Elvis loved a good pair of sunglasses. Big gold frames, tinted lenses, the works. They became part of his look in the 1970s.
One special pair recently turned up at a London auction, and the story behind them is better than any price tag.
They were a custom set, made by a company called Neostyle, in a style named the Nautic 2. Elvis wore them himself. This past month they went under the hammer at Propstore’s big music auction, carrying an estimate of ten to twenty thousand pounds, which is roughly thirteen to twenty-six thousand dollars.
But the money isn’t the good part.
The good part is how banged up these glasses got, and why.
See, Elvis didn’t keep them locked in a case. He gave them to his friend and bodyguard Red West, one of the men who stuck closest to him for years. And these two didn’t just stand around looking tough.
They trained together.
Elvis showing off the martial arts he loved
There’s no film of the glasses actually getting cracked, so the clip above shows something better. It’s Elvis demonstrating the martial arts he was so proud of. Watch how into it he gets. The man took his karate seriously.
Elvis was passionate about martial arts, and he liked to spar. Red West was often his partner. And when two grown men start throwing kicks and punches with a pair of sunglasses in the mix, well, you can guess what happens.
The glasses reportedly got broken during that martial-arts sparring with Red West. More than once.
So these weren’t some fragile display piece. They were the glasses of a man who worked out hard and had a friend willing to trade blows with him for fun.
The journey they took afterward is a story all its own.
Red West held onto them for years, then passed them to another member of Elvis’s inner circle, Charlie Hodge. Charlie kept the glasses for about 25 years. After that they spent roughly 18 years on display at the Elvis Presley Museum up in Niagara Falls, far from Graceland, where fans could come and look at a real piece of Elvis.
Then, this month, they came up for sale in London.
Think of everything one little pair of sunglasses saw. Karate sessions, a famous face, decades passing hand to hand between the men who loved him.
Watch the clip above and picture Elvis mid-kick with those frames on his face. Suddenly a few cracks in the lenses make perfect sense.