Carolyn Steber

It started, as most Elvis stories do, in the middle of the night.  In February 1967, at around two or three in the morning — normal working hours in his world — Elvis Presley was driving back to Memphis from a late-night horse-buying trip. Priscilla was with him, along with his friends Jerry Schilling and … Read more

There is a name on a grave at Graceland that most visitors walk straight past. It belongs to a tall, skinny, sharp-tongued woman from Mississippi who chewed snuff, wore sunglasses indoors all day, and made the best buttermilk biscuits her grandson ever tasted. Her name was Minnie Mae Presley. Elvis called her “Dodger.”  And in … Read more

In 1974, Elvis Presley walked into a Memphis furniture store called Donald’s, looked at a set of wild Polynesian furniture, and bought the entire collection in about thirty minutes. Carved wood. Fake fur upholstery. Tiki faces. And to finish it off, thick green shag carpet on the floor and on the ceiling. It is the … Read more

In 1961, Elvis Presley bought a chimpanzee. Not a puppy. Not a horse. A forty-pound chimp named Scatter — who would go on to wear tailored suits, drink whiskey straight from the bottle, ride around Beverly Hills in a Rolls-Royce, bite half the Memphis Mafia, and become the single most chaotic member of Elvis’s inner … Read more

Every year, more than a million people stand on the white memorial floating above Pearl Harbor and look down at the sunken hull of the USS Arizona, where 1,177 crewmen still lie. Almost none of them know that the memorial nearly didn’t happen. By 1960, the fundraising had stalled badly, and the project was quietly … Read more

Before there was Priscilla, there was Anita Wood. She was a beauty queen and TV performer from Tennessee, and in 1957 Elvis Presley told the world she was his “No. 1 Girl.” He gave her a nickname — “Little” — and he meant it seriously enough to put a promise in writing while stationed overseas: … Read more

On the night of July 1, 1956, millions of Americans switched on their televisions and saw the wildest young man in the country standing perfectly still. Elvis Presley was in white tie and tails, on a fancy set built with Greek columns, singing “Hound Dog” — to an actual basset hound wearing a top hat … Read more

In the autumn of 1955, a musician named Tommy Durden was reading a newspaper in Florida when a small story stopped him cold. A man had died alone in a hotel. Before he did, he had destroyed every piece of identification he owned — every card, every paper, anything that could say who he was. … Read more