Nancy Rooks started working at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, on May 9, 1967. She was a maid and a cook, and she stayed for years. To the rest of the world, Elvis was the biggest star alive. To Nancy, he was the man she saw at home every day, the one who’d wander into the kitchen and sing while she worked.
One day her daughter took a bad fall and hurt her foot. It wasn’t a little thing. The girl was in real pain and needed a doctor fast.
Nancy called the foot doctor near Graceland. It happened to be the same doctor Elvis used. The office told her he was too busy. There was no room to fit her daughter in.
Anybody who has sat by a phone waiting on a busy doctor knows that sinking feeling. You’ve done everything right and the door still won’t open.
Then Elvis found out.
Here’s what Nancy remembered. He didn’t pass along a message or ask someone else to make a few calls. He picked up the phone himself and called the doctor. A few minutes later he came back to her with the news. The doctor, he said, was “Waiting to see your daughter right now.”
Same office. Same busy doctor. One call from Elvis and the door swung wide open.
And he didn’t stop there. Rooks wrote that Elvis quietly paid the bill too.
This book club reads straight through Nancy’s own memoir, so you can hear how the whole thing played out in her words.
A read-through of Nancy Rooks’s memoir “Inside Graceland,” where she tells the story
That kindness stayed with her for the rest of her life. She’d worked around plenty of important people, and she knew what a boss usually was. Elvis was something else. “Elvis was my boss, but he was much more than that,” she wrote. “He was also like a brother to me.”
She said she was “treated like family over the years, not as an employee,” and that he “was never anything but the perfect gentleman with me.”
Nancy saw the private Elvis, the one the cameras mostly missed. She remembered him in the Graceland music room singing the old gospel hymn “How Great Thou Art,” filling the whole house with it. She wrote it all down in her 2005 book, “Inside Graceland: Elvis’ Maid Remembers.”
So the story in the video above isn’t the Elvis of the stage or the movie posters. It’s the one who heard that a staff member’s child was hurting and simply fixed it, then paid for it without a word. If you’ve only ever known him as the man in the white jumpsuit, it’s a gentle, homey side of him you’ve probably never heard about.