"You may have a pink cadillac, but don't you be nobody's fool,” Elvis sang on Baby, Let’s Play House. He did, and he wasn’t.The King amassed a collection of rarecars that would leave many a motorhead drooling with envy. In Eugene Jarecki's new documentary film The King – out now in US cinemas, and coming to the UK this autumn– the filmmaker drives around the States in Elvis's silver 1963 Rolls-Royce Phantom V (which he customised with a bourbon decanter behind the armrest), using the luxury car as a symbol of American excess.
But that Phantom was only the tip of the iceberg: Elvis spent $100,000 on hisCadillac Series 75 Fleetwood Limousine, which had 24-carat gold hubcaps, and diamond dust mixed into its white paintwork for added sparkle. Inside, it was fitted with white mouton fur carpets, a phone, a fridge, a 10-disc automatic record player and even a shoe-buffer.
Anyone wondering where Elvis's car fixation started should look back to his teenage years, when he was making a living as a truck-driver.When he was 16, the rockabilly singer Eddie Bond had told him, “Stick to driving a truck, because you’ll never make it as a singer.” He was determined to prove Bond wrong, and each new car was a way of putting his trucking past further behind him.
"While I was driving a truck, every time a big shiny car drove by, it started me sort of daydreaming," Elvis once said. "I always felt that someday, somehow, something would happen to change everything for me.” It certainly did. If bringing that daydream to life meant stuffing some of the world's most expensive automobiles with gold TVs and purple carpets, who can blame him?
Over the course of his career he owned a Ferrari, a Ford Thunderbird, and a Mercedes, but Cadillacs were always his first choice. A 2002 documentary repeated the claim that he may have bought up to 200 Cadillacs, but the real number is probably closer to 50.His 1955 modelwasoriginally blue, but pink repainted after Baby, Let’s Play House became his firstsingle to hit the national charts.He later gave itto his mother Gladys, who loved it – despite not having a driving licence. It was the most famous of his cars, but it wasn’t his first.
In fact, his very first car was a pink-and-white Cadillac, which his band the Blue Moon Boys used to tour the country for three months, until in June 1955 it belched out a cloud of smoke on the highway from Hope to Texarkana, Arkansas.
“The first car I bought was the most beautiful car I've ever seen,” Elvis once explained in an interview. “It was second hand, but I parked it outside my hotel the day I got it and stayed up all night just looking at it. The next day, it caught fire and burned up on the road.”
By a curious coincidence, its replacement also crashed in Texarkana just three months later, when Elvis’s guitarist Scotty Moore drove it into an oncoming vehicle.
It wasn’t allglamorous cars and dangerous driving. In 1956, the year he released his first album, Elvis got hold of the least rock’n’roll car imaginable: a slow, three-wheeled Messerschmitt KR200. This tiny bubblecar, essentially an airplane co*ckpit on wheels, was developed after Messerschmitt was banned from producing aircraft following the Second World War.
Elvis’s model was burgundy with a black interior, and caught the eye of his favourite tailor, Bernard Lansky. The singer was just as fond of clothes as he was of cars, so they came to an arrangement - as Elvis later explained in a radio interview:
“I said, you want the car so bad, I’ll make a deal with you. I said, you let me pick out all the clothes in here I want, and you can have the car. I was up there for about two hours and a half, and the store was a wreck when I left.”
In a TV interview years later, Lansky said he had refused countless offers from people wanting to buy his "cool, sharp” bubble-car. “You can get all the Cadillacs you like, but you’ll never get a Messerschmitt”. He passed away in 2012, but car still belongs to the Lansky family, whose Memphis clothes store now attracts the likes of Robert Plant and Steven Tyler.
