Finding Elvis

The quest for Presley leads to rags, riches, Hollywood image-building, tacky exploitation and heartfelt worship. Only against this dizzying backdrop can seekers hope to catch a glimpse of the King.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 4, 2002

If they only tour Graceland, the fans will see his furniture, jewelry and cars, all quite sanitized -- Elvis as entertainment idol and charitable businessman.

But to know more about Elvis than his accumulation of wealth, to know about about the poverty of his beginnings, the fans need to drive 100 miles to Tupelo, Miss., and stand in the two-room cabin in which he was born.

And to witness the extreme effect Elvis could have on his worshipers, they can stop off in a Mississippi hamlet.

At the shrine

HOLLY SPRINGS, Miss. -- A few knocks on the front door on a sunny Saturday morning. No answer. A few more knocks. Finally the door is opened by a short, thick man in a worn denim jacket who asks, with a drawl, what I want.

Could I have the wrong address?

Nope, for I can see behind the man that the ceiling, walls, even some of the steps on the stairway are covered with posters of Elvis Presley.

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

Paul MacLeod stands before a cutout of Elvis in a gold lame suit in the foyer of Graceland Too. MacLeod said he plans to be buried in a similar getup.

So is every other exposed surface on the first floor of this house, named Graceland Too. This is a shrine to Elvis, a rabbit's warren maintained in hodgepodge fashion by the gray-haired high priest who stands in front of me. Paul MacLeod is his name.

His only son's name is Elvis Aaron Presley MacLeod.

"You know all of his life Elvis spelled it with just one 'a,' but when he died, someone tole Vernon (Presley's father) that in the Bible, Aaron was spelled with two, so that's how Vernon had the headstone written. And that's why my boy's name is spelled with two."

MacLeod rattles this off almost in the time it takes for him to pocket my $5 bill for the narrated tour of the house. The two-story clapboard was built by his grandfather in this northern Mississippi village in the 1850s. Paul MacLeod relates that he was visiting his sisters in town in 1954 when he saw his first Elvis performance.

"Paid $1.50 to watch him and (rockabilly singer) Charlie Feathers and (movie cowboy) Lash LaRue. It was the grandest thing I ever saw."

It was not merely love at first sight.

It was idolatry.

MacLeod says he has devoted the 48 years since to worshiping at the King's throne, promoting Presley's memory since Elvis died in August 1977. That happened 45 miles away, in Memphis, in the original Graceland.

Amazingly for a son of the South, MacLeod's drawl comes out in machine-gun bursts -- he doesn't seem to pause to draw breath -- as he makes his way past the clutter filling every room.

Before we leave the foyer, he picks up a TV Guide, one of hundreds crammed in bookshelves by the front door.

Colored paper clips tag numerous pages. "Each one of these marks a show that has Elvis on it," MacLeod says. "Or the show has Elvis' music playin' in the background, or elst one of the actors mentions Elvis."

How do you know that, I ask.

" 'Cuz me an' my son videotape all of these channels and then watch the tapes -- and keep the tapes, if they got Elvis. And then we mark up these books, too.

"Got 31,000 tapes, at 4 1/2 hours apiece. Got 'em in trunks that reach to the ceiling."

Then MacLeod utters what turns out to be one of his standard oaths of truthfulness:

"If I lie to you for one second, go get a shotgun, saw off the barrel, come back here and blow my head off."

He puts back the TV Guide and reaches for a small, clear, plastic box, one of dozens stacked along a wall. It holds a piece of green carpet.

"See this? Know anybody in merchandisin', or in that World Web thing? 'Cuz if you do, I can make us millionaires! I got nine trunks full of these: 186,000 square inches of carpet from the Jungle Room in Graceland. Sellin' 'em for $20 an inch.

"That's no brag, neither."

We move into what might have once been the living room.

"I've had 220,000 visitors, all comin' by word a' mouth" MacLeod says. Actually, the former Cadillac assembly-line worker has been interviewed on CNN and by reporters from as far away as England. But he doesn't advertise this place.

We are walking past dozens of sheets of poster board covered with snapshots of people photographed in the house and outside. Some, mainly students from the nearby University of Mississippi, are in costumes that include a giant banana, but no one is dressed like Elvis.

MacLeod says his visitors have come from Sweden and France, South Africa and Switzerland, "a U.N. of Elvis fans." Celebrities he names include Lyle Lovett, Muhammad Ali, Robert Duval, Angie Dickinson, Mel Gibson and Garth Brooks. When the 1999 movie Cookie's Fortune was filmed in town, actor Chris O'Donnell was a regular.

"Priscilla (Elvis' former wife) has been here many times, most recently seven months ago."

MacLeod picks up a snapshot of a young blond woman, photographed in the house. "This is one of President Bush's daughters who was just here, Gina."

He apparently means Jenna, and though the face in the snapshot is too small to be easily recognized, a reporter for the local weekly newspaper later confirms her visit.

We move into the next room, as MacLeod continues his patter.

