Elvis Presley gave thousands of interviews in his career. He gave them to newspapers and magazines and television programs and radio stations. He gave them in dressing rooms and hotel suites and backstage corridors and occasionally in moving cars. He was not always comfortable in them. He was not always honest in them.
He had learned early and thoroughly the art of answering a question without answering it, of producing words that satisfied the interviewer without producing information that could be used against him. He was good at it. He had been doing it since 1956. But in the autumn of 1962, in a hotel suite in Los Angeles, he got up in the middle of an interview and left.
He did not excuse himself. He did not explain. He stood up. He walked to the door. He left. The journalist, a woman named Patricia Strand, who worked for a national entertainment magazine and who had been granted a rare extended interview, sat in the suite for 10 minutes waiting. Then she gathered her materials.
She packed her recorder. She left. She published the interview. The portions that had been completed before Elvis walked out. She did not mention the walk out in the published piece. She had been told gently but clearly by Elvis’s publicist that mentioning it would affect her access in the future. She did not mention it for 20 years.
In 1982, Patricia Strand retired from journalism. She had spent 20 years not mentioning something that she had thought about on and off for the entire 20 years, not because it was professionally damaging to mention. Elvis had been dead for 5 years. There was no access to protect anymore, but because she had not known for 20 years whether the question she had asked was the one that had made him leave.
The interview had been going well. Elvis had been warmer than she expected, more present. She had been writing about entertainers for eight years, and she knew the difference between an interview subject who was performing attentiveness and one who was actually listening. Elvis was actually listening.
They had covered his childhood, his early career, his experience of fame, his films. Then Patricia had asked the question she had been building toward. She described it in the retirement interview she finally gave in 1982 as the question she always asked entertainers at some point. The question she believed cut through the professional surface to something more real.
She had asked, “What do you think you would have been if you hadn’t been this?” It was a simple question. She had asked it dozens of times. People usually answered easily with a profession, a fantasy, a joke. Elvis was quiet. 30 seconds of quiet. She counted later from the tape. 30 seconds. Then he stood up. He said nothing.
He walked to the door. He left. For 20 years, Patricia had carried two theories about those 30 seconds. The first theory, the question had offended him, had implied perhaps that what he had become was a contingency, that some other version of him existed, and that this version, the famous one, the king, was only one of the options, had implied impermanence.
and Elvis, who spent his life afraid of impermanence, might have responded to that implication by leaving. The second theory was different. The second theory was that Elvis had stayed silent for 30 seconds, not because he was offended, but because he was trying to answer, that he had sat in a hotel suite in Los Angeles in 1962 and tried to imagine the version of himself that had not happened.
The version without Sun Studio, without Sam Phillips, without the specific chain of events that had turned a 21-year-old truck driver from Memphis into the most famous person in America, and had discovered that he could not see it, not because the question was offensive, but because the answer, the honest answer, was something he had never allowed himself to look at directly.
That he didn’t know who he would have been. That the music and the fame and the performing life had arrived so early and so completely that they had replaced whatever had been there before. That there was no version of himself he could access that predated Elvis Presley. and that looking at that, really looking at it in front of a journalist with a tape recorder had been too much.
Patricia Strand described the moment in the 1982 interview with the precision of a woman who had replayed it thousands of times. She said that in 30 years of interviewing, she had asked hard questions. She had asked questions that made people angry. She had asked questions that made people cry. She had asked questions that made people pause.
She had never asked a question that made someone get up and walk out before or after. And I’ve never been sure, she said, whether that means the question was too hard or whether it means the question was the right one. Elvis Presley came back. 20 minutes after walking out, he came back. He knocked on the sweet door.
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Patricia opened it. “I’m sorry,” he said. He came in. He sat down. Patricia did not ask the question again. She had enough professional instinct to know that asking it again would end the interview permanently. But she asked something adjacent. Is there anything you wish you’d done differently? She said. Elvis thought about this for a moment.
I wish I’d had more time, he said. For what? She asked. He was quiet. To find out who I was before all this, he said. Then he smiled. the performed smile, the one that ended conversations. But I guess that’s not how it works, he said. They finished the interview. He was professional and warm. He said nothing else that was as true as that.
Patricia Strand kept the tape, including the 30 seconds of silence, including the knock on the door. 20 minutes later, including the words, “I wish I’d had more time to find out who I was before all this.” She donated it to a journalism archive at her retirement. It is held there now, available to researchers.
30 seconds of silence, then a door closing, then 20 minutes of nothing, then a knock, then the truest thing he said in any interview. I wish I’d had more time to find out who I was before all this. He never found it. The music had arrived too early and stayed too long. But the question, Patricia Strand’s question, the one that made him get up and leave, stayed with him, as the right questions always Doing.
