Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Elvis’s will made no mention at all of any of the guys or the girls. Also, none of his relatives were named as specific and certain beneficiaries. Nor was his ex-wife, Priscilla. Nor was any mention made of a future spouse, one of whom might be the mother of Elvis Aaron Presley Jr.

  How could this be? How could this man famously generous in life to friends, family, lovers, and even strangers cut out of his will all but his children, his sickly father, and his aging grandmother? How could he not give at least some token of recognition—at least a token $10,000—to his cousin Billy Smith and his wife, Jo? How could he pass over people who had truly loved him and served him faithfully for a goodly portion of their adult lives, people like Charlie Hodge and Linda Thompson? Probably, Elvis knew little of the contents of his will and Vernon was its primary author.

  Elvis’s will, in effect, was an insult to all those who had loved and served him faithfully. The paradox of his generosity in life and his lack of generosity in death seemed impossible to explain. But, taking the long view, perhaps there was no paradox. Perhaps, after all, he had not really been so generous in life. Of course, he did leave the music. And he left distinct shadows dancing to the beat of a jailhouse rock on our cultural walls and in our memories … dancing … dancing …

  EPILOGUE

  THE MEDITATION GARDEN

  Elvis lies buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland. He created the garden in 1966 as he moved ever more deeply into his contemplation of Eastern religion, thinking, and practice. He commissioned Marty Lacker’s brother-in-law Bernie Grenadier, an interior decorator and landscaper, to design and oversee the project. It was located just beyond the swimming pool on the south side of the house. Originally the centerpiece of the garden was a shoulder-high fountain of water rising in the center of a low-walled circular pool twelve feet in diameter. The pool was circled by a walkway of tile and cement, bordered on the south side by eight white Ionic columns supporting a decorative white wooden trellis. Beyond the columns, a single step led up to a curved walkway. Just beyond the raised walkway, the southern border of the garden was marked by a high brick wall with four stained-glass windows, each depicting a vaguely religious scene. The bricks were from Mexico, and the stained-glass windows were brought by Bernie from Spain. The Meditation Garden was watched over from the east side by a classically perfect Jesus carved in marble by a Memphis artist, John McIntire. Jesus’s arms are raised high and magnificently outstretched to welcome all humanity to salvation.

  Vernon hated the garden, and he hated the Jewish landscape architect who had done the job. Elvis had been away in Hollywood throughout the construction. When he came home, Elvis listened to his father challenge Bernie’s bills for labor, hesitated, but soon gave the production his approval. “Write the check,” he said. No one could have imagined that a decade later Vernon would redesign the Meditation Garden to make it a monument dedicated to his own memory almost as much as it was dedicated to prolonging the memory of his son.

  In the fall of 1977, after thieves attempted to steal Elvis’s body from Forest Hill Cemetery, Vernon decided to move both Elvis’s and Gladys’s remains to Graceland and bury them in the Meditation Garden just south of the pool containing the fountain. Vernon decided that the contractor he got for the project wanted too much money for the parts that required taking up the tile and cement walkway in that area, so he put the bodyguards still on the payroll to the task. Soon they were out there armed with jackhammers, hefting chunks of debris and cursing Vernon for this violation of their professional dignity. Vernon relished the sight. “They ain’t working on Elvis’s chain gang anymore,” he declared proudly. “They’re working on mine.”

  In the middle of the night on October 2, 1977, workers brought Gladys’s and Elvis’s remains back to Graceland. Vernon had pulled strings to get that part of the estate legally designated as a cemetery. The authorization stipulated that all cemeteries in Tennessee have to be reasonably available for visits by any interested persons. Therefore, early in the morning, before Graceland is open for paying visitors, anyone can visit Elvis’s gravesite without charge.

  Vernon chose to arrange the Presley family graves on the south side of the pool, heads together and facing away, bodies stretched out fan-wise like fingers of an opened hand. Elvis is in the center. Vernon put Gladys two spaces to Elvis’s left. Why he did so became apparent in 1979 when he died. Vernon had saved that space for himself. At last, Vernon was able to put himself in the center of his family, and separate his son from his wife.

  Some visitors at the end of 1979 might have been shocked by the lopsided manner in which Vernon had arranged the three graves. There was no one permanently at rest on Elvis’s right side, symbolically a highly significant space. One might have expected Vernon to put Elvis’s mother in the place that would have honored the very special and powerfully close relationship that existed between them during her life.

  Vernon understood his role in the memorials that appear on the bronze plaques that cover the graves of his wife and son. It is clear from the language that he had help. Vernon had such great difficulty with spelling and punctuation that one might question his claim as he entered prison in 1938 that he had attained a fifth-grade education. However, writing the epitaph for Gladys was easy because it was so short. She got only four lines in her inscription:

  She was a great person, a great wife

  and mother.

  She was also loved by many.

  We love her dearly, and she is sadly missed.

  By Vernon Presley

  Vernon was proud of these random and rambling phrases.

