Inside Graceland: Elvis' Maid Remembers (3 page)

On several occasions, especially in the mid-seventies, he would try out different diets that became popular. On one occasion, he got heavily involved, for a short period of time, in a health food diet that had become popular in California. It consisted of eating a special diet food shipped from a health food store in Los Angeles.

He was so convinced that he was going to lose weight that he had Aunt Delta order him so much of the food, which was shipped frozen in special containers, that, when it came in, there was not enough room for the freezers at Graceland to hold it. Aunt Delta asked me if I would take some of it and store it in my freezer at home, which I did.

Of course, Elvis quickly tired of that diet, and moved on to other things, forgetting about the diet food from California. I still have empty bags of it stored in my deep freeze. I can’t bring myself to throw it out.

As time passed, I began taking on more and more responsibility. I think I earned the respect of Aunt Delta, who oversaw the daily “operations” of the place. She was the one everybody went to when something needed to be done, and kept a wary eye out to make sure things ran as smoothly as possible. She had Vernon’s backing in everything, and, through her, I learned the “in’s and out’s” of how things “fit together” at the mansion.

I became familiar with, and learned my way around, the house and grounds. The mansion itself was truly a beautiful old house. I learned that it had been owned previously by a well-to-do family in Memphis.

Shortly after going to work at Graceland, I was talking with my father-in-law about the house. He told me that, when he was younger, he worked as a sharecropper on a farm nearby, on Millbranch in Whitehaven. He said that he used to go to a dentist who, at the time, was living at Graceland, and that the dentist once pulled a tooth that was giving him trouble. He told me that he sat on an outside step leading down into the basement while the dentist pulled the tooth. That was obviously many years before Elvis bought the house.

Elvis moved into the house in April of 1957, and immediately began renovating it. He had the now-famous rock wall constructed and musical gates installed as soon as he bought the place. I learned that, while having the house painted after it was first purchased, Vernon had hired a crew of painters who were not unionized. When the local painter’s union found out about it, and knew that Elvis was a union member of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood, they set up a picket line outside the house, and for several days pickets walked a picket line on what was then a lightly traveled Hwy 51.

Luckily, Vernon apparently had hired union bricklayers to build the wall. For a short time there was a sign on the left column as you went through the gates saying that the wall had been “proudly built” by union bricklayers.

From then on, Vernon made it a point to make sure that any work that needed to be done on the house was performed by union workers.

I remember sitting with Grandma one afternoon while we were watching TV in her bedroom, and her telling me about when they first moved into Graceland.

She said, “We moved to Memphis from Tupelo when Elvis was only 13 years old. We didn’t have any money to speak of, and had to keep moving from place to place. All that changed when Elvis started his career, and suddenly got famous.”

She continued, “Elvis had told Vernon and Gladys to find a larger house, one big enough that we wouldn’t have to worry about neighbors complaining about the crowds, and such. Well, Vernon and Gladys finally found this place and everyone fell in love with it, especially Elvis.”

She went on, “At that time, a doctor owned the house. There was a church next to the property and people at the church were using it to keep canned goods stored in. So Elvis bought the house and we all moved in. Vernon and Gladys took the downstairs bedroom and Elvis moved in to the upstairs front bedroom. I moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms as well. Then, after Gladys passed, I moved here into Gladys’ and Vernon’s old bedroom. I’m much more comfortable here because I don’t have to climb any stairs. And this is where I intend to stay.”

When first purchased, in 1957, the house was quite different from what visitors see today on their tour.

To begin with, the house had been abandoned for some time before Elvis bought it. It’s hard to imagine now, once you’ve visited the place and seen it in it’s finest glory, that, right before Elvis and his family moved in, it was in a state of disrepair.

For a while it had been used as a church, and services had been held in the front part of the house. The basement, which at that time was largely unfinished, had been used for various functions. When Elvis moved in, there was a “Boys” and “Girls” sign on two half baths in what is now the hallway leading out of the pool room that connects up the back stairway and into the jungle room on the tour.

That back stairway, which, again, leads visitors up to the jungle room on the tour, was an outside stairway that led up to what used to be a small patio landing at the top of the stairs. At that time it was outside what was then the back door leading out of the kitchen into the backyard. What visitors now see at the top of that stairway, the famous jungle room, was not there when Elvis first bought the house. It was built several years after Elvis moved in. It was first just an enclosed and screened in porch, an area that had been an open space at the back of the house. It was later “walled in” and the large patio type windows were installed in the back. It had regular den furniture in it appropriate for the time. Then, in the seventies, Elvis furnished it in it’s present style, installing the green shag carpeting on the ceiling and the waterfall at the end of the room. The Polynesian style furniture was purchased by Elvis at about the same time and placed in the room. Elvis said that it reminded him of his visits to Hawaii, and those were happy times for him.

The massive chair sitting next to the waterfall was a favorite sleeping spot for Lisa when she was growing up. It was so large that she could easily stretch out on it and take naps. We kept a small blanket nearby to cover her with when she would fall asleep there.

That chair was so large that the far right window, as you face it from inside the room, had to be removed to get the chair inside. One of the workers, using a screwdriver while trying to force the window casing out of it’s frame, chipped the window glass, which had to be replaced. It was said that it took several days before Vernon stopped complaining about how much it cost to have that window replaced.

Elvis loved the waterfall, which had been designed and installed by Bernie Grenadier, Marty Lacker’s brother-in-law, but ended up not using it very often because it tended to splash water on the carpet when it was turned on. We were constantly mopping up the wet carpet around it after it was first installed.

