by Alanna Nash
They eloped two months after they met, on June 17, 1933, in Pontotoc County, where Vernon, barely seventeen but looking every bit a full-grown man, could pass as one. He borrowed the money for the marriage license, which spelled his name “Virnon,” either because the clerk made an error, or because Vernon, who was only semiliterate throughout his life, knew no better. Both he and his bride lied about their ages, Vernon adding five years, for twenty-two, and Gladys subtracting two, for nineteen. In a photograph taken of them about that time, they can hardly conceal their hunger for each other, their heads pressed together, Gladys snuggled up to him from behind, her arm around his shoulder.
Yet it was not precisely love at first sight. Initially, Gladys dated Vernon’s older brother, Vester, while her younger sister, Clettes, went with Vernon. “Gladys didn’t like my attitude much,” Vester said years later. “I was too wild in those days. So Gladys quit seeing me and we quit seeing the Smith girls for a while.” But soon it was a foursome again, as Clettes married Vester after Gladys wed Vernon—two brothers marrying two sisters. To further entangle the family tree—rooted in the first-cousin union of Bob and Doll Smith—Travis and John Smith, Gladys’s brothers, also married sisters. “So their kids and my brother, Bobby, and me were double first cousins,” explains Billy Smith. “You’ve got double first cousins on the Presley side, too.”
Gladys’s family was large, sprawling, and financially unstable, but in some ways, the Smiths were high-minded and genteel compared to the Presleys, another matriarchal southern clan. None of that was lost on the locals.
As Tupelo historian Roy Turner recounts, “When Mertice Finley Collins told her mother she had bumped into Gladys Smith in town and learned she had married Vernon Presley, her mother replied, ‘One of the Presleys above the highway,’ which was to distinguish where in the East Tupelo hierarchy they were. Even as Tupelo looked down on East Tupelo, East Tupelo was divided into two sects—the more prosperous below the highway, and the less fortunate above the highway. The highway being 78.”
Vernon’s grandmother, Rosella Presley, was the daughter of Dunnan Presley Jr., a Confederate army deserter and bigamist who abandoned the family when Rosella was a baby to return to his first wife and child. Rosella, who never knew him, grew up independent and freethinking, and continued the tradition, bringing ten illegitimate children into the world by various men who never stayed long enough to know their offspring. A sharecropper, she died at sixty-three without ever identifying the fathers of most of her children. But her youngest son, Joseph Presley, would say a man named Steele, part Cherokee Indian, sired at least a few of her brood.
“She was a very strict disciplinarian, but a loving mother. Despite the hardships, she always managed to give each of us a little present at Christmas—even if it was only a piece of candy or a secondhand pair of shoes.” Though she had no real education, she wanted better for her children, and saw to it that they attended school.
Two of them exemplified the best and worst of the family and set themselves up as passionate rivals, in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Noah Presley, the “good” son, moved to East Tupelo, where he ran a grocery store and drove a school bus. Civic minded, with a soft spot for children (he had thirteen of his own), he regularly took the kids of East Tupelo to the zoo in Memphis on Sundays. In 1936, when he ran for mayor of East Tupelo—then little more than a wide spot in the road, and considered inferior to the larger town of six thousand citizens—he was handily elected, gaining praise for improving East Tupelo’s physical facilities.
On the other end of the scale was Jessie Presley, also known as J.D. His mother had bestowed a gift upon him that she’d withheld from the rest of her children—honoring him with his real father’s surname, McClowell, in addition to her own. A sharecropper on Orville Bean’s dairy farm, Jessie had five children—Vernon, Vester, Gladys Earline, Nasval Lorene (also known as Nashville, or Nash), and Delta Mae—with wife Minnie Mae Hood, a tall, skinny, peppery woman from Fulton, Mississippi, whom he tried to dominate. Like his son, Jessie had married at seventeen, wedding an older woman (Minnie Mae was eight years his senior) of higher social standing.
In contrast to his brother, Jessie D. McClowell Presley was as self-centered and parsimonious as Noah was generous. Everyone in East Tupelo talked about how mean he was, particularly when he drank. They clucked about his habit of locking up his whiskey so Minnie Mae couldn’t get to it, and laughed at his stinginess in dictating how many pieces of cheese she could slice or biscuits she could serve when guests came calling. Remembered one relative, “When that was gone, you was out, so we didn’t ever go back no more for dinner. We went somewhere else if we wanted to eat.”
