NO sane person goes to Memphis in the month of August, when the air, rolling off the hard-by Mississippi River, hangs sticky sweet and damp, and the simplest inhalation feels like breathing through burlap. But on August 17, 1977, nothing would have kept me from this place. The day before, Elvis Aaron Presley, the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century and a social force beyond measure, watched his life ebb away on the bathroom floor at his beloved Graceland.
Now I stood only yards below that bathroom window, numb with confusion at the surreal events that had brought me to the grounds of the most private of rock and roll estates. At twenty-seven, I had been reviewing pop music for The Louisville Courier-Journal for only a few months, but my fanatical interest in the subject dated to Presley’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. How could the King of Rock and Roll be dead at forty-two?
I stepped to the edge of the press pool and gazed down the long driveway. There, to the soft sounds of crying, scores of fans who had succumbed to heat and grief lay prostrate on the grass. Behind them, thousands of mourners stood in line behind the famed gates that bore the resemblance of the man who lay in his casket inside Graceland’s foyer. All of us were waiting to hear the same news—the hour when the public visitation might begin.
It was then that Dick Grob, head of Presley’s security, walked out of the house and stopped where I was standing with John Filiatreau, a respected Courier-Journal columnist who had flown down with me on the company plane.
Grob raised his bullhorn: “Any members of the press who want to view the body, line up behind these two,” he announced, and put his hands on our shoulders. The single rule: no lingering—the line must move at all times. I turned to John. “You first,” I said, and he obliged me as we made our way inside.
There before us, in a large copper-lined casket, lay a swollen figure dressed in a white business suit, a blue dress shirt, and a silver tie, his skin a white and waxy hue.
A woman cried out: “He looks like a tub!”
Not to me, he didn’t. But he also didn’t look like Elvis Presley. I went through the line again, my mind racing with the possibilities of a hoax, a plausible explanation for the unthinkable. When I tried to ease my way through a third time, a guard pulled me out. “You’ve been through twice,” he said. “Only get one shot.”
Today, I have no doubt that Elvis Presley occupied that coffin. But in 1977, as eager as I was to gaze once more at that famous face, one man refused to look at all.
“It’s so strange,” remembers Larry Geller, a member of Presley’s entourage who styled Elvis’s hair for his funeral. “We all wore our black suits. But Colonel Parker wore a Hawaiian floral shirt and a baseball cap. And never walked up to the casket. Very strange. Very strange, indeed.”