"I saw 120 performances live. That's no brag.

"And we were friends."

That last part is some brag, apparently, because he has previously told reporters that he never actually met Elvis, although MacLeod did visit Graceland regularly.

He grabs a framed photo of a familiar-looking man with thick black hair who is wearing an orange jumpsuit and talking on a car telephone.

"That's me an' my wife, when we were still married and I was performin' " as an Elvis imitator.

With that, he suddenly punches the button on an old cassette-tape player and starts singing along with Elvis, All Shook Up.

As MacLeod's gravelly voice moves up and down, he holds on to a metal display rack loaded with cheap souvenirs. Having thus braced himself, he starts shaking one leg rapidly, more or less in time to the music.

The performance is stunning -- because it is unexpected, not because it is good.

He halts the tape and, without waiting for a comment, resumes his spiel, almost nonstop for two hours and 20 minutes. The Energizer Bunny with pie-wedge sideburns.

We pass more framed 8-by-11s of MacLeod in cut-to-the-navel jumpsuits. He used to dye his hair black, he says.

Then he points to some folded gold lame fabric.

"That's my barrel suit, just like Elvis wore. My boy's got one, too, only he's a lot bigger than me."

"Barrel suit?"

"Yep, gonna to be buried in it." Ah, burial suit.

Time spent with MacLeod is a believe-it-or-not venture: How much of what he says is true? Does it matter?

We move through more crowded rooms, past footlockers and huge plastic tubs. MacLeod keys the padlock on one trunk and opens the lid to reveal stacks of videotapes with dated labels. This would be the Elvis video archive.

Next, MacLeod opens scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about himself and Graceland Too. Then he flips open three-ring binders filled with the printed comment forms he hands to visitors; everyone raves about the tour.

Here and there in the house are busts of Elvis, life-size cardboard cutouts, movie posters. There are oven mitts, buttons, butane lighters and every other conceivable trinket bearing his image. In one room, the walls are covered with 45s, 78s and album covers.

"He made 737 recordings; 131 made gold or platinum.

"See that cover there, see how his hair is brown? That was his real color; then they started dyein' it black."

MacLeod pauses at one glass display case and points into it with pride. It holds a 1952 Memphis high school report card for Elvis Presley, some credit cards bearing his name, bricks MacLeod says came from Graceland when its owner was alive.

"The Disney people came here and wanted to buy all of this, the whole house. Offered ten and a half million dollars. If I'm lying, take one of my rifles -- I got a high-powered big-game rifle break your shoulder from the recoil -- you can blow my head off."

Everywhere in the succession of rooms and hallways are clippings and photos of Elvis. Young Elvis, Las Vegas Elvis, Hollywood Elvis, but not the unfortunate man who died from complications of prescription-drug abuse.

Not surprisingly, MacLeod says he has Super-8 film of that Elvis, too.

"Last night of his life, somethin' tole me to go on up to Memphis. I went to his house with my Bell & Howell camera, took some movies of him.

"Then, the next day, I heard on the radio he was dead, and I got to Graceland same time as the hearse.

"That's no brag."

Destination: Graceland

MEMPHIS -- Passing time at Tampa International Airport when my flight to Memphis was delayed, I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me.

"Why are you going to Memphis?" Lisbeth Pierce-Laporte asked me. "There's nothing there."

"I'm going to see Graceland," I answered.

"Oh, I've been there 17 times."

Obviously, there is something in Memphis, even Mrs. Laporte admits, besides her younger son, whom she was going to visit.

She first stopped by the estate in 1968. She was living in Rhode Island, she recounted, and was trying to decide whether to move to Tennessee or Florida. She checked Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga before arriving in Memphis.

Elvis' parents and the young teenager had moved 100 miles from Tupelo, Miss., to Memphis in 1948, looking for a better life. But they lived in public housing and low-rent homes until Elvis' career took off after he signed with RCA on Nov. 20, 1955.

No one at RCA could have realized it, but the company had landed the greatest record-seller of all time. He went on to have hit after hit, ballads and rockers both. He had a smooth voice, and he was handsome, with a great smile.

"When they first published his photo," Mrs. LaPorte recalled, "that's when we knew we had hormones."

In March 1957, Elvis paid a reported $100,000 for Graceland and $70,000 to have a privacy wall erected around its 13.8 acres. The house had been built in 1939 by a Memphis doctor, whose wife named it Graceland in honor of a relative.

Elvis Presley Enterprises, the organization that carefully protects and promotes his image and his revenue-producing estate, say that tourism at Graceland has held steady the past few years at more than 600,000.

Those visitors are taken on shuttle buses up the sloping, curving driveway to a portico supported by tall white pillars.

The tour covers the basement and ground floor, outbuildings and the Presley family grave sites. Visitors can only glance up the stairway, with its portrait of a young Elvis; not on view are his bedroom, bath, office and wardrobe room, the nursery of his only child, Lisa Marie, and five other bedrooms.