Still, Jessie has his defenders. “Was he being stingy, or were the times just hard and he was being careful?” asks Tony Stuchbury, an Elvis aficionado from England who often visits Tupelo to gather information for his Web site. “To judge him on that is a little bit unfair. I don’t think he’s the bad apple that people have painted him to be.”
Yet Jessie’s relationship with Vernon was also often strained, and when the boy was fifteen, his father sent him away for a year to sharecrop on the farm of a relative, likely as a disciplinary action. But Jessie also may have been jealous of Vernon’s physique and good looks, and considered him a sexual threat, for Jessie took pride in his own appearance and was known around the county as a womanizing dandy.
“When he’d get off of work on Friday,” Annie Presley remembered, “you’d see him go home and take a bath and dress to a T, and then you wouldn’t see him ’til Sunday evening late.”
Given to dapper suits, he cut such a handsome figure that women were said to stare at him as he strutted down the road.
Jessie may have also seen something else of himself in Vernon, as Vernon was the “bad” son to Vester’s “good,” just as Jessie had been compared with Noah. But Vernon did, in fact, demonstrate an aversion to three things: responsibility, conflict, and work. For a while, he and Vester—shorter, scrawnier, and no competition with the ladies—tried farming a little truck patch together, planting cotton, corn, and soybeans. But Vernon hated getting up before the sun and soon resorted to odd jobs, including working for Orville Bean.
Gladys’s paycheck kept them going, and Minnie Mae, who called Vernon her favorite, saw how they struggled to get by. They needed a house of their own, Minnie told her husband, and they could build it right next to theirs on East Tupelo’s Old Saltillo Road, on Bean’s property, located above Highway 78, which shuttled travelers between Tupelo and Birmingham, Alabama. Vernon borrowed $180 from Bean to buy lumber for a little two-room, wood-frame shotgun house, with the understanding that he would pay him rent to retire the loan with interest. Jessie, who was a skilled carpenter, helped his son with the construction, as did Vester. The three, mindful of the floods that raged through the area in the spring, raised the little house off the ground with stone piles. When it was finished, in 1934, it resembled housing constructed for mill villages around the area and was solid enough to last a hundred years or so, if not especially fancy, with no indoor plumbing or ceiling, just the roof. The two families shared a cow and some chickens out back.
The image of the Presleys’ first house would be seared in Elvis’s mind forever. In the fifth grade, he would write a poem in a classmate’s autograph book:
Roses are red, violets are blue,
When a chicken gets in your house,
You should say, “Shoo, shoo, shoo.”
When you get married and live in a shack,
Make your children clothes out of toe sacks.
By the end of June 1934, Gladys realized she was pregnant, and around her fifth month she told everybody she was having identical twins. Not only was she uncommonly large, all swollen up and heavy, and her legs hurting her, but also with time, she could feel two babies kicking inside her. Besides, twins ran in the family on both sides—Gladys had identical twin cousins, Elzie and Ellis Mansell, and Sales Presley had a fraternal twin, Gordo
n. Annie and Sales’s daughter would also have twins, and Travis and Lorraine Smith would sadly lose a set of twins. For her baby shower, Gladys received the usual items that comfort newborn infants, but also two sheets and thirty dollars in cash. Her friends and family were concerned that Vernon would drink it all up.
Gladys had always wanted a house full of children, all of them around her all the time, and she and Vernon were giddy with the news. (“Vernon thought he was a stud,” remembers Lamar Fike. “Elvis used to say that Vernon knew when Elvis was conceived, because afterwards, he blacked out.”) They picked out rhyming names—Jessie Garon for the firstborn, and Elvis Aaron. “Jessie” was to honor Vernon’s father, and “Elvis” came from Vernon’s middle name. They chose “Aaron” for Aaron Kennedy, Vernon’s best friend. The “Garon” simply rhymed with “Aaron.”
In the predawn morning of January 8, 1935, Gladys awoke to intense labor pains, and rallied her husband from sleep. “Vernon,” she said, shaking him. “I think it’s time. You’d best get your mama over here. And go call the doctor.” Vernon lit the oil lamp, took one look at his wife’s face, beaded with sweat, and then raced across the yard to his parents’ house and pounded on the door. “Mama! Papa! Come quick! Gladys is in labor!”
