The Commercial Appeal arrived at Graceland at 6:45 every morning. This was a routine that had established itself in the months since Elvis had bought the house, the specific rhythm of a household finding its shape. The paper at the gate, the drive up, the paper on the kitchen table by the time anyone was awake until noon from a late return the previous night, would sometimes sit with it over coffee and move through it with the unhurried quality of someone who has no particular agenda for the morning and is willing to let the newspaper set one. On the morning of September 14th, 1956, he was at the kitchen table at 7:15 when he found the piece. It was not on the front page. It was on page three in the opinion section, where the Commercial Appeal ran the longer considered pieces, not news, which was what had happened, but commentary, which was what someone thought about what had happened and wanted others to think
about it, too. The byline was Harold Simmons, who had been the paper’s primary editorial voice for 11 years and whose name in that position carried the specific weight of an institution speaking through a person. The headline was direct. Elvis read it. He read it the way he read things when the thing required reading carefully, not skimming, not the glancing relationship with text that is sufficient for most of what newspapers contain, but actually reading word by word, following the argument from its beginning through its evidence to its conclusion. Harold Simmons had spent 11 years developing a voice that was measured and authoritative and Memphian in the specific way that meant it spoke from inside the community’s self-understanding rather than from outside it. And he had used that voice to construct, across seven paragraphs, a comprehensive case for the proposition that Elvis Presley was damaging the
young people of Memphis. The moral framework was there. The specific language of 1956 concern about where popular culture was heading and who was responsible for heading it there. The religious dimension was there. References to what the entertainment being offered was doing to the relationship between young people and the values that the community held.
The social dimension was there. The concerts, the screaming, the behavior that the screaming represented, what it suggested about the erosion of decorum and the standards that decorum protected. The personal dimension was there. The hip movements, the hair, the specific physical vocabulary of a performance style that Simmons found not merely aesthetically objectionable, but morally significant.
Seven paragraphs. Harold Simmons had spent 11 years learning how to build an argument and he had built one. Elvis read to the end. He set the paper down on the kitchen table. He drank his coffee. He did not say anything to anyone that morning about what he had read. Gladys came in at 7:45 and he folded the paper to the sports page before she got to the table, which was not something he planned, but something his hands did before his mind had instructed them to.
He did not want Gladys to read it. Not because it would upset her. It would upset her, but that was not the primary reason. Because the paper was his to deal with and he did not want to share the dealing of it. He had eggs and toast and finished his coffee and went back to his room. He lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling for a while.
He was 21 years old. He had been famous for approximately eight months, which was long enough to have learned that the famous version of himself was thing that existed separately from the actual version, that the famous version received opinions and assessments and judgments that were about it rather than about him, and that most of what was written about the famous version did not require a response because responding would only extend the conversation in a direction he could not control.
He knew this. He also knew something else, which was harder to name and which was sitting in him as he looked at the ceiling of his bedroom at Graceland on the morning of September 14th. Harold Simmons had grown up in Memphis, had been writing for the Commercial Appeal for 11 years, had in those 11 years written about Memphis with the specific investment of someone who considered the city’s character to be a matter of personal concern, who felt in some real sense responsible for it, as if the city’s moral condition were something that his words could influence and that he was therefore obligated to influence carefully. He had written in seven paragraphs that Elvis Presley was making Memphis worse. Elvis lay on his bed and thought about this. Not about whether it was true, he had his own answer to that and it was confident and required no external validation, but about what it meant that someone
like Harold Simmons, in a paper like the Commercial Appeal, had said it. What it meant in the city. How it landed in the houses of the people he had grown up among, the people who read the paper at their kitchen tables the way he had read it at his, who trusted Harold Simmons’ voice to tell them what to think about things that required thinking about.
He thought about what he could do about it. He could call the paper and ask for a response, the famous person’s recourse, the right of reply, the correction of the record through the same channel that had carried the original assertion. He had people who knew how to do this, who could draft something and send it, and ensure it landed properly.
He could ignore it. This was the response his instincts initially offered, the dignified silence of someone who has decided that engagement validates what they are refusing to engage with. There was a logic to this. The logic was real. He lay on the ceiling and he thought about Harold Simmons’ seven paragraphs and about the specific claim at their center, which was that he was bad for young people, and about what that claim deserved as a response.
