by Alanna Nash
In other words, Elvis shifted all of his feelings for his twin onto his mother. These emotions would have been symbolic because they occurred before the acquisition of real language.
Yet Elvis and Gladys would come to communicate in a secret language all their own. Milk, for example, was “butch.” Ice cream was “iddytream.” And Elvis’s pet name for his mother was Satnin’, which according to Billy Smith means “a real condensed round of fattening. Elvis would pat her on the stomach and say, ‘Baby’s going to bring you something to eat, Satnin.’ ” Gladys, for her part, called him “Elvie,” and sometimes “Naughty,” as in, “You’re a naughty boy.”
They kept it up for life. In the late 1950s, when Lamar Fike would be with the Presleys at Graceland, “Elvis would rip through a paragraph of that, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But Gladys could. And Vernon could, and Elvis would baby talk him, too. I used to sit at that breakfast bar and wouldn’t understand a damn word they said, especially since Elvis had that little stutter. It was like a foreign language.”
Indeed, twin language is often described as “like speaking in tongues,” indecipherable to anyone but the twins themselves. Such behavior is not uncommon—in fact, surviving twins develop a secret language more often than not. And if the other twin isn’t there, the lone twin will speak it with anyone with whom he has a close, meaningful relationship, including his mother.
Even as a small child, Elvis would have had a moral uneasiness with his relationship with Gladys, precisely as he felt responsible for her. It would have left him always needing to be under the control of someone else and yet wanting to be in control of himself and others.
His perpetual need for imposing control also probably resulted from stuck grief, a phenomenon in which an individual, for whatever reason, is incapable of getting over a tragic event, such as the death of a relative or spouse. Such individuals show the same profundity of emotion over time and through the stages of grieving, as delineated by the Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the pioneering book On Death and Dying.
Elvis’s grief for his dead twin and his lethal enmeshment with Gladys left him incapacitated to develop in a normal way, so that he became psychologically truncated in his ability to take on true adult responsibilities. “He couldn’t do it on his own, because he didn’t know who he was—he’d never been able to individuate,” as Whitmer put it in an interview. The grown-up Elvis would always need to rely on someone else to really help out—first Gladys, then his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, his entourage the Memphis Mafia, and various women in his life. In short, at the core, he wanted to be infantalized, to regress, if not back to the womb then back to childhood, to be cared for and nurtured. Says Lamar Fike, “Elvis’s thing with women was that they had to baby him and take care of him.”
This, of course, would play eternal havoc with his relationships with the opposite sex. He would forever be insecure with females his own age—feeling safer and more comfortable around younger people in general—and not really know how to interact socially or recognize the proper boundaries and borders. Because of his stuck grief, particularly after Gladys’s death in 1958, he would always feel as if a part of himself were missing. This would become the most important motivator in his life.
As psychologist Whitmer explains, “It’s not so much the idea that being with another woman meant he was cheating on the mom. It’s more the whole issue of, ‘Mom had control of me. I enjoyed Mom’s having control of me. I enjoyed being enmeshed with my mom, and by the way, that’s why I can never emotionally mature to anything more than fourteen or fifteen years old. I just can’t go any further.’ ”
On the surface, for the first half of his life, Elvis could push himself to behave like a normal teenager, positioned somewhere from fourteen to eighteen years old. But his own self-perception, his default, was about fourteen or sixteen. As such, he continued to be attracted to fourteen-year-old girls up until his death at age forty-two, though for the most part, he saw them as innocents to be protected and wanted them to remain virgins.
Unconsciously, he felt fourteen-year-old girls were replications of himself, and he believed they constituted his missing part. But on a more conscious level, Elvis saw most women as either mothers or playthings. One part of his mind felt and experienced sexual energy as locked in with the concept of procreation—a woman was there for making children. The other half of his mind perceived women just as toys, or as little more than hormonal releases.
