Most people know Elvis Presley loved animals. Almost nobody knows that for a while, live peacocks roamed the lawns of Graceland, strutting around the most famous house in America with their tails fanned out. It looked magnificent. It lasted right up until the birds noticed something shiny parked in the driveway — and declared war … Read more
Around 600,000 people a year walk through the gates of the most famous private home in America. It is the second-most-visited house in the United States, beaten only by the White House. Almost every single one of those visitors assumes the name means something spiritual, or that Elvis chose it himself. He didn’t. The house … Read more
On October 3, 1945, a small, shy ten-year-old boy stood on a chair at a county fair in Tupelo, Mississippi, because he wasn’t tall enough to reach the microphone. He was wearing glasses. He had no guitar and no band. He sang an old, sad song called “Old Shep” completely on his own, and then … Read more
Plenty of famous people in the 1950s and 60s were handed honorary black belts they hadn’t earned. Elvis Presley wasn’t one of them. He trained in karate for nearly twenty years, under a string of serious instructors across three countries, opened his own karate school, and reached a rank most people who train their whole … Read more
In April 1975, Elvis Presley bought a Convair 880 jet airliner from Delta Air Lines. It was seventeen years old and had spent fifteen of them hauling ordinary passengers around America. He paid roughly $250,000 for it. Then he spent more than $800,000 — over three times the purchase price — turning it into something … Read more
Almost everyone on earth knows the phrase. It’s in films, in cartoons, in video games, in comedy routines. It has been said by sports announcers, politicians and stand-up comics who never heard an Elvis record in their lives: “Elvis has left the building.” What almost nobody knows is that the very first time those words … Read more
It is one of the most recognizable outfits in the history of show business. The gold lamé suit — jacket, trousers, belt, shoes and tie, all of it glittering — worn by Elvis Presley on the cover of 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Even the Elvis Barbie doll wears one. The world was told … Read more
In August 1956, a judge in Florida did something no judge has done before or since. He issued a warning to a 21-year-old singer that amounted to an injunction on his hips. If Elvis Presley moved them on stage that night, arrest warrants were ready, and he would be taken straight to jail. What Elvis … Read more
The man who controlled the biggest career in music history did not come from Hollywood, or Nashville, or any record company. He came from a traveling carnival — and the way he made his living before Elvis Presley is so outrageous that people assume it’s a joke. It isn’t. Colonel Tom Parker caught ordinary brown … Read more
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is one of the saddest songs Elvis Presley ever recorded. It went to number one in 1960, and it’s about a man begging to know if the woman who left him still thinks about him. There is nothing funny in it anywhere. Which is why the most famous performance of it … Read more
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