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.
