Adding a legendary name, a touch of Hollywood-meets-rock ‘n’ roll glamour and some Memphis bragging rights to a national conference dedicated to “strategic planning for incoming leadership,” Priscilla Presley was the keynote speaker Thursday during a Rotary Club convention at Downtown’s Halloran Centre.
“At 14, I was shy and lonely,” Presley, 79, told the assembled Rotarians, who had greeted her with an almost giddy standing ovation. “I met someone who was shy and lonely, as well. Elvis became the love of my life while also being one of the most famous people in the world.”
Presley’s 21-minute talk touched on Elvis, her career as a model and actress, her work as a steward of Graceland and the Elvis legacy, her animal welfare advocacy, and her personal ideals of community service, which dovetail with the Rotary mission.
She did not, however, mention the top Presley news of the moment, the release Tuesday of “From Here to the Great Unknown,” the much-ballyhooed memoir — currently the top-selling book on Amazon — that was completed by actress Riley Keough after the unexpected death last year of its primary author and Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla.
“To be honest, I haven’t read all of the book,” said Presley, after her talk. Of the segments she has read, she said, “I think it was done well.”
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Referring to her granddaughter, she said: “Her loss is very deep.”
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“I enjoy coming back to Memphis because I feel like this place is home to me,” said Presley, who was touted as an example of the Rotary vision that “one person can help change a city,” in the words of former Memphis Rotary Club president and longtime WMC-TV Channel 5 news anchor Joe Birch, who said he first interviewed Presley in 1979, at the “Hair Design and Trade Jamboree” at the Mid-South Coliseum, where she was introduced as the successor to Elizabeth Taylor as a spokesperson/model for Wella Balsam Shampoo.
If the public knows Priscilla Presley as the former wife of Elvis, a cast member for five seasons of “Dallas,” and the star of three “Naked Gun” movies (she said Leslie Nielsen was her favorite among all her TV and movie co-stars), Memphis owes her a debt for opening Graceland to the public in 1982, five years after Elvis died at his home mansion at the age of 42.
“That is something to celebrate,” said Birch, who pointed out that Graceland is the top attraction in a city where tourism — music tourism, primarily — has an economic impact of about $4.2 billion a year, according to Memphis Tourism. No wonder Rotarian Chuck E. Thomas III, a government relations officer at Southwest Tennessee Community College, included this plea on Presley’s behalf in his opening prayer: “Give her supernatural strength in keeping the memory of Elvis Presley alive.”
“Elvis vowed that he would never sell it,” Presley said of Graceland, the home the singer bought in 1957 (for $102,500) and which is now the second most-visited home in America, after the White House.
For Elvis, she said, Graceland was “a tangible symbol of how far he had come from this humble birth, living in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi… It became his personal symbol of achievement and his American dream.
“Keeping it in the family was something Elvis would have loved,” she added. “I’m so thankful I was here and able to save it from being sold… I will always be committed to sharing Elvis and Graceland with the world.”
Presley spoke during the final luncheon of Rotary International’s three-day “Large Club Conference” for North America, an annual event held this year in Memphis. (The luncheon also served as meeting number 5,480 of the Rotary Club of Memphis.)
About 100 club leaders from 68 cities ranging, alphabetically, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to York, Pennsylvania, came here for the conference. These representatives of such “large club” cities as Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Toronto were treated to concerts by Kirk Whalum and Memphis Jones, in addition to other Bluff City-specific enticements. The appearance by Presley — who lives in Los Angeles but remains associated with Elvis and Graceland — was the finale of the Memphicentric slate.
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Presley — who gamely posed for pictures with the Rotarians after her talk — met Elvis when she was 14, when her father, a career military officer, was transferred to West Germany, where Elvis was a solider, after having been drafted into the Army. At 17, she moved to Graceland, after Elvis completed his service. Elvis and Priscilla married at 21; they were divorced when Priscilla was 28, by which time she had begun “an adventure of finding myself,” she said Thursday.
Meanwhile, Elvis was basically “a kid at heart,” she said. When a Rotarian mentioned Libertyland, the old Fairgrounds amusement park, which Elvis would rent out for all-night outings with his cronies, Presley remembered marathon sessions with the King aboard the park’s notoriously ramshackle roller coaster, the Zippin Pippin. “I kept wanting to get off,” she said, “and he kept going and going…”
Ultimately, Presley found a connection between her former husband’s perseverance and dedication to his art and the Rotary Club’s commitment to community service (manifested, for example, in the food pantry the Memphis club operates out of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church). “We need to use our God-given talents to make the world a better place,” she said.
