ANDRE WIESNER speaks to a wannabe Presley in Graceland, Cape Town
By day he’s the owner of the Sea Point Taxi Association, but by night Ernest MacDonald dons a glittering white suit and wraparound shades and takes to the stage of his newly opened rock’n’ roll restaurant, Graceland, as his coffin-dodging idol and alter ego, Elvis Presley.
MacDonald’s suit is flared at the knee, worn with an upturned collar as buxom as a neck-brace, and is tasselled with multi- coloured baubles which have been clutched at by souvenir-hunters driven ”berserk”, even ”absolutely crazy”, when he’s given impromptu performances at nightclubs or been invited to appear at carnivals and parties.
The suit makes him look like five storeys of showbiz. It also makes the 53-year-old commercial pilot and former diesel mechanic look like a very macho Liberace who’ll step on your shoes and stomp on your face.
But while this suggestion of menace may have befitted the King’s volatile amalgam of down-home simplicity and big-city excess, it is out of character for MacDonald himself.
For instance, his spin on the Elvis myth probably reveals more about his own ethical stance than Elvis’s. ”He was a gentleman,” MacDonald says in the grizzled voice he is exercising daily to extend his tonal range. ”I think he was an honest guy. He had a generous nature. I feel he was a good youngster, a good American.”
What about the later Elvis, the career drug-addict and boozer? Hinting at his own term of hard living before he built up his business, MacDonald’s gracious answer is that ”we all have our problems, nobody’s perfect.”
It’s precisely this intimation of private sadness that lends nuance to the Elvis- facade’s epic gaudiness and which MacDonald tries to capture in quieter numbers. ”It’s like he’s pleading with somebody … ‘Treat me nice’.”
Looking more hangdog than hound-dog during our mid-morning interview, he takes the mike and drifts into introspective song, occasionally glancing at the karaoke machine he uses for rehearsals. While listening to tapes in his pink Cadillac (a crouching Batmobile the size of Luxembourg), MacDonald had realised Elvis ”has this … pleading in the voice, and I’m straining and I’m trying to get that in, and I can’t do it. But afterwards, when you’re singing all the time, you can achieve it.”
Although he’s long-practised in the Elvis- gyrations and says he’s adjusting to performing with a live band, he’s modest about his singing, which is a new venture. In 1996 onlookers told him: ”You dress like the guy and you dance like him. Surely you can sing like him?” He said: ”No ways.”
But the rock had started rolling and soon MacDonald was taking his karaoke act on the road around Cape Town, wending his way towards the real unreal thing: towards Graceland.
By night MacDonald’s persona may well be a sunglass-vizored rhinestone colossus, but he is Elvis on and off stage. Only the degree of Elvisness varies. Even as he cruises over the dancefloor in workday gear to greet me, the signature affectations are instantly visible: the muttonchop sideburns and crestfallen pompadour, the raised collar, the louche gait. ”Sometimes I just move,” he says, starting from his chair.
Indeed, the paradox MacDonald exemplifies is that modelling oneself on another identity is sometimes not a refuge from self but a recovery of personal authenticity. So, when asked how different he is from his normal self when he turns into Elvis, MacDonald laughs. ”I think that is my normal self.”
But how does he respond to the inevitable derision? ”Ag, it doesn’t worry me. If I wasn’t myself and doing this, and the next guy did it, I don’t know what my reaction would be.”
Could it be that those who ridicule him are resentful of his courage in acting on his desires? ”You must be courageous,” he agrees, ”or very thick or toe [impervious] to walk around with the sideburns and all that.
”But I know what I’m doing. It’s something that’s a dream,” he says, gesturing at the retro-trendy interior of Graceland, its pizzeria, its oak-veneers and cane furnishing. ”All my life I would say: ‘Hell, to be like Elvis must be incredible.’ The fact that you can entertain people who’re coming to watch you and enjoying it and going wild — it must be fantastic.”
For him Graceland is a transcendent space where sadness is assuaged. ”When I look over the people, I wanna get tears in my eyes from joy. I can hardly sing the next line. Then I imagine how he must have felt. … People say the spirit of Elvis is in me.”
If MacDonald becomes Elvis, who does the audience become when their reality-checks are over-run by make-believe? Sightings notwithstanding, he is sure Elvis is no more, but many Elvis devotees are harder to convince. Like the other kings of kings, he has been manhandled by the faithful desperate for contact with the undead divinity.
”You say I go crazy doing this, but I don’t know what the people are like, because they’re sending me stuff to autograph. A woman comes up to me and pulls up her top and says: ‘Sign here … sign there … kiss me.’ They go like that.” Once, at a private function, he fled for safety after being mobbed and left mayhem in his wake. ”They smashed the bar; they smashed the whole place. Why? The one was blaming the other why Elvis had left.”
I had expected a Vegas or mobster camp, and had rocked up to Graceland instead. I had hoped to meet a megalomaniac, and had met a man of the people.
For Ernest the importance of being Elvis isn’t in vain self-gratification. It’s in creating a cathartic ambience in which others, too, can fantasise and leave behind their workaday selves. ”I challenge anybody,” he declares, ”to go out of here and say this wasn’t good entertainment.”
Graceland is open from 8pm on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and is at 60 Newmarket Street, Cape Town