In 1954, Elvis Presley was driving a truck for an electrical company in Memphis for about $35 a week. Within two years, he was the most famous young man in America. It happened so fast that he never really got a chance to prepare for it — and for the remaining twenty-one years of his life, he could not do a single ordinary thing in public ever again. Not go to the cinema. Not walk round a shop. Not sit in a park. The most successful entertainer who ever lived spent two decades locked out of normal life.
His solution was to buy the normal life instead, and always after dark. If he wanted to see a film, he rented the entire cinema in Memphis and watched it privately from midnight until dawn. If he wanted to go on a rollercoaster, he rented the whole amusement park at closing time and had every ride, every game and every hot dog stand kept running all night for him and his friends. He rented roller rinks the same way.
He could not even move around the country like a person. On tour, he would come offstage and get straight into a car to drive through the night to the next town. He traveled under false names — for the last eight years of his life he checked into hotels as “Jon Burrows” — because putting Elvis Presley in a hotel register would shut the building down.
The affection of the crowds was genuinely dangerous, too. Fans did not just want to see him; they wanted a piece of him. He was regularly scratched and clawed by people trying to tear off a piece of clothing or a lock of hair as a souvenir. In 1956, the first time he played Jacksonville, girls chased him into the showers, tore the clothes off his back, and he escaped by climbing up and hanging onto the overhead pipes.
Elvis Presley Reveals the REAL Price Of Fame!! | Rare Interview Footage
Fame did not stop at him, either. It took his parents’ lives too. Vernon and Gladys had spent their whole lives poor and anonymous, and suddenly people were turning up at their house at all hours. Gladys in particular never adjusted. She had wanted her son to succeed — but not like this, and not somewhere she could not see him. Those who knew her said the crowds’ hysteria frightened her. She grew lonely and depressed in a mansion she had never asked for, and died at 46, in 1958, while Elvis was in the Army.
Then there was the press. From 1956 onward, newspapers printed whatever they liked about him, and he mostly did not answer back — which let the stories harden into accepted fact. He was called “Elvis the Pelvis,” which he loathed, calling it “the most childish expression I ever heard from an adult.” He was accused of corrupting America’s youth. Ministers preached about his soul from pulpits. A judge in Florida had arrest warrants drawn up and sat in the audience to make sure he behaved.
His girlfriend Linda Thompson, who lived with him for four and a half years, summed up what all of it did to a person better than any biographer has: “Elvis needed more love and care than anybody I’ve ever met. Probably more than anybody in this world ever has.”
He gave the world everything it asked for. He just never got to be an ordinary man again.