In the giftshop at the new Elvis exhibition at the Dome, you can buy your own version of his flared white jumpsuits. I can’t think of anyone who could wear one and not look ridiculous — particularly if they had a bit of a weight problem. But Elvis, who would have turned 80 this year, managed to pull it off.
This selection of the best Elvisiana from Graceland is full of the sort of kitschy excess that would sit so awkwardly on anyone else: his outsized solitaire diamond ring, the gold phone by his bedside table, the Harley-Davidson golf carts he used to rocket through Graceland’s grounds.
It’s easy to mock the schlock — and who could feel quite at ease in Graceland’s Jungle Room, with its green shag carpet, faux-fur armchairs and waterfall wall, fringed with fake vegetation? But it’s also easy to forget that Elvis died at Graceland in 1977; that the house, and his final, enduring image, were frozen in the 1970s, the decade that style forgot.
Nineteen seventy-seven was the year Mike Leigh’s tragicomic television play Abigail’s Party was first broadcast. As fans of the play will know, a semi-detached house in suburban London in 1977 hardly looked tasteful. What can you expect of the interiors belonging to the biggest rock star in the world, if they’ve been unchanged for 40 years?
You only have to look at the touching childhood exhibits in the show to see where all the excess — and the self-destructive, final madness — came from. Elvis was born in 1935 into dirt-poor poverty in a tiny two-bedroom shack in Tupelo, a nondescript city in the Mississippi boondocks. His father, Vernon Presley, went to jail for forging a cheque. When he did earn money, it was in short supply — his tax return for 1943, on display in the show, records a $12.56
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