Hunka hunka burnin' bacon

Elvis Presley was a connoisseur of macaroni salad, barbecue pizza and peanut butter. What other culinary catastrophes were hiding in his kitchen?

By Robert Sietsema

Read more: Graceland, Elvis Presley, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Aug. 14, 2007 | In the Vegas twilight of his career, Elvis Presley donned jumpsuits of silver lamé with electric-blue sashes, looking like an elephant in lingerie as he teetered across the stage, flinging damp hankies at his female admirers. Every bulge and bump on his sagging 250-pound physique was brazenly revealed. Who were his haberdashers? And is it still possible to prosecute them?

Now, decades down the road, fans still mourn him as a victim of drug abuse, a fallen American prince who popped uppers and downers until his 1977 collapse in a Graceland bathroom like a punctured blimp. But drugs weren't Elvis' only vice; what had he been pigging out on to make him so bloated? In observance of the 30th anniversary of his death, I decided to find out.

By now, everybody and their cousin knows that the King's favorite tuck-in was a toasted peanut butter and banana sandwich. In fact, in a 2002 feature, CNN pointed an accusatory finger at the PB&B: "This gooey concoction, fatter than a herd of hogs, was what Elvis Presley reached for when his stomach yelped." In the name of research, I found what seemed like an authentic recipe and executed it. To my surprise, it was delicious, with the salty peanut butter playing off the hyper-sweet banana. The viscous and sticky texture, too, was sublime (though I managed to splatter drops of molten peanut butter all over my jumpsuit).

It sure tasted of excess, but was it really that fattening? Using Random House's Handy Diet & Nutrition Guide, and totaling up the sandwich's component parts, I concluded that the legendary PB&B incorporates only 486 calories and 27.8 grams of fat, of which 10 grams are saturated. Compare that to a Big Mac with cheese -- 740 calories, 43.7 fat grams with 17.7 grams saturated -- and Elvis' guilty pleasure doesn't look so guilty after all. Perhaps he didn't limit himself to only one?

The PB&B may have been invented by Elvis' longtime cook and maid Pauline Nicholson, who called him Mr. P. and worked for him from 1964 till he died. Elvis was apparently very fond of her, calling her his "brown mama." She was one of the last people to see him alive on Aug. 16, 1977, when he nipped off after playing an early-morning game of racquetball. But Pauline Nicholson was not the only one in the kitchen at Graceland: no, he employed people to make him sandwiches 24 hours a day. Mary Jenkins (who wrote "Elvis, Memories Beyond Graceland Gates") was also African-American and also cooked for the King on a regular basis. She once famously said of him, "The only thing in life he got any enjoyment out of was eating."

Jenkins is featured in "The Burger and the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley," a 1996 docudrama made by the BBC and broadcast here on Cinemax. (And you thought the BBC was a classy outfit?) According to the film, Elvis bought a house for Mary Jenkins, who maintained that after his death, she could hear him rattling around in her bathroom every night. (Maybe he was rummaging in the medicine cabinet for some Tums.) But despite the movie's penchant for ghost stories and polyester-clad impersonators, it does some decent spade work turning up Elvis' early dining history. It reports, for example, that as a child in rural Mississippi, the King ate lots of critters including rabbits, squirrels and opossums. And even before he invented his signature pelvic thrust, Elvis was into organs, especially pig's feet, ears and chitterlings. Later on, after his parents moved him at age 14 to Memphis, he ate lots of sloppy Joes at Humes High School, according to school authorities. Well, who didn't?

Maybe Elvis did try to reform his nutritional habits near the end of his life, because his personal physician, George ("Dr. Nick") Nichopoulos, claims that Presley went on a cleansing diet of papaya juice in the months before his death. That might have been what killed him. Then again, Dr. Nick is hardly an arbiter of healthfulness: He was the one who prescribed all those uppers and downers.

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