By 8:30 he had decided. The church was on Macon Road, which was not far from Graceland, a 20-minute drive through the East Memphis neighborhoods that had the specific quality of residential Memphis in the morning, quiet and unhurried, the streets not yet at the volume of the day’s full operation. It was a small church, not the church Elvis had grown up in.
That was the Assembly of God on Adams Street in Tupelo, which was a different city and a different life. This was a church he had driven past before, had registered in the peripheral way you register familiar landmarks, a white-painted building with a simple sign and a parking lot that held 16 cars on a full Sunday, and considerably fewer on a weekday morning.
He had called ahead, not to the church. He had called the woman whose name he had been given by someone whose name he no longer remembered, a chain of connections that had produced, eventually, the information that the church ran a Wednesday morning program for the children of the neighborhood, a gathering that had been going for 3 years and that happened every Wednesday at 9:00, regardless of attendance.
“You can come,” the woman had said. “We’d We’d glad to have you.” He had not told her what the morning’s paper contained. He had not told anyone. He arrived at 8:50. The woman at the door was named Mrs. Adkins, and she had the specific quality of someone who has been running programs for children for long enough to have developed a comprehensive patience with the unexpected.
She looked at Elvis Presley standing on the church steps on a Wednesday morning and received the information with the equanimity of someone who has been given unexpected information before and has found that equanimity is the correct response. “Come in,” she said. Inside the church’s fellowship hall, which was a room off the main sanctuary with folding tables and metal chairs and the specific atmosphere of a space that serves multiple functions and is therefore fully committed to none of them, there were 14 children. They ranged from 6 to 12 years old. They were at the tables with the materials of whatever activity Mrs. Adkins had planned for the morning. Paper and crayons from the look of it, the kind of project that is self-evidently worthwhile without requiring justification. Some of them looked up when Elvis came in. Some of them did not. The ones who recognized him, and several of them did in the immediate way of children who absorb cultural information
without being able to account for how they absorbed it, went through the sequence that recognition produces in children, the double take, the confirming look, the expression that moves through disbelief towards a more complicated response. The ones who didn’t recognize him simply saw a tall young man with dark hair who had come into the room.
Elvis sat down at one of the folding tables. Mrs. Adkins did not make an announcement. She did not introduce him or explain his presence or frame it in any way. She simply returned to the activity she had been supervising and allowed the room to absorb the new element and reorganize around it at its own pace, which is what experienced children’s program organizers understand how to do.
A girl of about eight who had been working on something with a red crayon looked up at him from across the table. “Are you Elvis?” she said. “Yes.” he said. She considered this for a moment. “Do you want a crayon?” she said. “Sure.” he said. She slid the box across the table. He stayed for two hours.
He sat at the folding tables and did the activities that the 14 children were doing, the paper and crayons, and after that a game that involved cards and counting, and after that a period of free time in which the children moved around the room in the loose purposeful way of children who have been given permission to determine their own activity and are exercising the permission seriously.
He talked to the children the way he talked to people when he was not performing the famous version of himself, directly, with the quality of someone who is actually interested in the response to the questions they’re asking. He asked about school and about families and about what they liked and what they didn’t like, and he received the answers with the full attention of someone who has learned that children can tell immediately when an adult is genuinely listening and when they are performing listening to a child and that performing listening to a child is a waste of both parties’ time. Several of the children knew who he was. Some of them mentioned it. “My sister has your record.” and he responded to these mentions with the ease of someone who has learned to receive this kind of information without making it the center of the interaction. Most of them, after the first few minutes, simply treated him as someone who was there. This was the thing he had wanted. Not to be unrecognized. He had no illusion about that and it was not the
point, but to be there in a room with children doing the ordinary things that were done in a room with children, being the person he was rather than the person Harold Simmons had described in seven paragraphs that morning. He helped a six-year-old named Thomas with a card game that Thomas did not fully understand.
He listened to a nine-year-old named Patricia describe in considerable detail a horse that she had seen at a fair. He sat beside a boy named David who was 11 years old and was drawing something that required his complete concentration and who did not speak to Elvis for the entire two hours except once when he showed Elvis the drawing without explanation and Elvis looked at it with the quality of someone actually looking and said it was good and David nodded and returned to the drawing.
