Elvis - A Lighted Candle

[Rainbow Light]

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
7:45 pm Three days in Memphis …
On Tuesday, Aug. 16, 1977, I’d had a late lunch with my old high school buddy Dan and his wife and was driving to work when the news came on the radio that Elvis had died.

Wow, I thought. This is going to keep us busy.

I had no idea.

At the time, I was working four days a week on the copy desk of the morning Atlanta Constitution and spending one day each week writing the rock music column for the Saturday combined Journal-Constitution, then dubbed Weekend. Instead of spending the evening editing stories as usual, I was put to work assembling background material and making phone calls for the Constitution’s coverage of Elvis’ death.

The next day’s paper sold extremely well, so the editors decided to keep on top of the Elvis story in a big way. A reporter was sent to Memphis to cover the mass public mourning and funeral, and Elvis was on the front page every day that week. We kept selling more and more papers, and before the week was out, the morning Constitution had passed the afternoon Journal in sales for the first time ever.

Early that Friday evening, the city editor came out of a meeting and approached me on the copy desk. “How’d you like to go to Memphis in the morning?” he asked. They wanted me to interview people who knew Elvis and gather hometown memories for the cover story of a special Elvis-themed issue of the Weekend Leisure Guide (our entertainment magazine) coming out the next week. “Take Leslie with you,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”

Frankly, I was scared to death. This was easily the most important assignment I’d ever been given. They told me to go home early and get ready for the trip, and so I spent the rest of the night reading everything I had on Elvis, including the pertinent chapters in Rolling Stone’s rock encyclopedia and a copy I’d been sent of the brand-new paperback tell-all “Elvis: What Happened”, in which former “Memphis Mafia” members Sonny West, Red West and Dave Hebler painted a picture of a lonely, brooding superstar who stayed high on drugs and was fascinated with dead bodies and guns.

The next morning we were off to the land of the Delta blues. First trick was getting a hotel room. With the funeral over, most of the press might have already left town, but a Shriners convention was going on and they had most of the hotels booked up. We finally found a room at a downtown chain motel.

I’d been told to go over to the offices of the Memphis paper to check their files, but they proved surprisingly unhelpful, claiming they never let outsiders read their clippings after losing some in the wake of the MLK assassination. They did, however, deign to let me peruse that week’s papers, and I scribbled down the names of some likely interviewees.

The night before, I’d called a record company publicist friend in Atlanta who was formerly from Memphis, and he gave me the name of a music writer there. Leslie and I went over to the guy’s apartment in a funky intown neighborhood. He was getting a divorce and was living amid boxes of his possessions, overlooked by a big Dolly Parton record store stand-up. We talked about Elvis (he was one of those purists who thinks most of what Elvis did after he went in the army sucked, particularly the music from his movies). He did suggest some avenues I could pursue, however, and he said that tales of Elvis’ drug use and erratic behavior had been making the rounds for some time before his death. “He did some recording here a while back and one of the engineers said he’d never seen so many drugs around the studio as when Elvis was there.”

I got some addresses out of the phone book, and with Leslie driving the rental car and me figuring out where we were going, we set off in search of Elvis stories. We couldn’t get over how many hospitals there were in Memphis, and how desolate and abandoned its downtown looked. Beale Street looked like what it was at the time, a black commercial street that had seen better times. The days of the Hard Rock Cafe and B.B. King’s blues club were still years away.

That evening, we swung by Graceland, where a few fans, including some German tourists, were making home movies outside the ornate gates. The gatekeeper wasn’t very chatty.

Most of the people I tracked down in Memphis who’d had contact with Elvis and were willing to talk about it portrayed him not as the drug abuser pictured by Sonny and Red and the local music writer, but instead as a generous, God-fearing man. Their memories of Elvis were sweet and treasured and told with the warmth usually reserved for talking about a family member.

