – someone would compliment him on his jewelry and he would immediately take it off and hand it over), but because he would have just GIVEN the object to the person if he knew they wanted it. Don’t just TAKE something, Jesus Christ! But because of that situation in Graceland, Elvis had to keep his gold records and everything else separate. No fans could get their hands on THEM. Hence: the ‘trophy room”, now known as the Hall of Gold.

You enter the building and there is an exhibit set up in the front room, with a tour of Elvis’ career and life in display cases.

Then you enter the Hall of Gold through a doorway, and then, everything goes quiet. Being confronted with the reality of those gold records is an awe-inspiring experience. It’s the seeing it all in one place that gets you, that really lands. There were a couple of other people in that Hall of Gold, and everyone was whispering. It had that effect on you.

It is overwhelming, plain and simple.

I went from record to record down the hall. I looked at every single one. I have to admit I got emotional when I saw the platinum Moody Blue, Elvis’ last album. It went gold as well as platinum on September 12, 1977, not even a month after Elvis’ death. It’s a wonderful album, but it has all kinds of sad associations with it, so seeing it there was extraordinary. But the whole place was incredible. A monument to a lifetime of unprecedented (to this day) accomplishment.

After the Hall of Gold, you enter a dark exhibit area. This was a wonderful place, with lots of clothes – tons of clothes. Not the jumpsuits yet, but some of his movie costumes, as well as outfits he wore during his life: his wedding tux, the cray-cray get-up he wore when he met Nixon (yeah, I’m gonna go meet Nixon and I’m gonna wear a CAPE when I do so), the ruffled shirt and black suit he wore to accept his award as one of the Most Outstanding Young Men of Year in 1970. Of all of the awards he received, Elvis was most proud of this one. And he never went to awards shows, never never never, but he went to that one, and made a sweet acceptance speech.

The boxing robe in “Kid Galahad”

Wall of movie posters

The custom-designed skin-tight black leather suit for the 68 comeback special: a total thrill to see. Boy was actually skinny when you see this suit in person. Not just lean, but THIN.

TV given to Elvis by RCA to celebrate 50 million records sold between 1956 and 1968. Insane.

The head-to-toe red suit Elvis wore during the “Saved” gospel medley in the 1968 special

I would recognize this suit in my sleep. It’s the resplendent outfit he wore for the press conference before his Madison Square Garden concerts. There’s that funny moment when a reporter calls out, “You have a reputation as a shy humble country boy –” and Elvis can’t resist: he stands up, opens his jacket to reveal the giant gold belt, and says, “I don’t know what makes them think that …”

I loved this exhibit because it was so full of clothes: his own personal clothes and recognizable clothes from his movies. The blue suit from Blue Hawaii, the white hat from Trouble with Girls. I had been hoping to see the skintight bathing trunks he wore in Blue Hawaii (I always wondered, “Aren’t those a bit … uncomfortable? Where does everything GO, is basically my question.”) But alas, the trunks were not there.

I exited that building and then moved down the concrete steps to get to the racquet-ball court Elvis had had built on the property. I passed by the pool on the side of the house, and beyond that you could see the Meditation Garden where all the graves are.

Elvis had the racquet-ball court built in the 70s. The anteroom of the racquet-ball court is still as it was then. There’s an area immediately upon entering with some of Elvis’ workout stuff, as well as a pinball machine. There’s also a little bar with a couple of leather stools, where you could hang out and, oh, have some Gatorade after playing racquet-ball. Elvis loved Gatorade. I saw multiple bottles throughout the house and airplanes. Then there is an area below with couches and a little table, a standup piano (naturally) and a giant teddy bear, hanging out waiting for his time on the racquet-ball court.

So far so normal. Yes, it is a man’s private racquet-ball court, so that is already indicative of his outrageous wealth, but it looks like a normal space, a clear waiting-room and hangout spot for anyone who is working out, or playing racquet-ball, or whatever. It’s all Elvis, sure, but it looks ordinary.

You walk down the stairs into the lower area, and then open the door into the racquet ball court.

And that is where all semblance of anything even closely resembling normal life stops.

