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Published 30/05/03
Letter from Memphis
I was in Memphis, Tennessee earlier this year
to lecture on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and found myself outside
the gates of Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. So, talking about
the design icon of Glasgow, Scotland (as one had to describe the
place when in the States!), led me to the shrine of what some would
say was the greatest rock star of all time. He was also a man who
changed America in many different ways, from crossing the lines
between blues and country music and liberating young Americans from
the restrictions in behaviour left over from the Second World War,
to proving that the American dream — namely that someone from
the poorest background could make it in the USA — really did
exist. For Elvis, this meant becoming one of the most famous men
in the world with his own Convair and Lockheed jets.
Now, 26 years after his death, Elvis is $100m a year business,
raising many questions about the ownership of a name, an image and
even a personal history. And what is now Elvis idolatory —
after all, many fans go to Graceland to visit his grave and many
have shrines to Elvis in their own homes — has an echo in Glasgow.
Here — after the city ignored Mackintosh following his death
in 1928 and, in the early 1970s, even planned to abolish his Public
Martyrs and Scotland Street Schools to make way for motorways, and
isolate his Queen's Cross Church in the middle of an interchange
— there has been a change of heart. Shortage of road building
money saved the two schools, while the establishment of the Charles
Rennie Mackintosh Society, with its headquarters in the once threatened
Queen’s Cross Church, also rescued another Mackintosh building,
the Willow Tearooms in Sauchiehall Street, from demolition.
This revival of the tearoom's Room de Luxe, along with new uses
for the schools and the church, has been accompanied by the preservation
(by the National Trust for Scotland) of Mackintosh’s domestic
masterpiece, The Hill House in Helensburgh. More recently, his building
for the Glasgow Herald has been converted into The Lighthouse, Scotland's
centre for architecture, design and the city. At the same time,
much of Mackintosh's furniture has been put back into production
by Cassina and some of his cutlery by Sabattini, while his graphics
can be seen, sometimes in connection with Mackintosh buildings and
products, sometimes not. But there is a downside. Such is Glasgow’s
(Scotland’s?) new love of Mackintosh that a whole host of Mackintosh
inspired products — clocks, watches, mirrors, coasters, key
rings, card cases and jewellery of all kinds — is now on the
market. There has been, as the Film Maker, Murray Grigor put it,
an outbreak of Mockintosh.
But back to Memphis and Graceland. Here, too, there was a hiatus
after Elvis’ death as his estate went into financial decline.
This situation was reversed after his widow, Priscilla Presley,
visited tourist attractions such as Mount Vernon, Monticello, Biltmore
and Hearst's San Simeon, and examined how Disney, and America's
National Park Service managed cultural tourism. She then opened
Graceland officially to the public in 1982. Before then, Elvis’
father, Vernon, had simply welcomed visitors to the house. But,
as Graceland became the centre of what is now a complex, housing
Elvis’ cars and planes as well as shops, restaurants, cinemas
and the Heartbreak Hotel, so began the business of controlling Elvis’
history and the marketing of his name, image and souvenirs. An attempt
was also made — indeed, continues to be made — to control
the way in which all these reflections of Elvis’ life are interpreted
by his fan clubs.
First to be sanitised was Graceland itself, where much of Elvis’
more outrageous interior decoration — blood-red shag carpets,
teardrop lighting, leopard-skin pillows and fake-fur throw rugs
— was replaced by the regal blue and white décor that
is there today. In the words of Mrs Presley’s collaborator,
Jack Soden, ‘We wanted a dignified, super-conservative presentation’.
Next came the sanitisation of his life. This has been achieved
by controlling entrance to Graceland; bussing all visitors up the
very short drive (an idea taken from San Simeon, where the drive
to the mansion is much longer) and initially delivering the history
of Elvis and Graceland by specially trained guides, now replaced
by audio programmes. Hence, his musical, filmic and philanthropic
achievements are underlined and his sexual life, drug addiction
and final days are hardly mentioned. Nor, in the official guide,
is there any discussion about his role as an icon who, besides drawing
upon both black and white American music, also blurred racial and
sexual boundaries and, in fact, changed his own image from that
of a young, black-suited rock star to a much less radical musician
whose white jumpsuits used in his Las Vegas concerts owed much to
Liberace.
This very carefully controlled presentation also applies to the
souvenirs sold in the shops opposite Graceland. Thus, many of the
kinds of memorabilia beloved by Elvis fans, like the black velvet
paintings, are nowhere to be seen because, critics believe, Elvis
Inc sees them as ‘truck stop paraphernalia’. Instead,
the souvenirs are very tasteful and sometimes expensive, like the
$12,000 jukeboxes. This determination by Elvis’ estate to control
the way he is presented and remembered means its relationship with
his fan clubs has been tested to breaking point (especially after
the estate insisted on registering them). Thus there are fan clubs
that refuse to be corralled in this way (and so are banned from
official celebrations); while fans Paul and Elvis MacLeod have set
up their own shrine, Graceland Too, in Holly Springs, Mississippi
containing every conceivable piece of Elvis memorabilia they can
lay their hands on. The place looks a bit like a bordello but they
are interested in the complete man (warts and all!).
Just how much Elvis Inc would like to control everything to do
with Elvis is described in Erika Doss' book, Elvis Culture:
Fans, Faith & Image. She describes the company's
legal action (which it lost) against a night club in Houston called
Velvet Elvis. Also listed is its action (which was successful) in
preventing Joni Mabe in bringing a show based on her Elvis artwork
to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. But the company lost its court
battle in London (England) to prevent Sid Shaw from marketing Elvis
memorabilia under his trademark, Elvisly Yours, and Andrea Berman
continues to put her Cyber Graceland Tour on her website after lawyers
informed her that the doctrine of ‘fair use’ continues
online.
Nevertheless, the decision by a Denver gallery, Core New Art Space,
to turn a show about Elvis, which opened in 1997, into one on the
issue of ownership when Elvis Inc refused to allow the gallery to
use his name shows how difficult the situation has now become. The
gallery retorted by producing a poster in which Elvis’ eyes
were shown as ‘censored’. In California, for example,
Civil Code section 990 (the so-called Celebrity Rights Act) grants
statutory post-mortem rights lasting 50 years which prohibit the
unsanctioned use of the ‘name, voice, signature, photograph
or likeness on or in products, merchandise or goods’ of any
person. Similar laws have been enacted by 12 other states in the
US.
All this, of course, ignores the fact that Elvis himself never
‘owned’ the songs he sang, nor did he exercise any control
over his image (though he did, of course, help to shape it). But
the action taken by Elvis Inc reflects that taken by the estates
of other famous people, including Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx and
Agatha Christie. And it demonstrates just how far big corporations
with the money to pay lawyers are prepared to go to protect their
‘ownership’ of a name, an image and a history.
As for Mackintosh, well, apart from the official designs produced
by Cassina and Sabattini, all his imitators do is to describe their
products as ‘inspired by Mackintosh’. How he would have
viewed the appropriation of his motifs is anyone's guess.
Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith & Image by Erika Doss is published
by The University of Kansas, price $24.95 ISBN 0-7006-0948-2.
Richard Carr
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