The King and I
Mina Johnson
Word Count 940
Elvis Presley was not my kind of guy. I thought he was over-blessed with testosterone and good looks and did not appear to have a brain in his head. I thought he was laughing at all those naïve girls swooning over him. Never mind that I had done my own swooning over Robert Mitchum a few years earlier. Still, you could hardly be a teen-ager in the late fifties and not be familiar with “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” or “Shake, Rattle and Roll. “ To this day, hearing “Blue Christmas” stirs a little spark in my heart. Maybe I was not as impervious to the Elvis charm as I thought. In any case, he was an icon. You could not be unaware of him.
When my family moved to Memphis in 1973 from Westchester county in New York, his nearby presence began to impact my life in small ways. My husband and I bought a stately, but shabby mansion on Central Avenue in Midtown, a once wealthy part of town which had since been eclipsed by white flight to the suburbs. In my search for ways to cover up its flaws and make it look elegant, I found a Gloria Vanderbilt print in a dusty old fabric store which I decided was necessary for my happiness. While I was pleading with the owner to search his other stores for the 100 yards of fabric I would need, another customer who had been quietly observing the scene asked, “Who is going to make these draperies for you?” I was new in town. I had no idea.
“I made all the draperies for Graceland,” she said. “I would be happy to make yours.” She did a beautiful job. I used them over and over in the smaller houses and apartments where I eventually moved after my husband and I divorced. I cut them up to make pillows for my mother’s sofa. I nailed a pair on my office wall at the community college where I taught writing, fooling some people into believing there was a window hiding in that dark, claustrophobic space. The leftover lining was used to make pants for my teen-age daughter. Finally, I used the remaining drapes for packing material when I moved to a retirement community in 2013. Faced with the need to downsize, I sadly put them on the free shelf with a sign saying they were made by the same person who made the drapes for Graceland. They were gone the next day.
My next contact with the Presley family occurred soon after Elvis died. I was teaching English composition to a group of housewives who signed up for the course because it was conveniently offered in a Sunday school classroom at a suburban Methodist Church. I overheard them planning to share rides and noted that Sandy Miller said politely, “No thank you.” A few weeks later her classmates and I were stunned to see her picture on the front page of The Commercial Appeal walking beside Vernon Presley on his way to the hospital after a heart attack. The newspaper referred to her as his fiancé. During the course of the class, we became friends and she bemoaned the curlers in her hair when the paparazzi snapped that picture. She talked about the huge volume of letters which arrived at Graceland every day pouring out the love so many people felt for Elvis. A staff of five secretaries was required to deal with the volume. Vernon was in and out of the hospital until he died in June of 1979, and Sandy faithfully sat by his side doing needle work. They did not marry. I read that she was the executor of his estate.
I came home late from work one December evening to find a large package inside my entrance hall. When I opened it, I was stunned to find two beautiful pillows which Sandy had embroidered. My outspoken teen-age daughter picked one up and held it tenderly. “Just think,” she said, “the hands that made this pillow once touched Elvis’s daddy’s private parts.”
An estimated 18,000 people attended Elvis’s funeral-related events.Every August after that, thousands more attended “Elvis Week.” There were not enough hotels to accommodate the crowds; some of them sought out bed and breakfast establishments such as mine. One of my guests, a middle-aged woman from Virginia, could not wait to tell me about her mystical experience with Elvis. She was working on her computer when suddenly, her screen went blank, then whoosh, Elvis appeared, speaking soothing words of comfort. It was the most meaningful moment of her life.
The celebration of Elvis’s life came to a climax at the end of the week in an outdoor arena on Mud Island, a performance venue built on the Mississippi river. Various people who had known the singer talked a about their pleasant memories. The unpleasant memories had begun to fall away. We listened to his songs, and when the sun was gone we lit our candles and stood silently while the sound system blared, “I Did It My Way.” The mood was something like the somber/joyful celebration sometimes experienced in church on Christmas eve or Easter. The fact that it was so meaningful for my house guests gave me food for thought. Humans seem to have an empty space we long to fill with something that points us to the transcendent. Elvis grew up in a Pentecostal church and the hymns he learned there were meaningful to him all his life. Perhaps there was more to him and his legend than I understood.
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Mina is a retired college English professor. She currently oversees her family's farm in the panhandle of Texas, but lives in a Quaker retirement community in the Philadelphia area. She is the mother of DPA’s co-founder, Rebecca Johnson.