Lots of dads buy their kids a puppy. Only Elvis would turn a late-night trip to the pet store into the kind of story people still tell today.
Lisa Marie Presley was just a little girl when it happened, and years later she shared the memory herself. She told an interviewer back in 2013 that her room and her dad’s room sat on the top floor of Graceland, a part of the house fans never get to see. Elvis loved being close to her. He’d even set up a spot in her room “to watch TV just to be near me,” she said.
But the top floor is only where the story starts. The best part happened out in the middle of the night.
Here’s Lisa Marie telling a TV audience what it was really like to grow up in that famous house.
Lisa Marie remembers growing up at Graceland
Lisa Marie said Elvis did “crazy things in the middle of the night.” One of those things was bundling her up and taking her to a pet store to get her a dog. Sweet enough on its own. A dad and his girl, out past bedtime, picking out a puppy.
Then Elvis being Elvis, he didn’t stop at one.
In her own words, he went on “getting 50 other people a dog” too. One trip for one little girl’s puppy turned into dogs for 50 more folks, just because he could and because that was his heart. The number is hers, remembered the way she told it.
She shared the same memory again in a 2014 piece she wrote herself, listing the pet store among the outings she loved most with her dad. For Lisa Marie these weren’t stories about a superstar. They were simply nights with Daddy.
Below is a warm look at Lisa Marie back at Graceland years later, walking the grounds where all of this happened.
Lisa Marie back home at Graceland
What makes the pet store memory stick isn’t the puppy. It’s what it says about the man. Elvis had a giving streak that didn’t know when to quit, and his daughter got a front row seat to it her whole childhood.
No account ever named the breed or the store or even the year, and that’s fine by most fans. Some nights with Elvis were just too big to measure. A little girl asked for a dog, and her father found a way to make dozens of strangers smile on the same trip.
Watch the clips above to hear Lisa Marie describe her dad in her own voice, and see the home where those midnight adventures took place.