Everyone on earth can picture Elvis Presley’s hair. The glossy black pompadour, the sideburns, the curl falling over his forehead. It’s one of the most famous heads of hair in history. And here’s the part that stuns people: it was never real. Elvis was born a natural blond. He dyed it black for nearly his entire adult life — and the reason traces back to a comic book he read as a poor kid in Memphis.
His real color was a sandy blond that darkened to light brown as he grew up. As a teenager, his family couldn’t afford salon dye, so young Elvis reached for something cheap that was already in the house: black shoe polish. It worked better than expected. It gave him the jet-black shade he wanted, and because it was a thick paste, it also held his hair slicked back all day.
Later, once money stopped being a problem, he switched to a specific mix of store-bought dyes — Miss Clairol 51D blended with Black Velvet — and his stylist Larry Geller touched up the roots every couple of weeks. The only time the world saw it fade was in the Army, when he wasn’t allowed to dye it.
Was Elvis a natural blonde?
So why go to all that trouble? Part of it was simple showbiz smarts. Elvis figured out that jet-black hair made his bright blue eyes jump straight off the screen. He even wore a thin line of black eyeliner to push the effect further — a trick the actor Tony Curtis personally taught him.
He loved the look so much that he asked Priscilla to dye her hair black too, so the two of them would match.
But the real story starts earlier, in a Memphis housing project called Lauderdale Courts. Between roughly 1949 and 1953, a teenage Elvis was obsessed with a comic book series about a hero named Captain Marvel Jr. The character was a poor, disabled newsboy named Freddy Freeman who spoke a magic word and transformed into a superhero. And Captain Marvel Jr. had one very particular feature: glossy jet-black hair, tumbling over his forehead in a perfect wave.
Austin Butler, Tom Hanks and Baz Luhrmann on How Superheroes Inspired Elvis
Now look at Elvis in the 1970s, and you are basically looking at that comic book. The one-piece jumpsuit. The wide belt. The boots. The half-cape. Even the white scarf around his neck — Freddy Freeman wore one too. Elvis’s own cousin, Billy Smith, said it flat out: pull up a drawing of Captain Marvel Jr., and it looks a whole lot like seventies Elvis. And that famous TCB lightning bolt — “Taking Care of Business in a flash” — is the same bolt that sat on the hero’s chest. Elvis put it on his rings, his necklaces, his karate logo, the wall of his Graceland game room, and even the tail of his private jet.
His childhood stack of those comics is still at Graceland today. But here’s the perfect ending: decades later, DC Comics rewrote Freddy Freeman as an Elvis fan. The character now styles his hair after Elvis, quotes him, wears a lightning-bolt necklace, and, in one story, becomes a king himself! A full-circle moment for sure for Elvis Presley.