Elvis Presley gave away a lot in his life. One of his friends once said, “If he got a car, everybody got one.” But one gift was different.
In 1974 he bought one of his oldest friends a house in the hills of Los Angeles. He didn’t brag about it and he didn’t tell the press. For years, hardly anyone outside his circle knew.
The friend was Jerry Schilling.
Jerry first met Elvis in 1954, when he was a 12-year-old kid in Memphis and the 19-year-old Elvis picked him for a Sunday football game in the park. He went on to work for Elvis for years and became one of his closest friends.
The two had more in common than music. “We grew up in the same neighborhood, poor part of Memphis,” Jerry told CNN’s Larry King in 2007. Jerry has told stories about those early Memphis days for decades, and in this British TV interview he goes back to what it was like growing up around Elvis.
Jerry Schilling remembers growing up with Elvis
By the 1970s, Jerry had been living at Elvis’s house in Beverly Hills. When he offered to move out, Elvis wanted him to stay. But Jerry wanted a place of his own.
He’d even found one. It belonged to TV writer Rick Husky, and Jerry wanted to buy it. The trouble was, he couldn’t afford it.
When Elvis heard, he moved fast. According to Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick, Elvis called the owner at 3 a.m. and offered to write a check on the spot.
The house sits off Sunset Boulevard. A fan who goes by Spa Guy made a video about it, so you can get a sense of the hillside home that came out of that late-night phone call.
The Los Angeles house Elvis bought for Jerry
“Very generous. The home I live in today, he bought me in ’74,” Jerry told Larry King.
Then he explained what made this gift so different from Elvis’s flashier ones. “You know, I think, Larry, this is how sensitive he was. He didn’t talk about it.”
Here’s what Elvis understood without ever needing to say it out loud. Jerry’s mother passed away when he was a year old. He grew up without a real home of his own.
Elvis knew. And when the time came, he told Jerry why he’d done it.
As Guralnick tells it, Elvis asked him at the housewarming, “Jerry, you know why I bought you this home?” Then he answered his own question: “you never had a home, and I wanted to be the one to give it to you.”
Jerry gave Larry King his own version, all these years later. “And in 1974, he said, you know, you never had a home, I want to be the one to give it to you. And nobody knew about it.”
He was clear that it was never a show. “The guys knew about it, but you know, it wasn’t for publicity. And I still live there and I’ll always live there,” he told Larry King in 2007.
Jerry still shares his Elvis stories with fans. Here he is at the Westgate in Las Vegas just last month, telling stories about his old friend.
Jerry Schilling shares his Elvis stories in Las Vegas
And if you want more time with Jerry, this interview has him looking back on the Elvis he knew up close.
Jerry Schilling looks back on his years with Elvis
Elvis could have bought Jerry almost anything. He picked the one thing Jerry had gone without since he was a baby, and then he kept quiet about it.
Jerry put it simply in a 2007 interview: “Elvis bought this house for me.”