The King And I

What better way to celebrate this, the 60th anniversary of Elvis’ birth, than by a little chat with … Elvis? Yes, legally speaking, this is Elvis. Ron Wendlandt, a Spokane Valley man, officially changed his name last June to Ron Elvis Wendlandt.

“I go by Elvis now,” said Elvis, although for purposes of clarity we will refer to him henceforth as Wendlandt.

Still, he is Elvis by profession. He has made his living for the past three years as an Elvis impersonator. He plays conventions and nightclubs up and down the West Coast, and he will be seen by millions this month as a co-host of several Las Vegas segments of “MTV Sports.”

Suspicious minds want to know: What possesses a man to make a career out of pretending to be Elvis? “It’s a good living,” said Wendlandt. “It’s very lucrative.”

And he also does it to “keep the Elvis name alive” and to “take people back into an era where everything was a lot easier-going.”

It all began one day about 3 years ago when a houseguest heard him playing his guitar and singing.

“You sound like Elvis when you sing,” she said.

Wendlandt was all, to say the least, shook up. No one had ever said that to him before. He loved to sing, but he had no professional experience. He was working in his father-in-law’s welding business. As a kid, he hadn’t even particularly liked Elvis.

And then she really stunned him by asking him to do an Elvis impersonation show for the state postal convention in Seattle, which she was helping to organize. It was now, Wendlandt realized, or never.

Wendlandt, to his own surprise, said yes. A man can’t abdicate when offered the King-ship.

Friends made him a homemade Elvis costume, and the next thing he knew, he was at the Red Lion in Seattle, singing “A Hunka-Hunka Burnin’ Love” and trying to keep his Elvis collar from falling down.

“It wouldn’t stay up,” said Wendlandt. “We did the show anyway, and they paid us $275. And I thought, man, this is really great.”

During that show, a woman approached him with another booking, and it just “compounded from there.”

At that point, Wendlandt became a serious student of Elvis.

“I really wasn’t (an Elvis fan) as a younger person,” said Wendlandt, who grew up in Reardan and graduated from Reardan High School. “I really didn’t care for ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and that kind of stuff. I didn’t relate to that real well. It wasn’t until later on, when he started getting into the ballads and songs that had a lot of meaning - ‘My Way,’ ‘American Trilogy’ - that’s when I really started getting into his music.”

Now, he says the only music he listens to is Elvis music. He studies every nuance of the songs, to lend authenticity to his 175-song repertoire.

He not only plays Elvis on stage. He plays him at the grocery store. He plays him when he goes out to dinner. He plays him when he attends high school basketball games with his wife and two children.

“I always wear my hair like this,” said Wendlandt, who declined to give his age. “It takes me two hours to comb it every morning. I get people coming up to me all the time asking for autographs. I meet a lot of good people that way.”

What does his family think about it? His wife Becky says it’s “the greatest thing in the world to happen to him,” and she says the only drawback is the lack of privacy. For instance, the family went tubing at Kirk’s Lodge recently, and he spent the entire time signing autographs.

His son, Nathan, 12, is “pretty excited about it,” said Wendlandt. His daughter, Katie, 17, is “not sure what to think,” as Wendlandt tactfully puts it.

As for Wendlandt himself, even he occasionally has some reservations about the fact that he has virtually turned himself into another person.

“Yeah, I still think about that,” he said. “All the time, I’m playing the part of Elvis. But after reading all about him and studying what he did and everything, him and I are a lot alike. The way he was raised, he was raised in a Pentecostal church and so was I. The way he believed and everything, we just coincide a lot.”

Competition is stiff in the Elvis impersonation business. Wendlandt remembers a Las Vegas booking agent telling him, “Man, I got enough Elvises to last me the next 20 years.”

But none of those other Elvises landed a gig on “MTV Sports,” the popular MTV show hosted by Dan Cortese. Wendlandt got the job by hanging around Vegas and happening to get noticed by an MTV talent coordinator.

“She came up to me and said, ‘We want Elvis to drive up and down the strip showing us “your” town,”’ said Wendlandt. “All we did was ad-lib. We’d pull up in front of a casino, and immediately 400 or 500 people would come out, trying to get our autographs. They’re telling Dan Cortese to duck so they could get a picture of me. And here I am, a nobody!” Viva, as they say, Las Vegas.

The segments will air on MTV throughout the last week of January. Even Wendlandt’s parents in Reardan will probably be tuning in to catch their boy. They support Wendlandt “110 percent,” he said.

“I didn’t think they would, since they were raised Pentecostal and they never really liked me doing that sort of thing growing up,” said Wendlandt. “But now they think it’s just really great.”

What does everyone else in Reardan think? “At first they thought it was funny,” he said. “Well, everybody did. Now, people are starting to think it’s really neat.”

But there are still some people in Spokane who respond to the sight of Elvis by chortling.

Hey! Don’t be cruel.

“It used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore,” said Wendlandt. “I just feel sorry for ‘em, because I figure they’re just jealous.”