One of the editors in Atlanta had suggested we visit Presley’s hometown of Tupelo since it was “right next to Memphis.” Well, not quite. It was actually about 100 miles down the road in northeast Mississippi, which Leslie recalls looked like we’d driven back into the 1950s. We spent that Sunday afternoon in Tupelo, a blue-collar town with some of the hardest-looking women I’d ever seen.

We ended up at the Elvis Presley Birthplace in Elvis Presley Park on Elvis Presley Drive, a typically Southern Depression era white-frame shotgun house sitting on blocks, with a green tarpaper roof and tin-topped chimney. It reminded me of my father’s rural hometown back in Georgia.

As Billie Boyd, the birthplace director, told me, “You can’t walk through this little house and not absorb the vast difference in it and Graceland.”

The little house was about all there was then — no museum or gift shop or memorial chapel like there is now. Boyd had wanted to establish a museum before Elvis’ death, but she found dealing with the organization surrounding the King frustrating. She wrote asking for some souvenirs to display and all she got was a Christmas card … from Elvis’ L.A. office.

“I don’t know why he didn’t take more interest in this place,” she said with a sigh. “Maybe it was Col. Parker. Or maybe it was just all part of the Presley mystique that surrounded him his entire life.”

I tried to find Guy Harris, a Tupelo police captain who’d grown up with Elvis, but he wasn’t on duty that day. I ended up getting him on the phone the next day after we’d gone back to Memphis. He recalled Elvis as a bit spoiled and something of a mama’s boy, but said he “got along well with other kids and won his share of the usual neighborhood fights.” He said Elvis used to sing a lot “but we never noticed his singing any better than anybody else.”

Asking around, I was directed just down the road from the birthplace to the home of Elvis’ fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. J.C. Grimes. Her recollections of Elvis’ singing ability were more positive. She remembered getting the school’s principal to take Elvis over to the Mississippi-Alabama Fair to enter a singing contest. He won second prize, $5.

I was walking down the dirt road back toward the birthplace, where Leslie was waiting, when a big gold-colored Cadillac pulled up beside me. A large woman with a beehive hairdo rolled down the window and told me to get in. (Leslie wondered where the heck I was going and whether she’d see me again!) The woman, Janelle McComb, had heard I was in town looking to talk about Elvis. She said she’d been a close friend since he was 4 years old. I was a bit skeptical until she showed me her “TLC” lightning bolt necklace (Elvis gave his women friends “TLC” charms for Tender Loving Care and his men friends “TCB” for Taking Care of Business, she told me). Then she cemented her credibility by pulling out a big photo album full of shots of her and Elvis backstage in Las Vegas. She talked a while about him, getting emotional, but she didn’t want to be quoted.

Back in Memphis, I got on the phone trying to track down Ginger Alden, Elvis’ 20-year-old beauty queen fiancée at the time of his death. She wasn’t taking calls, but I got her mother, Jo, who talked about how the in-person Elvis contrasted with the onstage King, who wasn’t “as witty as he was in private. And he was always smiling that one-sided grin.”

I couldn’t get Sam Phillips, the man who owned Sun Records and discovered Elvis, but I got his son Knox on the phone. Knox was about 11 years old when Elvis first hit it big, and he remembered Presley making an impression on him right from the start. Knox was fascinated by Elvis’ long hair, sideburns and pink and black clothing. “Elvis was a strange animal for the times,” he said. “I remember one day at the studio, I went in with my mother, and Jerry Lee Lewis was playing piano, which Elvis always loved, and he and Elvis were doing some old gospel songs, and here I walked in with my hair in a ducktail just like Elvis, and he came over and hugged me and said, ‘Knox, stay with me son, stay with me.’ And, you know, I did. Just like all the other ’50s youth. Elvis brought the world together.”

I also found former Memphis Mafia member Allan Fortas, a nephew of former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, who talked about Elvis’ generosity. “He gave away cars like greeting cards,” Fortas said. “He’d read about some high school kid who was having financial problems, and that night he’d go over to their home and give them some money. He got a lot of pleasure out of it. He used to say, ‘What good is having money if you can’t spread it around?’ He just loved to see somebody’s face when he gave them a gift.”

