Most people assume Elvis Presley died rich. He very nearly died broke. And within a few years of his death in 1977, the people advising his estate had reached a firm conclusion: Graceland had to be sold.
The arithmetic was brutal. Elvis had roughly $5 million in assets and owed the government around $10 million in tax. That is not a fortune — that is a debt. And the house made things worse, swallowing a fortune every year in maintenance, security, and taxes while generating nothing.
Then things got worse still. Elvis’s father, Vernon, died in 1979, and his grandmother, Minnie Mae, in 1980. That left one heir: Lisa Marie, who was twelve. Somebody had to run an estate she was far too young to touch, and that responsibility fell to her mother — Elvis’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley.
EXCLUSIVE: Priscilla Presley Opens Up About Elvis’ Legacy and How She Almost Lost Graceland
The advice she received was unanimous and, in hindsight, spectacularly wrong. Sell the mansion. Cut the losses. And according to Priscilla, one of the reasons given was a sentence she has never forgotten. “Elvis will be forgotten in six months.”
Her answer was: there is no way we are selling this house.
She was almost entirely alone in that. So instead of selling, she did something nobody in the industry had really tried. In 1981, she hired a young investment man named Jack Soden and set about opening Elvis’s home to the public.
On 7 June 1982, Graceland opened for tours. Three thousand people came on the first day.
Priscilla Presley Gives Exclusive Tour Of Elvis’ Guest House At Graceland | TODAY
It has never stopped. Graceland is now the second-most-visited private home in America, behind only the White House, drawing around 600,000 visitors a year. When Lisa Marie turned 25 in 1993 and finally inherited what her father left her, the estate was no longer worth $1 million. It was valued at roughly $100 million. The wider Presley business has since been valued at $400 to $500 million.
Priscilla kept building, too. She helped design The Guest House at Graceland, a 450-room hotel next to the mansion that opened decades later — complete with a replica of the mansion staircase, suites modeled on Elvis’s private rooms, and a television mounted in the ceiling above the bed, because that is exactly what Elvis had.
He gave the world the music. His house still stands because one woman refused to sell it.