Minnie Mae and Jessie rushed over in their nightclothes, Jessie still hung over from the night before. Minnie Mae asked Gladys some questions, and then also implored her son to get the doctor. He took off running to Highway 78 and the nearest telephone, dialing the four numbers that connected him to sixty-eight-year-old Dr. William Robert Hunt, the poor man’s physician, who had been practicing in Tupelo since 1913, the year he received his Tulane University medical degree. Minnie Mae somehow sent word to the midwife, Edna Robinson, and began boiling a large pot of water on the wood-burning stove.
By the time Dr. Hunt arrived, steering his Model T Ford the mile and a half across the levee to the Presley home, Gladys was about to deliver. Jessie Garon appeared first, around 4 A.M. Then a hush fell over the room, and Dr. Hunt announced that the child was lifeless, stillborn. Gladys let out a long, piercing wail as the midwife carried the dead infant out into the back room.
Vernon, too, was crying, but according to the story Billy Smith heard down the years from the family, “Jessie, drunk out of his mind, thought Vernon was laughing. He went in and said, ‘Gitchy, gitchy, goo!’ And ‘Oh, ain’t it a beautiful baby!’ The baby didn’t respond, of course. So Jessie just kept going ‘Gitchy, gitchy, goo!’ Vernon was hurt to the bone, so finally he yelled out, ‘Oh, goddamn, Daddy! The baby is dead!’ Jessie got this funny look on his face and just said, ‘Oh, oh!’ About the time all that was happening, about 4:35 A.M., Elvis was born.”
Precisely what happened to Jessie Garon is open to speculation. Vester wrote in his book, A Presley Speaks, that Gladys and Vernon had been in a car accident just months before the twins were born, and that, in fact, they’d paid the rent on their little two-room house with their settlement money. Might Jessie have been injured in the accident?
And then there’s front porch gossip. According to the oft-repeated story, Dr. Hunt had his coat on to leave when Gladys insisted there was another baby. But a doctor who was about to record his 919th and 920th births would have recognized the signs of a second child, particularly the fact that Gladys’s uterus was still swollen. One variation of the tale has it that the first baby could have lived, that Dr. Hunt was, indeed, surprised by the second birth and had spent too much time attending to Elvis when something as routine as clearing Jessie’s windpipe might have saved him.
Vernon, in a story he told for the rest of his life, saw the tragedy as God’s will. Just before the births, he said, there were two identical medicine bottles setting on the mantel of the fireplace. Just as Gladys was giving birth, one of the bottles inexplicably burst, while the other remained intact. After Jessie was pronounced dead, Vernon interpreted the exploding bottle as a sign from heaven. When Jessie died, he said, Elvis took over his soul and spirit.
No matter what the cause of the baby’s death, Gladys, friends said, looked “more than half dead” from blood loss, and Dr. Hunt, who billed the Presleys only fifteen dollars as a “labor case,” sent her to the Tupelo Hospital, where she would stay for two weeks. Elvis, who was being breast-fed, went with her. The weekend after Elvis’s birth, Dr. Hunt announced in church that the Presleys had had twins, and that one had died. The community may have been poor, but it looked after its own, Janelle McComb reported. “Some of the congregation went to visit and took things.”
A few days after the delivery, a still exhausted Dr. Hunt recorded the births in his ledger, misspelling Elvis as “Evis” (probably following Vernon’s pronunciation), and transposing the i from “Jessie” into “Garion.” He similarly erred on baby Jessie’s death certificate, recording the date of birth as January 7 and listing him only as the nameless “infant of Vernon Pressley,” repeating the original family spelling. Dr. Hunt’s daughter, Sarah Hunt Potter, would later say that she wasn’t certain that 4:35 A.M.—Elvis’s time of birth as recorded in the ledger—was correct, since her father had waited so long to enter it.
However, a bigger mystery than the exact time of Elvis’s birth is the location of his dead twin’s grave. For decades, it was said that on January 9 Vernon had climbed the hilly terrain of East Tupelo’s tiny Priceville Cemetery in the bitter cold with the little coffin, a minister, and an undertaker from W. E. Pegues at his side. There, in the Presley plot, they supposedly carried out their grim task, burying the infant in an unmarked grave that all but disappeared when the grass grew in.
