Showing posts with label Elvis Presley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elvis Presley. Show all posts

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Barbara backstage





The 3 of them converged in a stairwell at the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, in June 1956: 21-year-old "Bobbi" Owens, 26-year-old photographer Alfred Wertheimer, and 21-year-old Elvis Presley. The resulting published shot (1st image) was one of 48 photos featuring Elvis's "date for the day," and the most famous of the 3,800 photos that Alfred took of Elvis over the 2-day period. Though some of the photos showed the girl from a more identifiable angle, the photographer - now 81 (2nd image) - never got her name and the fan never came forward, even after seeing the photo that became known as "The Kiss" hundreds of times. In the 1970s, a woman named "Barbara Satinoff" had called, identifying herself as the subject, but Alfred was not convinced. A year ago, when the caller read that the image was to be featured in a retrospective of the photographer's work, the "unknown young woman" - now 76 and known as Barbara Gray (3rd image) - found Alfred on Facebook. She had some convincing to do, and they have some conflicting memories of those moments in the stairwell, but Barbara has finally been acknowledged. Alfred named her in an affidavit and paid her a small settlement. Monetary gain was never her goal, however. "I just wanted to get my name on the damn picture,” she told Vanity Fair, which broke the story and tells it in detail in the current issue.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Embalming Elvis



You may have heard the news this week - as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, Reuters, BBC, Time, and many other media outlets - that the tools used to autopsy Elvis Presley (1935-1977) are being auctioned off. Quigley here to clarify the terminology for her readers: these are not autopsy tools, but embalming tools - as the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune correctly trumpet in their headlines. The lots to be offered by Chicago's Leslie Hindman Auctioneers (2nd image) include a needle injector, an arterial tube, and aneurysm hooks that would have been used to carry out the arterial embalming of the body at the Memphis Funeral Home before Elvis was casketed (1st image) for a private and public viewing. The items include a toe tag, but not the scalpel, scissors, and saw that would have been necessary to open the body for examination at the autopsy, which was conducted at his father's insistence at the hospital before Elvis' remains were released to the funeral home. The items, retained after their use in 1977 by the senior embalmer at the funeral home, consist of the embalming instruments and a collection of postmortem articles, and are expected to fetch a combined total of $10,000 to $14,000.

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