It was so overwhelming that my brain went blank with white fuzz. You are in the presence of something entirely other in that room. Success on a level that, to some degree, makes no sense. It just IS. Like the Grand Canyon, or like the planet Jupiter. Something so huge it can’t be comprehended in one glance, almost otherworldly, and yet also so real and so of-this-earth (he was, after all, just a guy, just a human being: this all actually happened) that the space is like an assault. It’s almost aggressive. How do ya like THEM apples?, the racquet-ball court sneers. Everywhere you look glimmers with gold and silver. You have to stand with your head thrown all the way back to take it all in. These are international awards, and platinum albums, and gold albums, and every other precious-stone album you can think of. There is memorabilia, and posters, and things like that, but it is all placed in such a way as to be absolutely intimidating. It’s not cozy. There were other exhibits where Elvis starts to seem human. His handwriting, his marginalia in his books, his hi-top sneakers, oh yes, he was just a guy, right? Just a guy who lived here. The racquet-ball court says, “Sure. That’s true. Graceland is cute, isn’t it? You really feel the personality of the guy who lived there, right? Well, take a look at THIS. This is success on a level never before reached or surpassed. This is like Neil Fucking Armstrong success. So be quiet and mind your manners.”

I mean, that’s what it feels like in there.

Aggressive over-the-top walking-on-the-moon no-more-Oxygen kind of success.

I actually felt a lack of Oxygen just looking at those towering walls of gold and silver.

Along the ground-floor level are giant isolated cases with Elvis’ famous jumpsuits in them, standing there, again seeming aggressive and strange. Clothes waiting for bodies to inhabit them. The jumpsuits were heavy outfits, encased with jewels, and they picked up the light from the ceiling fixtures way up high and they sparkled and shimmered. Everything seemed frozen and still. Elvis was there. But not the Elvis of the TV room, eating ice cream and watching football. No. This was the Elvis who broke his own attendance records throughout the 70s, who was a nonstop performing machine (to the detriment of his health), and who was untouchable, even more so after his death.

This was the room of the Myth, the Legend.

After I got my bearings (the room is dizzying, not to mention the fact that you have to crane your neck all the way back in order to see it all), I moved in closer to inspect those famous jumpsuits.

I ask you. Who else would have the balls to wear something like this and get away with it? Only a few people. Kings, of course. Marie Antoinette could do it. And Liberace, Barbra Streisand, Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson. But to be a strapping “U.S. Male”, the personification of Male Sexuality, and wear something like this and pull it off? That is strictly Elvis Territory.

Flag presented to Elvis posthumously from the Veterans Administration in tribute to his service

The famous American Eagle cape, created for Elvis’ Aloha from Hawaii TV special. This is the cape that he threw into the audience at the end of that concert, much to the dismay of his father, who had balked at the price of the damn costume. You’re gonna toss that cape that cost THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS into the crowd?? Clearly, they got it back. But I still love that story. The suit had been meticulously designed and created over a series of months. Elvis approved every design detail. He was totally into the American symbolism throughout the suit, he was in love with the suit. But not so in love with it that he wouldn’t throw the damn cape into the crowd. He didn’t GIVE a shit about stuff like that. He did not hold onto things. People, yes, he held onto them. But things? Buh-bye. You want it? It’s yours.

The racquet-ball court is a monument to the meritocracy that is show business.

I was not fully normal for about 10 minutes after exiting that intimidating space. It was like being propelled into outer space for a brief moment. That’s what it felt like.

Once you exit the court, you are led through a winding concrete path, grass on either side, to the Meditation Garden, designed by Elvis in the 60s, when he was going off the deep end with his New Age stuff. He wanted a place to do yoga, to pray, to meditate. Statues were built. (There are some funny stories about those statues. Elvis, naturally, got the idea for the Meditation Garden and then wanted it to be manifested IMMEDIATELY. He drove people crazy making demands at 3 in the morning to have something completed by 10 a.m. the following day.) The garden wasn’t originally a gravesite, but eventually it became that. Elvis’ mother was buried in a Memphis cemetery, and he would visit it occasionally, and every year on the anniversary of her death, or her birthday, he would make a pilgrimage. Even when he was out of town, he made sure her grave had fresh flowers, all that. Eventually, he made the decision to have Gladys moved to the grounds of Graceland. And that’s how the whole thing started.

Now it is the shrine where the Presleys are buried and there is a space left for Lisa Marie. (She has been funny in the past, saying how it’s weird to know where you will be buried, and also that you will then become a part of that Death Ritual going on at Graceland – but she’s tried to accept it. She is part of that legacy. But still: strange.)

