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An excerpt from:
PECKERWOOD PALACE
August 16, 1977; a Tuesday. Elvis Presley was dead, or so the 75,000 mourners rapidly assembling outside the gates had been told. The King was dead. Was it drugs? Boredom? Fame? An intimation that he had done about as much as be was ever going to do? A massive failure of imagination? A heart attack, the doctors said. He was finally going to be with his mama, Vernon cried, over and over again. "Oh, son. Now you'll see Gladys."
On Mr. Presley's orders, a plane took off for Oklahoma City to pick up the nine-hundred-pound, solid copper casket in which his boy would lie in state in Graceland. It was the same casket that had stood in the doorway between the living room and the Music Room on August 16, 1958. Gladys Presley's casket. Poor Mama in her coffin, inside the big casket, in her baby blue dress, in the Dresden blue front room with the golden molding up around the ceiling and the soft wine-colored plush underfoot.
When Gladys died, Vernon and Elvis wanted to have the viewing and the funeral at the house--her house--in the old Southern style, and invite the 3,000 fans lined up at the foot of the driveway, peering through the music notes emblazoned on the gates. Colonel Parker talked them out of it. This time, Vernon had his way. At noon on Wednesday, a hearse dashed through the back gate and pulled up to the house before the crowd half noticed. The undertakers spread out white canvas runners, from the front door to the foot of the staircase, on top of the bright red shag that now oozed like heart's blood through the downstairs rooms. In 1974, after Elvis had the new carpet laid, he had told the uncles at the gate to give the scraps left over to fans who wanted them for souvenirs.
The white runners stopped under the crystal chandelier that lit up the foyer and spilled a brilliant beam of light out past the columns, onto the lawn, through a big red P-for-Presley worked into the new stained-glass window over the door. Electric candle flames in crystal dishes danced and multiplied on the mirrored walls. Dangling teardrops tinkled in the breeze whenever the door swung open. There was another chandelier in the dining room that shot back reflections from the rhinestones worked into the red upholstery of the high-backed chairs around the table. And another above the landing where the family sat to keep watch over Elvis as the line of weeping fans shuffled forward, past the copper casket, until twilight fell. Omens. Portents. Elvis had bought all three chandeliers on August 16, 1974, three years to the day before his death.
The funeral proper took place on Thursday afternoon. The casket was wheeled into the living room. Surrounded by plastic greenery, it was positioned at the entrance to the Music Room, in front of the piano. On either side of the door to her solarium, Mrs. Moore, who had built the house at the end of the 1930s, had installed a screen of glass block. Along with the picture windows, the glass walls were the most contemporary details in a structure that otherwise masqueraded as a Civil War-era mansion. Elvis never liked the glass bricks: they smacked of a concept of modernism that had come and quickly gone. There's nothing sadder or frowzier than yesterday's notions of tomorrow. For years, the opening between the two rooms was muffled in drapery. Then, in 1974, the walls came down and the bricks were stacked in the garage. Stained glass panels went up. Preening peacocks, in a pseudo-Art Nouveau style--Tiffany, with an undertone of Coca-Cola collectibles. Blues, greens, yellows, and Coca-Cola red. Peacocks stand for eternal life.
Mrs. Moore had planned her home so that when she held her musicales she could throw all the formal rooms together into one vast concert hall. The performers took up positions where Elvis would later lie in his copper casket, and an audience of five hundred could watch and listen from tiny gilt chairs set up in the dining room, the foyer, and the living room, facing the proscenium of glass block. Now, in August of 1977, the white canvas was spread in the living room, and the furniture pushed back against the walls. Folding chairs were lined up in rows. Metal folding chairs, painted gold and white, rented from the funeral parlor. Two hundred fifty places. For the Smith cousins, the Presleys, and the old bunch from home; Vernon and Grandma; Ann-Margret and her husband, from Hollywood, and George Hamilton, the star who finally played Hank Williams in the movies, a Southern boy, come out of concern for his friend Colonel Parker; the guys who stayed, or left as friends, the ones who hadn't written books detailing a cycle of drug abuse and sexual excess; Priscilla, little Lisa Marie; the other girlfriends, including Linda Thompson, ex-Miss Tennessee, tall and bold and beautiful in a lavender sundress with spaghetti straps she wore because Elvis had always liked bright colors. The backup singers from the live stage show sang his favorite gospel songs.
