In 1965, a young Welsh singer walked onto a film set at Paramount Studios in Hollywood and got the shock of his life. He was 25 years old, had been famous for about a year, and had exactly three singles to his name. His name was Tom Jones, and he had grown up in a … Read more
At around three in the morning in the summer of 1975, a small Chow puppy named Getlo started behaving strangely at Graceland. Elvis Presley’s girlfriend Linda Thompson noticed something was badly wrong and called out a vet in the middle of the night. The vet examined the dog, then delivered the verdict nobody wanted: “I … Read more
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 … Read more
In 1957, the biggest singer in America published an article attacking rock and roll in the harshest words anyone had used. He called it music made “for the most part by cretinous goons.” He said it was brutal, ugly, degenerate and vicious, and that hearing it had been his misfortune. That man was Frank Sinatra … Read more
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
To the world, he was the King of Rock and Roll. To one little girl, he was just Daddy — the man who killed a rat in her bedroom, blasted a snake with a shotgun in the garden, and walked into her school like any other father. In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley sat down and … Read more
On February 14, 1973, two of the most famous men on the planet met backstage at the Las Vegas Hilton, and neither of them knew quite what to do. Elvis Presley had just come offstage. Muhammad Ali had been in the audience. Ali’s own fight doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, watched it happen and said it perfectly: … 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