“Because of this fact,” says Whitmer, “Elvis could never, ever develop any kind of serious, deep, meaningful relationship with anybody else. It’s as if he said, ‘I cannot stay in a marital, loving relationship with anybody but Gladys.’ ”
Many twinless twins dwell on the sidewalk of life and have high incidences of divorce and sexual and psychological difficulties. “It all goes back to issues of control,” Whitmer asserts. “They just don’t have a sense of identity that can be joined with someone else in a significant higher union. They all say, ‘I am my best friend’ or ‘My dead twin is my best friend.’ They think, ‘I can’t really be married. It just doesn’t work.’ And many of them do get married and many of them stay married, but it’s a very superficial, tangential relationship.”
The stillbirth of his twin, and his unnatural closeness with his mother, then, rendered Elvis a hopelessly poor mate for life.
When Vernon returned home from Parchman in early 1939, some folks around Tupelo regarded him as a criminal, shaking their heads and remembering when he was a deacon in the church. “Back then, people were leery and they were not as forgiving,” says Billy Smith. “If you were in jail, you were an outcast. Friends thought, ‘It’s best not to socialize, because people will think you’re a lot like him.’ It made it very difficult.”
But Vernon also took advantage of his situation, going off with Travis fishing, shooting, and jelly beaning around while Gladys was forced to get a job at Long’s Laundry. Vernon was just “vaccinated against work,” in the view of his friend Aaron Kennedy. “Never sick a day in his life, just sick of work.” Gladys and Vernon fought rounds about it, and finally, she shamed him into applying to the Federal Works Project Agency, a New Deal program, where he was assigned to the Sanitation Project in Lee County. By that summer, he’d be reclassified as a skilled carpenter on the project and bring home $52 a month. His continued good behavior after Parchman resulted in another suspension—this one for ninety days in August—and the governor granted him an indefinite suspension of his sentence that November.
With such a weight off the family’s shoulders, the Presleys spent a lot of time with relatives, getting together for potluck suppers, where Gladys would sometimes churn ice cream in an old-time freezer. They also made their own entertainment with after-dinner singings, or simply listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. Sometimes they had overnight guests, Elvis sleeping on a little pallet on the front floor with his parents, and the guests on a makeshift bed in the kitchen.
It was about this time, age four, that Elvis began to recognize a connection between music and sex, and demonstrate the sexual power that music had over him.
“I remember one night we went up to Gladys and Vernon’s,” Annie Presley said. “We were all sitting around singing, and Elvis was singing with us. Elvis had his little hand in his pocket, dangling his ding-a-ling. Vernon all at once just stopped singing. He could say anything and never crack a grin. So Vernon said, ‘Son, if you’d just quit playing with that thing a little bit, you might could sing.’ Embarrassed that kid to death! We all just hollered.”
Another incident from that era shows how young Elvis linked dancing and sex.
“When he was four or five,” Billy Smith reports, “my mama and Aunt Clettes were dancing together to some music. They were up on a trunk, waving their skirts around, so they were flying up. Elvis was in the room. And the more they danced, the more excited he got. He grabbed my mama by the leg. And he said, ‘Oh, my peter!’
Well, Gladys went wild. She yanked him up and yelled out, ‘You all quit that damn dancing!’ She pointed at Elvis and said, ‘Look what you’re doing to him!’ When my mama told me that, I liked to died.”
That formative memory would lead to one of Elvis’s strongest sexual charges as an adult, that of two women together. And as he grew older, he would have a new name for his penis: Little Elvis.
In the fall of 1941, Elvis entered first grade, attending Lawhon Elementary School on Lake Street, where he would spend the first years of his education. Starting school is a huge and often traumatic step for any child, and for Elvis, it was doubly hard being separated from Gladys for most of the day, especially since Vernon had lost his Federal Works Project job and traveled throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee on construction jobs, working mostly as a carpenter.
Elvis never really knew when his father would be home—the family was now living in a rental house on Maple Street in East Tupelo—and Vernon’s absence, along with the experience of leaving his mother during school hours, bound mother and son anew. They often visited Jessie’s grave together. Relatives would recall that Gladys urged and joined her young son in talking with the lost twin, a practice that originated from her daily prayer to Jessie for guidance. He became her mental embodiment of perfection, first in her mind alone, and then in Elvis’s.
