It might have been the smallest audience for which
Elvis Presley
ever performed. Just a few hotel housekeepers and his young daughter, Lisa Marie.
“We would come through the back door every morning,” one of those housekeepers,
Imelda Saulog,
told me in the summer of 1989. Elvis had been dead for 12 years. I was doing some writing about his life, and the managers of the Las Vegas Hilton, on whose stage he had always performed when he was in town, were allowing me to stay in his old suite for a week.
It was more of a house constructed for him atop the building than a hotel room: 5,000 square feet, four bedrooms, a sun deck on the roof. There was a large white piano near a window that overlooked the Vegas skyline. Ms. Saulog, who was assigned to take care of the suite, told me about those private concerts, with Elvis singing just for his daughter and the housekeepers who would come in each day to tidy up.
“Elvis’s bodyguards would be asleep in their rooms,” she said. “Elvis’s daughter would visit”—this was after he and his wife, Priscilla, had divorced—“and we would walk into the living room, and there would be Lisa Marie, coloring in her coloring book, all alone.
“Elvis would come out of his bedroom in his blue pajamas and check on her. He’d ask if she was all right, and she would always say yes, and he would tell her to come into his room if she needed him.
“Sometimes he would sit and play the piano. We would listen, and Lisa would keep coloring.”
The image has long haunted me. People would fly to Las Vegas from all over the world to see Elvis sing—but there he had been, performing in his pajamas at the break of dawn for his daughter and a couple of housekeepers who would sit on the couch and listen in silence. Mostly, I was told, he played and sang gospel tunes for…
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