Graceland wasn't just Elvis' home — it's ours, too

Chris Herrington, USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee

This month, ardent fans, curiosity seekers, tourists scratching essential Americana off their bucket lists, and others by the thousands will descend on Elvis Presley Boulevard to visit a kingdom now four decades without a king. They all will be received at Graceland.

Those who haven’t visited since this time last summer will find a lot that’s new. In 1957, a 22-year-old Elvis, with one movie and a half-dozen chart-toppers to his name, bought the house, a Georgian colonial on 13.8 acres, for $102,500. Now, the 17,000 square-foot home is surrounded by a new 450-room, $92 million hotel, The Guest House at Graceland, and by a $42 million, 200,000-square-foot entertainment, restaurant and museum complex, Elvis Presley’s Memphis.

Newlyweds Simon Day and Debbie Mannering joke together as they wait for foot traffic to clear before taking wedding photos in front of the Graceland Mansion. The couple traveled from England to be married at the Graceland Chapel with "Blue Hawaii" playing as they marched down the aisle. (Jim Weber / The Commercial Appeal)

The house tours have evolved over the years from drawling tour guides to a self-controlled audio tour to a new interactive tablet, narrated by actor John Stamos. As part of the recent renovation of the larger Graceland compound, two buildings on the house grounds have changed. The “Trophy Room” has been redesigned as a museum specifically about the house and Elvis’ home life, and the racquetball court, which once housed gold records and such, has been restored to its playable 1977 form.

But the house itself, inside and out, remains, if not quite the way it was upon Elvis’ death in 1977, much as it has been since it first opened to the public on June 7, 1982. Elvis lived here for 20 years. It has now been ours nearly twice as long as it was his.

In February, President Donald Trump referred to his Florida golf resort, Mar-a-Lago, as the “Southern White House.” But it would need to get in line to warrant such a designation. The historical-minded might cite George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia. The literary might make a case for William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, down the road in Oxford, Mississippi.

But the second-most-visited home in America, after 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., is at 3764 Elvis Presley Blvd., which has received more than 20 million visitors since 1982. Welcome, or welcome back, to the real Southern White House.

We get older. Graceland stays the same age.

(Jim Weber / The Commercial Appeal)

A new video — a highlight reel of sorts — that viewers see before taking the Graceland house tour depicts different Elvises: the teen idol, the Army private, the Hollywood leading man, the Vegas entertainer, the jumpsuit-clad touring sensation, the family man, and others. Everyone has their own Elvis. And everyone has their own Graceland too: place of pilgrimage, music history shrine, classic Americana, kitsch palace.

But it’s also a time capsule of the still-very-recent past. While the tour has gotten more high-tech and the rest of the installation bigger and sleeker, Graceland mostly stays locked in a moment. It still has ashtrays. It has 14 televisions, but none will ever be flat-screen. Its kitchen was renovated in the mid-1970s, and there it stays. That big, clunky microwave in the corner? It’s said to be the first in Memphis, at the cost of $1,000. The avocado-green-and-harvest-gold color scheme against wood paneling? It’s gone from typical to tacky to maybe retro cool. It hasn’t changed; only the visitors have. Elvis never got the chance to update to chrome appliances and granite countertops, or whatever is currently favored. Like your grandmother, he’ll always be formica.

That red, white and blue swingset in the backyard? Depending on your age, you may flash back to your childhood, or your early parenthood. You’ll think about how hot that metal slide must have gotten under the Memphis sun in August, and the cuts and scrapes that might have come from the uncovered joints at the top. Vernon’s office, in the back, may remind you of your grandfather’s shop, before he retired. Your dad’s office, where you once waited for him to finish up. The metal file cabinets and push-button desk phone carry a charge of nostalgia for the once ordinary, now just out of reach.

There will be times on your tour when you will not think about Elvis, but about yourself, your own family, your own back pages.

Mansion on the hill

(Jim Weber / The Commercial Appeal)

Elvis’ architectural ascent to Graceland began in a Tupelo shotgun shack and navigated public housing, modest rentals and a three-bedroom East Memphis ranch house before moving not up in Memphis society — Sam Phillips would buy his own dream house deeper into East Memphis — but out toward the Mississippi border.

