Alone in his huge, Antebellum house built in 1853 in Holly Springs, Miss., Paul MacLeod is living his vision of the American dream. He’s a 67-year-old former assembly-line worker, and it shows—his face slumps like a wet towel. He subsists on two cases of Coca-Cola a day. His wife, Serita, left him years ago, and he hasn’t seen her since. His son, too, left long ago . But MacLeod doesn’t mind living alone: He’s got Elvis Presley.
For 20 years, MacLeod has operated his own live-in Elvis museum called Graceland Too. Every corner, wall and inch of ceiling in his two-story mansion is covered with Elvis memorabilia, from The King’s high school report card (he failed music) to plush tigers (in honor of Elvis’ martial-arts name) and thousands of posters, clippings and photographs. MacLeod keeps Graceland Too open 24 hours a day, every day of the year. If he’s slipped into a light sleep at 4 a.m., knock loud enough and he’ll give you a tour. Only five bucks.
Graceland Too isn’t really about Elvis Presley. It’s about creating another world, one in which Paul MacLeod is king, slap-happy and in love with his favorite rock star, blissfully unaware of the faster, meaner, grimier world beyond his property. “I’m prepared to die right now if I could bring that guy back,” he tells me with a voice that sounds like he’s gargling maple syrup. While outisders—368,000 people since 1990, by his count—stop by and see him as an oddity, an old man gone batty, MacLeod says he’s “doin’ just what makes me happy.”
An hour south of Memphis and an hour north of Elvis’ birthplace in Tupelo, Holly Springs is an archetypal Deep South small town. Businesses close early; people walk home.
Dominey Long is 21, all Southern-blonde beauty and reserve, and she works at Marshall County Music, her father’s guitar shop on the town’s central square. She’s visited Graceland Too—everyone in Holly Springs has at least once—but she doesn’t plan to go back.
“The only way you can really describe what’s inside there is to go. It is…” She pauses, searching for the proper word, and elongates every syllable: “In-ter-est-ing.”
The people of Holly Springs generally fall into three camps in their views of MacLeod. Some see him as a freak. “People egg his house,” Long says. “They go by and knock and they just run away. People torment him because he’s… different.” An even smaller group see MacLeod as an endearing eccentric, his love and dedication an inspiration. The overwhelming majority, though, doesn’t see him at all. He’s the Elvis guy who doesn’t leave his house, attracts drunken college kids from Ole Miss, keeps a cache of guns lying around and blares “Hound Dog” at 3 a.m. Simple as that. “I don’t know if proud is the right word,” Long says. “People are just used to it.”
Elvis obsession is now older than Elvis ever was. Forbes has named Presley the fourth-most profitable deceased celebrity, his estate annually netting $55 million. Elvis Presley Enterprises has sanctioned more than 350 fan clubs worldwide. At the time of Elvis’ death in 1977, there were fewer than 75 professional impersonators; today the number exceeds 35,000. In 2005, a British parking attendant was prosecuted for stealing upwards of $980,000 to spend on Elvis records and memorabilia. The anecdotes are endless. Elvis’ popularity “can’t be explained by great voice, good looks, charismatic personality,” says Graceland-endorsed Elvis expert Stephen Christopher. “When you have the entire globe in your hand, there’s more to it than that.” Fanatics range from record collectors to, as Christopher says, “10-year-old kids in England who know who the key grip on every Elvis movie was.” And then there’s Paul MacLeod.
Graceland Too is guarded by two giant plaster lions that rest atop a five-foot cinder – block wall surrounding the house. With the chain-link fence on top of the wall, the property resembles a fortress. MacLeod’s driveway is sealed from the street by barbed wire, and just inside is a security booth staffed by a mannequin wearing a police jacket.
The lock on the front door is a knotted leather belt. When I knock on the thick glass, nothing happens. After eight minutes, I hear some shuffling inside. MacLeod opens up. He’s wearing a camouflage jacket with a comb in the front pocket. His slicked-back, once-thick black hair now looks like wax. When he speaks, his words slip and trip out of his mouth, his dentures rarely keeping pace with his gums. He doesn’t have an email address and doesn’t give out his car-phone number, so Suzann Williams, assistant director of the Holly Springs Tourism and Recreation Bureau, passes along any messages. MacLeod was expecting me.
