In the spring of 1960, a black Lincoln Continental pulled up outside a boarding school in Virginia to collect three small boys. Billy was 7. Rick was 6. David was 4. Their mother introduced them to the man beside her as their new daddy — and then the car drove them to their new home. That home was Graceland, and the young man who came out to meet them was Elvis Presley.
To understand how strange this was, you need the background. Elvis’s mother Gladys had died in 1958, and it destroyed him. She was the most important person in his life. While he was serving in the Army in Germany, his grieving father Vernon met a woman named Dee Stanley, who was married to an Army sergeant and had three young sons. Dee divorced her husband, and on July 3, 1960, she married Vernon Presley.
Elvis did not take it well. He was furious that his father could think about remarrying so soon after Gladys died, and he refused to attend the wedding. He and Dee would never be close. To Elvis, his mother could not be replaced by anyone.
But here’s what makes this story worth telling. Whatever Elvis felt about Dee, he did not take it out on her children. He invited all three boys to come and live at Graceland — and according to Billy Stanley, who wrote about it years later, Elvis turned to his father and said something the boys never forgot: “I always wanted a little brother. And now I have three.”
Elvis Presley’s Stepbrothers on Elvis and Living at Graceland
What happened the next morning tells you everything about how Elvis welcomed people. Rick Stanley walked outside and found the yard at Graceland transformed. It was full of cats, dogs, ponies, scooters, bicycles, tricycles and swing sets — all of it bought for three boys who had turned up the day before.
Rick’s memory of those years is simple: “I felt very much at home when I was at Graceland.” He remembered evening after evening of throwing a football around in the back garden with the biggest star on the planet.
They stayed for most of the next seventeen years. And as they grew up, the boys didn’t go off to college or build separate careers — they went to work for their brother, touring with Elvis as aides and bodyguards, part of the group known as the Memphis Mafia. Their mother later admitted she resented how completely her family’s lives had been swallowed by his. Vernon and Dee divorced at the end of 1974.
The boys never got over him. Rick Stanley became a Baptist pastor and a minister of music, and spent his life talking about the Elvis he knew — a man who, in Rick’s words, could turn it on in front of 12,000 people and then come offstage acting like a little kid, insecure, asking if the show had gone okay. “Actually,” Rick said, “he was a very shy person.” He was still telling stories about his brother when he died in 2019. David Stanley still performs a show about him in Las Vegas. The little boy who got out of that Lincoln at Graceland aged four now stands on stage and calls it “My Brother Elvis.”