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This Week in Elvis's Life

Read what events happened in Elvis's life during this week.

Newsworthy: From AP:

Elvis 'top-earning dead celebrity' 21 hours ago

Elvis Presley is still the King when it comes to earning power from beyond the grave, according to a website.

Presley has reclaimed the top spot in Forbes.com's list of top-earning dead celebrities, raking in an estimated 49 million dollars in the past 12 months

He last came first in 2005.

John Lennon is second with earnings of 44 million dollars, followed by Charles M. Schulz 35 million dollars, George Harrison 22 million dollars, Albert Einstein 18 million dollars, Andy Warhol 15 million dollars, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) 13 million dollars, Tupac Shakur 9 million dollars, Marilyn Monroe 7 million dollars, Steve McQueen 6 million dollars, James Brown 5 million dollars, Bob Marley 4 million dollars and James Dean 3.5 million dollars.

Presley died in 1977. His estate continues to generate millions from music royalties, DVDs, licensing deals and tourism at Graceland, his mansion in Memphis.

Newsworthy:From the LA Times: Lisa Marie Presley and dad cut single Just as Natalie Cole did in 1991, Lisa Marie Presley has recorded a song with her late father.

Cole's effort was a duet with Nat King Cole on "Unforgettable," a pairing that proved to be a huge commercial hit and went on to win Grammys as song and record of the year. Hank Williams Jr. also won a Grammy for his 1989 posthumous duet with Hank Sr., "There's a Tear in My Beer."

Now Presley has teamed up with papa Elvis on his 1969 track "In the Ghetto." One of the producers was David Foster, who also produced "Unforgettable."

"In the Ghetto" went on sale at iTunes Friday, with all profits going to Presley Place, a program designed to help the homeless.

There is also a video that features Elvis performing in Las Vegas in August 1970 -- when his daughter, now 39, was 2.

-- Lee Margulies
NEWSWORTHY: Go to Elvis.com for all news about the 30th anniversary.
NEWSWORTHY: In an interview with CNN's Larry King at 9 p.m. Wednesday, Priscilla Presley will talk about her former husband. TCM will spend Thursday playing the King's movies.
NEWSWORTHY:From the AP: Hawaii has always had a special spot in the heart of world-famous celebrity Elvis Presley. It was here, in 1961, that he filmed Blue Hawaii. And it is here that he has returned decades after his death.

No, we're not talking about another one of those awful Elvis impersonators with their terrible voices and ugly hair. We're talking about the real deal. Elvis is back, albeit in statue form.

Thursday, television cable network company TV Land installed a bronze state of Elvis in Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii. It has been twenty-four years since the King performed a record-breaking concert here. The bronze statue is about ten feet tall and is on a pedestal that looks like a giant record. He is holding a microphone in one hand while also hanging onto his guitar. The statue is wearing Elvis' famous jumpsuit, and even has his famous hairdo and sideburns.

A plaque on the bronze Elvis statue reads: "Elvis Aloha From Hawaii / The World's First Satellite TV Concert / Jan. 14, 1973 / With supreme talent and sincere humility, Elvis Presley made his gift the world's / Thank you, thank you very much / From the People of TV Land."

The TV Land cable network paid in full for the bronze statue. It is meant to mark a milestone in television history. When Elvis performed here in Honolulu, his concert was broadcast around the world on television and was watched by a couple billion adoring fans. TV Land is also installing similar statues of celebrities and famous TV events at other spots around the US. TV Land's president was there, as well as Honolulu mayor Mufi Hanneman and several hundred Elvis fans who wanted to be on the spot when the bronze statue was unveiled. The mayor got to place the first lei on the statue (a lei is a necklace of flowers). To correlate with the statue's installment, the cable network will also be airing several Elvis specials.

At the statue's unveiling, fan groups did performances as well as took some time to capitalize on the moment; the audience could buy Elvis wigs and other Elvis-related souvenirs.

Not everyone thinks the statue is a great idea. One Honolulu resident said that he thought it was a "stupid and tacky gesture that is basically just a giant ad for the TV company." Others thought it was a wonderful way to pay some honor to a celebrity who loved Hawaii so much.