In one stay in Memphis, Elvis gave away more than $250,000 in gifts, Fortas recalled, “and someone said that was a lot of money, and he said, ‘You know what that means? A 31-day tour instead of a 30-day tour.’”

Fortas had worked for Elvis during the early days and the Hollywood period, and was saddened by the excesses he saw in Elvis’ later life, when he thought the King led an unhappy, isolated existence.

But what was surprising was that even in a conservative town like Tupelo, the attitude seemed to be that if Elvis did take drugs, so what? “Even if he did abuse drugs,” Billie Boyd said, “it doesn’t matter. He was still a great man and deserves to be honored.”

And it wasn’t drugs we heard about in Memphis for the most part. It was stories of Elvis’ kindness. There was probably no better illustration of the King’s impulsive nature and generosity than his penchant for giving away cars. And not just any cars, but Cadillacs.

So Leslie and I went on Monday to Madison Cadillac, where they told me Elvis bought “over 100 Cadillacs in about a 10-year period and gave most of them away.” He would usually call up and arrange to have the showroom open after hours and he and some of his cohorts would come in and pick out the models they wanted. “One night,” dealer Nat Gilmore remembered, “he bought 13 Cadillacs as Christmas presents and they drove them off.”

I’d read in the Memphis paper about Marian Cocke, who started out as one of those strangers who were the objects of Presley’s generosity, but ended up being a close friend. She nursed him during the last three of his stays at Baptist Hospital, and in return Elvis gave her a number of gifts, including a car. “He always wanted me to stay with him at the hospital at night,” she told me, “so I would pull my regular shift, go home and fix supper for my family, and then go back to stay with him. I wouldn’t accept any money from him at all. I just did it because it pleased him.”

She said Elvis “was very well read and very well versed in the Bible” and remembered the hard times of his childhood without regret. “He’d just say, ‘Miz Cocke, I’ve been there.’”

She last saw Elvis three weeks before his death, but she had talked to him on the phone the morning he died, making her one of the last people to hear his voice.

“I was so very distressed when I heard … he was a good boy. I really do miss him,” she said, her voice quavering. “But it’s like they say, when you live in the heart of those you love, you never die, and I don’t think Elvis will ever really die. I feel about him like I felt when my mother died last year. He’s not really dead. He’s just moved to a better town.”

The post-script: The managing editor of the Constitution was so impressed with our Elvis sales (and my article) that he decided the paper needed something it had never had: a fulltime entertainment writer. And starting about a month and a half later, that was my job for the better part of 10 years, before I moved back into editing and switched over to the afternoon Journal (now, sadly, gone). Elvis, of course, became in death an even bigger star than he was in life. But I didn’t realize quite how much a part of everyday life he still was until after my most recent trip to Memphis.

I’d been back there several times over the years before returning for Ringo Starr’s 1999 All Starr Band tour, when my friends Rick and John and I took my son Bill to Sun Studios, Beale Street and Graceland.

After we got back home, I was showing my daughter Olivia, who was 5 at the time, some of our photos. I came to one from Graceland and said, “That’s brother in front of Elvis’ grave.”

Olivia’s eyes got wide, her jaw dropped and she gasped with incredulity. “Elvis,” she said, “is DEAD??!!”

I realized Marian Cocke had been right. Elvis wasn’t really dead. He’d just moved to a much better town.

[Di]

Out of the mouts of babes.

[Amanda Viola]

Olivia’s eyes got wide, her jaw dropped and she gasped with incredulity. “Elvis,” she said, “is DEAD??!!”

I realized Marian Cocke had been right. Elvis wasn’t really dead. He’d just moved to a much better town.

That's it! He just moved to a much better town.

[Rainbow Light]

You got it for sure, ladies!