Lisa Marie said you could always tell when her dad was feeling good. He’d come downstairs, round everybody up and announce they were all going out.
And when Elvis took the family to the movies, he didn’t just buy a few tickets. He rented the whole theater. The entire place, all to themselves.
In her memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown,” written with her daughter Riley Keough, Lisa Marie remembered the good times at Graceland. “My dad loved to have fun and he loved everybody else to have fun with him, and he loved to laugh,” she wrote.
So when he closed down a theater in town for a private night at the movies, what do you think was up on that big screen?
Can you guess the two kinds of films Elvis picked again and again?
Take a second. He loved to laugh, remember. That’s a clue right there.
The theme that still makes everyone grin
Press play on this and turn the sound up. If this tune doesn’t put a smile on your face, nothing will. It’s one half of the answer.
Here’s what Lisa Marie wrote, according to her memoir. On those nights, “he’d shut the theatre down in town and take everyone to see a James Bond movie or The Pink Panther.” Because that quote has been confirmed on one book-review site rather than checked against the page ourselves, we’ll let her words stand as reported.
But what a pairing, right? Bumbling Inspector Clouseau in one corner and suave secret agent James Bond in the other. The man who could have screened anything on earth, and what he wanted was to laugh and to watch a little intrigue. Just like the rest of us.
Picture the scene. A whole movie house, dark and empty except for the Presleys and their friends, popcorn going around, Elvis laughing right along with everyone else at Peter Sellers tripping over himself. Nobody crowding him, nobody pointing a camera, nobody asking for a thing. Only Elvis and his people in the dark, having the time of their lives.
A taste of the spy side of the bill
And here’s the other half of Elvis’s double feature. This is the sort of cool, sharp picture he’d put up on that private screen.
It tells you a lot about him, honestly. Elvis could be larger than life on stage, but at home the joys were simple. A funny detective. A spy in a tuxedo. His people all around him in the dark, having fun.
That’s the version of Elvis his daughter wanted us to remember. Not the legend. The dad who shut down a theater just because he was in a good mood and wanted everyone to laugh.
Watch the clips above, then imagine the whole family in that empty theater, grinning in the glow of the screen.