  Elvis’s epitaph is much lengthier, almost overflowing the plate that covers his body. It gives his name and dates. Then he is described as the son of, first, Vernon Elvis Presley and, second, of Gladys Love Presley, and then as the father of Lisa Marie Presley. Next, Elvis gets eighteen rambling lines of high praise in trite phrases. He was a “gift from God,” and he was “loved dearly.” He had a “God-given talent” and “without a doubt he became most widely acclaimed.” Also, he was a “great humanitarian” and “became a living legend in his own time.”

  Finally, Vernon declared, “We miss you son and daddy,” thus slipping Lisa Marie into the scene again. He concluded using the first person singular, “I thank God that he gave us you as our son.”

  Vernon added the “taking care of business” sign at the bottom—TCB with a lightning bolt under the C. He again indicated in stone he was the composer of this memorial.

  Just above Elvis’s grave there sits a lantern on top of a low pedestal. It is the eternal flame, yet it always seems on the verge of dying. The flame flickers weakly and colorlessly in its six-sided clear glass container.

  A close look at the right corner of the burial plot in the Meditation Garden reveals that there is one more family member represented. There Vernon placed a small bronze plaque on a low stone base to recall Elvis’s stillborn twin:

  In Memory of

  Jessie Garon Presley

  January 8, 1935

  There is no body under the plaque and no overt indication of how Jessie fits into the family.

  Asked why he did not bring Jessie’s remains from the Priceville Cemetery in East Tupelo to lie with those of his mother and brother in the Meditation Garden, Vernon replied lamely that he did not know where the child was buried. Elvis himself as a young boy would climb the hill to the cemetery and visit the place where he understood that his brother lay. Elvis might have been guessing, but some relatives and friends surely knew where Jessie’s body was buried, and little Jessie could have rejoined his family had his father cared enough to find him. Jessie Garon did not make that journey in Vernon’s lifetime, but he might do so yet.

  At the end of 1979 in the Meditation Garden there were two empty sites for graves on Elvis’s right side. In 1980, Vernon’s mother, Minnie Mae, died and took the spot next to Elvis. The second is still there, waiting.

  In thinking about how the Presleys are arra
nged in the Meditation Garden, it is interesting to consider again how the family arrayed itself in the earliest photograph of Elvis, taken while Vernon was being held in the Lee County jail. In this picture, Elvis is standing on a bench while his mother sits on his right and his father sits on his left.

  The futures of Elvis, his mother, and his father are eerily foreshadowed in that photograph. Gladys, a woman in a heavily male-dominated society, will labor ceaselessly to protect her husband and her son. Elvis is looking at the camera, about to do what he thinks the camera wants him to do. From age nineteen until the day he died, he strove to do what the living camera—his audience—wanted him to do. Gladys hates her son’s drive; Vernon loves it, especially the reflected power he reaps as Elvis’s father and his partial control over much of the river of money flowing out of his son’s talent and ambition. As Elvis comes of age, Vernon—suffering from a “bad back”—becomes less and less able to earn money to support his family. Once Elvis begins to rake in the money, he jests that he has “retired” his father—at about age forty—and one does not hear about Vernon’s bad back anymore.

  While Gladys is alive, Elvis does not marry and have children as she so passionately wanted him to do. He is busy performing and partying. Gladys drinks more and more because Elvis will not allow her to protect him. Vernon is caught up immediately in Elvis’s power and money. When Elvis is away, Vernon will play; he becomes the lord of the manor and increasingly abusive toward Gladys. Finally, powerlessness and alcohol kill her. She is barely in her grave before Vernon is conspicuously bedding down other women and strutting about so that others know that he is a manly man.

  Then Elvis becomes Vernon’s abuser. “Get out of the way, Daddy,” he said as he was about to bulldoze the small house on the Graceland grounds that Vernon wanted to keep for storing things from his office. Before and after his mother’s death, Elvis does not settle down as she begged him to do. He goes from one girl to many girls and with many girls to guns, badges, and drugs. As Elvis slips deeper into drugs, Vernon makes only a token effort to help him, to save his son’s life. He relishes the attention he gets while on tour with Elvis; he is the father of the King. Vernon is always counting the money, and Elvis is not. Gladys did not count money either. She could never balance the household books even when Vernon was working. She was a compulsive consumer, as was her son. He used spending money like a whip to lash his father—repeatedly and almost viciously, as if to punish him for what he had done to his mother. Vernon at the end, at the very site of Elvis’s death, in the very room in which he died, is with his new girlfriend, a woman about thirty years his junior, as he looks down at his son’s body lying on the floor. After Elvis dies, Vernon can do as he likes. He does not marry the girlfriend. He chooses to bring the earthly remains of his wife and his son from a public cemetery to Graceland. He plants them exactly where he chooses—on either side of the space that he has reserved for himself. As in the early photograph, Elvis should have been in the middle with his mother on his right and his father on his left. Vernon composes an epitaph that waves Gladys quickly away, and he appropriates as much of Elvis’s glory for himself as he can. Graceland, even the Meditation Garden itself, for two years became his chain gang.

