what was elvis like in person? (like the rest of us, only a few know)

TWO QUORA QUESTIONS an­swered in one day, both about Elvis. (Check out the pre­vious post on this site’s front page for the first ques­tion and my an­swer.) The ques­tion this time was,“What was Elvis Presley like in person?” This is a dif­fi­cult ques­tion to an­swer for those of us who did not know the man per­son­ally during his life.

I chose to an­swer with an anec­dote about an­other per­son’s anec­dotal ac­count of their meeting Elvis way back when. My an­swer is the text be­tween the two im­ages below:

Elvis was polite and easily engaged

Thirty years ago, I lived in an apart­ment in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona. I had two re­ally nice neigh­bors, Frank and Sandy. The latter had been in the hotel busi­ness for years, and told me his Elvis story: he was working at a re­ally swanky hotel in Hawaii when Presley was there in 1961 filming Blue Hawaii.

Sandy was not an Elvis fan. In fact, he pre­ferred pop vo­cals, old-fashioned jazz, and show tunes. The first time he met the young Elvis, the singer had been out all day and was di­sheveled, sweaty, and in a hurry. Sandy was not im­pressed, and it more or less con­firmed his dis­taste for rock & roll in gen­eral and Elvis Presley in par­tic­ular.

A few days late, Sandy bumped into the singer in com­pletely dif­ferent cir­cum­stances and had a com­pletely op­po­site ex­pe­ri­ence: Elvis was po­lite, warm, friendly, and easily en­gaged. Sandy said he was per­haps the most charis­matic person that he had ever met—and Sandy had met plenty of movie and recording stars over the years!

In­ter­est­ingly, Sandy was sur­pris­ingly taken aback that Elvis was so at ease and playful with gays, a topic rarely dis­cussed among Presley fans and his­to­rians.

FEATURED IMAGE: Joan Blackman and Elvis Presley in a scene from Blue Hawaii, filmed and re­leased in 1961. The movie and its music were big im­prove­ments over the pre­vious year’s movie and sound­track album, G.I. Blues. But both were light­weight and huge steps down from the music-based movies of the ’50s (Loving You, Jail­house Rock, and King Creole). Nonethe­less, Blue Hawaii sold lots tickets and records and made lots of money and laid the foun­da­tion for the next few years of Pres­ley’s ca­reer.