Either way, Elvis is back.
NEWSWORTHY:A Stanley brother is up to something new. Story from Hollywood Reporter:'King' looks behind rock throne Stanley's Presley feature focuses on musician's last days By Thomas K. Arnold

Aug 9, 2007 While most studio home entertainment divisions are repackaging old Elvis Presley films to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the King of Rock 'n' Roll's death on Aug. 16, 1977, Echo Bridge Home Entertainment is taking a different tack.

The studio is accepting orders for a controversial independent film, produced by Presley's stepbrother, David Stanley, that details his fast decline and final days. "Protecting the King," which stars Tom Sizemore and Matt Barr, will debut Oct. 9 on DVD; it premiered in May at the Festival de Cannes. While the millions of Elvis fans worldwide are a natural target, Stanley warns, "This is not your mother's Elvis. It's not from a fan perspective, but from a young man who grew up with it, lived in it and survived."

The film focuses on the time Stanley spent working for his stepbrother from 1972 until Presley's death five years later. It was a tragic period and a difficult time. "We were on the trail of destruction," Stanley said.

Presley had gotten hooked on prescription drugs after his 1972 divorce, and Stanley and other members of the King's inner circle looked on helplessly as Presley spiraled to his doom. "His medication went from use to abuse," Stanley said. "We did Madison Square Garden in 1972, and he was 165 pounds. By the time he died, he was 255 pounds, and he was taking a handful of sleeping pills and up to nine shots of Demerol just to go to sleep (anywhere) from midnight until 7 or 8 in the morning, and a bunch of amphetamines to wake up around in the 5 in the afternoon."

Stanley was among the first to discover the King's lifeless body in the bathroom of Graceland, Presley's Memphis mansion, a moment also recounted in the film.

"It was in the middle of the afternoon," Stanley recalls. "That moment just stays in my brain. There's no closure for me. Everybody else remembers when he died, but not very many people go through every year and say this is the anniversary, like I do. When I walked in and discovered him dead, he was no rock star, no king. He was the guy who 17 years earlier had picked up a 4-year-old kid and welcomed him into his family."

Stanley, who also wrote and directed the movie for Impello Films, his Dallas-based production company, moved to Graceland as a toddler in 1960, along with his two older brothers. His mother, Dee Stanley, had broken up the family to marry Vernon Presley, who two years earlier had lost his wife, Gladys, Elvis' beloved mother.

"All I knew was we had moved out of this trailer in Virginia and into this mansion in Memphis," Stanley recalled. "The first day we got there, Elvis bent down and said, 'I always wanted a little brother, and now I've got three.' The next day, we woke up and he had bought an entire toy store and had it delivered to us. He spoiled us rotten, from that point on."

Stanley was there when Presley went to Hollywood to make movies, spending summers on studio back lots. He was there when Presley married Priscilla, and he and his family went to Las Vegas in 1969 when Presley started doing live shows again.

When he was 16, Stanley said, he went to work for Presley, and the next five years had such an effect on him that they led to a book and now this film.

"I personally raised the money," Stanley said. "I remember when I used to go the studios with Elvis, and he would say, 'I wish I could direct.' I've always loved movies, and now I got to do something Elvis never did."

Stanley already is working on two more film projects: "Restoring My Father's Honor" details the fate of his dad and how he lost his family to Vernon Presley, while "Predator in the Pool Pit" is about crooked evangelists of the 1980s.
NEWSWORTHY:From the NY Times:Op-Ed Contributor How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?

By PETER GURALNICK Published: August 11, 2007

ONE of the songs Elvis Presley liked to perform in the ’70s was Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” its message clearly spelled out in the title.

Sometimes he would preface it with the 1951 Hank Williams recitation “Men With Broken Hearts,” which may well have been South’s original inspiration. “You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes/Or saw things through his eyes/Or stood and watched with helpless hands/While the heart inside you dies.” For Elvis these two songs were as much about social justice as empathy and understanding: “Help your brother along the road,” the Hank Williams number concluded, “No matter where you start/For the God that made you made them, too/These men with broken hearts.”

In Elvis’s case, this simple lesson was not just a matter of paying lip service to an abstract principle.

It was what he believed, it was what his music had stood for from the start: the breakdown of barriers, both musical and racial. This is not, unfortunately, how it is always perceived 30 years after his death, the anniversary of which is on Thursday. When the singer Mary J. Blige expressed her reservations about performing one of his signature songs, she only gave voice to a view common in the African-American community. “I prayed about it,” she said, “because I know Elvis was a racist.”

