When Larry Geller prepared Elvis Presley’s hair after his death in August 1977, there was no concert waiting at the end of his work. For years, Geller had stood beside Elvis before appearances and important moments, but now his friend was lying still. Accounts of Elvis’s final farewell describe Geller helping prepare him for viewing, an experience he later remembered as deeply personal. Some of the exact dialogue from those hours survives primarily through later recollections, so it deserves to be treated as memory rather than a verbatim contemporary record.
The person who made the moment even harder was Vernon Presley. He had already buried his wife Gladys in 1958. Now, nineteen years later, he was confronting something no parent expects to face: the death of his only surviving son. Geller has recalled Vernon’s grief in heartbreaking terms, including the words “This is the last curtain.” Whether every word was preserved exactly or not, the image behind the recollection is devastating. Elvis had spent his adult life walking through curtains toward audiences. This time there would be no applause on the other side.
Outside Graceland, the scale of the loss was enormous. Fans gathered at the gates and soon passed through the mansion to say goodbye. But inside, celebrity mattered very little. Vernon was not mourning the man on the record covers. He was mourning the boy he and Gladys had raised in Tupelo, the son who had bought Graceland at 22 so his parents could finally experience the security they had never known during his childhood. Less than two years later, Vernon himself died in June 1979. That short distance between father and son’s deaths makes photographs from those final days especially painful.
Years later, Paul Simon described experiencing Graceland in an unexpectedly similar way. He remembered seeing Elvis’s costumes and awards without feeling particularly emotional. Then he reached the grave. Reading the inscription about Elvis’s music touching people around the world, Simon said, “I just start to cry.” He came to think of Graceland as a metaphor for a “state of grace.” Paul McCartney, who had grown up idolizing Elvis, made his own quiet gesture when he visited in 2013: he left a guitar pick at Elvis’s grave, explaining that it was “so Elvis can play guitar in heaven.”
Perhaps that is why Graceland can feel so different once you reach the Meditation Garden. The gold records, jumpsuits and photographs tell the story of Elvis Presley the phenomenon. The graves tell the story of a family. Before there was a King, there were Gladys, Vernon and their surviving little boy trying to make a life together. Fame eventually changed their circumstances beyond recognition, but it never changed the simplest relationship in that story. On those terrible August days in 1977, the world lost Elvis Presley. Vernon Presley lost his son. And no amount of fame could make that goodbye any easier.