Meanwhile, while Elvis was still in the showroom, a bank teller named Mennie Person was admiring his Cadillac limousine out front. The King quickly had his salesman add it to the list. Furthermore, there is also a story involving a woman casually mentioning to Elvis her birthday was coming up in two days. So what does Elvis do?
He has one of his guys cut her a check, and gift her with a Cadillac, of course. There are also stories of Elvis Presley paying a visit to a Denver car lot. In , Presley started recording for Sun Records, a Tennessee recording label known for many of the hit songs of that time, and he quickly became a global star.
Elvis' first pink Cadillac a Fleetwood Series 60 went up in smoke, literally. Despite his dangerous on-stage persona, Elvis was tender-hearted and very close to his parents. So much so that his second pink Cadillac purchase, a Fleetwood Series 60, was gifted to his mother, according to The Guardian. This is the same pink Cadillac you can still see today on display at Graceland Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
Only two days before her birthday, bank teller, Mennie L. A year later, we put together a crew and it took about a year to make the movie. I went to California, Colorado, New Hampshire — where they had one of Elvis' gift cars being refurbished in the state prison there. We went to Graceland — we were the first film crew to be able to film in the car museum there. We were sanctioned by Elvis Presley Enterprises to use the images of him we had, all that stuff.
It came out in , and it made a little bit of noise, but not much. For the most part, it came and went. Then, because it's his 80th birthday year, I wanted to do something in celebration of that, so I'mm resurrecting the film and I have a three-piece rockabilly band called the Rockabilly Kings — it's kind of a play on my name, which is Latin for king, and Elvis being the king of rock and roll. We do his early Sun and RCA recordings.
That's the music I love that he made. So when you started the movie, did you have a hypothesis about Elvis — were you trying to capture something about him? Or did you just want to tell the stories of the cars? It was specifically about the generosity, and I didn't realize how many other items he gave away. People oftentimes received other things — houses, jewelry, fur coats for their girlfriends, and his girlfriends — gifts for some of the singers in his band, as well as his inner mafia, the Memphis Mafia, the good old boys on his payroll.
All of this kind of came out as I interviewed people — the depth and breadth of his generosity. We'd heard stories. Everyone had heard about him giving cars to complete strangers. For the most part, it was all done anonymously. If you happened to be at a dealership when he was there, he just might buy you a car — especially if you were a good-looking woman. A newscaster up in Denver — Don Kinney. Elvis was up in Aspen that week on vacation and word got out that he bought 12 Cadillacs and was giving him away.
So they signed off this segment of their show by reporting it — a human interest thing. And this guy, Don Kinney, his co-anchor signed off by saying, "Elvis, if you're watching, I'd love to have a Cadillac, too.
And he cracked up and he said to Ron, "Who was that guy? Don gets on and says hello and Elvis says, "Hello, this is Elvis. I just saw the newscast. I want to buy you a Cadillac. So he goes, "Come on, who is this?
Goddamn it, this is Elvis, he wants to buy you a car. I interviewed him standing next to the cute little blue Cadillac. The first I ever heard about Elvis' habit of giving away Cadillacs was from a comedian named Bill Hicks, who had a bit about it.
And he suggested that giving away so many cars was why Elvis had such trouble financially — was that the case? Yeah, like probably every entertainer, every rock star — everybody lives over their head, and it probably was one of the underlying things that caused his death. It was before the Betty Ford Clinic. Everybody was kind of going by the seat of their pants. And he had a major pill addiction that he was in denial about and it was slowly killing him. Because he constantly had to tour to keep up with his expenses, it probably led to the fact that he wasn't taking care of himself and he died at a very young age.
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