Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

I’m driving the 93 miles down Highway 78 from Memphis to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born and lived for 13 years, to see if maybe I can get a clue as to what this is all about.

The drive feels very Rural Southern. Kudzu vines swarm everywhere. Corn is $1 a dozen. A preacher is talking on the radio.

“I’ve been down that Long Road of Sin,” he says. “I went out and just ate the world.”

Election campaigns are under way, in the form of signs in people’s yards.

RE-ELECT ZACK STEWART

HIGHWAY COMMISSIONER

“Sometimes,” the preacher says, “we all get in that old carnality way.”

The Birthplace is at the end of a short street lined with extremely modest homes. Shacks, really. The Birthplace is a shack, too, only it has been fixed up nice and moved a short distance to a little park, which also has a modern building where you can buy souvenirs.

The Birthplace has only two rooms, furnished with donated items. The most authentic item there is Laverne Clayton, who sits in the bedroom and charges you $1 admission. She was born in 1935, same as Elvis; she lived next door to him for 10 years, went to school with him.

“He liked K-Aro syrup and butter and biscuits,” she says. “He liked to play Roy Rogers. I was in the schoolroom, third grade, when he sang “Old Shep.” We thought he was silly. We didn’t pay him no mind.”

And now she collects money from people who come from Japan just to see where he was born. And she doesn’t understand, any more than I do, why.

“A lot of the people don’t believe Elvis is dead,” she says, shaking her head. “They tell me he’s on an island somewhere.”

“You don’t argue with real Elvis fans. You just let them talk.”

At the Birthplace I buy a book called Elvis Now—Ours Forever, a collection of reminiscences from True Fans edited by Bob Olmetti and Sue McCasland, who was a gate person in the mid-’70s. The book almost throbs in your hands with the intensity of the fans’ devotion.

Jan Lancaster, Tupelo, Mississippi: “Every time I went to Memphis, I went by [Graceland]. ... Like I was eight months pregnant, and my girlfriend and I went up there with our husbands. They went to a skin flick, dropped us off, and I had a coat on so if ELvis sees me he won’t know I’m pregnant. We sat all night long—it was 22 degrees. ...”

Linda Horr, Richmond, Indiana: “I don’t think any fan could love Elvis as much as I do, except maybe, to the fans who have actually met him, the hurt is worse. If that is so, then I thank God for sparing me that kind of pain—for the loss I feel is bad enough.”

Part of it, of course, is his music. He really could sing, and except for a sterile period in the ‘60s when he was acting in mostly awful movies with mostly awful soundtracks, he made a whole lot of good records—”Jailhouse Rock,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Suspicious Minds” ... “Burnin’ Love,” and many more that don’t get played much on the radio. Elvis croons continuously over the P.A. system at the souvenir-store plaza across from Graceland, and as you wander around you often find yourself thinking when a new song comes on, Yeah, that was a pretty good one, too.

Part of it was his lack of pretense. I realize that seems like an odd way to talk about a pampered, insulated superstar who performed in spangled jumpsuits, but if you watch tapes of him in concert, what strikes you—what strikes me, anyway—is that, unlike his preening, pouting, self-important impersonators, the real Elvis never seemed to take himself particularly seriously. He laughed a lot, and most of his jokes were at his own expense—muttered throwaway lines about the legendary Pelvis, the Leer, and (near the end) the Paunch. He seemed to find the adulation as inexplicable as many of the rest of us do. Watching him, I found it hard not to like him.

“Elvis,” says Linda Cullum, veteran of many years at the gates, “was always a regular person.”

And indeed he was, in some ways. He got very famous, and he got very rich, but he didn’t move to Monaco, didn’t collect Mausse, didn’t hang out with Society. He was a boy from the South, and he stayed in the South, and when he made it, he brought his daddy and mama and relatives and friends to live with him in and around his mansion. To the end, he hung out with good old boys, and he did the things a good old boy does, only more so.

There’s a long-standing tradition in the American South in which getting drunk and/or stoned and chasing women and shooting off pistols and racing cars around for the sheer hell of it are normal, everyday male activities, generally accepted with a resigned or amused shrug by much of Southern society. In the show business part of this society they called this “roarin’ with the ‘billies [hillbillies].” In country music, tradition practically dictated that as soon as you got a little money, you went out and spent it on cars, clothes, rings and women, all flashy. Many in rock and roll adhered to this self-indulgent philosophy.

Elvis was a product of this culture and when you traveled with Elvis, you were roarin’ with the No. 1 Billy.—Elvis: the final Years, by Jerry Hopkins

The cars, the guns, the jewelry, the wild parties, the binges, the famous plane trip from Memphis to Denver in the dead of night solely to buy peanut butter sandwiches—none of this bothers the fans. Hey, it was his money. He earned it.

Another part of it—a big part, the shrinks say—is sexual: repressed longings released by this exotic, sensual stud who dared to thrust his hips at the Wonder Bread world that was white American pop culture in the ‘50s. But that was a long time ago, and there have been plenty of sex symbols since. Why do these people remain so loyal to Elvis? Why does it seem as though their ardor has intensified, rather than cooled, since his death?

And why are their feelings so personal, for a man some of them never saw in person, and many of them never met? Talk to a True Fan, and odds are she won’t talk about Elvis’s art, his genius, the way fans of, say, Bob Dylan will talk. Odds are she’ll tell you how, when he performed, he always seemed to be looking at her, singing to her. The True Fans really believe that Elvis loved them,just as much as they love him. They talk about how much he cared for them, how much he gave them, how, in a way, he died for them. He was under so much pressure, the True Fans say; he worked so hard to meet the demands of his public. No wonder he was sick. No wonder he turned to drugs. In some fans you sense a distinct undercurrent of guilt: If only he hadn’t kept his pain so private, if only I had known, maybe I could have helped. ...

This devotion gets more and more confusing the longer I try to understand it. I’ve been reading books, listening to records, watching tapes, talking to fans, talking to Graceland officials. I have two notebooks full of quotes from people trying to explain the Elvis Thing. They can’t, and neither can I.

But I’m not laughing at it, the way I used to.

There’s a painful scene near the end of the documentary “This Is Elvis” showing Elvis in one of his final concerts, six weeks before he died. His appearance is shocking: This is a bloated, obviously sick man, his belly hanging out over the gaudy belt of his jumpsuit. He sings “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and when he gets to the talking part in the middle, he forgets the words; forgets the words to a song he must have sung a thousand times. He keeps going, stumbling and slurring, not looking at the audience, giggling to himself as he blows line after line, finally giving up.

When, mercifully, the song ends, Elvis introduces his father, Vernon, who looks only slightly older than his son, and much healthier. And then Elvis sings “My Way,” holding a piece of paper, in case he forgets the words.