When Elvis still sat up, he generally dined in his Kon Tiki chair in front of the waterfall in Graceland’s jungle room. Brooding over the rare sit-down dinners in the dining room was the 36-inch color TV, which was always kept on; Elvis also had a closed-circuit TV so he could watch the kitchen help. To find all this out, Adler rounded up the usual suspects–Elvis’s cook, his nurse, his valet (and stepbrother) Billy Stanley–and even talked to the director of nutrition services for the Memphis schools and a “quartermaster historian” at the Pentagon, to learn what Elvis ate in the high-school cafeteria and the army mess. Stanley said he was fired for asking, “Where you gonna put it?” when Elvis started in on a second pizza; but he’s still loyal to the King’s memory. “It wasn’t really fat,” Stanley says. “It was water retention.”
Elvis fans loved him anyway; now that he’s gone, his gluttony seems merely part of the self-parodic grandeur. Wretched excess? A contradiction in terms.
Elvis’s last dinners, Adler writes, “were almost transcendental,” as if he were seeking to prove that the laws of cause and effect didn’t apply to him. We don’t know about transcendental, but judging by his very last–four scoops of Sealtest ice cream and six Chips Ahoy cookies, for a man who could well have afforded larks’ tongues and truffles–they were just about perfect.
