From Graceland: Karal Ann Marling's description of the Jungle Room at Graceland:

"[The room displays] an ensemble of cypress-crotch coffee tables, green shag carpeting (on floor and ceiling), mirrors framed in the breast feathers of pheasants, flocked Austrian shades, Wookie-fur lampshades, and massive pine chairs and couches carved with chain saws in a style other stunned observers have labeled Polynesian Primitive, Early Goona-Goona, or Tahitian Provincial. Angry South Sea gods fume silently in every corner. Ceramic tigers prowl the artificial greenery...

"A recent article celebrating Graceland's listing on the National Register of Historic Places maintains that the Jungle Room only looks strange to the 1990s because times and tastes have changed: in another hundred years, we are told, the Tiki sofas will seem no more or less tasteful than a roomful of Belter Victoriana in the American Wing at the Metropolitan. But leaving the Jungle Room to the drowsy embrace of history suppresses the barefaced ha-ha-ha vitality of the place and the evanescent glee of a really good joke...

"The Jungle Room is an act of faith in serial novelty. Out with the old, in with the new, over and over again...When Elvis ensconced himself in his den to watch TV, he shot the set if his interest flagged...

"Diehard fans are sometimes disappointed by the formal rooms along the highway side of Graceland. They're beautiful, in a chilly blue-and-white way, but remote and overarranged...The Jungle Room feels different. Personal...'It's funny,' says the fan, 'but you can feel him there, like it fit his personality.' Nonbelievers prefer the Jungle Room, too, because the overt bad taste lets them recoil in horror and imagine themselves a notch or two higher than Elvis on the class scale. Or the maturity scale, for the Jungle Room affords a glimpse of a rich man spending his money like a ten-year-old with a huge allowance and an overactive imagination...

"Elvis's friend Liberace, whose many gilt-on-white estates overflowed with functional objects tortured into piano shapes, embraced an overemphatic fauxness that formed the basis for his stage act...His movie-star houses...were teasing advertisements for a public persona masquerading as a private one, or vice versa. There is no similar irony in Elvis's Krakatoa-style den. Only a rush of pleasure enhanced by the awareness that there were more jokes to come, more wacky stuff from Donald's to buy someday, more Saturday matinee fantasies to be lived out in the privacy of Graceland."

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Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Illustrations: Karal Ann Marling

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