Illustration by John Amoss
Mary Hinds of Washington D.C., has written speeches for former president George Bush and rubbed shoulders with power brokers at all levels of government. She’s currently at work on two books.
Carol Hodges of Maitland, Australia, stays busy being a wife and mother, while her husband, Peter, hauls crews for a railroad. What links a working-class couple from “down under” to a former insider on Capitol Hill? Simply this: Elvis. While some Memphians tend to lump The King’s fans in one category – big-haired women and sideburned men hanging around Graceland saying, “He wuz a saint!” – interviews with several Elvis fans across country poke a few holes in that stereotype. The Memphis phenomenon who died 20 years ago in August touches people of every age, class, country, and profession. As Jeanne Kalweit, president of an Elvis fan club in Chicago, says, “We’re not all just a bunch of menopausal broads running around in poodle skirts.”
Indeed, they aren’t. Take Jonathan Long of South Pittsburg, Tennessee. He’s only 16 years old and calls Elvis “the best.” Long has started a fan club, will appear as an extra in the made-in-Memphis movie The Road to Graceland, and his goal after high school is to work for Graceland “because you might as well do what you love.”
Or consider Gordon Dakin, 64, of Ancaster, Ontario. He’s a nuclear engineer and a former baseball player with the St. Louis Cardinals farm club. An Elvis fan “from way back,” Dakin says one of the highlights of his year is attending the Elvis convention in Collingwood, Ontario, which draws upwards of 50,000 people. “It’s good to be with people who appreciate his music and the kind things he did for people.”
For every fan, this passion for Presley apparently evolves at different times in different way. Hinds of Washington has been hooked on Elvis since he first wiggled his pelvis back in 1955, but it wasn’t until she visited Graceland with an old college friend in 1993, that she launched a fan club called Elvis on Capitol Hill. “Our member are lawyers, politicians, writers, lobbyists, think-tank members, and news reporters,” says Hinds. “In Washington, your job is your life, so a good way to relieve the stress is to rock-and-roll with Elvis.” But she adds that it’s not just the music these members dig. “We like the scholarly, research angle,” says Hinds, who is working on an annotated bibliography of the King. During the “In Search of Elvis” conference held at the University of Mississippi in 1995 Hinds recalls that “scholars, interns, all sorts of academic types could sit around and talk for hours about Elvis and civil rights, Elvis and the spread of the Pentecostal church...it was fascinating.”
For many fans, however, the King’s charisma strikes a more personal note. “I was homebound with my bedridden mother,” says Kalweit of Chicago, “and one night after Elvis’ death, the movie That’s The Way it Is came on. I wasn’t a fan before, but I heard him singing these beautiful ballads and it just blew me away. I was smitten from that night. He pulled me through a very tough time in my life.”
For an Asian family of fans, Elvis represented hope when life looked awfully bleak. Henry Newinn, 54, was first exposed to Elvis through American G.I.s in his native South Vietnam. “I saw this movie poster with Elvis wearing a red shirt, black pants, red shoes, and I really wanted to look like that,” he says. “I was about 13 at the time.” Years later, when Newinn fled Vietnam with his wife and year-old son after the fall of Saigon, they struggled to find work in Houston, Texas. Even though he had a liberal arts degree and had worked as a manager for the U.S. State Department in Vietnam, the only job Newinn could find for a while was busing tables. Today, Newinn – who’s president of the Asian Worldwide Elvis Fan Club – and his wife are engineers, and their son John, now 23, is a law student at the University of Houston. Through the years, Elvis’ music has given the mjoy, inspiration – and a measure of fame. John, also known as “Elvis John,” frequently dons a white jumpsuit and croons Elvis hits for charity fundraisers, and last year he placed second in Graceland’s Elvis impersonator contest.
If Elvis fans share a love for Elvis, many voice a mutual frustration when it comes to media bashing of the King and his fans. Sitting at a table at Wilson World Hotel, Carol and Peter Hodgess have come from Australia to visit Graceland; this is their second trip. Carol has wonderful impish grin; Peter’s blue eyes are wide and friendly. They are absolutely ordinary, and delightfully so. But these ordinary fans are seldom captured on camera. “The media goes for the outlandish ones every time,” laments Carol.
