In spring 1960, a black Lincoln Continental pulled up outside a boarding school in Virginia to pick up 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. 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. While he served in the Army in Germany, his grieving father, Vernon, met Dee Stanley, who was married to an Army sergeant and had three young sons. Dee divorced her husband, and on 3 July 1960 she married Vernon.
Elvis was furious. He could not accept his father remarrying so soon after Gladys died, and he refused to attend the wedding. He and Dee were never close.
Elvis Presley’s Stepbrothers on Elvis and Living at Graceland
But here is what makes this worth telling. Whatever Elvis felt about Dee, he did not take it out on her children. He invited all three boys to 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.”
What happened the next morning tells you everything about how he welcomed people. Rick walked outside and found the garden transformed — cats, dogs, ponies, scooters, bicycles, tricycles and swing sets, all bought overnight for three boys who had turned up the day before.
Rick’s summary of those years: “I felt very much at home when I was at Graceland.” He remembered evening after evening throwing a football around the back lawn with the biggest star on the planet.
They stayed for most of the next seventeen years, eventually working for him as aides and bodyguards.
Rick became a Baptist pastor and spent his life describing the Elvis he knew — a man who could command 12,000 people and then come offstage acting like a little kid, asking anxiously whether the show had gone all right. “Actually, he was a very shy person.”
David still performs a show in Las Vegas about him. He calls it “My Brother Elvis.”