The first thing that struck both of us when walking through Graceland was how small it is, not much larger than a typical suburban house. If your frame of reference is a 300 square foot cabin built by your father in Tupelo, Mississippi, Graceland must have seemed enormous. Compared to the McMansions of today, however, the home’s excesses seem entirely limited to what’s inside the structure: shag carpeted walls and ceilings; round, fur covered beds, and mirrors or velvet on every conceivable surface. If it can be embroidered with tiger stripes or bedazzled with sequins, by god, do it.
We plunked down our $54 to take the tour with a rising sense of irony, but for most of the tour-takers, this was not the case. This was a shrine for them, with Graceland the physical manifestation of the American Dream. We even got to witness a German tourist posing on the steps of the Lisa Marie (Elvis’s airplane) with his slightly modernized Elvis haircut and Elvis attire, striking a jaunty-hipped pose. He wasn’t there to chuckle at the TV room with three televisions, one for each broadcast station.
When we finished the tour, we both felt that it had glossed over a lot, painting Elvis has a folk hero who had died of a heart problem, but completely neglecting the years of drug abuse and debaucherous living. Some snatches of this backstory come out in Lisa Marie’s interview clips on the audio tour. Her tone is oddly flat and affectless and when she speaks of her father, she talks with more warmth about Elvis the persona than she does about Elvis the father. Apparently the memories aren’t all bad, however, as we learned that she stays at Graceland when she is in Memphis. When we learned from Chris and Kate Peck about the Blues Ball in town the next day and Lisa Marie’s expected presence there, we immediately wondered, was she hiding upstairs during the tour? Does she wander in slippers down to the plastic-covered kitchen for coffee before the first group comes rambling through? We might be willing to go up to the Platinum admission rate for that spectacle.