When Sinatra passed the idol torch to Elvis
Nearly 40 years after the King’s death, Graceland welcomes its 20 millionth visitor
By Tim Townsend
It was a passing-of-the-torch moment. Elvis Presley, just back from serving in the Army in 1960, appeared on the final season of ABC’s The Frank Sinatra Show.
Sinatra, “greatest of the oldtime teenage troubadours,” according to Life magazine’s coverage of the episode, built a show around a homecoming theme for Presley, “still a reigning favorite after two years in the Army.”
Presley’s departure, to serve as a $82-a-month truck driver with the Third Armored Division in Germany was its own event, with fans traveling to Brooklyn to see him off as more than 100 reporters and photographers looked on. Asked what he’d do on furlough, the 25-year-old said he hoped “to get to Paris — and look up Brigitte Bardot.”
For three hours before setting sail for Europe with 1,300 other soldiers, Presley “tried hard to be both military and obliging,” Life reported. “He signed autographs, posed with a big Teddy bear and answered some foolish questions with humor and good sense.”
When Presley returned home, ABC won a battle to air his first post-Army TV performance, paying $125,000 (about $1 million today) for the honor. Sinatra lobbied for Presley to appear on his show, and the two performed a duet, trading verses of each other’s songs (Sinatra sang “Love Me Tender” and Presley sang “Witchcraft”) while hamming it up for the screaming girls in the audience.
Today’s Sinatra and Presley fans no longer scream, but they are honoring the singers’ memories in 2016. On Monday, 34 years after it opened to the public, Graceland welcomed its 20 millionth paying visitor (31-year-old Londoner, Tiffany Greenoak who was on her honeymoon). A thousand miles northeast of Memphis, in New Jersey, the Hoboken Historical Museum was one of a handful of institutions celebrating Sinatra’s 100 birthday (which was in December).
Nearly five years after Presley’s death, at age 42 in 1977, Graceland had become a tax burden on his estate, and Priscilla Presley decided to open the home up to the public. All 3,024 tickets sold out that first day Graceland opened its doors in 1982. Today, about 500,000 people a year still visit the mansion to see the green shag carpet in the Jungle Room, and get a sense of how the King lived.
“Every time I go in there, I feel like Elvis is going to come down the stairs any minute,” Priscilla Presley told the AP in 2012. “I have no doubt that he’s there, somewhere, his spirit. I think people feel that.”
Just two months after Graceland went public, thousands of Presley’s fans flocked to Memphis to mark the 5th anniversary of his death.
“The 21-room mansion appears stately from the outside,” the New York Times reported on the occasion. “Inside it appears to be decorated largely in mirrors and television sets, three embedded side by side in one wall, one for each major network.”
Graceland immediately attracted Elvis impersonators. Some, according to the Times, “are rather comical, one resembling Don Knotts more than Elvis Presley.”
Across the street from Graceland, Coughlin’s flower shop began raking in the cash, “doing heavy business in floral sprays and arrangements in the shapes of hound dogs and teddy bears.”
One fan paying her respects was North Carolina resident Melinda Lee of Concord, who said she visited Graceland twice a year and was waiting for her child to turn 18 so she could move to Memphis.
“It’s like your first love,” Lee told the Times. “He fulfilled the American dream, and we were part of making it come true.”
