Word: priscilla
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Your article on Elvis Presley Enterprises and the licensing of Elvis memorabilia [BUSINESS, Aug. 4] had me howling over E.P.E. president Priscilla Presley's astute insight into how Americans value their dead icons. And your review of riches generated since the King's death reminded me of an Elvis-impersonators convention in Las Vegas. Some 20,000 would-be Elvises attended the gathering in 1977, a 5000% increase over 1975. Had the impersonator trend continued geometrically through 1997, there might now be full national employment due to the tens of millions of Elvis wannabes. Just think, Priscilla Presley could displace...
Elvis had left his entire estate to Lisa Marie, naming his father Vernon executor until Lisa Marie reached age 25. Vernon, who died in 1979, named Priscilla, who was not an heir, as executor. Vernon believed, no doubt correctly, that with dozens of bankers and lawyers circling the estate, Priscilla was the one insider most likely to keep the interests of her daughter at heart...
...shocked when the estate was handed to me, because there was very little money available. We really didn't have anything," said Priscilla during an interview in her modest office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where she has run Elvis' estate since 1979, when not making a name for herself as an actress in prime-time soap operas or Naked Gun movies. Then again, perhaps she should not have been so shocked at the estate's relative puniness. "Elvis," she notes with an ex-wife's hard-won lucidity, "did not plan for the future. When he needed money...
...estate was heading toward the red when Priscilla took over. There were the taxes and maintenance on Graceland, salaries for hangers-on and family members, the looming depredations of the IRS. By the early '80s, Priscilla, now both trustee for the Presley estate and president of EPE, had recruited her own money manager, a Kansas City, Mo., businessman named Jack Soden, and the two of them set about figuring out what to do with the estate. The most obvious move, which they explored, would have been to sell off Graceland; one potential buyer, the city of Memphis, did a feasibility...
...wisely reappointed her mother as trustee of the estate. Besides facilitating her brief marriage to Michael Jackson, Lisa Marie's majority has freed EPE to take greater risks; thus the real estate deals and coming clubs and casinos. Even in Elvisworld, however, there is such a thing as excess. Priscilla turns up her nose at the notion that Elvis clubs might some day reach a McDonald's level of saturation. "Then it's about nothing but money," she says, "and you lose what it is all about." All of which begs the question, How many Elvis bowling shirts...