GoElvis.com,

Larry Geller was Elvis Presley’s hairdresser, spiritual guide, on-staff confidante and the last person to touch him in the coffin when he fixed the King’s hair for the last time.

“That’s why I’m here today,” Geller testified, addressing an audience at the Memphis College of Art. He came prepared to tell secrets. His delivery was dramatic and emotional. The lecture was free, and easy to find, with a 56-foot cutout of Presley in front of the college, the legs framing the entrance.

But only 25 people walked through them into a cool, dark auditorium that holds 350.

That may be because Geller is but one of an entire faculty’s worth of Elvis Presley experts, scholars, authors and friends in town to honor the 20th anniversary of the pop icon’s death.

The problem is that there seems to be no audience for them. The 70,000 or so fans in town for Elvis Week ‘97 already know most of what there is to know about Presley. They don’t have time for lectures. They are too busy doing their own hair for Elvis impersonation events, or waiting in line at Graceland or Elvis Presley’s Memphis theme restaurant.

But that doesn’t deter Geller or any of the others who lecture on Elvis.

“It takes a while to convert the Romans,” said Dr. Vernon Chadwick, a Presley scholar and organizer of the weeklong Third International Conference on Elvis Presley, which includes Geller.

Chadwick’s event is titled ‘Elvis: 20/20 - Past and Future.’

This is the only symposium to be endorsed by Elvis Presley Enterprises. Panelists included producer Sam Phillips, who discovered and contracted Presley for Sun Records, and Peter Guralnick, author of Last Train to Memphis, the first of a several-volume biography on Presley.

The most riveting hour of the conference was a question-and-answer session with producer Phillips, a charter member of the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. After the disclaimer that “I’m not altogether here today,” Phillips went on to prove that he was.

“He was able to sense things,” said Phillips about Presley’s knack for picking the perfect song to record.

Phillips stood by his story that he didn’t regret selling Presley’s recording contract to RCA for $35,000 in 1955. He needed the money to keep his studio going, and he didn’t need Tom Parker, Presley’s new manager.

Phillips had discovered Presley in 1954, though it didn’t take much, he said.

“Anybody, even a deaf mute who could read lips, could tell that Elvis had a beautiful voice,” he said. But Nashville was already full of those. Phillips said his strategy was to make Presley’s sound more raw and primitive, and hold back on the ballads.

To his regret, Phillips didn’t see much of Presley in the 1970s. “He still has a magnetism that makes you want to be with him spiritually right now,” Phillips said.

None of the dignified panelists could touch the histrionics delivered by the hairdresser Geller. A pioneer men’s stylist to Hollywood stars, Geller was summoned to Presley’s Bel-Air mansion to “fix his hair” on April 30, 1964.

“Within an hour, Elvis started opening up to me about his childhood in Tupelo, about his brother being stillborn. Tears were streaming down his cheeks,” said Geller.

By appointment’s end, Geller had quit all his other clients to dedicate himself to the service of Presley. They were together in Memphis and on the road, touring by motor home. Once while in Arizona, both Presley and Geller saw the image of Jesus in the clouds at the same moment, an epiphany so powerful they had to pull over.

At that moment, Presley would have given up show business and become a monk, if not for Geller shaking some sense into him.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Elvis. You’re the greatest entertainer of our time.’”

The hairdressr said Presley saw his death coming. “Elvis had a premonition. He knew,” Geller testified. “He said ‘I know my fans think I’m fat, but I’m going to look good in a coffin.’”

Geller saw to that. At the funeral home he blackened the singer’s hair for the last time, using mascara. Then he touched his forehead and the coffin was closed.