Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

This is a recurring theme with Elvis fans: They’re tired of explaining themselves. If you don’t hear what they hear, feel what they feel, that’s your misfortune. If you want, they’ll talk to you about it, but they don’t expect you to understand.

Shirley Connell, 39, was one of the early gate people, back in the ‘60s. She had two big advantages:

1. Her family’s backyard adjoins Graceland’s.

2. Her mama loved Elvis, too.

Which meant young Shirley was allowed to spend virtually all her waking time, except for school, at the gates. And, like other regulars, she

sometimes got invited along on the outings Elvis organized. Which is how it happened that one year she and her mama went to the movies all night, almost every night, from November through March.

Elvis regularly rented a downtown Memphis movie theater so he and his entourage could watch first-run movies (never his own, most of which embarrassed him). For years, his fans, the regulars, were allowed to join him. They weren’t exactly with him, but they were in the same room with him, and that was enough.

“The schedule was,” Connell recalls, “he’d come in, and we’d watch anywhere from three to five movies, and he’d leave. Then I’d go home, and if given enough time, I’d catch a nap, and if not, I’d go straight to school. Then I’d come home from school at 2:30 in the afternoon, do my homework, and go straight to bed. Then I’d get up at 10 o’clock and find out what time the movie was.

“We saw The Nutty Professor 14 times. The Great Escape was 10. Doctor Strangelove was 12. Mama would go to sleep. ... I went out and ate one time, during The Nutty Professor, I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I was just gone long enough to eat. I didn’t dare leave.”

if you ask her why, it shows you could never understand.

Connell still lives in the same modest ranch house. She has pictures of Elvis on the walls, and a lot of souvenirs, including one of Elvis’s custom-made silk shirts and an RCA portable radio Elvis gave her for Christmas in 1963. She has the box, the wrapping paper, the original long-dead battery.

She took me out to her backyard one evening and dragged out a rickety old ladder so I could climb up and look over the wooden fence into the manicured grounds of Graceland. Two of Elvis’s horses were grazing there. She hasn’t looked over that fence in years.

Graceland today is a business, a tourist attraction operated by the Presley estate. The mansion, built in 1939, sits on a small hill overlooking Route 51, which in Memphis is Elvis Presley Boulevard. When Elvis, then 22, bought Graceland in 1957 for $100,000 the area was mostly country; now the boulevard is a semi-sleazy strip, lined with car dealerships and fast-food places. (Not that this is inappropriate, cars and fast food being two things Elvis consumed in vast quantities.)

Half a million people visit Graceland each year, but most of them are tourists, as opposed to True Fans. Most go for the same reason they would go

to see a man wrestle an alligator: curiosity. Sure, they like Elvis, or they wouldn’t be there. But when they go through the house, stand where he stood, look at the things he owned and touched, they’re not moved. Some are even amused.

And, Lord knows, there is plenty to be amused about. The decor is stunningly, at times hilariously, tacky, representing the Let’s-Not-Leave-a-Single-Square-Inch-Anywhere-Including-the-Ceiling-Undecorated school of interior design, featuring electric-blue drapes, veined wall mirrors, carpeting on the ceiling, etc. And it’s hard not to laugh at the earnest speeches of the clean-cut, relentlessly perky young guides, describing, say, Elvis’s collection of police badges, as though these were artifacts at Monticello.

Scene from the tour: We’re in the TV room, which has mirrors on the ceiling and a squint-inducing navy-blue-with-bright-yellow color scheme. “You’ll notice the three TVs in front of you,” the guide says. “This is an idea Elvis got from Lyndon Johnson.”

Now we’re in an outbuilding, originally built for Elvis’s extensive model-racing-car layout (which he quickly got bored with and gave away) and now housing a memorabilia display. We pause before a display of extravagantly over-decorated jumpsuit costumes. “Elvis found the fringe to be a problem onstage,” the guide is saying, “so he moved on to outfits that were more studded.”

The tour ends when, in a bizarre juxtaposition, we move from Elvis’s racquetball court to his grave, out by the swimming pool. This is where the True Fans often break down.

The tourists, though, usually just take pictures, then head back across the street to the plaza of stores selling licensed souvenirs. This is a place where good taste never even tries to rear its head. Just about anything they can put a likeness of Elvis on and sell, they do. You can get, for $2.95, a decanter shaped like Elvis wearing a karate uniform. You can get some Love Me Tender Conditioning Rinse. If you like to read, you can get a copy of I Called Him Babe—Elvis Presley’s Nurse Remembers, You can get sick.

But here’s the thing: the True Fans don’t much like this, either. Most of them accept it, because they know that without the tourists and the souvenir dollars Graceland would have to close, and they’d lose a strong link with him. But they don’t like it. They don’t want a souvenir manufactured in Taiwan 10 years after Elvis died; they want something real.

Like Elvis’s cigar butt. Tom Kirby got one. His friend and fellow gate regular, Debbie Brown, recalls how this came about:

“We were good friends with Jo Smith, who was married to Elvis’s cousin, and she had always been real thoughtful, especially as far as Tom was concerned, because he had always been such a good fan. ... So they were playing racquetball or something, and [Elvis] laid his cigar down, half smoked, and then he walked out. So she picked it up, and she thought it would be a real neat souvenir for Tom. So she brings this cigar to Tom—she wrapped it up in a little tinfoil paper—and Tom is so excited, he runs over in the middle of the night, pounds on the door, and I go, ‘What,’ and he says, ‘look

what Jo’s given me.’ And he unwraps the precious little tinfoil holding his cigar, and he goes, ‘God, Elvis’s cigar. It’s just fresh, she got it to night.’ And I go, ‘God, let me see it.’ And I grab it and stick it right in my mouth, because I know it’s been in his mouth. And Tom goes, ‘But I haven’t even put it in my mouth yet!’”

An even more wonderful thing happened in Atlanta, where Brown, Kirby, and some other gate people went to see Elvis in concert, and where they managed to get into his actual hotel room, after he had left for his last show.

“The keys were hanging in the presidential suite, in the door,” Brown recalls. “We instantly took the keys out, went inside, and shut the door. We went through the wastepaper cans. ... We were running around, jerking open cabinets. There was a cart there, and it had a big giant urn of the most horrible black coffee—that’s the way he liked his coffee—and the bacon there was on a large platter, and it was burned to a crisp—that’s the way he ate his bacon. Instantly we knew we had success, and we just grabbed this bacon—Elvis had this!—and we went [she makes gobbling sounds]. You know, so we can say we ate with him. He just wasn’t there, but we ate off his tray.

“Then my girlfriend and I looked at each other, and we thought—the bed! So I ripped the sheets back, and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m looking!’ And she said, ‘For what?’ I said, ‘A pubic hair!’

“You’d have to be a die-hard fan to appreciate that. I mean, I know it sounds sick, but wouldn’t that be the ultimate, for a female?”