The elegant white house, partially hidden up off the highway amid a grove of oaks, with room in the back for horses to roam, was a country boy’s dream.

The "mansion on the hill" is an image as rich in American music as rumbling trains and rolling rivers. Hank Williams in the 1940s, Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s and Neil Young in the 1990s all looked toward it. On his own 1960 gospel album, “His Hand in Mine," Elvis sang of a “Mansion over the Hilltop” as a kind of metaphor for heaven.

Elvis’ dream fulfilled was already “Graceland” when he purchased it, named after Grace Toof, the aunt of one of the home’s original owners and now a resident of Elmwood Cemetery. Elvis kept the name. Wouldn’t you?

But if Graceland evokes both spiritual peace and Southern grandeur, it’s more subtly rooted in Hollywood image-making, and was so even before Elvis took ownership. The white columns and green shutters reference Tara, from “Gone with the Wind,” but not as author Margaret Mitchell envisioned it. The more opulent look of the house on the big screen was modeled, instead, on producer David O. Selznick’s Culver City, California, headquarters.

Graceland was built in 1939, the year of the film, for Dr. Thomas Moore and Ruth Brown Moore, and designed by Memphis architecture film Furbinger & Ehrman at a time when “Gone with the Wind” was all the rage, setting off a Colonial revival of which Graceland was at the Memphis forefront. The house suggested Old South but filtered through the lens of then-new Hollywood.

Twenty years later, new owner Elvis, fresh from his first Hollywood experience, repeated this dynamic. His Mississippi-bred parents, at various times early on, kept chickens and donkeys in the back. But Elvis lit up the driveway to mimic comedian Red Skelton’s Bel Air estate, the winding journey up to this mansion on the hill tracing the path of his own upward mobility. The swimming pool and what would become the so-called Jungle Room were influenced by the Hollywood lifestyle. The Meditation Garden, installed in the heady days of the mid-'60s and destined to become Elvis’ final resting place, was a kind of down-home translation of a California ashram.

Business in the front, party in the back

(Jim Weber / The Commercial Appeal)

Non-devotees tend to have two common takeaways from their Graceland visit: the supposed gaudiness and/or datedness of its decor and its relative modesty of scale compared to the magnitude of Elvis’ celebrity.

It’s larger than most of our own homes, much smaller than that of any commensurate star today. (Are there any commensurate stars today?) But while some of its design choices are wild, even in the context of its time, the functionality is familiar. Graceland is divided into three zones: The formal front for guests. The casual back for friends. The private upstairs for family. We are all graciously granted friendship, but we are not family.

Behind those Corinthian columns and Tishomingo stonework is a row of formal rooms once designed to host classical recitals. White carpet and furniture — including the then-trendy 15-foot sofa, custom-made and dating from Elvis’ initial 1957 decoration — accented by blue and gold. Stained glass, a baby grand in the music room and a big chandelier over the dining room table. Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding china on display.

Step through the doorway from dining room to kitchen and everything changes. This is a kitchen asking to be used. Pausing, you can imagine a late-night creep to that harvest gold refrigerator, and frying something up — peanut butter and banana, why not? — in the cast-iron skillet that sits on the range. Guests have gone. Now it’s time to live.

Behind the kitchen is what Elvis called the den, a former patio enclosed in the 1960s, a place to watch TV, hang out with friends and have a casual meal. It was initially a callback to the Presleys’ previous house on Audubon in East Memphis, wood paneling and gold leather, later adorned with a water feature that survived multiple design iterations.

It accrued the name “the Jungle Room” after Elvis’ death, when the house went public and people tried to make sense of the bulky furniture and green shag carpeting on both floor and ceiling, all product of a 1974 redecoration that may have been colossal bad taste or a kind of elaborate because-I-can lark or some of both. Writing 20 years later, the art historian Karal Ann Marling described it as “an ensemble of cypress-crotch coffee tables, green shag carpeting (on floor and ceiling), mirrors framed on the breast feathers of pheasants, flocked Austrian shades, Wookie-fur lampshades and massive pine chairs and couches carved with chainsaws in a style other stunned observers have labeled Polynesian Primitive, Early Goona-Goona or Tahitian Provincial. Angry South Sea gods fume silently in every corner. Ceramic tigers prowl the artificial greenery.”