Another room prominently featured on the tour which was not part of the original structure is the trophy room. It was originally covered over to provide a room for the slot car racing set that Elvis was given as a Christmas gift one year by Priscilla. What is now that room was originally an open grassy area, behind and next to the music room, which had contained two very large shade trees. Elvis had a barbecue pit set up there which, because of it’s proximity to the swimming pool, saw many summer nights of fun under the stars. What was to become the trophy room as fans know it today actually started out as a long covered walkway leading from the very back of the music room all the way across the front of the present room to the swimming pool. Drapes have been added to the back wall behind the piano in the music room to hide the existing doors that originally led to that walkway. That original walkway is now the hallway for the “Hall of Gold” in the trophy room.

Back in the sixties, Elvis had a number of his plaques and awards hanging around the walls of what is now the TV room down in the basement. That was before it was redecorated to it’s present blue & yellow lightning bolt design by Linda Thompson in the seventies.

Eventually, as more and more trophies came in, it was decided to turn the first floor room into a showcase area, and that’s how it became known as the “trophy room”.

As mentioned earlier, the basement of the house was mostly unfinished when Elvis first moved in. About the only thing down there at the time were the two half baths, and some open rooms. Elvis finished those rooms into what are now the TV room, the pool room, a laundry room, and what was, for a long time, Charlie Hodge’s bedroom (located behind the TV room).

On more than one occasion, when it rained hard, the basement flooded and Charlie, getting out of bed with the lights out, stepped into standing water. I remember on several occasions hearing Charlie’s scream coming from the basement, letting us know he had stepped out of bed before turning the lights on in his room.

Changes were made over time to the first level of the house, as well. When Elvis first bought the house, it had a four-car garage attached to it. It remained that way until 1960, when Vernon and Dee got married and moved into Graceland with Dee’s three sons, Billy, Ricky, and David Stanley, from a previous marriage. At that time, Elvis converted the garage into a two bedroom “annex”, with a living room area. The annex was later modified in various forms and, over the years, became home to several of the “Memphis Mafia,” I think that Priscilla stayed in one of those bedrooms when she flew in from California when Elvis died. Finally, it was updated and had a modern kitchen installed when Vernon moved there in 1978, the year before he died. He had moved back into Graceland from Dolan Street to be closer to his mother, Dodger, and his sister, Delta. Because of his heart condition, being on the first floor of the house kept him from having to climb any steps. He was living in the annex at the time of his death in 1979.

Other changes to the house took place on a fairly regular basis, as times and needs dictated. Priscilla’s bathroom has been redecorated twice since she moved out of the house in the early seventies, one time for Linda and again for Ginger.

Elvis’s bathroom also got a new look. In the late sixties, he used to have his hair trimmed and washed in there. There was an old barber’s chair, that used to sit in front of the small bathroom window, that was used for that purpose. One of the things done during the remodeling was to install a large round circular shower in the bathroom. The barber chair was then moved to the bathroom near the swimming pool in the trophy room. After he would have his hair cut, I would go in and sweep up the hair and make sure it got thrown away so no one would get it and try to sell it.

The last room to get remodeled was Elvis’ bedroom. He had almost the entire room done up in dark naugahyde, including the ceiling.

He once told me, jokingly, that he was considering having a kitchen installed up there. “That way,” he teased me, “I can tell before I get married again whether she can cook!”

He kept the bedroom, which had the windows blocked out with heavy drapes, very dark at all times. If you didn’t know what time it was before going into the bedroom, you would never be able to tell by just standing in it. It was done that way by Elvis because he lived his life by a completely different timetable than the sun. If he wanted to go to bed at noon, he didn’t want to have to worry about sunlight keeping him awake. Therefore, he kept the room dark all the time and relied on lighting when he wanted the room light.

He had the usual assortment of lamps and such, but the main source of lighting came from a set of neon lights that ran around the top of all four bedroom walls. There were actually two colors of neon tubes, which, when lit together, gave off a very pleasing soft light which shone onto the ceiling. These lights were recessed behind panels at the tops of the walls, creating an indirect system of lighting. Those lights stayed on 24 hours a day.

The light switch to those lights was on the right wall as you first walked into his bedroom, near the TV monitor which sat on a table. On that same wall he had hanging a framed plaque featuring a poem, one of two, that had been written and given to him by his family friend from Tupelo, Janelle McComb.

He also had a huge custom-made king-size bed, with a fancy system of armrests built into the headboard. That allowed him to pull them out and sit up and watch TV, or read the paper, or eat his meals, and then push them out of the way when he was ready to go to bed.

When they came to deliver the bed, I remember that the delivery people made someone sign something saying the delivery company wouldn’t be responsible for any damage done to the top mattress, because it was so large they had to forcibly fold it in half to get it up the stairs, around the top of the landing, and into the bedroom. Luckily, the bed was not damaged.

The tight turn at the top of the stairs also caused another problem involving furniture several years later.

A long couch had been built in place across the entire back wall of his office, behind where his desk was located, when he had first purchased the house. One day Elvis decided, as he often did, that he wanted to replace it with a new couch so he told the carpenters to remove it from his office, take it downstairs to the basement, and put it in the pool room.

Well, as is always the case, it was not to be that simple. What they did not take into account was that the sofa, which was probably at least ten feet long, had been built in place originally and, thus, would not just fit through the door, make the turn and go down the stairs around the small narrow landing.

After several attempts, and no small amount of huffing and puffing, Vernon finally decided, out of desperation, to have them cut it in half just to get it through the small passageways and out of the house. So, as would only happen at Graceland, we were all suddenly and unexpectedly greeted, while in the kitchen one afternoon, by the sound of a chainsaw upstairs cutting a sofa in half. If I had been in any other house besides Graceland, I probably would have been alarmed.