Todd Morgan, director of creative resources for Graceland, agrees that, especially during Elvis week, the cameras seem to zoom in on the most ridiculous character they can spot. “And then the media hold that person up as being a typical Elvis fan,” says Morgan. “It’s not fair to us or to the fans or to Elvis.” He recalls a conversation with a photographer several years ago. “There was a sideburned guy sort of mugging for the camera, trying to get himself photographed. I told the photographer, ‘That guy is working you.’ He said, ‘I know, but the paper told me to get the imitator picture and come on back.’”
No one denies that bizarre Elvis fans exist. Says Syndi Sylvia, president of Elvis Memphis Style fan club: “There are some crazies out there who go off the deep end. I think they might be lacking something in their lives. But the media just zeroes in on them and that skews the whole thing.”
Stereotyping by the media isn’t the only thing that bugs Sylvia, a former nurse technician and medical records manager who moved with her husband from Cape Cod to Memphis in 1991. Ask her about Memphians’ attitude toward the King and brace yourself for an earful: “Don’t even get me started. I’ve been very disappointed in the way Memphians treat Elvis. If they moved Graceland, Memphis would be nothing more than a little distribution place to move things from point A to point B. They better wake up and smell the coffee.” In the Elvis Memphis Style fan club, less than 20 of the 300 members are from Memphis. Says Sylvia’s husband Roland: “There are Elvis fans in this area, but they stay in the closet until Elvis week. They’re afraid to come out till then.”
Not these folks, though. They’re proud Elvis fans, and you better not diss the King. For many, his weight is a real touchy subject. Hodgess of Australia says, “I heard this guy once, he was about 16 or 17 stones, talking about Elvis’ weight. I said to him, have you looked in the mirror lately?” Jonathan Long recalls one of his classmates referring to a weeklong Elvis special on TV as Fat Man’s Week. “I got really mad,” says Long. “We have to stand up for Elvis because he’s not here to do it for himself.”
Syndi Sylvia won’t take any lip off locals about her devotion to the King. When a coworker once made a snide remark about Elvis fans, Sylvia shot back, “What did you do last week? Watch TV? Feed your face? I raised $2,000 for charity. What did you do?”
Raising money through Elvis fan clubs is common, but some fans says this garners little media attention. “They’d rather focus on the freaks than on the good work we do,” says Kalweit of Chicago. According to Patsy Andersen, manager of fan relations at Graceland, the more than 500 established clubs raise some $300,000 annually. While some of the money helps fund charitable projects in the cities where the clubs are located, a large portion of this amount goes to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the Elvis Presley Trauma Center at The Med.
Andersen says new fan clubs open each year, both in the states and abroad. She recently returned a call to a fan in Russia who was starting a club. “When someone answered the phone in Russian, I thought uh-oh, we have a small problem here. But as soon as I said ‘Graceland,’ that did it. You’d have thought the gates of heaven had opened.”
During her 15 years at Graceland, Andersen has met not only the “ordinary” fans from all over the world, but a host of celebrities, too. “Everybody comes,” she says. Ticking off such names as Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, Sharon Stone, Diane Keaton, and Dan Aykroyd, to name just a few. And while President Bill Clinton has never visited Graceland to her knowledge, Andersen says, “He’s definitely a fan. When the Elvis stamp was issued, [Clinton] had a representative standing in line to buy $10,000 worth of memorabilia.”
Among the celebrities who have visited Graceland is Merv Griffin, who showed up in his limo with his manager totally unannounced. He came in wearing sunglasses, and Andersen made it her secret goal to get him to shed the shades. As he stood before the Wall of Gold, which is stacked 20 feet high with gold records, the glasses came off, recalls Andersen, “and Merv said, ‘You know, Patsy, the man is really bigger than life.’”
For people who love ELvis, the attraction runs deeper than his extraordinary fame, wealth, and talent. Fans speak of his generosity, his spirituality, the way he could speak directly to the heart. Perhaps Carol Hodgess says it best: “His voice was magic, and he had this incredible calming effect that just drew you in. But it’s more than that. He was so sincere. Someone said he had love in his face, and that’s true. Best of all, he cared about his fans. I think he appreciated us as much as we do him.”
