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| from www.elvispresleyfansofnashville.com |
In a recent book-review-based article about
Elvis in London Review of Books
(accessible here if you’re a subscriber), Ian Penman was in full and fascinating flow -
especially in advancing the argument that rather than Elvis having offered, as
generally claimed, “black carnality sieved through white restraint” maybe it
was more like the opposite: a fusing of “black politeness and white carnality”.
He argues that Elvis was essentially placid and biddable - and quotes this from
Pamela Clarke Keogh, in her 2004 book Elvis: The Man. The Life. The Legend :
“Beneath his extraordinary politeness he has the docility of a house servant”.
Penman adds that “it’s hard not to hear in Keogh’s ‘house servant’ the echo of
a far less neutral phrase: ‘house nigger’.”
They get there by building far too much on
Elvis’ famous politeness - his saying “yes ma’am” and “no sir” to reporters. It
wasn’t “extraordinary politeness” and it wasn't particularly black. Every white southerner still talks like
that: I was a guest in a home in Georgia only six years ago and its teenage
boys, truculent enough in general, called their father “sir” and their mother
“ma’am” at the end of every dinner-table sentence. As for Elvis,
well yes: he almost never defied the Colonel, and he agreed to record all kinds
of crap; yet early on in his career, when he might have been expected to defer
to all those record-biz professionals, it was Elvis who took charge at those
first recording sessions for RCA, for instance demanding, as Peter Guralnick reports, 31 takes of ‘Hound Dog’ before he was satisfied. He knew exactly what he wanted, from himself and from Scotty Moore, and he insisted on achieving it.
But Penman makes many another point, and
with great eloquence, and it’s only in the concluding flourish of his piece,
when he envisages Presley’s last days, that he gets careless and makes a
mistake that’s often made, describing Elvis as lost, malfunctioning and
stranded in “the huge echoing
mansion”. A letter in the next issue of London
Review of Books corrects this misdescription of Graceland briefly, but I should like to offer rather
more detail, from a feature I wrote for the Sunday Telegraph in 2001.
Everyone thinks they know about Graceland.
How tacky it is, how redneck vulgar and gross. As a true Elvis fan - who therefore finds it hard to recommend
anything he recorded after 1961 - I too came to scoff. I expected it to emanate
a lethal mix of Colonel Parker’s Las Vegas Elvis and the stultifying
buddy-buddyism of his “Memphis Mafia”,
and that my fellow visitors would be obese women in Babar trousers
tottering on white high heels under nosecones of sticky hair.
Driving out from downtown along bleak Elvis
Presley Boulevard, the first thing you see is Heartbreak Hotel: “A new place to
dwell… heart-shaped swimming-pool… affordable rates”. Then the car-parks and an
airport terminal’s worth of “facilities”: a vast reception area with Elvis
soundtrack, Elvis video screens and long queues for tickets. You file past the Post Office and Burger & Soda Bar to the shuttle buses. Many punters are well-dressed, articulate, young
and even black: no odder a crowd than for Alan Bennett (and its average age
lower too).
The 42-seater buses arrive incessantly.
Headsets guide you on your journey. You can repeat bits and pause at will
(though few senior pilgrims manage more than clamping them to their ears).
Snippets of hits chime in resourcefully. Setting the unabashed tone, a Deep
Heat Rub voice intones: “Just across the street, beyond the stone wall” - it’s
brick -
“is Graceland Mansion. The shuttle will take you through the famous
gates and up to the house.” Here El breaks into “Welcome to my world - won’t
you come on in?”, retreating before the narrator’s “You’re about to hear the
story of Elvis’ life and phenomenal career. He’ll tell you some of the story
himself.” As comically ghoulish as you could wish.
Through the gates and up the hill, you de-bus,
thrilled to stare up at those antebellum pillars. The house is so small! It’s a
delight. Far from being enormous, enormously vulgar and 1970s, it proves modest
and demure - and so strongly redolent of the 1950s that
the Elvis whose presence you feel inside is not the bloated figure in the
rhinestone jumpsuit but the lithe 22-year-old who first moved in.
It was built by a doctor in 1939 and,
excepting those pillars, is altogether restrained: smaller than any Edwardian
vicarage and seriously less grandiose than anything Tom Jones or Michael
Heseltine would live in.
The entrance hall is ten foot wide, and a
few steps in is the five-foot-wide plain staircase. You are not allowed
upstairs, “because Elvis never invited visitors up there himself.” It’s a
sensible rule - best not to think how people might behave in
that death-scene bathroom.
Turn right and you stand in the roped-off
entrance to the sitting-room: a modest room with muted pale cream carpet.
There’s a 15-foot-long sofa, but it’s neither florid nor overstuffed. Blue
closed curtains guard the windows. Cream armchairs sit opposite, flanking a
large fireplace with mirrored panels above. The middle of the room is
uncluttered space. There’s a long coffee-table, a table-lamp, a tall
glass-fronted cabinet. OK, the open double-doorway through to the music room is
framed by lurid stained-glass panels depicting peacocks, but the music room
itself is small, almost diffident, accommodating an elderly TV set, small sofa,
side table and a Story & Clark baby grand as baby as could be.
Off the hall in the other direction is the
dining-room, 22 feet by 16. “Around this table,” proclaims the headset, “Elvis
shared many evenings of warmth, laughter and storytelling. Everyone at
Graceland liked the same downhome southern cooking they grew up with.”
Impossible not to contemplate Elvis’ notorious obesity - and
that of so many Americans. Yet the room holds no frisson of underclass gross-out.
We are at the humble end of Dynasty
culture here: gold and purple chairs - but
only eight - around an oval metal-edged table sitting on
streaked black marble, the mirrored table top matching the walls. A chandelier
holds eighteen electric candles.