Graceland is an easy target of sarcasm, especially for those of us who weren't like the Presleys: lower-middle-class Americans suddenly made wealthy, able to furnish an eight-bedroom home in the 1960s and '70s. That is where the big house is frozen in time, with no significant updating of the decor since Presley died.

The tour shows Graceland as if Elvis has just stepped out, perhaps for one of his numerous concert tours.

When visitors turn on the taped narration in the headset provided with the $16 ticket, they first hear a syrupy Welcome to My World; this was Elvis' home for almost half of his 42 years and seven months.

As viewed from behind restraining ropes, here are the highlights:

A 15-foot sofa seating at least seven and covered in white brocade dominates the white-carpeted room to the right of the entrance foyer. At the far end is a smaller room with an entryway defined by panels of stained glass depicting peacocks. Inside this room is a piano and a TV in a console.

Across the foyer and opposite the living room is the dining room, with a formal table set on black marble beneath an impressively large chandelier.

Adjacent is a spacious kitchen, paneled in dark wood and filled with appliances in that '70s color, avocado.

The tour heads to the basement and its television room. Elvis learned that President Lyndon Johnson had three TVs side by side, tuned to what were then the only networks. On the far wall of this room, TVs run tapes of period viewing: a Johnny Carson show, Dr. Strangelove and a Clint Eastwood Western. The U-shaped sofa of what used to be called a conversation pit includes 19 spangled throw pillows. The decor is yellow and navy blue.

Across a narrow hall is the pool room, and here it appears a designer was consulted: 350 yards of a multicolored fabric in a paisley pattern drape the walls and are gathered in tight folds across the ceiling. There are cushioned armchairs and red leather chairs. On the walls are numerous prints: a Toulouse-Lautrec, modern prints of geometric shapes, a line sketch of a nude, a Vogue cover rendered in the style of the artist-designer Erte, and what appear to be centuries-old tinted engravings of hot air balloons.

Though the pool room became the favorite during Mrs. Laporte's 17 trips through Graceland, the next stop is her least favorite: The Jungle Room.

The taped narration says Elvis picked out the heavy, carved wood furniture (covered in fake fur) and green shag carpet that continues across the ceiling of this rectangular room. He wanted to remind himself of Hawaii, where he had filmed movies and performed. One rough-surfaced wall has water dribbling into a small pool.

Next on the tour is a room of odds and ends: a large bed covered in white fake fur that was in Elvis' dressing room in 1970, a mirror above the headboard, plus an 8-track tape player and radio. A case holds eight handguns, from a pearl-handled derringer to a .357 Magnum, plus a rifle. There are dazzling wristwatches, a tooled leather saddle, a softball uniform, boxing gloves, and karate uniforms and pads. (Elvis was said to have earned black belts in two martial-arts disciplines.)

The tour moves outside, where a few horses graze. Here is the Hall of Gold, where more than 80 of Elvis' gold-record awards are displayed, along with movie costumes and posters, his Army fatigues and duffel bag, and some of the $1,000 checks he made out annually to 50 Memphis charities.

Beyond the building holding his awards and memorabilia is the Meditation Garden. Between a semicircular, stepped viewing area and a small pool with a fountain, Vernon Presley had the bodies of his wife and son buried, a few yards from the tree-shaded house. Vernon was also buried there, as was his mother, who had lived at Graceland.

Their graves are covered with simple metal tablets, usually surrounded by real and artificial floral tributes and stuffed animals left by fans.

A $180 home

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

The two-room cabin that Elvis’ father and relatives built, in Tupelo, Miss., had neither electricity nor running water. Three years after Elvis was born here, the family was evicted.

TUPELO, Miss. -- The green space occupied by those grave sites is relatively small but not much smaller than the two-room cabin in which Elvis was born, in this dirt-poor town during the Depression.

In 1934, Vernon Presley borrowed $180 to buy materials that he, his father and grandfather used to build that cabin. It had bare planks for a floor, bare planks for a ceiling, and newspapers covered the walls.

The cabin had neither running water nor electricity.

The front room was the bedroom for the parents and their son. The back room was the kitchen, where Gladys Presley also washed and sewed the clothes.

Though both parents worked, they could not repay the loan for the house materials. They moved in with Elvis' grandparents when the child was 3. Ten years later, Vernon and Gladys packed what they could in a trunk and moved with Elvis to Memphis.

In 1957, Elvis was to appear at the fair in his hometown and drove past the cabin. It was for sale. He told city officials he would donate his fee if they would use it to buy the cabin and 15 acres around it and make the site a park. They did, and the city since has added a ballfield, a swimming pool, a covered picnic pavilion, a small chapel and an Elvis museum.

The cabin is open to visitors. Vernon Presley came back to tell the docents where to place the double bed, two rocking chairs, a dresser and a radio, the sewing machine and the wood-burning stove.

In practical terms, it takes only a few strides to walk from the screen door through the two rooms. But these plank floors are a good starting point for appreciating an American legend.

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