But Priceville has been questioned in later years. Billy Smith says that Jessie was, indeed, buried in an unmarked grave, but in another cemetery closer to Saltillo. One of Elvis’s classmates insists the twin was buried in a cemetery by St. Mark’s Methodist Church across from the birthplace. And Joe Savery, who owns the original death certificate, has said that “nobody really knows where that child is buried. . . . Later on, Elvis tried to find out. . . . You would think that somebody in the family would have known where they buried that child, but I have never known anybody that does.”
However, Roy Turner believes Priceville is the burial spot after all. Someone put a small marble foot marker there years ago that sets near the grave of Noah Presley. “When I stumbled on what I thought was Jessie’s grave, because of the chronology of the surrounding Presley graves—then a space for two more that was never used—I assumed this was the spot. A lot of people in that era were not able to afford tombstones. When I first saw the grave, there was only a concrete chunk marking the spot and some artificial flowers.”
Becky Martin, one of Elvis’s favorite fifth grade classmates, confirmed it as Jessie’s final resting place and remembered the Presley family usually put flowers on the grave when they visited the cemetery each decoration day, which at Priceville is the first Sunday in August.
Jessie’s death certificate also lists Priceville Cemetery as the burial site, as does the receipt at Pegues for the coffin. Some years back, “I was doing a documentary on the [1936] Tupelo tornado and interviewed Mr. Pegues, wanting to know how many deaths they handled,” continues Roy Turner. “While he was going through his records, he said, ‘You might be interested in this.’ ” The book contained records from the 1930s, and the funeral director showed Turner where Vernon bought and paid for the coffin, and for Pegues to handle the burial.
“People say, ‘Why didn’t they just move Jessie to Graceland the way they did Elvis and Gladys?’ ” asks Billy Smith. “There wasn’t anything to move. They had a little wood coffin for the baby and all. But there couldn’t be anything to move but a hunk of dirt. The little coffin’s rotted and gone. Baby’s gone. Maybe bones. We don’t really know. Why bother? Leave it in its resting place.”
Today, the Presley gravesites in Graceland’s Meditation Garden include a small plaque for Jessie, as J. D. Presley spelled it, not “Jesse,” as is so often written.
From the momen
t Elvis was born, mother and son demonstrated a remarkable closeness, almost as if Gladys had been Elvis’s twin and not Jessie. She tended to the infant’s every need, refusing to hand off care to a relative or even her husband for a single afternoon’s respite. “Gladys had a one-track mind,” offered a female cousin. “She would hold that baby so tight I thought he might suffocate. She wouldn’t let nobody carry him around but her, not even Vernon.”
In fact, Vernon, who had so held his young bride’s affections, would in short order seem more like a boarder in the house, as he would for the remainder of the Presleys’ life together.
As Lamar Fike says, “Gladys ruled her house when she married. But when Elvis came along, he and Gladys ruled that roost together. You had a wife who dominated the whole thing, a husband who didn’t like to work, and an only child who was doted on by his mother. A child who listened to his mother and father argue all their lives. That’s what molded Elvis into what he was. It was one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever seen.”
Any mother who lost one of her twin babies as Gladys had would have naturally feared losing the surviving child, as Gladys did as long as she lived. Leona Moore, a former nurse at the Tupelo Hospital, told author Elaine Dundy that Gladys miscarried another child when Elvis was seven. Billy Smith doubts it, saying he would have heard that in the family. But true or not, Gladys apparently was not capable of having other children, which further contributed to her overprotection of Elvis. “My mother,” the adult Elvis would say. “I suppose since I was an only child that we might’ve been a little closer than . . . I mean everyone loves their mother, but . . . Mother was always right with me all my life.”
During Elvis’s formative years, a number of events collided to cement her relentless hold on him, more for her comfort and solace than his.
The first occurred nine months after Elvis’s birth, when Gladys’s grandmother, Ann Mansell Smith, mother of Bob and the matriarch of the Smith family, died. Far worse, in a matter of weeks, Gladys’s own mother, the tubercular Doll, expired at fifty-nine. Her passing marked three deaths in the immediate family in eleven months, reawakening Gladys’s fears, phobias, and abandonment issues. She clung to her son tighter than before, almost as if he were a shield against a treacherous and mercurial world, where disaster could strike at any second and take away all that mattered.