In 1974, Elvis Presley talked to a young woman in a car park in Memphis. Her name was Magnolia Smith — everybody called her Maggie — and she was a college student with no money and no way of getting to and from her classes. She had recently lost her father, and she and her mother were struggling.
By the end of that conversation, Elvis had bought her a car and given her a job at Graceland.
Peter Guralnick, the most respected of Elvis’s biographers, records the basic sequence: Elvis bought a car for Maggie and her mother, then hired her, then, a few days later, bought her a second car of her own so she could commute to school. She was still at Graceland in 1977.
But what makes this story worth telling is what he actually asked her to do. According to her own account, Elvis made her main job passing her degree. She was studying biology, and he was, by every description, relentless about it. He rang Graceland to check on her grades and had her give him a full report over the phone—how her classes were going, what she was studying, how she was doing.
Maggie (Magnolia Smith) and Elvis: The Hidden Father-Daughter Bond That Changed Both Their Lives
He paid her tuition. He paid her a regular wage. And her actual instruction was to sit somewhere quiet and do her homework.
When she was not studying, she answered the phone, helped out wherever she was needed, and spent a lot of time with Lisa Marie. She traveled with the family in Memphis and out on the West Coast.
She has described him, more than once, as a father figure — which lands very differently when you know she had recently lost her own. And her most affecting memories are not about cars or wages. They are of Elvis sitting and crying with her, praying with her, and reading to her. She specifically remembered him reading “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran, the book he loved more than almost any other. In her words: “He gave me that book. You see, I was closer than a lot of people thought.”
One honest note. Maggie’s exact role is disputed. Some accounts from the Memphis Mafia describe her simply as a maid Elvis felt sorry for. A more recent book argues she was his executive assistant and Lisa Marie’s nanny.
Nobody disputes the core of it. A man met a struggling student by chance, bought her a car, paid her fees, and made passing her exams her actual job.