Presleys in the Press

We strain to remember he was of normal proportions; the costumes and Army uniforms in the trophy hall help. What was he? A hair under 6 feet — a Hollywood 6-footer for sure. In his lean days he couldn’t have weighed more than 175 pounds. He liked "manly sports," had a couple of black belts. Elvis, the martial artist, could probably beat you up.

If he were alive, that is. But if he were alive he would have turned 70 a few days ago. Maybe he wouldn’t be so dangerous, especially if he stayed fat. Elvis was always on the verge of domestication anyway — he would have happily settled for Dean Martin’s career, for a few movie roles that didn’t require him to sing. Rock ’n’ roll was a fad, a get-in/get-out proposition. Mick Jagger never expected to be strutting and posing at 30, much less 60. Elvis just wanted to hold onto Graceland for as long as he possibly could.

We don’t always get what we want, even if we get to be the King. Even if we get the pilgrims solemnly milling around our misspelled marker and fat guys goofing on us with store-bought sideburns and dark glasses. Sometimes an impulse to throw the moneychangers out of Graceland arises, but then you realize it’s not your Elvis they mock but a cartoon circulated for those who lack the imagination to believe their own eyes. Elvis was like the sun; it was dangerous to look directly at him. Maybe it still is.

Even at 70, he might still have the hair — what Time magazine famously called "five inches of hot-buttered yak wool." Elvis had dyed his hair. He noticed that black-haired movie stars lasted longer than fair-haired ones. He went from dirty blond to jet black. He might have let it go gray, but Ronald Reagan didn’t.

A legend has public responsibilities; the rock ’n’ roll career choice forecloses the opportunity of aging gracefully. If you miss your window for dying young and beautiful — and Elvis did, though he was young enough — the only options are exile or ridiculousness. Disappear or be the middle-age man with the bald spot in spandex on Behind the Music. Where are they now, all those beautiful sighing young boys in their lace shirts and eye makeup?

That’s one reason the escape fantasy is so tantalizing — the myth that Elvis got out, that he’s even now drinking coffee in some truck stop, piloting an RV around the country. He changed his name and let himself go, he wanders the flea markets and craft fairs, pokes his head in at the roadside attractions. Once for a laugh he entered a contest for Elvis impersonators and came in second.

It didn’t happen that way; Elvis is dead and buried out there in the meditation garden, just beyond the cement pond. It’s safe to crack jokes at Graceland these days; there are fewer lachrymose ladies in bouffants, fewer docents with steel smiles. The tours are selfguided, they hand out state-of-theart receivers and headphones. Graceland doesn’t take itself as seriously as it did a decade ago: One trash can is stenciled "Thank You," the one beside it "Thank You Very Much."

The reason anyone comes here — other than to feel superior to Elvis the Rube — is to test for the presence of the ghost. Yet while Elvis is everywhere at Graceland, on the screens and in the photographs, while his voice glides through your headphoned skull as you stare at the sparkling things they’ve sealed behind glass, there is no sense of haunting. There’s no frisson of awe when you realize you’ve touched the very doorknob his hand must have grasped.

Graceland is not like Rowan Oak, where the sight of Faulkner’s double-barreled whisky flask can crack your heart — there is something altogether sunnier about it. Graceland is more amusement park than museum. Its modest scale humanizes and demystifies Elvis, or at least that part of Elvis that was human.

Graceland is as touching as Lincoln’s spectacles — it reminds us that there was a man to go with the myth, that all the hagiographies and exposes were rooted in the plain, if never simple, hopes, desires and fears of a being not unlike ourselves.

Elvis never understood his talent or the forces that exploited it, but it is wrong to think that he was not a Promethean figure or that he was not one of the most important figures who has ever lived. There are all kinds of reasons to dismiss him: Because he was an entertainer, a pop singer, a dumb cracker, a person of bad taste, a Southerner, a creation of Sam Phillips, a sellout, a white boy who pirated and usurped the traditional modes of a culture not entirely his own. You can say what you want about Elvis, but what matters is that he arrived and he was what he was and the world noticed.

Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley set the world afire; they didn’t invent the noise but they forced it through the portal. Elvis may not have understood exactly what he was doing but he knew he was doing something — he was in uncharted territory, flung out past Frank Sinatra and his bobby-soxers. He had no role models to follow — the very idea of rock music as a way to express adult concerns must have seemed ludicrous. Elvis was no recording artist, he was a truck driver who came into Sam Phillips’ shop to make a record for his mama. Did he have ambitions, aspirations? Sure. We all have them. But we’re not all Elvis.

A story in The Washington Post last month called Elvis the greatest sellout in American history. "Not just in the history of rock ’n’ roll, mind you," the author, David Segal, wrote. "He’s the greatest sellout, period." And, as far as it goes, Segal has a point. Elvis was always a commercial venture, a capitalistic notion. He took the money and he did what they told him even if he thought it was silly. Elvis was a good boy, kind to his mama, polite to his fans, respectful of the men in suits who decided things for him. So? Some business bought the rights to his name and image for $100 million a few weeks back, figuring that there was yet some juice in that lemon. It’s probably a good investment, it’s hardly an insult to the brand.

It’s easy to deny Elvis because he didn’t invent the idea of artistic integrity in rock ’n’ roll, to parody his karate gestures, to imagine Elvis as insincere or — as Public Enemy’s Chuck D. has — a cynical "racist." But there are other ways to interpret the way he sang and lived, and, if you listen hard, maybe it’s even possible to imagine that there was something authentic in the way he attacked "Mystery Train" or "That’s All Right." Maybe you can hear the exhaustion in some of the later stuff after 1956, but listen to the music that was recorded at Sun Studios and say that the kid doesn’t mean it, that he is nothing but a Vegas-bound schlock artist. Listen to Elvis sing gospel and say he didn’t believe.

It’s no trick to dismiss what’s popular. It’s hard to hear all that old familiar material with fresh ears, to dismiss the Elvises that crowd your field of vision, to ignore the jumpsuits and the leather jackets and the curled lips and to try to understand exactly what happened.

To quote e. e. cummings, "Jesus he was a handsome man..." (How do you like your browneyed boy, Mr. Death?)

Graceland can make you sad, or it can make you smile at the amiable strangeness of our kind. Elvis’ kitchen is avocado and Tappan, nothing much really, his Jungle Room not so wild and woolly as remembered or advertised. Graceland is human scale, cramped with tourists.