Elvis' family and friends recall his always saying to others "Come to Memphis, I want to show you Graceland." Elvis is thus regarded as Graceland's original tour guide.
Elvis Presley's Graceland: The Official Guidebook
It gives us great pleasure to invite you to visit the house, to enjoy the ambiance of its rooms, and to experience for yourself this national treasure.Hillary Rodham Clinton, The White House: An Historic Guide
On the covers of the official guidebooks, Graceland and
the White House look pretty much the same. Tight shots on white
porticoes--four classical columns each--evoke the big house, our
standard-issue national icon of gracious living. And, of course,
I am writing this piece because we are all invited for
a visit. Indeed, more people visit these two houses than any others
in the United States, over a million to the White House annually,
three quarters of that number to Graceland (no numbers are available
for drive-bys at Rockingham).
Which brings me to the first big difference: nobody lives
at Graceland. It is different in D.C. According to the White House
guide book, the presidential residence is the "only residence
of a head of state open to the public on a regular basis free
of charge." Is this not exactly what we have been fighting
Saddam about? Putting global resonances aside, this is an extraordinary
piece of information. Indeed, in today's Did-Bill-Kiss-Monica
atmosphere, such national visitation rights suggest that we hold
our presidents' privacy to a pure celebrity standard--inquiring
minds need to know.
The open-door policy relegates the president to shopkeeper status,
living above the store, a tourist attraction in his own home.
This is a hallmark of the contemporary presidency: we all want
to get up close and personal with the man in the White House.
Even I receive a Christmas card from the First Family and, having
gotten a couple, feel that I am entitled to receive them forever.
We expect hospitality from the president--at least a look around
the pad--and we can get it just by showing up at the door. Such
simultaneous free access to both the press-hyped presidential
peccadilloes and to the president's space begs the current questions:
what did the president do, and where did he do it?
This surveillability of the presidency has become increasingly
optical and architectural. I lifted a page from an airline copy
of U.S. News & World Report during my recent swing
to Washington and Memphis to get an axonometric drawing of the
president's inner sanctum, otherwise "off-limits" (like
the upstairs bedrooms) to the public. Actually, this is a somewhat
elastic situation: upstairs is the area of the residence that
is open to the public on payment of a (fairly substantial)
fee. The magazine image maps the Oval Office, study, dining room,
bathroom, pantry, patio, and secretarial office. More interestingly,
the drawing also shows the location of several peepholes, which
allow a calculation of precisely the optic surveillability of
the space, even when it remains behind closed doors. Unshown in
the image (but alluded to in the text) are a photo-electric sensor
system for keeping tabs on the president's movements and a "secret"
tunnel joining the office and the family quarters.
It is a map of the invisible, of the few gaze-free zones in the
White House, not necessarily the scene of the crime but scenes
in which the commission of the hoped-for-crimes might be
undertaken. Elvis was himself no slouch in the peccadilloes department,
and like the White House's, the Graceland tour is structured to
both reveal and conceal, to create a forbidden region where forbidden
pleasures (the pill popping and the girleen bacchanals) might
have taken place. Like the White House, Graceland puts upstairs
off-limits out of respect for the privacy of the King. And it
is off-limits: the flack who took me around had been in Graceland's
employ for ten years and had never mounted those fateful stairs.
Canny management. The unknown is the most fertile ground for fantasy,
and everyone, it seems, who comes to Graceland is interested in
the fundamental mysteries of the cult. Half of the country claims
to have seen Elvis in the past six months, after all. This makes
him strangely visible, which, in turn, makes the preservation
of his privacy a thoroughly reasonable idea.
We have come to accept a standard-issue version of celebrity.
Ours is the culture that invented attention deficit disorder,
and we like our icons as succinct and empty as possible, no nuance
please. By such shorthand, Graceland and the White House produce
the aura of celebrity very similarly. Both offer the spatialized
mysteries of the second floor and the secret ceremonies of the
Oval Office or the Rec Room, sites where we can attach our own
conclusions about the most interesting aspect of the private lives
of celebrity, its appetites and follies. There is also the rock-steady
neoclass, homes-of-the-stars architecture, one of America's signal
contributions to world culture. I remember a trip to Karachi some
years ago, during the days of the Afghan war. The city was awash
with tremendous wealth accumulated by arms and drug smugglers.
A beachfront quarter of the city was filled with their mansions,
and the most magnificent of them was a preternaturally white replica
of the White House at the correct 5/8 Disney scale.
"America's White House bears the stamp of every president"
reads the guidebook. Some, of course, leave a greater imprint
than others, and decorating does not seem to be a particular passion
of the current occupants. Elvis--after buying it from some local
patricians--moved into Graceland and really redid the place.
If the White House is a shrine to the genteel styles of the early
Republic, Graceland is a Mecca of High-Tack, just the decor to
go with sequined jumpsuits and pink Cadillacs. Never mind the
mirrored walls and carpeted ceilings, though, the effect was very
much like my White House visit, at least structurally. Whatever
one's decorative sensibilities, these are both places deeply invested
in period. While the one may be done in Empire Bleu and
the other in Avocado Green and Harvest Gold, this is taste that
is definitely not of our time.
But that is not exactly true either. I was recently at the Getty
Museum in Los Angeles, another fine example of the architecture
of power. Like the presidential mansion, the Getty is an enormous
white (and, er, beige) house stuffed with period decor. The familiar
formula is less successful here than at either Graceland or the
White House because the aura of J. Paul Getty--deceased long before
the realization of his institution--is simply too spare to inflect
the result in the direction of either dignity or kitsch. One grasps
at straws: standing in front of van Gogh's irises, the best I
could do was to put myself in mind of the fate of Getty's grandson's
ear.
Elvis and the president (Elvis is the not surprising Secret Service
handle for Clinton) enjoy(ed) the same perks, beginning with the
relatively modest mansion (Graceland is small!) and continuing
with Air Force One and the fleets of armor-plated cars, the ubiquitous
retainers, and especially that man in the crowd carrying the "football"
with its hot line to Armageddon. On the side of purer pleasure,
the standard scenes of the American presidency include the White
House pool (think JFK skinny-dipping with Fiddle and Faddle) and
the private screening room (think of Nixon and Kissinger watching
Patton for the umpteenth time). Elvis's screening room--done
in delicious mod-squad style by Memphis decorator Bill Eubanks--even
incorporates presidential technology, the triple TVs that Elvis
had admired in the LBJ White House (although Elvis used his to
watch not the three networks' news but a simultaneity of football
games). Elvis had just what the president does (and it is all
on display at Graceland, including the jet), and he lived the
style to the hilt, a wiggling dervish of sociability wading through
a crowd of sycophants and hangers-on.
One of our national myths is that anyone can grow up to occupy
the White House. As Graceland makes abundantly clear, you do not
even need to be president to do it.
1998