8th
Elvish
Today Elvis would be 3/4 of a century old—HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUBBA!! When I was a gangly little moppet I had a natural fondness for The King…mostly because I saw the world through I Love Lucy-colored glasses. The 1950s swivel-pelvis Elvis seemed like the American Ricky Ricardo from my wee P.O.V.
So I totally couldn’t handle it when I found out that Elvis and my grandpa were bosom buddies.
Gpops was Elvish—one of those 1950s actors with shoe polish hair and “lady-killer” good looks. Love Me Tender was his first big Hollyweird movie.
My grandpa is no bragasaurus and keeps fairly mum about his acting days—he found the stuntmen to be creepy and felt his Mr. Goodwrench commercials were gratingly sexist. But every now and then we run into someone who assures us of his long lost fame—usually old movie and Bonanza aficionados like my brother’s closeted hair cutter at the Yellow Balloon. Then there was that one time at an Oscars after party when a throng of Hollywood geezers brought me like a sacrificial lamb to movie mogul Richard B. Zanuck with the sole introduction of “this is Barry’s Granddaughter.”
We usually have to pry information out of him with an assault of probing questions. I have a debilitating case of vintagephilia so YES I find it exciting that the “omnisexual” Errol Flynn gave my publicist great grandpa a blood transfusion in 1940. If this coerced name-dropping makes us starstruck his reaction is always, “Look, these people aren’t anything special. They get up and take a shit in the morning just like everybody else!”
I suppose this is the Fame-is-Lame attitude that would make it okay for my Elvish grandpa to lose all the telegrams that Elvis sent to him in the 60s.* Memorabilia FAIL. I am having phantom eBay pains today.
*He also lost his Golden Globe. Don’t even.
