Every big family seems to have one cousin who can make anybody laugh. In the Presley family, that cousin may well have been Harold Loyd.
Harold was Elvis’s first cousin. His mother was one of Gladys Presley’s sisters, so he was a nephew of Elvis’s beloved mom. In 1961 Harold went to work at Graceland, Elvis’s home in Memphis, as a groundskeeper. Later he moved over to security and the front gate.
He told his stories to writer Jack Dennis in 1992 for the San Antonio Headlines Examiner, and the fan site Elvis Australia shared that interview again in 2024. Everything below comes from Harold himself. This clip is posted under his name with the title “A Message From Harold,” so it’s a chance to meet the cousin behind the story before you hear it.
A message from Elvis’s cousin Harold Loyd
The story starts in the den at Graceland. Today that room has a famous nickname, the Jungle Room.
Harold said he walked in one day and Elvis didn’t want company. Elvis hollered at him to get out.
Harold said fine, he’d go. But first he turned his cap sideways and pulled what he called a “terrible, ugly face.”
It worked. Harold said Elvis nearly fell over laughing and told him it was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen. If you’ve never been inside the room where it happened, this walk-through shows you the den just the way visitors see it now.
Inside the Jungle Room at Graceland
You’d think that would be the end of it. A silly face, a good laugh and back to work.
Instead the face got its own portrait. Harold said they later took a picture of him making it, and “we blew it up an 8×10 and had it framed.”
That framed photo ended up in Las Vegas. According to Harold, Elvis kept it in his dressing room there and looked at it before he went on stage each night. So the King of Rock n’ Roll, about to walk out in front of a full showroom, would stop and grin at his cousin’s goofy mug first.
And the photo had one more trick left.
In December 1975, during one of Elvis’s shows in Las Vegas, Harold said someone “handed it suddenly to Elvis during his show.” Elvis cracked up right there on stage. He showed the picture to the band, the singers and the fans down front.
Harold heard the rest secondhand. He was told that Elvis kept glancing at the photo on top of the piano and laughing for the rest of the show. No film of that moment has turned up. This 8mm film of Elvis on stage in Las Vegas in 1975 lets you see the kind of show that framed face crashed that December.
Elvis on stage in Las Vegas in 1975, on 8mm film
Harold worked for his cousin for years, and he made it clear that Elvis looked out for him. “Anytime I ever got into any kind of trouble or type of jam, he would always help me,” Harold said.
Out of everything Elvis could have kept in that dressing room, he chose a photo of Harold with his cap turned sideways, making the ugliest face Elvis had ever seen. That says a lot about the two of them.