At first it was just Gladys out there. Jessie Garon, Elvis’ twin, who was stillborn, was buried in Tupelo, Mississippi. Obviously there would have been nothing left of him by the 60s, but Elvis had a marker put out in the Meditation Garden anyway, for his long-lost brother. (Jessie, Jesse … there are multiple spelling mistakes in the Presley history. Elvis’ middle name: Aaron, Aron … these spelling mistakes have led to insane conspiracy theories which I will not go into.) When Elvis died, he was buried in a cemetery in Memphis, but eventually moved back to Graceland due to vandalism of his grave. Vernon Presley died only two years after his son, and he is buried there as well. Elvis’ grandmother, who lived with him his entire life (and even moved to Germany with him when he was in the service) outlived them all, dying in 1980. She is buried there as well.

There was a crowd gathered in the small semicircle around the graves. People took pictures. There are giant bouquets, and small flowers as well. Little stuffed animals placed around the graves. I suppose you could call it morbid, but I didn’t feel that way. To me, it felt totally Southern. Authentic, natural, and yes, a little bit strange. But once upon a time, families buried their loved ones on their property. For most of human history that has been the case. You live amongst your own dead. That’s not only necessity, but it’s right. Elvis couldn’t let go of his mother. He never recovered from her death. I imagine it was a comfort to have her right there. It also might have been a bit of a torment. You know, you’re floating in the pool 10 feet away from your mother’s grave. But Elvis liked to have everything with him at all times: he traveled with a trunk of his favorite books, and he traveled with his entourage of good friends. He didn’t like anything or anyone to go away from him. So of course he would want Gladys there. And his brother as well.

This was one of the most important revelations about my trip to Memphis. Mencken called Memphis “the buckle of the Bible belt”, and you can see why Elvis loved it there, why he flourished there early on, and why he made it his home base. It is an honest and authentic place. He could have moved to Nashville, or New York. He had homes in Hollywood, of course, for his other home base while he made his movies, but he always returned to Memphis in between shoots, driving home with his friends and wife or girlfriends in a giant RV, stopping off in Vegas, or in Colorado to go skiing. Memphis was the draw. He could relax in Memphis. He was still famous, but he was more of a “local boy made good” in Memphis. And Graceland was his palace of privacy. Having his dead family around him probably made him feel very good. If he couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night (which he never could), he could go out to the Meditation Garden and talk to his mother and brother, or pray, or just think. Whatever.

The crowd was quiet. Nobody was pushing or shoving, nobody was even speaking in a loud voice. It’s a cemetery. The place is soaked with grief. But it’s outside, and the day was grey and quiet, and it all felt rather peaceful to me. It wasn’t a CIRCUS. I really liked that. I know it’s far more nuts in August, with a chanting circle of people holding candles walking around his grave. I am not interested in participating in that. It was nice to just stand there, as the family once all stood there, and look down at the graves. There were flowers from Priscilla by Elvis’ grave.

After that, you walked back out to the main drive. Shuttle busses were waiting, but with my VIP badge I was free to wander around some more. I walked up to the front of the house. There were only a couple of other people about. I sat on the white-painted cast-iron benches. I checked out the stone lions. I walked far back into the middle of the front lawn to get a view of the house in its entirety.

I looked up at his bedroom window. I wandered around. I went to check out the big nativity. I was totally alone. I went over to the side yard to see the big MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL – ELVIS sign hanging between the trees.

Finally I was ready to move on. I went up to a security person and showed my badge, asking her where I went next. She told me to walk around to the side of the house by the carport and go in the door that would be open there. It was so cool to be sort of set free, to not be hustled along, to have the space to look at everything, the random things – not just the stuff pointed out on the tour. So I strolled around to the back of the house. The carport has no cars in it, but you could just imagine the lone line of gleaming vehicles that were there once upon a time. I found the open door and went inside. There is another exhibit in there, part of my VIP tour, and it was yet another highlight.

There were a couple of different displays having to do with different elements of Elvis’ life. Immediately upon entering, you were confronted with a huge glass case filled with piles of personal checks, written by Elvis, for the various charities in Memphis. PILES of checks. The second he started making money, he started giving it away. He held a ceremony every year at Christmas down at the City Hall, I believe, where he handed out checks to local businesses and local charities.

There was a small exhibit devoted to Gladys, with a couple of her dresses hanging there. A regular housedress and the black dress with the silvery neckline that she wore when Elvis was inducted into the Army. There was Elvis’ giant white Bible that had to have weighed 10 or 15 pounds.