Down the hallway is Vernon and Gladys’
bedroom: purple clothed headboard and coverlet, bad landscape paintings, old
chests of drawers, pink and mauve tiled bathroom, small sad stains on the pale
carpet. How little time most visitors spend peering into each room! “Beautiful
bedroom.” “Beautiful chandeliers”. “Beautiful.”
It’s not, but it isn’t as bad as millions
of American interiors. 1970s unpleasantness hovers, of course: it was the last
decade available to him. But the recurrent surprise is how much the Presleys
kept faith with 1950s suburbia: their aspiration when Elvis first made it and
could rescue them all from their public-housing tenement downtown (itself a
climb up from the shotgun shack in Tupelo, Mississippi where Elvis was born in
1935) and the temporary home on Audubon Drive. It’s an unassuming dream and I’m
moved by his lifetime loyalty to it.
The kitchen (cue El singing “Get into that
kitchen make some noise with the pots ’n’ pans”) is a long slender room with
muted wood cabinets and undesigner toaster, coffeepot and eggtimer. It has
1950s simple solidity, and little touches like a small cheery wall-clock, its
green face showing limes and lemons. No dentist’s wife would find it good
enough if she moved into Graceland today.
Down a narrow staircase with walls and
ceiling mirrored we reach the basement TV room, “professionally decorated in
1974 in bright yellow and navy blue”. Again, ’70s ghastliness is undercut by
’50s naivété. The huge white porcelain monkey with black toenails squatting on
the coffee table is magicked away by Elvis’ disarmingly inexpensive
record-player on a shelf alongside about thirty LPs (the front one by gospel
group the Stamps) and lovely old racks of singles not in their sleeves. Three
television screens sit side by side, apparently because Elvis read that
President Johnson watched all three network news programmes at once.
The basement also holds the den, where 350
yards of multi-coloured fabric entirely cover the walls and ceiling, reminding
me of Central Park’s Nirvana Indian restaurant and hippie-tent sumptuousness.
Dark blue carpet, red leather chairs, smoky blue snooker table, ostrich
feathers, Toulouse-Lautrec poster, Tiffany lighting - its
deliberate bombardment confesses that Elvis was touched by the 1960s too.
“Wow!”, people exclaim here, “Oh Jesus!…”, “This is wild!” and “Boy, this is a
cosy place!”
There’s a bad patch after this: back to
ground level via green shagpile-covered stairs with shagpile walls and ceiling.
These were once the back steps accessing the yard; but Presley added a family
room. In 1974 it got the Indonesian jungle treatment. That monkey belongs here.
Dark fur-covered Far Eastern sofas. An ugly teddy on an enormous round chair.
Floor and ceiling in, er, green shagpile. Exaggeratedly highbacked chairs
carved to look like you’re on drugs when you see them. Ruched curtains. A bare
brick wall with dribbling waterfall under red spotlights. This room holds all
the later Elvis’ dark paranoid misery. This is what he sank to, fat and
isolated in a vortex of self-loathing boredom. Unable to face the world but
obliged to record, this room became a makeshift studio. Here in this hell-hole
in 1976 he made his last LP.
It’s a relief to get outside, via an annexe
converted from the 4-car garage for a special display: a 1960 stereo console; a
gold sofa once in the music room; the slightly famous white fake-fur round bed;
a model of the Tupelo shack (in the headset, too briefly, Vernon sings “Jimmie
Rodgers was born in Dixie”: an eerie authentic hillbilly prefiguring of very
early Elvis). Here too is the 1950s desk and furniture from Elvis’ office,
touching as well as risible, with its bible, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and a consoling Roosevelt
quotation about how “it is not the critic that counts, not the man who points
out how the strong man stumbled…” The TV shows home-movie footage of Elvis
diving incompetently into the pool, and Priscilla doing it perfectly.
Across the homely little yard, past
Lisa-Marie’s swings, the garden-shed office where Vernon dealt with fan-mail is
another time-warp, with ancient filing-cabinets, a small fridge covered in
brown leather like the sofa, and the oldest photocopier I ever saw. This room
should be in a proper museum.
Another TV runs Elvis’ post-Army
press-conference. He says proudly: “No, sir, I have NO plans for leaving
Memphis.”
The back of the house is white and
well-proportioned, standing peacably in its several acres of pasture with
well-judged trees and horses. The swimming pool is small and pretty; it isn’t
shaped like a guitar or a heart and doesn’t shout money or ego. You move on to
the chic Italianate meditation garden with its circle of graves where the
family now lies oblivious to the constant earthly turmoil.
A shuttle bus returns you to where you
began. You head into the black hangar of the car museum. A screen plays the car
bits from all his worst films. The cars are excellent, and so is the detailed
printed information.
Here is his 1962 Lincoln Continental with
gold alligator-hide roof; a black 1975 Dino Ferrari he bought second-hand; the
red 1960 MG 1600 used in Blue Hawaii;
the batmobile that was his 1971 black Stutz Blackhawk. How nice, if true, that
Sinatra had ordered it and Elvis charmed them into reassigning it. Then also a
1973 for which he paid $20,000 up front, leaving, bizarrely, $10,000 owing in
instalments. Best of all is the legendary 1955 pink Cadillac Fleetwood, a
wondrous colour and gigantic.
You exit, of course, through one of the giftshops. Get
your Elvis lunch-box here. Don’t forget your boarding-pass for the Lisa Marie®,
Elvis’ aeroplane. It was being readied for another concert date on August 16,
1977, when he died. What sort of plane is it? No executive Lear Jet, nothing
state of the art: an ex-Delta Airlines Convair 880 passenger plane. It won’t
surprise you that it was manufactured in 1958.
_____
© Michael Gray