For sheer kitsch appeal, it’s hard to beat the King’s 1956 Cadillac Eldorado, originally white but repainted a regal purple by Jimmy Sanders, the friend who had previously customised his Fleetwood. It wasn’t just any purple, but a very specific shade: the story goes that Elvis squashed a handful of grapes onto the paintwork, and told Sanders he wanted the car to be that exact colour. On the inside, it was fitted with white pleated leather and a rich carpet of dyed purple fur. Despite taking the time to personalise it, it seems the novelty wore off quickly; he sold it a year later.
The Messerschmitt may look like an outdated boondoggle, and purple fur interiors might never have caught on, but Elvis’s taste in cars was often ahead of his time. While serving with the US Army in Germany in 1958, he bought a BMW 507. Only 250 of this unusual luxury model were ever made, as its eye-watering cost put off most potential buyers (but not stars: Dr No’s Bond girl Ursula Andress also owned one). In recent years, however, the car has been hailed as a groundbreaking design, and a 507 was sold at auction last year for more than £1.2 million.
Elvis’s 507 was white, but repainted red as a kind of camouflage; apparently his fans kept writing sultry messages across it in red lipstick, much to the amusem*nt of his army pals.
As the singer’s wealth and fame grew, so did his car habit. “If Elvis saw a car he liked in the window, he'd stop and buy it,” his road manager Joe Esposito once. “That was basically it. If the dealership was closed and we knew the owner, we'd call and wake him up. We'd say, 'Listen, Elvis wants to buy this car'. Naturally the guy would meet us there, because if he didn't, Elvis would say, 'Well, we'll find someplace else'.”
When Stutz dealer Jules Meyers turned up at Elvis’s house in 1970 with an early prototype for Stutz Blackhawk, the singer insisted on buying it there and then. Meyers tried to explain that the finished car wouldn’t be ready for months, and that he needed to keep this particular model to show buyers, but the king wasn’t having any of it. According to his bodyguard Sonny West, Elvis replied: “How do you think you will sell more cars– when you drive it, or when people see medriving it?” Frank Sinatra is also said to have had his eye on the prototype, but Elvis beat him to it.
It was the first Blackhawk ever sold. Elvis paid $22,500 for the car, enough to buy a house at the time, plus $1,500 for a cutting-edge car phone. It was expensive, but not Elvis's flashiest mod-con: one of his Cadillacs had a television trimmed with 24-carat gold.He was such a fan of the Blackhawk that he ended up buying five, and giving away two as gifts.
Elvis didn't always love his cars. In 1974, after a blazing row with his girlfriend Linda Thompson, Elvis hopped into thecanary yellow De Tomaso Pantera he had bought her and tried to drive it away. But the temperamental sports carwouldn't start. So he shot it, leaving a bullet-hole in the door, and another two in the steering wheel.Somehow, this mindless act of descructionworked: the engine started running, andThompson was left eating his dust.
Unsurprisingly, Elvis's touch has inflated the value of his cars. In 1994, an old burgundy and silver Cadillac Seville worth $5,000 sold at auction for over $100,000 because it happened to be the onehe was driving the day before he died. It ended up in the hands of Greg Page, a member of the Australian kids' novelty band The Wiggles,before going under the hammer again in 2014, and was sold to a pair of Elvis enthusiasts who lent it to Britain's National Motor Museum in Beaulieu. It prompted complaints from Elvis fans, who claimed an American treasure had been pinched by the British.
If he were still alive, though, the King would probably have no such qualms about giving the car away. He used Cadillacs as gifts the way other people might use a bottle of wine or box of chocolates. According to one report, in 1966 alone Elvis bought"two black Caddies for his bodyguards, another for his hair stylist, two white ones for a couple of friends, another white one for his personal valet, a maroon one for another friend, and tucked a yellow one under the tree come Christmas time".
It's this side of Elvis that Jarecki overlooks when he argues that the"ostentatious imperial wealth" of his Rolls-Royce "is precisely what I feel has gone wrong for America". Elvis's spending was lavish, but it was also generous –as if the daydreaming former truck driver felt the need to give everyone else a slice of his good luck.
