Pauline Nicholson spent years in the kitchen at Graceland, and she had her own name for the man she worked for.
To her, Elvis Presley was “Mr. P.”
Pauline was a cook and housekeeper at Graceland, the Memphis mansion Elvis called home. She came to work there in the mid-1960s, thanks to a neighbor named Cleo Smith, who introduced her to Elvis. Cleo already had a good idea of what Pauline could do in a kitchen. As Pauline’s son, Ossie Nicholson Jr., put it, “She knew my mother cooked well.”
So Pauline went to work for one of the most famous men in the world. And the two of them got along.
Elvis would sometimes come into the kitchen and talk with her. She sometimes looked after his little girl, Lisa Marie, too. To Pauline, the job turned into something closer to family.
“Elvis was like a son to her, to hear her talk about it,” Roslyn Guest told The Commercial Appeal, the Memphis newspaper, in 2005.
The kitchen was the center of Pauline’s world at Graceland. For years it stayed off the public tour, and this fan video explains why it took so long for visitors to finally see the room where she spent her days.
Inside the Graceland kitchen where Pauline cooked
Then came 1974, and a hard year for the Nicholson family.
Pauline’s husband, Ossie Nicholson Sr., was laid off from his job. For any family, that’s scary news.
Elvis found out.
He hired Ossie Sr. himself, as a guard at Graceland. Just like that, Pauline’s husband had work again, and he had it at the same house where his wife was already part of the household.
It’s the kind of thing Pauline’s family never forgot, and it tells you how Elvis felt about the people who worked in his home.
Pauline stayed on long after Elvis was gone. She kept cooking for the Presley family for years. And the family kept coming back to her.
At Christmas in 2004, Lisa Marie and Priscilla came to Memphis. They asked Pauline to come and cook for them. The little girl she used to look after was all grown up and still wanted Pauline’s cooking for the holidays.
Fans who want to see Pauline herself can find her in the 1981 documentary “This Is Elvis.” For a look at the rest of the house she knew so well, Graceland’s own video tour walks through the mansion where she worked for so many years.
Graceland’s own video tour of the mansion
Pauline Nicholson passed away in July 2005. She was 76.
Her son said that in her later years, she loved to talk about the old days. “She relived her time with him,” he told the paper.
Those memories went back to a kitchen in Memphis, and to the day a man she called Mr. P made sure her family would be okay.