Walk through the Graceland exhibits in Memphis, and you’ll come to a 25-inch RCA color television from the 1970s with a bullet hole in the screen. It isn’t a replica or a prop. Elvis Presley genuinely pulled out a gun and shot his own TV set while it was switched on, and the story of what he was watching at the time has become one of the most repeated tales in music history.
The singer on screen was a Broadway star named Robert Goulet.
By the 1970s, Elvis had become fascinated with guns and had a serious collection. And he had developed a habit that everyone around him learned to live with: he shot things. He shot at chandeliers. He shot light switches. He shot small appliances and, on occasion, large ones. His girlfriend Linda Thompson once described standing at a sink when she heard glass breaking and felt air move behind her leg — there was a bullet hole in the door behind her, and another shattered pane beyond it. A member of the household came in to check she was all right and explained it was just Elvis having a little target practice. He is even said to have shot his own car when it wouldn’t start.
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So why does Robert Goulet get the blame? One popular version of the story says it was personal. According to that telling, Elvis had never forgiven Goulet for allegedly making a move on his girlfriend Anita Wood while Elvis was away serving in the Army in Germany.
Years later, when Goulet turned up on television, Elvis is said to have picked up a pistol and fired. There’s an even better detail attached to that version — that Elvis afterward signed the ruined set with a marker pen, writing a very rude message that ended with the words “if he can’t take a joke — E.P.” and then told his friend Charlie Hodge to go and sell it, because “it’s worth more now anyway.”
He wasn’t wrong, by the way. One of his bullet-damaged TV sets later sold at auction for close to $15,000.
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But there’s a serious problem with the grudge version, and it comes from Goulet himself. Asked about it directly during Elvis Week in Memphis in 2004, Goulet said plainly that the two of them were friends, that Elvis bore him no ill will, and that he was not being singled out at all.
According to Goulet, Elvis also shot the TV when other singers came on — he named Mel Tormé and Frank Sinatra. Graceland’s own spokesman has said the same thing: “There was nothing Elvis had against Robert Goulet. They were friends. But Elvis just shot out things on a random basis.” Elvis’s cousin Billy Smith put it even more simply — sometimes he did it because he was in a mood, sometimes because something on the screen annoyed him, and mostly because he wanted to.
Here’s the best part of the whole story, and it’s completely true. Graceland’s archivist Angie Marchese has confirmed that when Elvis fired at that famous set, the bullet missed every single tube inside. Which means the television still works. The staff went inside it and sealed the screen with epoxy to prevent the cracks from spreading further, and the bullet itself is kept as part of the collection. Elvis Presley shot his TV, and the TV won.