Heartbreak Hotel
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Casual Heartbreak Hotel Museums are always changing, and the change is rarely good. In 1999, David Brooks recorded the decline and fall of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in these...
...It has been minting money ever since...
...Facing a mounting pile of bills, Priscilla decided to open Graceland to the public in 1982...
...The trust was managed first by his father, Vernon, and later by Elvis's ex-wife, Priscilla...
...His note to J. Edgar Hoover was my favorite, but there were a bunch on display, each testifying to his wonderfully sincere goofiness...
...But this attempt to tame the wild side of Elvis seems doomed...
...She talked about his obsession with food—how he would sometimes request the same dish for dinner night after night for months at a time...
...One of them, The Coming Aquarian Age, lies open to Chapter XI, titled "The Coming Aquarian Age and the Emancipation of Woman...
...On his desk is a stack of books...
...The audio-tour featured Priscilla's anecdotes about life with Elvis...
...Priscilla has been removed from the audiotour, replaced by her dippy daughter, who seems to have no concrete recollections of her father other than the "vibe" he gave the place...
...The tour featured Elvis's massive collection of law enforcement badges...
...But the best part of the old Grace-land tour was the wall featuring his correspondence...
...Lisa Marie still technically owns Graceland itself, but the administration of the museum was turned over to CKX, which immediately, and ominously, proclaimed that it wanted to "enhance the visitor's experience...
...The second observes, "ENLIGHTENMENT...
...His legendary meeting with Richard Nixon occurred because he wanted the president to deputize him as a "federal agent at large...
...On the page, Elvis has left three small notes in the margins...
...Then, in 2005, Lisa Marie sold 85 percent of the estate to an entertainment conglomerate, CKX, Inc...
...Graceland has always been a strange kind of museum...
...Gone is the shot-out TV set...
...Graceland records some 600,000 ticket-buying visitors per year...
...Where Priscilla once hinted at its dark nature in the audiotour, Lisa Marie makes his expiring at the age of 42 seem unremarkable...
...She recalled the frequent gunplay and how Elvis once shot a television in his basement TV room so he wouldn't have to get up from the couch to turn it off...
...I cannot recite his full catalogue from the Sun years or trace the complete Dutch genealogy of "Colonel" Tom Parker the way real devotees can...
...Today tickets for adults range from $22 to $55, depending on the tour you take...
...In the Elvis world, this matters...
...the real man was too great a figure to be bent into submission...
...Gone is any hint of the reckless use of firearms...
...Upon his death, Elvis left the property in a trust to his daughter, Lisa Marie...
...Gone is any mention of Elvis's eating habits...
...The first, by the chapter title, asks, "NEW...
...To hear the current telling, you'd think he was a rockabilly Horatio Alger...
...I was unable to find a single one of his letters...
...He had asked nearly every lawman in the Union for honorary status...
...The changing presentation of the monuments on the national mall, well covered in The Weekly Standard by Andrew Ferguson and Catesby Leigh, has been nothing less than a disaster...
...Elvis was a prolific letter-writer...
...For a while, all was well...
...In one of the displays at the new Graceland, the museum tries to intellectualize Elvis, claiming he was an avid reader...
...One of my colleagues at the office, for instance, made his first pilgrimage to Graceland back when Elvis's grandma Minnie Mae still lived there...
...Jonathan V Last...
...It gives me no pleasure now to report on the "progress" of another great American landmark: Elvis Presley's Graceland...
...Graceland now emphasizes Elvis's movie roles (the better to sell DVDs) and charity work...
...Pur chased by a 22-year-old Elvis Presley in 1957, it was his only real adult home...
...I have, however, been to Graceland before...
...Try as they might, the Lilliputians can't sanitize everything...
...And sitting alone in the bottom right-hand corner is the third, where Elvis has scribbled, with no further explanation, "KARATE...
...All of the rough edges that made Elvis endearing have been sanded to soft, boring curves...
...And the museum's recent transformation is obvious even to me...
...Even Elvis's death has been airbrushed...
...When Lisa Marie turned 25, she took control of the trust, although she allowed Priscilla to guide much of the handling of Graceland...
...When I visited in 1996, Graceland was seductively charming...
...I am but a casual Elvis fan...
...Today, nearly all of this is gone, banished in the attempt to make Elvis into some sort of modern-day saint...
...In 1999, David Brooks recorded the decline and fall of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in these pages...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 8