And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”

It was due to rock ’n’ roll, he emphasized, that groundbreaking artists like Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who would only recently have been confined to the “race” market, had acquired a broad-based pop following, while the music itself blossomed neither as a regional nor a racial phenomenon but as a joyful new synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore.”

No one could have embraced Paul Ackerman’s formulation more forcefully (or more fully) than Elvis Presley.

Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music — “I don’t sound like nobody.” This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.

It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis’s records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.

“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Elvis told a white reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1956, he used to listen to Arthur Crudup, the blues singer who originated “That’s All Right,” Elvis’s first record. Crudup, he said, used to “bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

It was statements like these that caused Elvis to be seen as something of a hero in the black community in those early years. In Memphis the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed him as a “race man” — not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions. In the summer of 1956, The World reported, “the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

That same year, Elvis also attended the otherwise segregated WDIA Goodwill Revue, an annual charity show put on by the radio station that called itself the “Mother Station of the Negroes.” In the aftermath of the event, a number of Negro newspapers printed photographs of Elvis with both Rufus Thomas and B.B. King (“Thanks, man, for all the early lessons you gave me,” were the words The Tri-State Defender reported he said to Mr. King).

When he returned to the revue the following December, a stylish shot of him “talking shop” with Little Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland appeared in Memphis’s mainstream afternoon paper, The Press-Scimitar, accompanied by a short feature that made Elvis’s feelings abundantly clear. “It was the real thing,” he said, summing up both performance and audience response. “Right from the heart.”

Just how committed he was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue — and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic — in an interview for the black weekly Jet.

Anyone who knew him, he told reporter Louie Robinson, would immediately recognize that he could never have uttered those words. Amid testimonials from black people who did know him, he described his attendance as a teenager at the church of celebrated black gospel composer, the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, whose songs had been recorded by Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward and whose stand on civil rights was well known in the community. (Elvis’s version of “Peace in the Valley,” said Dr. Brewster later, was “one of the best gospel recordings I’ve ever heard.”)

The interview’s underlying point was the same as the underlying point of his music: far from asserting any superiority, he was merely doing his best to find a place in a musical continuum that included breathtaking talents like Ray Charles, Roy Hamilton, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and Howlin’ Wolf on the one hand, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and the Statesmen Quartet on the other. “Let’s face it,” he said of his rhythm and blues influences, “nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”

And as for prejudice, the article concluded, quoting an unnamed source, “To Elvis people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.”

So why didn’t the rumor die? Why did it continue to find common acceptance up to, and past, the point that Chuck D of Public Enemy could declare in 1990, “Elvis was a hero to most... straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain”?

Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history, but the reason for the rumor’s durability, the unassailable logic behind its common acceptance within the black community rests quite simply on the social inequities that have persisted to this day, the fact that we live in a society that is no more perfectly democratic today than it was 50 years ago. As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context, for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?

Elvis would have been the first to agree. When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ’n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.” The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

“The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley,” said Sam Phillips, the Sun Records founder who discovered him, “had to be one of the biggest things that ever happened. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music, but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think?”

Or, as Jake Hess, the incomparable lead singer for the Statesmen Quartet and one of Elvis’s lifelong influences, pointed out: “Elvis was one of those artists, when he sang a song, he just seemed to live every word of it. There’s other people that have a voice that’s maybe as great or greater than Presley’s, but he had that certain something that everybody searches for all during their lifetime.”

To do justice to that gift, to do justice to the spirit of the music, we have to extend ourselves sometimes beyond the narrow confines of our own experience, we have to challenge ourselves to embrace the democratic principle of the music itself, which may in the end be its most precious gift.

Peter Guralnick is the author of “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.”

NEWSWORTHY:Stepbrother Recalls Living With Elvis By MICHAEL CIDONI, Associated Press writer

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

D. Edward Stanley is royalty by marriage. His mother's.

On July 3, 1960, Stanley's mom, Dee, married Vernon Presley, widower father of Elvis Presley, the king of rock 'n' roll. Stanley, only 4 at the time, and his two older brothers moved into Elvis' Graceland estate in Memphis, Tenn.