After such sad outings, Gladys, wanting to cheer Elvis up, often bought little treats for him and made him cakes with butter frosting. He had his special cup, glass, and eating utensils, too, and sometimes refused to use any other.
Part of it had to do with a phobia about germs, particularly about eating food that anyone else had touched. Even as an adult, Elvis would drink from the side of a coffee cup, near the handle, thinking it was cleaner, since most people drank from the middle. He routinely refused to eat if someone else reached over and got something off his plate, even if it was an immediate member of his family, as Billy Smith noted.
“Elvis used to carry a knife and fork in his back pocket because he didn’t like to eat with anybody else’s. He’d eat from your dishes, but not with your silverware. He didn’t break that habit until he went into the army. Used to take that knife and fork to school with him. He didn’t eat or drink after anybody and he didn’t want you to drink after him.”
Attending school and meeting new children opened Elvis up to a new world—something he desperately needed, given his insular family situation and the fact that he was a shy, dreamy child. Yet being with so many boys his age would have naturally underscored his grief in not having Jessie by his side. Sometime after Elvis started school, but before he was old enough to know the facts of life, Gladys inadvertently pulled a cruel trick on him, perhaps not realizing how it would affect him.
Barbara Hearn, who dated Elvis during his early fame, first became a family friend when the Presleys lived on Alabama Street in Memphis. She and Gladys found an easy friendship, sitting and talking. “If you were shelling peas or something, you’d get into some pretty deep conversation,” she relates. One day Gladys told her about the time in Tupelo when she was sick and the doctor paid a house call.
“Elvis saw the doctor leaving, and he came running into her bedroom, saying, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ Gladys had doubled a pillow up and put a blanket around it, and she said, ‘Oh, Elvis, come and look what the doctor’s left!’ It looked just like a baby lying there, and he was so happy. He broke out in a big smile and ran over there, but when he saw that she was playing a joke on him, he was so disappointed and angry. It made him furious, because he really thought there had been a baby. She probably wouldn’t have done it if she had thought about it a while, particularly after she saw how upset he got. I’m sure she was sorry afterward.”
By 1943, Vernon was working hard to stabilize his family’s finances and to establish himself as a worthy citizen after his incarceration at Parchman. He continued to travel to find work—moving the whole family to the Mississippi Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula that May, where he and his cousin Sales Presley, Annie’s husband, signed on at the Moss Point Shipyard. But by the end of June, all the Presleys were homesick and returned to Tupelo. Vernon found a job as a driver for L. P. McCarty and Sons, a wholesale grocer, and the family continued to enjoy what must have seemed like prosperity, compared to so many other stressful periods of their lives.
The following year, Elvis started fourth grade at Lawhon Elementary. It was a significant time in the young boy’s life, as it was probably this year that he “courted” his first real girlfriend, Elois Bedford. (Caroline Ballard had earlier won his heart, but the “relationship” was short-lived.) After Elvis became famous, Elois would forget precisely when their “romance” started, but she never forgot his smile, more a perpetual silly grin than anything else. “I can close my eyes now and still see him walking toward me,” she said in the early 1990s. “I picked him out of all the boys. He picked me out of all the other girls. As far as dating, we didn’t. We were too young.”
Theirs was a typical interaction for children of their age—they wrote notes to each other in class, called each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” and spent time together at various events, particularly the Halloween carnival, where they entered the cakewalk. Elois remembered him as a loner—quiet and well mannered, wearing “very common clothes,” either overalls or khaki pants and shirt, but always clean. Elvis was already starting to distinguish himself with his singing.
