Elvis In Clinton's Biography

Former U.S. President (and big Elvis fan) Bill Clinton published his memoires. In the 957 pages he found space to rate the films of Elvis Presley, his favorite: "Love Me Tender". He also owns a scarf worn and signed by Elvis Presley that he keeps in his music room.

Updated: The complete text as posted on the FECC messageboard:

"Elvis Presley began to make movies in the late fifties. I loved Elvis. I could sing all his songs, as well as the Jordanaires’ backgrounds. I admired him for doing his military service and was fascinated when he married his beautiful young wife, Priscilla. Unlike most parents, who thought his gyrations obscene, Mother loved Elvis, too, maybe even more than I did. We watched his legendary performance on The Ed Sullivan Show together, and laughed when the cameras cut off his lower body movement to protect us from the indecency. Beyond his music, I identified with his small-town southern roots. And I though he had a good heart. Steve Clark, a friend of mine who served as attorney general when I was governor, once took his little sister, who was dying of cancer, to see Elvis perform in Memphis. When Elvis heard about the little girl, he put her and her brother in the front row, and after the concert he brought her up onstage and talked to her for a good while. I never forgot that.

Elvis’ first movie, Love Me Tender, was my favourite and remains so, though I also liked Loving You , Jailhouse Rock, King Creole and Blue Hawaii. After that, his movies got more saccharine and predictable. The interesting thing about Love Me Tender; a post-Civil War western, is that Elvis, already a national sex symbol, got the girl, Debra Paget, but only because she thought his older brother, whom she really loved, had been killed in the war. At the end of the film, Elvis gets shot and dies, leaving his brother with his wife.

I never quite escaped Elvis. In the ’92 campaign, some members of my staff nicknamed me Elvis. A few years later, when I appointed Kim Wardlaw of Los Angeles to a federal judgeship, she was thoughtful enough to send me a scarf Elvis had worn and signed for her at one of his concerts in the early seventies, when she was nineteen. I still have it in my music room. And I confess: I still love Elvis."

There is another short reference to Elvis later on, as Clinton talks about his Mother's funeral:

"She was buried in the cemetery across the street from where her father's store had been, in the plot that had long awaited her, beside her parents and my father. It was January 8, the birthday of her favorite man outside the family, Elvis Presley."