Eating like a King: the last meal of Elvis Presley

There’s a side of rock and roll excess that’s rarely discussed with the same sense of awe as decades of drink and drug use. Naturally, conversations around those two have shifted in modern times toward a more sympathetic tone, but even now, when people ask themselves how Keith Richards is still standing, it’s at least half intended as a compliment. Elvis Presley‘s Quaalude use might have given him a bit of traditional rock edge, but his diet and subsequent weight gain made him a laughing stock.

While substance use is seen as a cool inevitability of rock stardom, binge eating isn’t. Still, it’s also a more predictable occurrence when you consider the realities of life on the road, the endless room service and pitstop meals, and getting into any fancy restaurant off the back of only your name.

Presley, who has now been subject, in part, to two biopics, had a complicated relationship with food. According to Mary Jenkins, his cook for over a decade at Graceland: “He said that the only thing in life he got any enjoyment out of was eating.” It was a tragic symptom of his longing for home and his grief when his mother died, and also a lunge at some sense of normality. In the face of unparalleled success and fame, he only wanted a homecooked, familiar meal.

The knock-on effect was that Presley, once a heartthrob who drove teenage girls to near insanity, rapidly gained weight towards the end of his career. The media seized on it with glee, cheerfully reporting that he drank so much Pepsi it was delivered to Graceland in a distribution lorry or ate 12,000 calories on a good day. It’s the kind of cruelty generally reserved for women in the public eye, and it made the coverage of his death even more egregious.

When Presley died, he weighed 159 kilograms. He’d settled into a routine of eating breakfast in the late afternoon, reportedly going for a pound of bacon at a time. He was said to have caused a Tennessee-wide egg shortage after taking a shine to Spanish omelettes and was routinely eating hundreds of dollars worth of ice cream bars late at night. When the press reported in similar specifics about things like Black Sabbath’s cocaine bills, it made them somehow even more legendary. The details about Presely’s diet were just sad.

It made his last meal even more tragic out of its sheer normality. It wasn’t a tray of hamburgers or his much-loved fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. On August 16th, 1977, he had four scoops of ice cream with six chocolate chip cookies and later died on his bathroom floor. The National Enquirer bribed one of his cousins, Bobby Mann, to sneak a camera into Graceland to take a picture of his open casket, making the cover and selling over six million copies.

Weeks later, there was a failed attempt to steal his body, which is maybe the most fitting testament to the enduring fascination with it.