Over to the side was a replica of Elvis’ office, which had originally been upstairs in Graceland. Upstairs is off-limits in Graceland but I am so glad that they chose to re-create it here, because it was filled with books. I was obsessed with the books. Karate books and history books, a biography of Churchill, the Warren Report. The desk was a big brown desk, with a cool console at the front of it, where he could probably buzz down to the kitchen to ask for a snack, or call down to the gatehouse. Graceland was a totally WIRED private home. I think there were 27 televisions, all in all. There were also closed-circuit TVs so you could see the fans down at the gate, or see what was going on in the backyard. Elvis’ chair was a big leather desk chair. I was in love with the casual-ness of it, and the feeling of WORK. Behind the desk was a small organ, with sheet music set open. There was also a fish tank and some plants.

Oh, the books. To get my hands on those books.

There was a whole rack of Elvis’ clothes. Not just costumes, but stuff he wore around the house. Elvis was not a blue jeans type of guy. He was always immaculately dressed. He liked tight silk shirts and tight pants and colorful socks.

I was the only one in there. There was a van taking off in about 5 minutes for us VIP-ers, but I wasn’t ready to move on yet. No problem. Another van would be coming over in about 15 minutes. The tour was so great like that. It was the books that really got me in this particular exhibit. There were so many of them. I wanted to download them into my brain.

Anyone who knows the story of June Juanico and Elvis knows that during the summer they were dating (1956), he was starting to have some stress issues, as his fame started exploding. He had a hard time controlling some of the members of his entourage, and they were already getting him into trouble. He had to handle them. He had to handle the Colonel. He had to be nice to EVERYONE, even if he didn’t feel like it, because everyone was watching everything he did. He talked with June about this during their late-night dates. He hung out at June’s house, and ate June’s mother’s chocolate cake, and felt relaxed and private with the Juanicos. But his zone of privacy was shrinking on almost a daily basis. June picked up on his stress and on one of their dates, they were parked outside of her house, talking and making out and all that. She said to him, “Hang on – have something I want to give you” and she ran inside, grabbed a book, and ran back outside to give it to him. She thought it would help him. It was Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. He had no idea what to expect but was really touched that she would give it to him, and he called her early the next morning, 7 or 8 a.m. He had stayed up the whole night reading it. He read it twice. He was blown away by it. It was just the book he needed. How had she known?? They spent their next dates talking about The Prophet and all of the lessons they both had learned from the book. Elvis had been particularly taken with the section on marriage, and they talked about that too. If Elvis went into the New Age discovery world later in the 60s – it all began with this book. It let him know that there was a place for him in this world, that he was a spiritual being, that the material world was secondary, and that being a contemplative thoughtful person was always preferable to just reacting to events. His fame was an entity that had a life of its own and yes, he had to react to it, but he could also always remind himself that there was more to life than this, that even being famous didn’t mean you had no inner life anymore. He always had the book with him throughout the rest of his life. It may not have been the copy June Juanico originally gave him, but on the day he died, a copy of The Prophet was on the bedside table at Graceland. June Juanico, married and with kids when Elvis died, heard in the news about that book being on the table … and had a real moment with herself about it. The continuum of life. Her younger self trying to help out her jittery nervous well-meaning boyfriend with a gift of a book. A book he very well may have taken the wrong way. But she took the risk of giving it to him anyway, and it was one of his most cherished books in his vast collection.

So yeah, my point is it was pretty cool to see it. Knowing how well-thumbed those pages were, how much he loved it, how he never got sick of it.

Finally I was ready to leave. I got back onto the waiting van. I was the only person on the damn van. We then began a tour of the rest of the property, part of the fun of my VIP status. We drove back to see the barn. We drove by the trailer homes back section, where Elvis had created a small tent-city basically, for his friends and guests. We saw all the different buildings on the farm. The tour guide was actually sitting on the van with me, and she told me all about everything. We slowed down for closer looks. It’s a huge piece of land.

Gorgeous. Melancholy on that grey January day.

But beautiful.

It was time to go back across the street and visit the planes and cars.

The tour had really only just begun.

On our second day in Memphis, we woke up at 6 a.m. We had to be at Graceland for the 8 a.m. gospel concert. We both had to take showers. It was going to be a long day and we wouldn’t be coming back to the hotel. After the gospel concert, we were slated to meet up with my blog-friend (and, hell, real-life friend, although this was the first time we met for real – amazing) Lisa, at Sun Studios at around 12:30. She was driving in from Little Rock. We would do the Sun tour, and then go grab something to eat, and basically hang out in Memphis with Lisa. I couldn’t wait. Lisa and I have “known” each other for years through our various blogs and social networking and all that. I think it was around 2004 when she found my blog by Googling “St. Elmo’s Fire fans” – I mean, come on. The woman is a kindred spirit. We have talked about everything under the sun on my site, on hers, on Facebook, and on Twitter, where she rules the roost. Politics, movies, celebrities, our lives, our families. Facebook gives a greater intimacy than the blog does. I don’t post much personal stuff here (as I’ve said: it seems like I do, but it’s really just trompe l’oeil by design), but on FB it’s mostly personal. So I have gotten to know Lisa’s family through her pictures, I’m “friends” with her teenage son on Facebook (she has two teenage sons), and it was really quite an event that we were FINALLY going to meet in person!!

