‘Most of the time, Elvis never even knew I took his picture,” says Alfred Wertheimer, whose intimate and unaffected photographs of the young Elvis Presley on the threshold of superstardom, in 1956, including the unforgettable backstage shot The Kiss, are the subject of a major exhibition opening this month at the Grammy Museum, in Los Angeles. “Elvis was almost laser-focused on whatever he did. So I would wait till he was involved—and Elvis was the kind of person who would be involved every 15 minutes in something else. Whether he’s combing his hair, or buying a ring, or in rehearsal; whether he’s talking to his father about why the plumbing isn’t working and the swimming pool isn’t full, or reassuring his mother that it’s O.K. to take a ride around the block on his motorcycle, or posing with some girls to take snaps by other girls, his life was full of activity.”

After Los Angeles, “Elvis at 21,” as the exhibition is called, will embark on a three-year, nine-city tour sponsored by the History Channel, including stops at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas; and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service with Wertheimer’s longtime dealer, Christopher Murray, of Washington’s Govinda Gallery, the show comprises 56 digital pigment prints, a medium perfected by David Adamson, who also works with Robert Frank, Chuck Close, William Wegman, and Annie Leibovitz. The opening, on January 8, is timed to coincide with what would have been the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s 75th birthday.

According to a 2002 Harris Poll, 84 percent of Americans “have had their lives touched by Elvis Presley in some way.” Graceland, his home at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard, in Memphis, attracts 600,000 visitors annually and has been made a National Historic Landmark, a designation it shares with Mount Vernon, the Alamo, and Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Elvis has sold more than one billion record units worldwide and has headed Forbes’s list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities every year but two since its inception, in 2001. The Elvis Presley Trust earned $52 million in 2008, beating the estate of its closest competitor, “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz, by almost $20 million; indeed, the deceased King even out-earned the living Madonna by some $12 million. Andy Warhol’s 1963 Elvis (Eight Times), a 12-foot-long, black-and-silver, full-figure portrait of the star flashing a pistol, was reportedly offered for sale privately for $150 million at the height of the pre-recession art boom. In his eerily prophetic way, Warhol, who never met Presley but did dozens of paintings of him in the early 60s, based on that same publicity still from the movie Flaming Star, may have been the first to intuit that Elvis, like Marilyn, Liz, and Jackie, would become an icon in the true sense of that overused word, an object of worship, a holy saint for a secular culture.

“Elvis who?” was Al Wertheimer’s reaction when RCA publicist Anne Fulchino asked him to photograph a fast-rising singer from Memphis who would be making his fifth appearance on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s Stage Show, a half-hour variety program produced by Jackie Gleason and broadcast live from the CBS studio in New York every Saturday night, preceding The Honeymooners. “Anne Fulchino was my friend,” Wertheimer says. “And besides, I worked cheap, and she had a limited budget. She said, ‘Al, can you go down to the Dorsey brothers’ show this Saturday and photograph for me?’ So I said, ‘Tommy Dorsey is one of my heroes! Benny Goodman. Big band. Terrific!’ She said, ‘No, I want you to photograph Elvis Presley.’ Thirty seconds of silence. I’d never heard of an Elvis, let alone an Elvis Presley. I said, ‘Yeah, Anne, sure, if that’s what you want. You know, I’m willing to work under any condition.’ I needed the rent money.”

Young and Hungry

Wertheimer, a German émigré, had begun his career only a year before, having graduated from Cooper Union School of the Arts in 1951 and served two years in the U.S. Army. He had recently bought two black Nikon S2 split rangefinders, the updated version of the camera that his idol, the photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, had used for his Korean War coverage in Life magazine. “All the lenses were black,” Wertheimer explained. “I said to myself, If I get the same type of camera, not only will I become invisible, I may become as good as Duncan.” These were the cameras, equipped with 35-mm. and 105-mm. lenses, that Wertheimer used to shoot 3,800 photographs over the course of seven days spent in close proximity to Presley in March, June, and July of 1956—the year “the Memphis Flash” became “Elvis the Pelvis,” going from regional sensation to national phenomenon and, through a combination of shock and seduction, shaking up America’s long-standing inhibitions about race, gender, and sex. By that August, a month after Wertheimer photographed Elvis recording “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” for RCA in New York, the 45-r.p.m. record of the songs had become the first to top all three Billboard charts: Pop, Country, and Rhythm & Blues.