A Hunka, Hunka Elvisosity

The man loitering along the stone wall says he’d recently been in a mental hospital, and no one doubts his word.

Before the doctors cured him, he believed himself to be Elvis Presley. Now, he merely wishes that he was. The wish is written all over his face, not to mention his back and shoulders. Much of the man’s torso, in fact, is covered with tattoos of Elvis’ visage, and his soft hairless midriff is given over to a painstakingly rendered portrait of the Graceland estate, just beyond the wall, where Presley died 20 years ago on Aug. 16, 1977.

What makes the man so remarkable, however, isn’t his fanatical love of the King, nor his fondness for king-sized tattoos. What makes him stand out is the way he blends in. Only during something called “Elvis

Week,” only now, only here, could such a man say, “I belong.”

Some call it Tribute Week. Some, specially disdainful Memphians, call it Death Week. But the nine-day festival of concerts and contests, sing-alongs and silent auctions, guided tours and graveside vigils--a roundelay of events that draws 50,000 people each year to this riverfront city where Presley lived beginning in 1948--has been officially titled Elvis Week by the all-controlling Graceland marketers who run it.

In the closing moments of this surreal century, Elvis Week may be the most surreal experience America can offer: Imagine a major metropolitan area where a man without mitten-sized mutton chops and a white sequined jumpsuit feels out of place, peculiar.

Picture a city of 600,000 that grows overnight by more than 10%, a city where German Elvises roam the streets, Italian Elvises haunt the bars and East European Elvises loiter in the lobbies. Try to envision whole blocks of hotels and restaurants overflowing with Swedish and Australian and Belgian Elvis impersonators, rubbing caped shoulders with Elvis fans and Elvis scribes and former Elvis associates, every Elvis-loving one of them gobbling a deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, the favorite snack of their idol. It’s a state of total Elvisness, a critical mass of Elvisosity, complicated by a large, incongruous convention of Tupperware saleswomen meeting simultaneously in town.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says David Beckwith, a Los Angeles-based public relations executive helping promote Elvis Week, who counts 90 TV crews from throughout the world planning to cover at least one of the events. “The other day I started to wonder if we were doing the Olympics.”

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Despite all the outward silliness, Elvis Week is a mostly serious affair, which builds to an emotional crescendo at a stirring candlelight vigil. Each year, in the predawn hours leading up to the anniversary, fans gather around the grave and light candles in Presley’s honor. The first candle is lit the night before, from the eternal flame at the head of the grave. The last flickers out some 12 hours later, when the hardiest fans finally straggle back to their hotels and motels, at least one of which features a guitar-shaped swimming pool and 24-hour Elvis movies in every room.

This year’s vigil, scheduled to start at sunset tonight, is expected to draw 20,000 fans.

Some, however, are taking the solemnity up a notch. For them, Elvis Week has become manic, almost hypnotic. These are the people who come not to praise Elvis, nor to bury him, but to pray to him. And the sight of them frightens even their most rabid fellow fans.

“I hate to say this,” says Becky Yancey, a Memphian who served as Presley’s personal secretary from 1962 until 1975, “but in the year 2000-and-something there’ll be an Elvis religion. That’s sad. That’s scary. Because he was just a human being.”

Whether or not he was just a human being--a point hotly debated on Memphis street corners and radio stations--Presley is a martyr now, particularly to the Elvis-as-saint adherents. He’s a martyr to the record companies, a martyr to the money-grubbers, a martyr to the muse who saddled him with such a terrifying gift.

The reasons for this astonishing ascent from king to King of Kings are varied and subtle. First, his brilliant bridging of black and white musical strains in a segregated society still earns him respect and gratitude. Second, his rags-to-sequins life story continues to inspire rural Southern fans, who still see in him their home-grown Cinderelvis. Then, too, his love of home and family still charms ever more generations of fans, as do his gorgeous voice and face, which seem as fresh today as they were in 1954 when he burst onto the scene.

Plus, there’s that hair.

But even those who knew Presley--in fact, made their living worshiping him--wonder if the adulation isn’t spinning out of control.

“It’s hard for me to believe that here we are, 20 years after the man’s dead, and this is going on,” says Joe Esposito, Presley’s road manager and one of the first people to discover Presley’s lifeless, drug-filled body on the floor of Graceland’s master bathroom, his silk pajamas around his ankles. “Some of those people have no life. They need to get one of their own.”