Over the following 17 years, Stanley would become part of the Presley posse — roadie and bodyguard, witnessing Elvis' career highs and personal lows. Right through to the bitter end: Presley's death from a drug overdose on Aug. 16, 1977.

On the brink of this week's 30th anniversary of Presley's passing, and this fall's DVD release of Stanley's autobiographical drama "Protecting the King," the filmmaker talked to The Associated Press about living with Presley, witnessing his death and protecting his memory.

___

AP: Were you aware of Elvis' fame when you first moved to Graceland?

Stanley: I didn't know what an Elvis Presley was; I didn't know what a "Hound Dog" was. I just knew that I moved into a very big house.

AP: And after that?

Stanley: When I was 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, I was pretty much confined to the 14 acres of land that the Graceland mansion rests upon. I didn't go out much. It was this normal family: holidays, Christmas. Elvis would go to Los Angeles. Elvis would make movies. But when he was home, it was always family time.

AP: By 15 you dropped out of high school and went to work for him.

Stanley: That's when I began to become part of the so-called Memphis Mafia and to travel with him everywhere that he went. Now those were great, fascinating years. I did almost 1,000 concerts with Elvis Presley. We traveled all over the U.S.: the best hotels, private jets, everything that goes along with it. I'll be honest with you, I was a hormone with feet when I was 16, 17, 18, 19 years old. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll was part of my upbringing. Some people went to the University of Southern California, I went to the University of Elvis Presley.

AP: Elvis was living the high life then, too?

Stanley: In '72, '73, '74, '75, Elvis was involved in prescribed medications, and that went from use to abuse. For example, Elvis was 165-168 (pounds), '72 until '74. '75: about 200. '76-'77: 255. These were results of medications prescribed by doctors that Elvis took on a regular basis. This went from a use-to-abuse scenario.

AP: You were there when he died?

Stanley: On Aug. 16, 1977, I was downstairs in the pool room at Graceland. ... Someone came to me and said, "David, Elvis is sick." I had a friend of mine with me (and) I said, "Let me take you home, 'cause we're going to cancel the tour." I didn't think that it meant anything bad. Ran the guy down to the gate, came back up the driveway and, as I did, the ambulance pulled in, and I realized, this is pretty serious.

"I still wasn't freaked ... because Elvis' medication had caused some problems before. We'd canceled shows, been in some situations where we had to pull them through because he'd taken too much. So, I wasn't thinking the worst. I was just thinking, we're canceling another tour. I go in the back way, the ambulance attendants go in the front way, and when I come into Elvis' bathroom, he's laying in a fetal position. ... A couple others were there, and they had converged on him, and they had just rolled him over, and I realized that he was gone. There was no mistake that on that day, Elvis Presley had left the building.

AP: Did someone try to help him?

Stanley: Paramedics said, "What do we have?" They came. They started working. I automatically blurted out, "It's a drug overdose." Now that's a controversial issue with a lot of people. But it's funny how the world has become an authority on my big brother. I was there. I lived with this guy for 17 years. I toured with him for five years. I knew his habits, his medications — whens, wheres, dos, don'ts. That day he took too much and it cost him his life. It was a tragic day.

AP: Give us your take on all the anniversary doings this week.

Stanley: The people can't get enough of him. The inevitable question that you may ask is "Why? Why it is Elvis Presley draws so much attention?" And the answer is the same answer that I had 30 years ago: I have no idea. I don't know why. I just think Elvis was one of those magical dudes, man. He was a highly spiritual individual. He had a tremendous charisma and magnetism that went beyond explanation. I would bet, in 30 years, when I'm 80something, we could be here still talking about Elvis.

AP: How was it to go back to those old days for your DVD?

Stanley: I'll be 52 in a couple weeks, and I was almost 22 when Elvis died. And as I went through the experience, it was almost cathartic. ... Probably the most difficult part was depicting the last day. We're the first film ... that takes you into the bathroom in Elvis Presley's mansion, and shows the dramatic ending of his life. That was tough. I had to stop so many times because I was just weeping, 'cause it was so real to me.

AP: Will Elvis' fans be upset with your portrayal?

Stanley: I am not trying to tear down the icon that Elvis Presley was. He was a fun-loving, caring individual. He was a giver, he was the undisputed king. He had a master's voice. He was a great humanitarian. But the film reminds us that even the great ones are human. And humans are subject to frailty.