Just before the service started, word came from the gate. Caroline Kennedy, the late President's daughter, wanted to come up and offer her respects. The assumption up at the house was that, having been the victim of tragedy herself, she was paying a kind of state visit to the sorrowing family of the King. It seemed only right. And so, before the hymns and the comforting words from the clergy, she was ushered into Graceland as those closest to Elvis said their last goodbyes, and gently steered into the Jungle Room where the members of the household huddled together, inconsolable. Poor Vernon. His mother, Minnie Mae: Grandma, the "Dodger." Aunt Nash. Aunt Delta. Priscilla: "Would you like a Coke, or Seven-Up?" It was a most peculiar room, Kennedy later wrote in well-bred distaste.
The whole house was peculiar for an antebellum mansion. The transparent statue of a naked woman just behind the casket, which revolved under a waterfall of plastic beads. The plastic plants. The picture of a city skyline on one wall, painted on black velvet. The scarlet portieres tied back with gold tassels that framed the graceful arch leading to the dining room. The huge chairs inside, with their scarlet satin covers quilted in gold thread and speckled with rhinestones. The scarlet carpet, everywhere. On the floor. Glued in squares onto the carved panels of every white door in the house, as though Graceland were hemorrhaging from every orifice.
As it turned out, Miss Kennedy had not come to pay a simple condolence call. She was working for a New York daily and her assignment was the Presley funeral. Because she missed her deadline, the story wound up in the Rolling Stone in September, at the height of the tabloid frenzy over Elvis's death. Sales of the so-called bodyguards' book of scandalous revelations had been flat: after August 16, the paperback version became a bestseller at supermarket checkout counters everywhere. <span style='color:white'>One of the relatives accepted $75,000 from the National Enquirer for a fuzzy picture of the dead Elvis taken surreptitiously during the private viewing. The picture wound up in the same place as the paperback, among the racks of chewing gum, flashlight batteries, and Lifesavers.</span>
The cumulative message was clear. Elvis Presley had been a freak. And his awful scarlet house proved it. Oh, it looked just fine on the outside, dignified and stately. Perfectly normal. But past the front door, in the inner recesses of Graceland, horror lurked. Edgar Allan Poe. "The Telltale Heart." Bill Cosby's giant chicken heart. A Valentine for lunatics. Elvis had ended his days inside the pulsing red ventricle of some giant organ of perverted love. No wonder he died of a heart attack.
People who saw the roseate Graceland between 1974 and Priscilla's postmortem restoration of 1981-82 were just as stunned as Caroline Kennedy was. Everything above the basement--everything that wasn't gilded or mirrored or befurred--was a violent Christmastime-lipstick-cherry-Coke-fire-engine-hellfire red. It began at floor level, with a Red Sea of shaggy carpet in screaming cerise. Elvis's live-in girlfriend Linda Thompson had spotted it at Ducks Carpets and modified the rest of the decor to match: the drapery swags (of the same cut and pattern as the blue ones in use today), the velveteen-covered Louis-somebody living room suite, the tall dining room chairs with the rhinestones, and the stained-glass room divider with the peacocks. The squares of Duck's best red shag stuck to places on the woodwork previously innocent of redness. And that wasn't all. White fur rugs were tossed over the carpeting at random intervals. Whatnot tables were borne aloft on the gilded torsos of busty female caryatids. The lamps were metallic fountains that spewed forth hanging diamonds and ersatz rubies. The throw pillows on the sectional sofa had sewn-on mirrors to match the strips of mirror applied to the walls, the mirrored tabletops, and the series of stark, mirror-covered cubes mixed in willy-nilly among the Frenchified curlicues.
Elvis was no passive observer of the reddening of Graceland. It wasn't all Linda's fault, as members of the inner circle have claimed. He picked out the living room suite and told a writer that he got the idea for the mirrors from the inside of a ballet studio. Out on tour, mirrors let him see himself as the fans would see him on stage, bejeweled like one of his own living room lamps. At home at Graceland, the mirrors let Elvis be the star of his own daily life. He put them on the ceiling of the cellar stairs and on the ceiling of the basement room in which he could lie back in splendid repose upon a bank of velvet cushions and, from underneath one heavy, half-closed eyelid, watch himself as he would someday look in death.
Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