But first? We needed to get to Graceland for some gospel. It was dark when we woke up and the sun still hadn’t come up by the time we reached Graceland, although the sky was starting to get light. Our drive into Memphis was so gorgeous. The flat land on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi brown and rich and still in shadows. The Mississippi still and dark beneath the bridge. It was a wet overcast morning, quiet and still. When we got to Graceland, it was 7:30 in the morning and mine was the only car in the parking lot. We howled with laughter looking at it. NERDS.

However, at the ticket pavilion near the parking lot, the line had already formed. It was chilly enough that everyone was bundled up (the day before had been damn near hot), and everyone was drinking coffee and still a bit sleepy. A sound check was running a bit overtime, so we had a bit of waiting to do.

I wandered off through the parking lot to look at the back of the planes, just sitting there in the dark morning, empty, no tours going on yet. They looked so impressive, the Lisa Marie especially. I loved being there before it was even officially open. It seems to me that that is really the way to see it, because it seems most like normal life. (Well. If “normal” means a giant private jet in your yard. But. That WAS “normal” to Elvis. He wasn’t a tourist in his own life. This was his life. So there you go.)

There is a high gate around the plane area, but of course the huge tail is visible with the famous TCB logo and the lightning bolt.

It was finally time to go in. The concert took place in the ticket pavilion across the street from Graceland. It feels like a hotel lobby, dark carpeting and lots of space, and a bunch of chairs were set up in one area, and there were microphones, and a sound board at the back. The concert was so beautiful. I cried off my makeup sitting in the front row. Beautiful emotional way to wake up. I was so honored to be there, to be a part of it. Jen and I had a great time.

When the concert finished up, it was only 9:15, 9:30. Graceland was still not awake. It was the day before Elvis’ birthday. But the crowd in that ticket pavilion was still only us gospel concert people. Many of them were staying on to take the tours, but Jen and I were driving back into Memphis. We were hungry, aching for breakfast by that point, and we had a bunch of time before we had to meet Lisa at Sun. Before we went off in search for food, we walked out onto the front lawn of the ticket area, directly opposite Graceland, and hung out for a while, wandering around.

We crossed the street to Graceland.

The musical-gates were wide open. There was a stop sign in the drive right there, but nobody was in sight. There was no one in the gatehouse (where Vester used to sit!), and nobody walking around on the yard. It might as well have been a private home. Nothing would have stopped us (at least initially) from starting up the drive towards the house. It was wide open. I was amazed by that. It was beautiful, actually.

We perused the wall and the brick gatehouse, all of which were covered with graffiti.

Graffiti from every corner of the world.

I stood by the wall and stared up at Graceland. Nobody else was out there with us. There weren’t any other fans. It was too early in the morning, I suppose. But that was one of the special things about our early morning trip to Graceland. You really got the sense that you were looking at someone’s home. Not a museum, or a national monument. It seemed wholly and utterly private.

Yes, grandiose, with a huge message from Elvis hung between the trees (MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL. ELVIS. – a sign he hung up every Christmastime the entire time he lived there). And a life-size nativity in the front yard with life-size camels and kings and all that.

But still. Even with the splendour, it was clearly a home. And with no fans out there, no one monitoring the gatehouse, no vans shuttling across the street, nobody else out there … you really felt like that was still a living house, with occupants, and maybe you’d get a glimpse of Elvis coming down the drive on his motorcycle. A place stopped in time. And yet casually of our time as well.

It was almost eerie.

I am not sure what I was expecting. I was expecting a mob scene, frankly. I was expecting throngs of people everywhere, at all times. Perhaps his death anniversary is more of a draw (this is what we heard anyway from every Memphian we spoke to). But every time we went to Graceland, even on his birthday, which was (naturally) more crowded – it was still a kind of quiet place, watchful, waiting, still. I didn’t have to jostle my way to the front to get a good view, I never had to hold my camera up over my head to get the shot I wanted. It was calm, orderly, peaceful.

And on that early Saturday morning, it was deserted.

The gates flung wide open.

Nobody in sight.