Mrs. Adkins moved through the room with the practiced efficiency of someone managing an operation they have run many times. She did not treat Elvis differently than she treated anyone else in the room which was its own form of respect, the implicit acknowledgement that in this room the relevant credential was showing up and he had shown up and that was sufficient.
At 11:00 the program ended. The children put on their coats and said goodbye to Mrs. Adkins and filed out toward the cars that were waiting for them in the parking lot. Several of them said goodbye to Elvis with the ease of children saying goodbye to someone they have spent a morning with which is to say without ceremony, without the weight of his specific identity, simply with the ordinary farewell of temporary companions.
Thomas shook his hand. It was not a gesture Thomas had planned. It was simply what occurred to him at the moment of departure, the formal expression of a six-year-old who has decided that a handshake is the appropriate conclusion of a morning’s acquaintance. Elvis shook it. Mrs. Adkins walked him to the door.
They stood on the church steps in the September morning air, which had the specific quality of Memphis September, warm still, the summer not yet entirely relinquished, but with something in it that suggested the coming change. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “Thank you for having me,” he said. She looked at him for a moment with the frank, assessing quality of someone who has been watching people for long enough to read them with some accuracy.
“Was there something specific,” she said, “that brought you this morning?” Elvis looked at the parking lot, at the cars leaving with their children, at the Macon Road beyond the parking lot, the ordinary Wednesday morning Memphis traffic moving in its ordinary Wednesday morning way. “I read something,” he said, “this morning in the paper.
” Mrs. Adkins waited. “It said I was bad for young people,” he said. The September morning held this. “And you thought,” Mrs. Adkins said, “that you’d come spend a morning with some young people.” “Yes, ma’am,” he said. She looked at him with the expression of someone whose assessment has just been confirmed.
“Harold Simmons,” she said. He looked at her. “I’ve been reading Harold Simmons for 11 years,” she said. “He means well.” She paused. “He’s often wrong.” Elvis said nothing. “He won’t change his mind,” she said, “not about this. That’s not who Harold Simmons is.” She looked at the street. “But the children you sat with this morning, Thomas and Patricia and David, they’ll remember you were here, that you came and you sat down and you listened to them.
” She paused. “That counts for something, even if Harold Simmons never knows about it. “He won’t,” Elvis said. “Nobody will.” Mrs. Adkins looked at him. “Good,” she said. He drove back to Graceland through the September morning. The city moved past the windows of the car, the way Memphis moved on an ordinary Wednesday, without urgency, without drama, the specific quality of a city at midmorning, when the rush of the start of the day has settled and the urgency of the afternoon has not yet arrived. He did not think about Harold Simmons’ seven paragraphs. He thought about Thomas’s handshake, about Patricia’s horse, about David’s drawing, which had been a detailed and serious rendering of something that Elvis had not been able to identify precisely, but that had clearly meant something specific to David, and had been executed with the complete
concentration of someone for whom the drawing was the most important thing in the room. He had not written a response to the commercial appeal. He had not called a press conference or issued a statement or asked anyone with a legal background to look at the language of the piece and advise him on his options.
He had not told Parker, who would have had opinions, several of them useful and several of them beside the point. He had gone to a church on Macon Road and sat at a folding table with 14 children for 2 hours. He turned onto the drive at Graceland. In the years that followed, the person who told this story was not Elvis.
Elvis did not tell it. He did not tell it the week it happened or the month or the year or any of the years after that when he might have told it and the telling would have served him in various ways. The person who told it was Joe Esposito, who had not been there, had found out about it later, much later, in the indirect way that you find out about the things the people close to you did when you were not watching.
He never mentioned it. Joe said in the telling, “Not once. I found out from someone at the church years later who recognized me and asked if I knew Elvis had come by one Wednesday in 1956.” Joe had paused in the telling. “I said I didn’t know.” “And the person said, ‘He sat with the kids for two hours. Didn’t tell anyone.
Just showed up.'” Joe had looked at whoever he was telling the story. “That was Elvis,” he said. “That was who he actually was.” He paused. “He didn’t answer that article,” Joe said. “He went to the church.”
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