The Jungle Room was tsk-tsked when the outer world first encountered it. Now there’s a kind of hold-my-beer gleefulness about it.

The walk down the mirrored tunnel to the Graceland basement is odd, but it’s a descent to a place where you’d definitely want to hang out. The term “man cave” was apparently coined in the 1990s, but Elvis was already there. In the TV room, the three televisions embedded into the wall were inspired by Lyndon Johnson but now evoke a bygone era of three broadcast networks. People stop to gawk — the mirrored ceiling, the yellow shag carpeting, the art deco-inspired “TCB” lightning bolt graphic on the wall, the porcelain monkey on the coffee table. But we all yearn to step past the divider and plop down on that big horseshoe sectional sofa. See if maybe the bar is still stocked. If Graceland wanted to provide an ultimate VIP experience, it would rent out the TV room for fantasy football drafts. Who wouldn’t have wanted to be in the Memphis Mafia League?

Across the hall, the pool room is Graceland’s most underrated oddity, overshadowed by the Jungle Room up above. It took a crew of three people 10 days to cut, piece, pleat and hang 350 to 400 yards of busily designed fabric to the walls and ceiling. Why? It feels like a boy’s sheet fort as imagined rather than as experienced.

One sense you get is that the front belongs to Gladys, the beloved mother who left too soon, a place to make her proud, while the back belongs to Elvis, always an agent of novelty and change, a self-made Gatsby who doesn’t really yearn for approval. If the front of Graceland — its facade and formal rooms — is a reflection of aspiration, the basement and Jungle Room wiggle their hips at anyone else’s notion of respectability.

A curated composite

Visitors who don’t know the house’s history or who aren’t listening or reading closely can be forgiven for thinking they’re seeing Graceland as it was when Elvis lived in it, at the time of his death. That’s not quite right.

Graceland had more of a blue orientation in the 1950s. Red and white in the 1960s. A final redecoration in the mid-1970s apparently left most of the front rooms drenched in red, a discovery noted with infamy soon after Elvis’ death. A final redecoration of the front rooms came post-mortem, the red theme purged on the path to public viewing.

The white, blue and gold you see in the living room today, in contrast to the red circa 1977, was an apparent attempt to soften the house for public exposure but also a call back to the time of its purchase, an approximation of Gladys’ 1957 vision for the house. It probably never looked exactly like this when Elvis lived there, but it isn’t quite a fiction. It’s a curated composite, every item owned by Elvis, even if some of them were retrieved from storage. And that’s OK. The red had been no more the “real Elvis” than what came before or what Graceland assembled later. Now, in the Trophy Room museum, you can see some of that notorious red furniture on display.

The house changed frequently and would have kept changing. Elvis, in the world and at home, was a change agent. Graceland is stuck in a kind of eternal present assembled from 20 years of Elvis’ past. Stained-glass peacocks from 1974, blue drapes from the late 1960s, the long sofa and coffee table constants since 1957. But aren’t all our presents just an accumulation of our pasts?

A promise kept

(Jim Weber / The Commercial Appeal)

To a degree you can choose your own adventure at Graceland. You can find your own Elvis, whether in the house or in the museums across the street. Many visitors stake their claim — pay their tribute — on the Alabama fieldstone wall along Elvis Presley Boulevard that’s become a kind of do-it-yourself billboard.

My Elvis tends to be the musician. I find him at the start of the career museum, with those six original Sun singles lined up under glass, and then on a big screen around the corner where you can watch Elvis sit down during his 1968 NBC “comeback” special, original guitarist Scotty Moore at his side, and dig deep into the mid-'50s music that launched him.

Maybe you find your Elvis in the car museum or in the Jungle Room or in the Trophy Room museum now lovingly anchored with documents and artifacts from his life: an elementary school report card, a Bible, the keys to his house.

Or maybe you find him out back, where he once ferried Lisa Marie around on a golf cart and which always seems so peaceful even when crowded with visitors. Not in his final resting place, in the Meditation Garden, but on a video that loops inside his father’s office, where Elvis sat on March 8, 1960, fresh from the Army and took questions from the hometown press. What did he miss about Memphis? “Everything.” Would he keep Graceland? Would he leave home? “I’m going to keep Graceland as long as I possibly can,” he says. It was a promise kept.