THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 23“Even during covid, the publishing and
licensing revenues have continued to in-
crease,” he wrote. “In 2019, JUST at Grace-
land we sold over $12M of merchandise/
memorabilia.”
Weinshanker promotes and protects
Elvis’s legacy with the unworried confi-
dence of a man who calls Elvis “the most
handsome, charismatic person ever to live.”
He provides proof of Elvis’s enduring ap-
peal: “We have probably still the most
popular entertainer channel on SiriusXM,”
he says, then mentions a trio of successful
Graceland movies on the Hallmark Chan-
nel. Before the pandemic, “Elvis in Concert
— Live on Screen,” featuring Elvis singing
on a big screen accompanied by the Royal
Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, filled
arenas in the United Kingdom, Australia
and Latin America. Projects under devel-
opment include “Agent King,” an animated
Netflix series featuring Elvis as a govern-
ment spy.
“We’re very cautious — it’s not about the
dollars,” Weinshanker tells me in a 40-min-
ute phone conversation. “It’s really about
what’s best for Elvis and what’s best for his
brand. But we’ve never been busier.”
Even if you’re not an Elvis fan, the
Graceland tour is memorable, particularly
the Jungle Room, with its tiki-tinged furni-
ture, artificial waterfall and green shag
carpeting on the floor and the ceiling. For
me, Graceland was like entering a 1970s
time machine, from the period furniture to
the old-school television sets. For Wein-
shanker, though, the experience was more
profound. “My first experience at Grace-
land literally changed me as a human being
from the beginning of the tour to the end,”
he says. “I was a different person when I
came out. I think it just does that to people.”
At the time, he says, he was a cocky
manager for a band that had sold millions
of records. But Graceland showed him the
colossal hugeness of Elvis. “I walked out
realizing how big, how all-encompassing
and how really never-to-be-repeated the
success and the rise of Elvis was,” he says.
“It wasn’t just music and pop culture — it
was his outfits, it was being a first adopter. I
saw a revolutionary. Da Vinci was a revolu-
tionary. Vincent van Gogh was a revolu-
tionary. Einstein was a revolutionary. You
can’t even understand the leap. It’s other-
worldly, it’s hand to God, any of these terms
that you want to use. And it made me think
of the world in a different way. And on that
day, I said, ‘One day, I’m going to be
involved in Elvis’s legacy.’ ”
Linking Elvis to the world’s most note-
worthy humans is common among aficio-mainstream and popular than before. After a series of dreadful
films and uninspired soundtracks in the ’60s, Elvis was a cultural
afterthought. Then came his electric black-leather ’68 comeback.
At a “Conversations on Elvis” event at the Graceland resort,
Priscilla Presley told a story about the aftermath of his death. She
was an executor of Elvis’s estate, and one of the attorneys urged her
to sell Graceland.
“He’ll be forgotten in six months,” the attorney said.
Not quite. In 1982, when Graceland opened to the public, it
received 400,000 visitors. The next year it rose to 550,000, and it
continues to welcome half a million visitors each year, making it
one of the five most-visited homes in America. But maintaining
interest is not guaranteed. In March 2020, Rolling Stone pub-
lished a story with an ominous headline: “Can Elvis Rise Again?”
The story cited a Forbes report stating that the Presley estate “was
annually pulling in $60 million a decade ago,” but the number had
dropped by 30 percent. Auction-house sales of Elvis memorabilia
had also fallen from $4 million in 2017 to less than $1.5 million in
2019, according to Rolling Stone.
When I email these numbers in April to Joel Weinshanker,
managing partner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, his response arrives
12 minutes later.
Elvis Presley in a
promotional image
for the 1957 film
“Jailhouse Rock.”photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images