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Transcription: [00:03:41]
{SPEAKER name="Warren Perry"}
Well, there's one of Elvis that hangs at Graceland. And then—

[00:03:47]
there really--
there's a Donald Trump right there, a very young Donald Trump.

[00:03:54]
My wife indicated this to me last night, this is very interesting.

[00:03:57]
I don't know how much time that the Donald had to sit for this portrait but look at that sweater!

And Shannon was so keen to observe [[audience laughter]] - his Ralph Wolfe Cowan sweater. So he might have to do a little bit of uh fixing on that.
But there's some there's some other images in here of Johnny Mathis.

[00:04:20]
This is from the album cover of Heavenly. And Mr. Cowan has painted no less than 6 album covers for Johnny Mathis. Let me tell you a little bit more about him.
Here's a letter he wrote.

[00:04:34]
Ehh-- I made this inquiry a couple of years ago, and he's kind enough to write me back.

[00:04:41]
To tell me a little bit about the origin of this work.

[00:04:44]
And he says: dear warren, in the early 1950's I painted a portrait of Johnny Mathis for his first album cover 'Heavenly'. Elvis saw the painting and for years tried to contact me through Johnny Mathis.

[00:04:56]
It may have been a competition between stars or just phone-tag. Johnny and I had been close friends and I think Johnny wanted to keep my artistic talent to himself.

[00:05:04]
And of course I didn't want to risk my friendship with Johnny. There was always a mutual admiration; I loved Johnny's singing and he loved my paintings.

[00:05:11]
Through the years, I've painted six album covers for him. It wasn't until the early nineteen sixties when I asked to open the first portrait painting studio--when I asked to open the first portrait painting studio at Cesar's Palace in Las Vegas. It was then that Elvis walked in, put his hands across the door and said "You can't get away from me this time. And I'll wear whatever you want."

[00:05:31]
I started drawing him that night, on a blank forty-eight-inch circular canvas, that was abandoned when he told me he preferred the full-length sized portrait.

[00:05:42]
When the full-length painting was finished, Elvis came by and personally carried the four-foot-seven--four foot by seven foot painting across Las Vegas Boulevard to his room at the Aladdin where he always stayed.

[00:05:55]
I was told about that portrait and my friendship with--I told all about that portrait and my friendship with Elvis in a film organized by Priscilla called "Graceland"

[00:06:03]
After Elvis died there were many ridiculous sightings of Elvis, I humorously painted him on a canvas as though he were at the wheel of a car. I framed it in a car door--that I painted pink; the same shade as his Cadillac at Graceland.

[00:06:16]
My assistant manager--at the time had a lot of fun with it. One day they drove the painting down in my Chrysler convertible to the National Enquirer Headquarters.

[00:06:25]
[[audience laughter]] They left my car at the corner with the painting of Elvis framed in the window. Sure enough the National Enquirer photographed it, printed it, and claimed it as another Elvis sighting. [[audience laughter]]

[00:06:37]
That year the painting won a prize and the Fort Lauderdale art museum. Somehow the National Portrait Gallery got wind of it, your board passed on it because the car door that it was framed in wasn't the same year and model as Elvis's Cadillac but they wanted to know what else I had painted since I was the only painter that Elvis ever sat for.

[00:06:53]
Also, the only painter he ever paid for and the only one he ever allowed to hang in Graceland. When Elvis died his full-length painting was hanging in his bedroom.

[00:07:02]
The painting is very personal to him; this fit all the requirements for the National Portrait Gallery. Luckily, I had rolled up all the unfinished paintings from Vegas and stored them in my mother's garage at Fort Worth, Virginia.

[00:07:13]
I was able to restore and repair the circular Elvis portrait. As you can see I added the red shirt and the blue sky to make it different from the Graceland painting.

[00:07:22]
Also, that was the one the board approved. I've heard from clients who've seen the portrait hanging at the National Portrait Gallery that it gets great attention. For that I'm very happy.

[00:07:32]
Elvis was funny and had charisma that was bigger than life. I enjoyed our friendship. Any questions, feel free to call. Sincerely, Ralph Wolfe Cowan.

[00:07:39]
Um, he's a terribly nice man and Mr. Cowan, when I talked to him one night it, over a couple of hours, he was practically in tears at times talking about how lucky he felt and and this he considers to be, the hugest honor in in that's that's a pretty great honor among honors because he's painted an awfully uh large number of people.

[00:08:03]
Let's talk a little bit about Elvis. He was born on this day in nineteen thirty-five so he would be seventy-four years old today, which would make him, what is that, nine years into his social security benefits if I'm right. [[audience laughter]]

[00:08:15]
He's been dead for thirty-two years this coming August. One of the more interesting statistics that you read is over those thirty-two years, how many of his albums, how many of his individual records have gone gold again, how is that.

[00:08:32]
There's always Elvis fans, but interestingly every time you buy an Elvis record in a new format, RCA keeps a total on it. So--when you got rid of your 8-tracks and you went to cassette and you bought Elvis's um "In the Ghetto" or "Suspicious Minds", all the people who went out just like you and bought it in that new format, made that album or that record gold or platinum again.

[00:09:00]
With the conversion to CD, everything in the new format went gold or platinum again. With respect to his movies, they sell in all the new formats as well.

[00:09:12]
He died in nineteen seventy-seven on August sixteenth, his first number one record was--I bet Sid can tell us this. What was his first number one record?