People who met Elvis Presley often struggled to explain the first few seconds. Photographs had already prepared them for the dark hair, blue eyes and face that had become recognizable around the world. Yet the recurring surprise was that the larger-than-life image didn’t necessarily make him seem distant. Ginger Alden remembered meeting him with her family years before their later relationship. Elvis recognized her father, walked over, shook hands with everyone and affectionately patted the young Ginger on the head. When she encountered him again at Graceland in 1976, she expected something almost theatrical when he entered the room. Instead, Elvis quickly sat down and began talking with everyone. The icon had entered, but then behaved like a host.
Kathy Westmoreland discovered something similar from the other side of the stage. When she joined Elvis’s show in 1970, she was terrified after her first performance because she didn’t know many of the songs Elvis unexpectedly chose that night. She feared she had made enough mistakes to lose the job. Instead, Elvis came to her dressing room afterward. He didn’t criticize or embarrass her. He reassured her that they had heard her and that she had sounded beautiful. Westmoreland later remembered how effectively Elvis could bring out the best in people. It is a small incident, but perhaps more revealing than another story about a Cadillac or an expensive piece of jewelry. He understood what a frightened person needed to hear.
Elvis himself knew there was a gulf between the person strangers imagined and the man who actually went home after the applause. At his 1972 New York press conference, a reporter asked whether he was satisfied with the public persona surrounding him. Elvis answered with one of his most revealing observations: “The image is one thing and the human being is another.” He added that it was very difficult to live up to an image. Coming from a man who could walk into a room and instantly become its center of gravity, the admission is striking. The world had constructed “Elvis Presley” into something almost superhuman, while Elvis still had to live inside that creation.
Perhaps that pressure explains an especially poignant memory Westmoreland shared years after his death. During one of their final conversations, Elvis suddenly asked her, “How are people going to remember me?” He couldn’t have known how enormous the answer would become. Decades later, people still remember the voice, the clothes, the looks and the impossible electricity of his performances. But the smaller memories may tell us something the photographs cannot: a superstar walking into a nervous singer’s dressing room to reassure her, remembering an old acquaintance years later, or sitting among guests at Graceland and simply talking. The image made Elvis Presley immortal. The human being is why so many people who actually met him never seemed able to forget him.