Inside Graceland: Elvis' Maid Remembers (6 page)

I was the lucky one that had to carry it up to him when it was ready. By this time he had settled down, and I was able to convince him that we had never received his call in the first place, and that it had not been intentional.

He immediately apologized to me, and, shortly after finishing his meal, came downstairs and apologized to the others who had been there. We all knew it had not been him, but the effects of the medication that had caused the outburst. And, typical of Elvis, we could tell for the next day or so that he really regretted having acted that way in front of all of us.

Most of the time, he was like an overgrown teddy bear to be around. And he loved to play practical jokes on everyone. Unfortunately, none of the staff at Graceland was immune to them, including yours truly. I was the “victim” of his pranks more times than I care to remember.

One day, I was making up Charlie Hodge’s bed in his bedroom downstairs in the basement (located behind the TV room). I was humming along, not paying attention to anything except what I was doing, when I heard Elvis in the next room. I didn’t think much about it and went right on making up the bed when, all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elvis’ hand appear and then quickly disappear at the door. At about the same time I heard him yell “duck”, as a small firecracker came sailing into the room and exploded about ten feet from me!

I jumped and screamed all at the same time! I’m not sure what I said, but it was enough for Elvis to come into the room and apologize to me, as best he could, considering the fact that he was laughing so hard that he fell onto Charlie’s bed. Before long, I was laughing too.

As any true Elvis fan knows, he loved playing with all kinds of fireworks. He would send one of his Memphis Mafia buddies across the state line into Arkansas to buy a carload of fireworks for special holiday events. Also, on a whim, he would decide it was time to “play war” with fireworks, and, to those of us who didn’t actively participate, these were times to find a safe hiding place inside, so as not to get “hit”.

One afternoon, during one such war game, a roman candle went astray, (as they always did), and went through one of the den windows, starting a small fire in the drapes right inside the window. Vernon was sitting in the den when it happened and jumped up, said a few choice words about how his son was going to “kill everyone”, and, while he began beating the fire out, yelled for me to get a water hose for him. I ran outside, grabbed the first hose I saw laying on the lawn, and rushed it back inside to him. I then ran outside and turned on the water. Within seconds I heard him yelling even louder. Upon rushing back inside, I realized I had taken him a sprinkler hose, with small holes all along the hose for watering small beds of flowers. Needless to say, it was not the hose he had wanted.

Eventually, the right hose was found and the fire was put out. After which I got a lesson from Vernon on the difference between a regular hose and a sprinkler hose.

Another occasion involving fireworks took place one early afternoon. I was cooking something in the kitchen when Elvis and a few of his buddies decided to have some fun. They went outside, into the backyard, and began shooting fireworks at one another. As usual, one of the errant fireworks exploded against the back of the jungle room, jolting everyone inside the house with a thunderous noise. We all went running outside but could not find where the roman candle had gone. All we could see was a little bit of smoke coming from behind the flashing of the air conditioning units. One of the guys got a hose, (the right one this time) and sprayed the area down for several minutes until no more smoke could be seen. Confident that the problem had been taken care of, Elvis and the guys went on with their “battle” for several more hours, finally calling it quits.

Later that evening they all decided to go out for the night, leaving the rest of us at the house doing our usual routines. Sometime, around midnight, someone came rushing inside screaming that there were flames shooting out of the outside wall around the air conditioning unit.

We all rushed outside and, sure enough, the entire area was practically engulfed in flames. Luckily, George Coleman was at the house doing some electrical work, and was able to get the flames under control. To be on the safe side, however, it was determined that we probably needed to have the fire department come out and make sure the fire was not smoldering under the wallboard.

Within several minutes, what seemed like about a thousand firetrucks, with red lights flashing, were lighting up the entire back area of Graceland. The firemen were very nice, as usual, and, after several minutes of checking, determined that George’s efforts had indeed taken care of the problem. They left, after having awakened all of Whitehaven with their wailing sirens.

The next day, as Elvis was walking by George, who was sitting at the counter drinking a cup of coffee, Elvis winked at George and said, “So, I hear you guys had a little excitement last night!” And that was all that was ever said about almost burning the house down.

Just another interesting evening at the Presley residence.

One day I was busily cleaning Priscilla’s upstairs bathroom, located off the room Elvis used as his office. He came into the office, sat down at his desk, and began to work on something. He must not have been in the mood to work on it that day because he called me into the office and said, “Nancy, come over here and sing with me.”

(Before going on with this story, I must tell you that it finally became, after some time, fairly routine and comfortable for me, Nancy Rooks, to sing along with THE Elvis Presley. It happened on such a regular basis, along with any other person who might be around when he wanted to sing and didn’t want to do it alone, that I finally did become fairly comfortable with it. Amazing, but true!)

Elvis went over and sat down at his piano and called for me to stand next to him. I was standing to the left of him and he began to play and sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” I joined in singing and we made it through that song. He started playing and singing another song, I don’t remember which one it was, but we both made it into several lines of the song when we both had a memory lapse at the same time and could not remember the next words.

After joking around about it for a few seconds he began to hum parts of it, and then sing, as he got to the parts he remembered, then hum again as he got to more words he couldn’t remember. I began doing the same thing and, between the two of us, we were singing and then humming, singing and then humming, when, all of a sudden Charlie Hodge walked into the room and, in amazement, asked, “What in the world are you two doing?”

Elvis, without missing a beat, said, “What do you THINK we’re doing, we’re SINGING!” Charlie paused for a second, then said, “Well, you’re KILLING that song.”

As is widely known, Elvis loved guns and would not hesitate to use one in the most mundane circumstances.

