I just watched the movie “Elvis.” It’s a biopic, not a documentary, so I suspect some of the truth was stretched a bit, but I enjoyed it. Although I remember listening to a lot of Elvis’ music, I was part of the generation that turned to the Beatles and never looked back. However, the movie reminded me of the time in 2006 when Kathy and I spent a few days in Memphis and visited Graceland, which, as you probably know, is not just the Grammy Award Winning Album of 1987 by Paul Simon, but also the home of Elvis Presley.
Although you can find all the facts you would ever want to know about Graceland elsewhere on the internet, I thought I would share a few basic ones. Graceland is a Colonial Revival-style mansion built in 1939 on 13.8 acres of land. Elvis Presley purchased the estate in 1957 for $102,500. Graceland has 23 rooms, including eight bedrooms and four bathrooms. It’s 17,552 square feet, but was only a tiny 10,266 sq. ft. bungalow when Elvis bought it. (For comparison, my wife and I live in a ranch-style house that is worth more than Elvis paid for Graceland even though it is much, much, much smaller. We didn’t enlarge it but did put on a new roof.)
For a tour of Graceland, you go to the parking lot and visitor pavilion located across the appropriately-named “Elvis Presley Boulevard” from the mansion. You can purchase tickets there if you don’t already have them. Since the White House is the only historic building in the US that gets more visitors than Graceland, you might want to plan ahead. There are many other things to see at the visitor pavilion like the jumpsuit, automobile, and airplane exhibits. The basic mansion tour doesn’t include those options, but the promoters are kind enough to sell higher-priced tickets that do include them. When it’s your time for the mansion tour, you’ll be given headphones and taken by bus across the street.
After queuing up in anticipation, the guard at the door finally let our group enter. When you go through the foyer you can see the living room off to the right with the music room in the distance. The dining room is to the left but I don’t have a photo; there must have been too many tourists in the way! I did get a view of the kitchen. Elvis paid $1000 for the microwave in here. Notice the cool TV sets in the kitchen and the music room.
(Mouse over any photo to see caption or click to enlarge, then use arrows to scroll through the images.)
One of the rooms that Elvis put in when he added on to the house was the rather large Jungle Room. This was his den, though some might call it his “man cave.” Many of the items there were imported from Hawaii or are in a Hawaiian style. He had just finished filming “Blue Hawaii” and wanted to capture that atmosphere. The stone wall in the fifth photo above is a “waterfall” but it’s no longer used because it leaks. Although you can’t see it in these photos, the ceiling of the Jungle Room is covered in green carpeting.
I don’t remember this, but from the first photo below, it looks like when we headed down to the basement, the stairway had a mirrored ceiling. The big guy in front of me kind of blocked my view! The television room definitely had a mirrored ceiling. There were three TVs in there, side-by-side, so Elvis could watch all three networks at the same time. He got the idea from President Lyndon Johnson who reportedly watched multiple news programs at once. Elvis was quite the TV junkie. There are a total of 14 sets located throughout Graceland. I wonder how many TVs Elvis would have there if he were alive today!
Elvis loved to play pool. His pool room is something else! It was decorated, walls and ceiling, with more than 300 yards of pleated fabric. The fabric went up the walls and flowed out onto the ceiling. All of the pieces of fabric meet in the center of the ceiling over the pool table. The colorful fabric walls were decorated with very colorful works of art.
Tourists are not allowed on the second floor where most of the bedrooms are located and where Elvis died. However, items from a couple of the upstairs rooms — his office and his upstairs wardrobe room — have been relocated downstairs so that visitors can see them. The office of Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley, is located in a building just outside the house and is also part of the tour.
We then headed out into the backyard where we saw Elvis’ kidney-shaped swimming pool. In the distance, several horses were grazing in the pasture. Elvis purchased his first horse for Priscilla. After she took to riding “like a natural,” Elvis decided to buy a horse for himself. He eventually found a big golden palomino that he named Rising Sun, and soon became quite passionate about his horses.
Elvis had a Meditation Garden created in his backyard so that he had a quiet place to escape and deal with the problems in his life. It’s now the place where he and his family are buried. After his death in 1977, Elvis was first buried next to his mother’s grave in Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis. Nine days later three men were arrested who were planning to rob the grave and demand money for the return of the body. As a result, Graceland was given approval to be used for burial and the bodies of Elvis and his mother, Gladys, were moved there. Later his father, Vernon, and grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley, were also buried there.
It’s impossible to think about Elvis without thinking of his records, his movies and his performances. So, I think I should close this post with a variety of photos from Graceland that illustrate these aspects of his life.
“Elvis has left the building.“