On April 30, 1964, Elvis Presley needed a haircut. He was in Hollywood filming, so an assistant rang a 24-year-old hairdresser named Larry Geller, who worked at a famous Beverly Hills salon and cut hair for Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman. Geller drove over to Elvis’s rented house on Perugia Way expecting a routine forty-five minutes.
Instead, Elvis asked him what he was really interested in — and got an answer about religion, philosophy, and the meaning of life. Three hours later they were still talking. Elvis hired him on the spot.
Almost nobody outside his inner circle knew this side of him. The world saw hip-shaking and jumpsuits. In private, Elvis Presley was a relentless reader who wanted to understand why he, of all people, had been chosen for a life like his. Within a year of meeting Geller, he had gone through over a hundred books on religion, spirituality and the supernatural, scribbling his own notes in the margins as he went.
What he read was extraordinarily wide. He studied the Bible alongside books on Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition. He read the Autobiography of a Yogi. He read Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. He kept returning to Cheiro’s Book of Numbers for guidance, and he loved Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet so much that he knew long passages by heart. And he didn’t keep it to himself — he handed books out to the Memphis Mafia and read aloud to them for hours, hoping they’d care as much as he did. When he went on tour, the books went with him in trunks.
The Elvis I Knew-Larry Geller Interview
Not everyone was happy. Priscilla later wrote that she felt he was too attached to those books. She described him announcing that for the two of them to be true soul mates, she would have to join his search for the answers of the universe — and handing her several enormous volumes to get started. To the guys around him, Geller became a threat. They nicknamed him “the Guru.”
The person who minded most was Colonel Tom Parker. Elvis’s manager took 50 percent of everything he earned, and a client who was starting to ask big questions about meaning and purpose might begin to ask about contracts. Parker decided Geller was a bad influence and moved to cut him out. He instructed the entourage to keep Elvis away from him, and told Elvis directly to drop him.
From that point on, Geller was allowed to style Elvis’s hair and nothing more — the two men were never left alone together.
Then came the fire. In 1967, Elvis’s spiritual library — the books he’d annotated, carried on tour and read aloud to his friends — was gathered up and burned in a bonfire. Accounts differ on exactly whose hands lit it; Parker is widely blamed, and Priscilla’s own book describes the burning too. Geller saw where things were heading and left before he could be pushed. He had no contact with Elvis for five years. But here’s the ending nobody expects: it didn’t work. Elvis kept reading and kept searching for the rest of his life. Geller came back in 1972, styled his hair again, and was at Graceland on the day Elvis died in 1977.