He Was Nothing but a Hound Dog

December 1, 2008
by Richard Horgan

Fifty years after the father of Elvis Presley ruined the life of an American soldier stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, that soldier’s son has turned their tale of friendship, adultery and betrayal into the screenplay for his second feature film. The fact that writer-director D. Edward Stanley, after these events went down, would go on to become Elvis’ stepbrother (at age four) and eventual bodyguard (at age 16!) only adds to the intrigue of how Vernon Presley proved to be no friend of Master Sergeant William J. Stanley.

Titled Restoring my Father’s Honor, the flashback drama chronicles the efforts of Stanley Jr. to right the story of how Vernon, after befriending Stanley Sr.overseas in 1958 and starting an affair with the latter’s wife Dee, relied on the trappings of his celebrity to squash the distraught husband’s attempts to expose the adultery. Instead of flushing out Vernon as a scoundrel, Stanley Sr. wound up in a padded room at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and saw his wife go on to marry Elvis’ dad in 1960, just as the truth about the sordid love triangle was finally being exposed.



The idea that Stanley Jr., after living at Graceland from 1960 through 1977 and making a 2006 feature about his bodyguard days titled Protecting the King, is now engaged in the business of vetting Vernon (pictured above right, circa 1959 with Dee) as vermin to today’s audiences cannot help but elevate this project above the usual indie fray. Especially when you add the fact that Stanley Jr. did not attend his biological father’s funeral in 1991 and only really started to learn about what went down in Germany in the late 1950’s via dad’s unpublished memoirs, which he received posthumously in the mail.

In terms of Elvis lore, Stanley Jr. is perhaps best know as the earliest and most vocal proponent of the theory that the King’s death was in fact a suicide. These allegations first came to light in 1990, when the now Dallas based filmmaker shared his theory in a Life Magazine interview article written by Presley biographer Albert Goldman.

Source Article: http://www.filmstew.com/showBlog.aspx?blog_id=1460