The Elvis-Kiss Mystery—Solved!
In the summer of 1956, a 21-year-old Elvis Presley, already inciting libidinous mayhem from Kansas City to Jacksonville, impishly touched tongues with a young woman in Richmond, Virginia. Alfred Wertheimer snapped the shutter just at the moment of contact. The result: “The Kiss,” one of the most storied photos in Elvis lore. Yet for five decades, no one, not even Wertheimer, knew the identity of Presley’s date—until now. Her name is Barbara Gray.

The Kiss”—as the photograph is sometimes called—is in fact the most enduring of the 3,800 exposures that photographer Al Wertheimer made of Elvis Presley, many of the best taken during a two-day period in June 1956. While chronicling the rock prince on the threshold of becoming the King, Wertheimer, then 26, famously caught Elvis on the road and at his home in Memphis with his family and entourage. But that prize frame has become one of the classics in the rock-photography canon: Elvis, in a stairwell at the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, minutes before a concert, darting a mischievous tongue toward the deliciously reciprocating mouth of a mysterious girl in black.

This auction item is a 8x10 print of "The Kiss" with Elvis and Barbara and is signed by Barbara Gray.

(Photograph taken by Alfred Wertheimer in 1956)