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Somehow, many say, forecasts of a future “Elvis Christ” seem less ludicrous when you see yet another caravan of charter buses pulling up to Graceland, delivering another few hundred self-proclaimed “pilgrims,” who peer over the stone fence at the white-columned estate as though viewing the Holy Land.

Bethlehemphis.

“Elvis’ death is viewed by these people--and this isn’t an exaggeration--as kind of a sacred death,” says Peter Harry Brown, who recently co-authored a life of Elvis called “Down at the End of Lonely Street” (Dutton). “If you talk to these people, they love reliving this sad, pomp-surrounded death. They feel like he was sacrificed. Even when it isn’t the anniversary, the place is a circus.”

No matter how many times they’ve been to Graceland--the second most visited home in the U.S., after the White House--pilgrims who “come home” for Elvis Week want to walk again through the hermetically preserved Presley mansion, with its roped-off rooms and freeze-dried 1977 decor. They want to be reunited with the basement and kitchen, they want to revisit every chrome nook and shag-carpeted cranny, including the avocado-green carpet adorning the ceiling of the famous Jungle Room.

“They say blue is his favorite color,” says Debbie Edwards of New Jersey, after viewing the navy blue-and-canary yellow TV room.

“Was,” corrects her young daughter, Celeste. “Was!”

“Yes, was,” the mother says, chastened.

“Elvis,” reads one note left at Presley’s grave, which is alongside the house, just off the kidney-shaped swimming pool. “Thanks for carpeting the ceilings of our hearts with love and joy.”

“People ask, ‘Why do you go back, it’s not like they redecorate,’ ” says Harry Elstob, an Elvis-sideburned South Carolina resident who made his sixth trip to Graceland this week. “But when Elvis died, it was like a member of the immediate family died.”

He stops and wipes a tear, not the first he’s shed this week. Not the last, either.

Pulling himself together, Elstob displays the Elvis belt buckle he’s worn every day, without fail, for two decades. He crows about his collection of 23 Elvis neckties and his prized Elvis wheel cover, which protects the spare on his van. Then he sparks up a filterless Lucky Strike and explains that, like any religion, Elvis worship brings people together, unites them in a common cause.

“My wife was in the gift shop yesterday,” he says, “and a woman bumped into her by mistake. The woman said, ‘Oh, excuse me, I thought you were my friend.’ And my wife turned to her and said: ‘I am.’ ”

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After Graceland proper, the gift shops directly across Elvis Presley Boulevard are the most revered way stations in any pilgrim’s progress. The same multimillion dollar company that tightly controls Elvis Week also licenses Elvis merchandise, giving official sanction to everything from Elvis baby spoons to Elvis body lotion. Such energetic hawking of all things Elvis does more than amass a king’s ransom for Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, and ex-wife Priscilla. It primes the worldwide martyr market.

Elvis Presley Enterprises now grosses an estimated $50 million each year--some say the number is twice that--by treating every Elvis-related object as sacred. Souvenirs as holy relics. Knickknacks as artifacts. How else to explain the photocopies of Presley’s last will and testament that retail for $2?

“It started out with just an altar,” explains Marjorie Wilkinson, president of the Elvis Fan Club of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, describing the Elvis shrine at her home. “But then it expanded. Over my fireplace I now have a black velvet peacock painting that was in the living room at Graceland when Elvis died.”

Wilkinson paid dearly for the painting at a collectibles auction, she says, and she shelled out for the pukka necklace that once belonged to her idol.

“Elvis,” she says soberly, “is a palate on which you paint whatever you need.”

Marilyn Hills, a receptionist from Brighton, England, fell in love with Elvis when she was 12, and her love endures to this day, despite his worldwide fame, his many women, his death.

It was his voice that won her, as a young girl listening to the radio. “The fact that he was the most beautiful man who ever walked the face of the earth was a bonus,” she says.

When news broke that he’d died, Hills plunged into a mourning period that lasted months. Then she scrimped and saved and took a second job, until she had enough money to travel here and pay her respects. Despite a busy life caring for her husband and two young daughters, it was the first of many pilgrimages she would make.

“I never thought of him in a sexual sense,” she says one morning, after being among the first to visit the grave when the gates opened at 6 a.m. “Just a loving sense. If ever I met him, I wouldn’t jump all over him. I’d just say thank you.”

She reconsiders. “And maybe touch his hair.”

ON THE WEB

Are you honoring the 20th anniversary of Elvis’ death--er, disappearance--with a special celebration of your own? Or, better yet, have you seen him lately? Join in a discussion on The Times Web site at https://www.latimes.com/elvis.