"People always look good in their coffins."
- Elvis PresleyOn Sunday, he would have been 60 years old.
He was born at 4:35 a.m. on Jan. 8, 1935, in a clapboard house at 306 Old Saltillo Road in East Tupelo, Miss., and was named Elvis - the middle name of Vernon Presley, who was out with friends that night and did not know he had become a father. A stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon, was put in a cardboard box and kept on the mantle overnight.
Forty-two years later, at about 2:15 p.m. on Aug. 16, 1977, Elvis Presley was found dead in the upstairs bathroom of his home at Graceland. Remembering the look of it, longtime friend Joe Esposito later wrote, "His face was smashed into the thick carpeting, his nose flattened to one side, and he appeared more bloated than usual."
Esposito said Vernon Presley, recuperating from a heart attack, collapsed near his son's body as family friend Charlie Hodge kept crying out for Elvis not to die and 9-year-old Lisa Marie stood quietly at the bathroom door. An ambulance took Presley to Baptist Memorial Hospital, where a doctor stepped out of the emergency room to tell the family, "He's gone. He's no longer here."
Yeah, well.
There's a cafe and souvenir shop on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway that's called Elvis Inn and boasts "the world's largest Elvis statue." There's the 24-hour coin-operated Church of Elvis in Portland and there's the McDonald's in Tupelo, plastered from its stucco ceiling to its warthog tables with faces of the King.
There are thousands of self-certified impersonators, gargling their way through movies about movies about Elvis, jumpsuits afire, shirts open to the night, shoe polish dripping from their hair, doing the well-a-well-a-well-a while they wait for a phone call from the sky pilot, fingers trembling with invisible music. And there's that candle-lit line outside Graceland every Aug. 16, a winking shadow of the bowl-cut, mile-long promenade below the czar's window in Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible."
On Sunday they'll be out again, roaming around, looking for some sign that the King still lives, trying to find a place to sit with other pomaded, crinkled heads, working to retouch Elvis over a cup of joe, clapboard birth to hip-blues to what-he-would-look-like now. There will be those who say he'd be a fat pig, for sure - a glutinous, wobbling lobber, a decrepit grotesque of the Priapus he used to be. These would be the same ones who voted for the Presley stamp from Vegas, who talk about "Charro!" instead of the '68 comeback special, who gleefully point at pictures of Gladys Presley in her mountain years, saying, "See, see?"
But there are others who, closing their eyes, can imagine the 60-year-old Presley coming full circle, clean again. To them, he would've gotten up one morning and thrown out all his jumpsuits in a fit of gospel pique - Burning Flame and Inca Gold and King of Spades gone to the Graceland dumpster. He would have stopped dying his hair black, letting it go stone gray, and chased radio waves to get the Blue Moon Boys back together for an album recorded eight steps back from the mike, Louisiana Hayride-style, titled, "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone." In that scenario of Elvis, he likes Lyle Lovett and Arrested Development, does a great Clinton imitation, and has memorized Homer Simpson's best lines ("Mmmm-mmm, floor pie!"). He shows up at obscure film festivals, gray hair slicked back, looking a little like Dennis Hopper from the side, to accept a lifetime achievement award and hold seminars about the puppy-subtle difference between "Girls! Girls! Girls!" "Girl Happy" and "The Trouble with Girls."
As people sit in nouveau-beatnik eateries arguing both sides of the man - saggy-faced Waldo in a weirdsmobile suit facing off against a laughing King, winking at Homer jokes - there should be a copy of "The Ultimate Elvis" by Patricia Jobe Pierce on the table. The book, published last year, lays it all out, day to day, year to year.
On his birthday in 1953, for instance, Presley got a 1942 Lincoln Zephyr, which his parents had bought for $50, the same amount they paid monthly for a duplex at 462 Alabama St. in Memphis. On his birthday two years later, Presley's "Milkcow Blues Boogie" and "You're a Heartbreaker" were released on the Sun label and, two years after that, Presley was eating birthday cake on a train to Hollywood to make "Loving You."
Things started going downhill not long after that. Presley didn't want to celebrate his birthday in 1964, having lost out to George Hamilton for the lead in the Hank Williams story, "Your Cheatin' Heart." By 1968, his films had grossed $135 million and he'd sold more than 100 million records, but his marriage to Priscilla was having its troubles. By 1971, he was using massive amounts of Hycodan and had to be rushed to the hospital after an overdose.
The day after his 38th birthday, Presley was mobbed by fans as he arrived by helicopter at the Hawaiian Village Hotel in Honolulu, and a year later Gov. Jimmy Carter proclaimed Elvis Presley Day in Georgia. But Presley was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital with severe stomach pains on his 40th birthday and spent his 42nd birthday with Lisa Marie in California, panda-angry and out of shape.
A photo of Presley at a concert in Providence, R.I., in May 1977 shows him bulging past the breakpoint of a white and gold jumpsuit, his face as round as two moons. On June 26 he gave his last public performance, at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. In August he had groaned his way to the far side of 260 pounds, and on Aug. 16 he was dead.
There was no way to count the crowd that stood rag-faced through Presley's funeral at Graceland and the burial at Forest Hill Cemetery. A dozen cream-colored Cadillacs accompanied his white hearse to the cemetery, where Presley was buried alongside his mother. Their bodies were moved to Graceland in October after three men broke into Presley's crypt to prove he wasn't dead. Two weeks later the National Enquirer ran a front-page picture of the King in his coffin, a photo that reportedly cost the paper $75,000. The issue sold a record 6.5 million copies.
With each passing year, people keep lighting candles on Jan. 8 and Aug. 16, recounting in pained detail Presley's dirt-poor birth and his last hours on Earth.