I remember being in the kitchen when one of the maintenance men came in and offhandedly mentioned having just seen a small snake crawling up one of the trees in the front yard near the house. Elvis, in one of his all too typical ideas to take care of the problem, decided to go outside and see for himself. Naturally, the few of us gathered in the kitchen followed him outside to see what he would do.

He went over to the tree and, apparently getting a quick glance at the snake, yelled, “Nancy, go get me a gun!” Accustomed as I was to these types of things by now, I casually asked, “Which gun, Mr. Elvis?” He laughed and said, “ANY gun, I don’t care! Just hurry before this snake gets away.” I rushed inside, ran upstairs to his office and grabbed a long barreled gun of some type from his gun case, and rushed it back outside to him. By that time I’m sure that little snake was probably in Mississippi, but, having perceived that Graceland was being overrun by snakes, Elvis grabbed the gun, warned everybody to stand back, and then blasted the tree full of holes with a deafening roar. (I can only imagine what the usual group of fans idling around the front gate that day must have thought!) Then, with the barrel smoking like in one of his western movies, he laughed, told everyone it was safe to be on the grounds of Graceland again, and calmly walked back into his mansion, confident that at least that snake, which of course he never hit, would never be back again. Another routine pest problem taken care of at Graceland.

Speaking of snakes, we did, in the late sixties, occasionally find a small green snake or garter snake down in the basement. Dodger got to where she refused to go downstairs because she was so afraid of seeing a snake down there.

I personally killed a very small green snake at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the jungle room one morning. I killed it with a metal rod I got from the nearby laundry room. It’s not all that unusual, I guess, considering that the basement was once just an open unfinished room with window openings all around it before Elvis had it all redone. The maintenance men eventually found and plugged all the openings, thus putting an end to the critters in the basement. That never mattered to Dodger, though, and, as far as I know, she never went back down into the basement again.

Going back to guns at Graceland, I remember another time I was busily involved in doing something in the kitchen when, all of a sudden, I heard a very loud “pop” in the other room. Thinking it was too loud to be a firecracker, I went running into the foyer, which is located just beneath his upstairs bathroom, in time to see a fine mist of sheetrock dust, followed by a stream, at first, and, then, a deluge of water pouring from the ceiling near the front door above the foyer. I ran down the hallway to a small closet where we kept table linens and such, and grabbed an armful of whatever was there and went back and threw them on the floor to try and help absorb the water.

I then ran upstairs, yelling, “Mr. Elvis, are you ok?” After hurriedly knocking on two doors, I ended up in his bathroom standing side by side with Elvis, still dressed in his pajamas, with a smoking gun in his hand, and a sheepish grin on his face.

With my heart pounding I tried, as politely as I could, to ask him what had happened. (Of course, all I would have had to have done is to look at the shattered toilet, in a million pieces, to realize that he had shot the commode!) He grinned, muttered something about how he had never liked that toilet anyway, and walked calmly back into his bedroom where he sprawled out on his bed and began watching TV.

I never found out what made him mad enough to blow the commode to pieces. And, of course, I never asked him again.

Aunt Delta ended up getting Mike McGregor and Earl Pritchett to run to the local plumbing supply store, buy a new black commode, and install it as if nothing unusual had ever happened. (You can still barely see where the repair was made in the ceiling of the foyer as you first walk in the front door. Look up and slightly to the right, near the entrance going into the living room.)

Then there was the time that Elvis decided Priscilla needed to learn how to shoot a gun. I don’t think she had ever fired one before, but that didn’t matter to Elvis. When he decided something needed to be done, it needed to be done right then and there. He assured Priscilla, who was a little apprehensive about firearms to begin with, that it was an easy thing to learn, and that he could make her an expert marksman in no time.

Elvis and his boys had long used the old well house, connected to the office in back, as a shooting range. Earl Pritchett and Mike McGregor had banded several large telephone poles together and placed them right inside the door to the well house. Paper targets would then be placed against the telephone poles and the shooting would begin.

So the stage was set. Elvis and about ten of his buddies got several guns together and set up a table out in the back yard, right behind the jungle room, to put them on. Priscilla, a little nervous, was standing next to the table with them. The rest of us, acting as a cheering section, took our places on both sides of the “shooters”, lining all the way from the office back to the house. And then the show began.

Elvis started off by first spending several minutes taking turns firing each of the assembled guns at the old well house target, to make sure he got the “right one” for Priscilla. After deciding on the right one, a long barreled .45, he handed it to Priscilla who almost dropped it due to it’s weight in her hand. We should have known then to move back a little.

After a change of firearm to better suit her small hand, she was ready to become a master marksman. Elvis spent a great deal of time trying to explain to her the proper way to hold it, how to take aim, and how to slowly but surely squeeze the trigger so as not to get a recoil. Having said all that, Priscilla pointed the gun toward the target, closed both eyes, jerked on the trigger, and sent a ricochet of brick flying towards all of us as her bullet completely missed the door to the well house and hit about three feet to the left of it.

It would not have been too bad if she had only fired one shot. But she must have gone into a panic because she kept pulling the trigger, spraying the entire wall area, and again showering anyone within about thirty feet of where she was with brick particles.

It was like a mass stampede as everyone scrambled back toward the house, trying to get out of the way of any future surprises.

Elvis immediately grabbed Priscilla’s hand and took the gun from her. A brief minute of dazed silence then erupted into a round of applause and hooting after we realized no one had been hit.

To her credit, Priscilla did eventually conquer the art of the handgun, but not after ripping quite a few bullet holes in the old well house. I can still see Priscilla firing and Red West standing behind her yelling, “Ten feet to the right!”