From the Observer archive, 13 April 1969: 'The Elvis factory has grossed in excess of $200m'
Elvis Presley married
longtime sweetheart Priscilla in May 1967, ending many a fan's dream.
Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Elvis Presley
still walks as if he's sneering with his legs. When he's on stage, he
still bounces like a Jeep driver crossing a ploughed field. His latest
record, If I Can Dream, is now zooming up the charts both here and in
America. He's 34 and although his blue eyes and dark brown hair are
still glazed and lacquered, his 6ft 2in has developed a stoop. But his
lopsided grin tells us that the Elvis factory has grossed in excess of
$200m.
Fifty-one of his records have sold more than a million
copies each and the total number of discs bearing the Presley imprimatur
is around 300 million. His 29 films have cost an estimated $30m to
produce but have already grossed $200m. He now makes four films a year
for which his fee is $1m a picture, plus 50% of the gross takings.
Merchandising of Elvis products – from stuffed hound-dogs to
heartbreak-pink lipstick – brings in another $3m annually.
Recently,
the London Palladium thought it would invite Elvis to star in a week's
spectacular. The management rang up Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's
guardian. "Come to the Palladium," said the management, "and we can get
you $28,000 for the week." "That's fine for me," said Parker. "Now how
much can you get for Elvis?"
Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a
two-room insanitary shack in Tupelo, a shanty town in Mississippi. He
was brought up in, of course, Memphis, Tennessee. His career had a
classic beginning. An out-of-work truck driver, he stopped off one day
at a local record shop. "How d'ya make a disc?" he asked the girl behind
the pokey desk. "You pay four bucks and you do your stuff into a mic,"
she snarled back. "You do anythin' in particular?" "I'd kinda like to
hear my own voice," said the 18-year-old Presley. "With this," he added,
indicating a battered guitar. "OK," said the girl. "Name?"
"Elvis Presley."
He
[now] describes his first recording as sounding "like someone beatin'
on a bucket lid", grinning with his sparkling white teeth – all capped.
Now his old songs like Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, All Shook Up,
Hound Dog and Are You Lonesome Tonight, are being re-released so that
they will become the gospel for this decade of pop as they were for the
last. An International Elvis Presley Appreciation Society has been
formed. It has its own international anthem called Loyal, Steadfast and
True.
And Presley himself? He lives in total seclusion in a
colonial mansion called Graceland near Nashville, surrounded by 12
beautiful male bodyguards with whom he practises karate and marksmanship
– with water pistols. The house is painted luminous blue and gold and
glows at night. It's filled with stuffed pandas, elephants, monkeys,
dogs and hundreds of teddy-bears. He calls everybody who is older than
him "sir". Purity has remained an essential attribute – no one ever goes
to bed in his movies, although in his latest he does seduce a nun.
"I
don't aim to let this fame business get me," he said recently. He never
ventures out himself, except to the film studios; to keep his fans
appeased, he occasionally sends his solid gold Cadillac on a
coast-to-coast tour so they can touch it. Two years ago, to the horror
of every teenager, he married a longtime sweetheart, Priscilla Beaulieu.
They chose to be married in an hotel. It was called – naturally – the
Aladdin Hotel.
