Elvis Presley could sing just about anything. He could walk out in front of thousands of people and own the room without a flicker of nerves. But there were two little words most of us say all the time that he just couldn’t get out of his mouth.
The men and women who worked beside him noticed it fast. And they figured out his own way around it.
Joe Esposito would know better than almost anyone. Joe was Elvis’s road manager and one of his closest friends, the guy who ran the whole machine behind the show for years. The way he told it, when Elvis made a mistake, he never fixed it with words.
Here’s Joe talking about the Elvis he knew, the friend behind the famous face.
Joe Esposito remembers his best friend Elvis
“If he made a mistake, he wouldn’t say he was wrong,” Joe said. “He would just buy you something.”
And he meant it big. Joe once needed a house, so Elvis helped him find one, wrote the ten thousand dollar down payment check without a second of haggling, then handed Joe a raise so he could cover the rest. That was how the man said a lot of things he couldn’t put into plain words.
One of his backup singers watched the exact same habit up close.
Myrna Smith sang with the Sweet Inspirations, the group that backed Elvis on stage for years. She told the whole thing to writer David Adams in a long interview, years before she passed away in 2010. Two little words, she said, were the ones he could never manage.
“Because he didn’t know how to say I’m sorry about anything,” Myrna said.
Then she told a story that shows you exactly what he’d do instead.
There’d been a backstage mix-up one night, the kind of thing that leaves people upset. Elvis knew it. So he asked Myrna to come help him pick out a car, and he told her it was for his dad. He took her to a Cadillac lot after hours, when the place was shut and dark.
He walked the rows with a flashlight until he found a blue Eldorado he liked.
Myrna Smith of the Sweet Inspirations on the Elvis she knew
Then he pointed it out and said, “There’s your car.” It had never been for his dad at all. The whole late-night trip was his way of saying sorry without ever once having to say it.
He’d even been careful enough to ask first. Before any of it, Elvis checked with Jerry Schilling, another longtime member of his inner circle who happened to be dating Myrna back then. “Is it all right if I buy Myrna a car?” he asked him.
So the two words never did come. They didn’t have to. Myrna tells the rest of it better than anyone, flashlight and all, in her own voice.