A sign pronounces Paul MacLeod “the Universe’s, Galaxy’s, Planet’s, World’s Ultimate #1 Fan.” Graceland Too’s front parlor room houses many of his 35,000 Elvis recordings, hundreds hung up on the wall and ceiling. It seems like an understatement.
MacLeod points to a photograph. “There’s a picture of Elvis in Tupelo with a little hat on. His own family looks at that picture, looks at it real good, and they don’t even know it’s my son they’re lookin’ at! That’s right, my son was born Elvis Aaron Presley MacLeod. He’s a dead ringer for Elvis.”
I ask when the Presleys looked at the photograph, and where his son is now, but it seems the Graceland Too tour train stops for no one.
“You ever heard of Stevie Wonder, the blind singer? I got so much gold and platinum around here shinin’, turns out I could make Stevie Wonder see again,” he says, pointing to a sparkling gold lamé suit, a replica of a classic Elvis get-up.
Locked in a cabinet in the next room are just a few bottles from MacLeod’s “250 million dollars in cash worth of Elvis Presley wine.” Later, a bag of ashes, “the first flowers placed on Elvis Presley’s grave.” But mostly, these aren’t Elvis artifacts. They’re Paul MacLeod artifacts. One wall shelves hundreds of newspapers, the “400 papers worldwide that’ve put me on the cover,” he tells me. Another wall is covered with videotapes.
MacLeod modestly estimates that he’s “been on every television program in the world. And I own the rights to all of ’em.” The back storage room is lined with Polaroids of thousands of Graceland Too visitors, with photos of “46,000 new members that I still gotta hang up” resting in boxes.
Three big-screen Tvs sit facing MacLeod’s bed on the first floor, the only place to sit in the entire house. All three are set on different channels, to capture even the briefest mention of Elvis.
“If some bastard yells Elvis’ name, any second, it’s recording.
I’m lucky if I sleep around here for five or 10 minutes. Last year I didn’t sleep for three straight days and nights,” he says. MacLeod hands me a three-ring binder, opens it and points to a typed passage: “1:05 a.m., August 6, 1992, NBC, Arsenio Hall mentions Elvis in his monologue.”
“Up to the second,” he snaps.
MacLeod’s favorite stories are of the woman who “dropped dead in front of my face” at his first Elvis concert in 1954, thereby launching his obsession. There are stories of girls who come by “rippin’ their panties off 24 hours a day,” of how his only son (who declined to comment) looks and sounds just like Elvis and of how, when MacLeod’s wife confronted him about his Elvis obsession, he “handed her a million dollars in cash and told her ass bye” because “[Elvis] just makes me happier than she did.” MacLeod proudly shows off pictures of his sisters, who “are dead ringers for Jayne Mansfield, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and Priscilla Presley.”
“We all paint a canvas of who we think people are,” says Sue Watson, a staff writer at Holly Springs’ South Reporter, who’s met MacLeod but doesn’t claim to know him. “But in that painting, in that brush there’s also part of who we are. We want to find an island where we can stand on a real clean spot and be the observer and look over into any country, any land, any individual, any psyche. But we’re all standing on the same ground.”
Around 2:30 a.m., 19-year-old Steven Cook and some friends from Memphis step down off the porch of Graceland Too. Cook’s visited MacLeod more than three times, making him a card-carrying lifetime member.
“You come here and he tells you things are worth $10,000 and you see the $1.50 price tag. But you don’t care. You want to accept what Paul says because Paul’s reality is better than our reality,” Cook says. “At Disney World, you might think ‘Bullshit, we’re not actually in a cave.’ But here? ‘Paul, you’re completely correct.’”
To many visitors, Paul MacLeod is as much a roadside attraction as, say, the World’s Largest Buffalo in Jamestown, North Dakota: a strange, briefly entertaining diversion. Maybe the joke is on them. Behind the barbed wire and the belted-shut door, Paul MacLeod lives out his fantasy. Spreading the good word of The King is urgent business, and he’s the royal messenger.
Illustrations by Lizzy Stewart