“What I remember most about him was his singing in chapel [at school]. I can still see him singing ‘Old Shep.’ It was so pretty. He had such a beautiful voice back then. I remember our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dillard, saying, ‘One of these days he is going to be on the radio.’ ”
“Old Shep,” Red Foley’s mournful story of a boy and his dog, was the kind of tearjerker that made up the backbone of country music of the era. But the tragic saga would have strongly resonated with a child who had experienced his own painful loss, and Elvis’s friend Becky Martin recalled that he imbued it with such emotion that some of his schoolmates cried when he sang it.
Elvis was still stuck on the song the following year, impressing his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Oleta Grimes, the daughter of Orville Bean, who was once more doing business with Vernon, having just sold him a new four-room house on East Tupelo’s Berry Street. Mrs. Grimes found Elvis to be such a promising singer (“He sang so sweetly”) that she took him to the school principal, J. D. Cole, who agreed with her—the boy had talent. Mrs. Grimes spoke with Gladys, and they agreed to enter Elvis in the talent contest on Children’s Day at the annual Mississippi–Alabama Fair and Dairy Show at the Fairgrounds. The first-place winner would receive a trophy and a $25 war bond, and even the runners-up could go home with a smaller trophy, or at least $2.50 worth of fair rides. Ten-year-old Elvis, wearing eyeglasses, a necktie, and suspenders to hold up his pants, climbed up on a chair for yet another a cappella rendition of “Old Shep.”
For decades, the story circulated that Elvis won second place, but in fact, he did not. Nor did he win third or fourth, but rather fifth. Shirley Gillentine, who belted out “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” secured first place. And Nubin Payne, who wrote her own song, “Someday,” and accompanied herself on guitar, came in second. A rare photograph shows Shirley holding the largest trophy, Nubin the second largest trophy, and Hugh Jeffries, an East Tupelo boy who played the Hawaiian guitar, the third-place prize. Elvis, a defeated look on his brow, stands empty-handed.
Elois Bedford was proud of him all the same. But later that year, another girl captured Elvis’s attention, and now he had to break the news. “I was just about to get on the school bus and go home that afternoon,” Elois remembered, “and Elvis handed me a note.”
It was short but not sweet, saying only: I have found another girl.
“Her name was Magdalene Morgan,” Elois continued. “I lost him that day.”
The event was meaningful in the larger scheme of things—moving f
rom Elois to Magdalene was perhaps the last time Elvis limited himself to sequential girlfriends. In years to come, and especially once his recording career caught fire, his love interests would be both many and concurrent. This was behavior he learned from both his grandfather, J.D., and to some extent Vernon.
Maggie Morgan was a far more important figure in Elvis’s life than Elois Bedford, as their interest in each other spanned several years and ran deeper on every level. And although neither of them could have known it at the time, Maggie was an archetype for so many women to come: She was a stand-in for Gladys.
With dark hair and eyes, and standing a good three inches taller than her new beau, Maggie had known Elvis since the third grade at Lawhon Elementary. But it was at the Assembly of God church that her infatuation simmered. Already the church pianist by eight or nine, she played behind the budding singer as he performed the old hymns—“Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross.” Vernon and Gladys did not attend church regularly, Aaron Kennedy said years later, and no one could depend on them to take a lead there. But Elvis and Maggie rode the church bus together as Christ Ambassadors—a youth group that traveled the nearby towns of Saltillo, Corinth, and Priceville. And the two were paired off together in the Christmas pageants, Elvis playing Joseph to her Mary.
Gladys and Maggie’s mother were friends as well, and the women visited in each other’s homes. During such times, Elvis and Maggie would sneak out of the house together to be alone.
“We would walk in the woods and hold hands and talk, dream aloud about the future and what we wanted to be. Elvis always wanted to be a singer. That was his dream even then. And he always said [the girl] he would marry would have to be a lot like his mother.”
On one visit, Elvis and Maggie ventured out into the woods behind his house, and Elvis carved a heart into the side of a tree, carefully cutting out their initials and the words LOVE FOREVER beneath them. Later, he did the same thing on a stack of lumber. The two had an understanding—they were sweethearts and belonged to each other, and as Maggie remembers, “We were so close at that time I just thought we would always be together.”