LOVE ME TENDER, WITH GRAVY

My little brother and I made a pilgrimage to Graceland recently, and while it was exciting and interesting to explore the first years of rock, the highlight of the trip was learning about how the King ate. Elvis came from humble beginnings in Tupelo, Mississippi, where, it’s safe to say, there was never a surplus of food. This childhood partly explains his later gastronomic excess. Like a rich man buying the expensive toys he was denied as a child, Elvis was making up for lost eating time.

And did he ever make up for it. Elvis’s favorite food was the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich, an item that he pursued like the Holy Grail. Elvis loved the peanut butter and banana sandwich, and, of course, he loved all things fried. So he tried to fry his beloved sandwich — for years unsuccessfully. The sad result was always the same, a soggy mess of disintegrating bread, squishy bananas, and liquid peanut butter.

Like all geniuses, Elvis had stick-to-itiveness. He brought in the big guns and hired a cook for Graceland. Mary Jenkins Langston, kind and literally stout of heart, found that the cause of Elvis’s failure was his butter-to-sandwich ratio. The King had been using three sticks of butter for every two sandwiches he fried. In a brilliant display of collaborative engineering, Elvis’s father, Vernon, suggested toasting the bread. Langston then set to work getting the butter titration just right. She cut back a smidgen on the Land O’Lakes, and voila! Critics would later call Langston an “enabler” and an “accessory to murder.” I call her a heroine.

Elvis also had the obsessiveness of a great eater. One night a meatloaf was served for dinner, and he was taken with its thickness and density, not to mention the lardy gravy and buttery mashed potatoes. He ate — which is to say, he, Priscilla, Vernon, and all of their friends ate — meatloaf every night for the next six months.

Another story from the Elvis legend has him phoning his Memphis Mafia buddies late one night and telling them to come to Graceland with a toothbrush. The boys assembled, then Elvis called his flight crew and told them to fire up his jet, the Lisa Marie, and plot a course for Denver. Once they were airborne someone asked why they were going to Denver, and Elvis replied — with a lip curl, one assumes — that there was a diner out in Denver that made a to-die-for peanut butter sandwich called the Fool’s Gold. Details on the Fool’s Gold, like sightings of sasquatch, are a subject of controversy, but Elvisologist Steve Burgess reports that it consisted of “an entire Italian bread loaf slathered in butter and hollowed out to contain a jar of Skippy peanut butter, a jar of Smucker’s grape jelly and a pound of fried bacon.” That may be apocryphal, but I like to believe it’s true. Either way, this was the first of many trips along the Memphis-Denver corridor.

Mary Jenkins Langston claimed that food, not music, was Elvis’s real passion. “He said that the only thing in life he got any enjoyment out of was eating,” she remembered. But she also saw the dark side of his love. She saw things that even Priscilla won’t talk about today. Langston once told the BBC that when she watched the King eat, “he’d have butter running down his arms.”

While in Memphis, my brother and I ate several meals at the restaurant owned by the King’s estate, and, while we never had butter running down our arms, our hands were shiny enough to make turning a doorknob difficult. We had lots of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and meatloaf, and banana pudding, just like Elvis. Often after meals we found ourselves short of breath, and by the end of the week I began to sweat when I ate.

The conventional wisdom says that the King’s demise at the tender age of 42 was due to his unfortunate addiction to prescription drugs. I have a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich that says otherwise.

JONATHAN V. LAST