  At Graceland the little boy wearing the man’s hat is still looking at the camera. He is still giving his audience what it wants. Visitors to Graceland, including the Meditation Garden, do not dwell upon images of Vernon. They see Elvis. Each one feels the Elvis he or she wants and needs, the Elvis that they brought with them when they left their houses and headed down the highway for Memphis. Appropriately, the Meditation Garden is the last station on the tour of Graceland. It does encourage meditation. When visitors leave the garden, they talk earnestly with each other as they walk up the shady drive to meet the bus that will take them back to the reception center across the boulevard and into the world. They feel fulfilled, just as they felt fulfilled when they left his performances. That was Elvis’s genius. It is as if the child is still there looking at the camera, ready to give whatever the camera asks.

  Omaha

  Less than four months before Elvis’s body came to rest in the Meditation Garden, CBS made a superbly revealing feature film of his last tour entitled Elvis in Concert. In images and interviews, it caught beautifully the truth that he had the love and loyalty of a host of middling Americans, male and female, young and old.

  It begins on Sunday, June 19, 1977, on a highway near Omaha, Nebraska, leading to the Civic Auditorium Arena in which Elvis will perform that night. A highway sign marks it as one mile from the junction with Highway 680 and forty-eight miles from Lincoln, Nebraska. The auditorium building has a huge sign declaring that Elvis will perform that night at 8:30 in person. Sold out, the sign blares, the usual Colonel Parker brag whether precisely true or not.

  The parking lot has license plates from Colorado, Virginia, New York, South Dakota, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin—no large cars, no small cars, just middle-sized cars, and one truck. The camera follows the crews putting together the stage, the lights, and the sound equipment for the performance. As the audience gathers in the late afternoon, numerous interviews capture beautifully the diversity of these people and why they were there:

  A woman in her midthirties, long dark hair, dark eyes.

  “He will always be the King no matter what,” she says, shaking her head back and forth as if to prohibit any thought of dissent before it has even arisen.

  An older woman in her fifties.

  “I think he’s a good clean fellow.”

  A woman in her midthirties, blond, sparkling blue eyes, shoulder-length hair.

  “I’ve got a daughter about twelve years old, and I’ve talked about Elvis and about how great he was when I was growing up. She has no idea who the man is. And I think a kid can’t grow up without knowing who Elvis Presley is.”

  A young woman about nineteen, deeply golden-blond hair, cool. Asked “Why Elvis?” she responds:

  “I think it’s a lot of the flashy clothes he wears and everything. And it seems like all women like that.”

  An older man.

  “We’re retired people, and … all ages come to see him, I think.”

  A young man, midtwenties, long dark hair, dark eyebrows, handsome.

  “I like the stuff he buys, cars, all the rings, the clothes, it’s quality, I mean. And I think he’s a very religious person. I mean very. But he’s human, I mean. I … he cusses onstage, but that’s human, I mean. He’s religious like … he’s nice to people, I mean. He’s … he’s human.”

  A stout, strong-looking woman in her midtwenties, long straight jet black hair, no makeup, a wide friendly smile, wearing an Elvis button.

  “He’s so special and everything. And he’s the best-looking guy in the world.” She laughs, almost giggling.

  A woman in her midthirties, short black hair, a wife and mom.

  “This is about my twenty-eighth concert since 1972.”

  At this point the camera pans the gathering crowd: older women, kids, kids sleeping on their mothers’ laps, popcorn, paper cups, one woman wearing aT-shirt that reads i’m not elvis. People are moving around while the crew is setting up the show.

  A couple in their forties. They could be farmers. The man is talking.

  “We lost our home Thursday in a tornado in Sioux City,” he says. He and his wife went to the hospital. She got four stitches under her chin. He had twenty-three lacerations on his back—“like Jaws got ahold of me,” he laughs. Their children’s rooms were completely destroyed. Fortunately the kids were with their grandparents at the time. “I don’t really feel like standing around too much,” the man says, “but we still came down to see the King.”

  A young-looking woman, perhaps in her late thirties, with brown hair in a short, perky cut. She sports a flower over her ear and one on her collar.

  “He’s honest. That’s the main thing. He’s honest. And he … And he’s got vibes, you know.” She introduces her grow
n son, an Elvis fan since he was three; he’s seen Elvis five times. “He’s a really nice guy,” the man says. “I really like the way he respects his mom.”

  A black man in his thirties.

  “I give Elvis a lot of credit for bringing blues into rock and country. He’s the first guy to ever do that, and I admire him for it. He has a lot of courage … I hope to name my kid after him some day … I just love the guy.”

  A man in his thirties, with a mustache, a receding hairline, and gold-rimmed glasses.

  He still lives at home and is a post office worker. The pay is okay, but “just about all the money that I do make goes for seeing the Elvis shows … It’s worth every penny of it.” Elvis is religious, he says, even though he can’t go to church every Sunday like regular people; you can tell by the way he sings spiritual songs. Onscreen Elvis ratchets up on “How Great Thou Art.” Behind him in full voice are the Sweet Inspirations, Kathy Westmoreland, and J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet.

  A beautiful young woman, about twenty-five years old. Her long black hair falls just below her shoulders in front, parted in the middle to frame a smooth, oval face, dark eyes, and full lips. She is wearing a white top, open at the neck. She has a necklace bearing a cross. Why is Elvis important to her?