Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Elvis didn’t precisely say the same, since he wasn’t much of a talker. At school, in fact, he stood out only for being an especially giving child who wanted to please. His grades weren’t remarkable—arithmetic and geography, especially, proved nearly fatal. And his features had not yet formed into a handsome face, his high cheekbones, part of his Indian ancestry, just barely discernible, and his hooded eyelids looking more droopy than dreamy. It was only when he turned to music that he seemed to shine. In Maggie’s view, he was just a nice polite boy, her “ideal guy.”

  With boys, Elvis wasn’t as restrained. On Berry Street, he played with the son of Lether Gable, Vernon’s partner in crime in the check-forging caper, who was now the Presleys’ next-door neighbor. The boys were wrestling one day, getting rougher than they intended, when Elvis somehow snapped his playmate’s hip. He felt terrible about it and, according to Annie Presley, “went and sat with him every day and visited while he was laid up.” And while he didn’t play hooky, sass his parents, or talk back to his teachers, “Elvis was a lot like his daddy in one respect,” his cousin Bobby Roberts offered. “Both of them were always joking.” The company of men and boys, sitting around and telling stories, relaxed him.

  “One night one of his uncles was visiting, and he was telling us never to mess with women, that women would eat you up like blue cheese, or something like that. When he said that, Elvis fell on the floor laughing. He got a big kick out of that.”

  Still, most of his friends were females, like Becky Martin or Barbara Spencer, and he didn’t mind babysitting for his relatives’ children, toting them on his hip the way a girl might do. Gladys remained his whole world, as his role model, friend, companion, and protector. “I could wake her up any hour of the night,” Elvis said in 1958, “and if I was worried or troubled by something, well, she’d get up and try to help me.”

  For too many years, she walked him to school every day, and legend has it she continued such hovering behavior long after Elvis was old enough to walk on his own, or with other children his age. Annie Presley dispelled that, insisting, “She didn’t walk him to school. She’d walk him to the highway and see him across, and then she’d come back home. Lots of evenings, we’d just sit on our porch and watch for ’em and see ’em get close to the highway. Then one of us would go and see ’em across the road.”

  Oleta Grimes, Elvis’s fifth grade teacher and a neighbor to the Presleys, also refuted the myth that Gladys accompanied Elvis to school, both at Lawhon Elementary, and later at Milam Junior High.

  “Being a neighbor,” she told author Bill Burk in 1991, “I walked with the children, and I don’t remember Mrs. Presley walking Elvis to or from school, particularly during the fifth grade. He and the others walked with me most days.”

  However, Gladys still watched her son like a hawk, even when he was playing with other children. Many of them, like first cousin Harold Loyd, who lived with the Presleys for a while in East Tupelo, feared her and nearly prayed that nothing would happen to Elvis while they were together.

  “I always played with Elvis real gentle when he was a kid, ’cause I knew how Gladys was. Many times I heard him say, ‘Mama, can I go out and play?’ And she would say, ‘Yeah, you can go out and play in the yard, but don’t you get too far away that you can’t hear me if I call you.’ The rest of us would wander off, go down in the bottom, and go swimming in the channel, all except Elvis. He couldn’t do that. He had to stay right there close to the house.”

  “My mama never let me out of her sight,” Elvis confirmed in 1965. “I couldn’t go down to the creek with the other kids. Sometimes when I was little, I used to run off. Mama would whip me, and I thought she didn’t love me.”

  Eventually Gladys loosened the reins enough that Elvis and his friend James Ausborn could go to Tulip Creek to fish and swim.

  For the most part, Elvis chose devotion to Gladys over popularity with his peers. But occasionally he would challenge her in larger ways, either because the pull of joining in with the others got the best of him, or because he desperately needed to find and prove his own identity. His cousin Bobby Roberts recalled Gladys would tell Bobby not to let Elvis climb a tree, “But he’d climb the tree anyhow, just like all boys do. He would climb right to the top of the tallest tree. She was always worried about him falling and hurting himself.”

  Elvis also held his own in fistfights as he grew older, knowing the other kids would run over him if he didn’t risk the occasional black eye or a bloody nose. Even that proved problematic with a mother like Gladys, reported playmate Odell Clark.

  “I remember some folks next door jumped on Elvis one day, and Gladys wore two or three of them out with her brush broom—parents and all.”

  It was not an isolated incident. Another time, remembered Christine Roberts Presley, Elvis’s great-aunt and the wife of J.D.’s brother Noah Presley, Gladys got a stick after a child who came to play. “He said something about Elvis, and boy, Gladys picked up a broomstick. That boy ran and hid. She said, ‘You come out of there, or I’ll whip you ’til you can’t even walk!’ ”

  Yet Gladys would also discipline her son. His friend Guy Harris remembers the day he and Elvis decided to dig up some wild rosebushes, getting sunburned in the process. “We got sun-blistered pretty bad. She fixed our lunch, and Elvis claimed he was too blistered to eat. He was trying to stay outside and away from her as much as he could, ’cause he didn’t want the old switch.”

  “I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up,” the adult Elvis admitted. “It’s a natural thing when a young person wants to go somewhere or do something and your mother won’t let you. You think, ‘Why, what’s wrong with you?’ But then later on in the years you find out that she was right—that she was only doing it to protect you, to keep you from getting in any trouble or getting hurt. And I’m very happy that she was kind of strict on me, very happy that it worked out the way it did.”

  On January 8, 1946, Elvis’s eleventh birthday, Gladys accompanied her son to the Tupelo Hardware Store to buy him a present. Memories conflict as to just what he picked out—some say a bicycle—but evidence points to a .22-caliber rifle, which he wanted more for target practice than for shooting animals. Once when Vernon had offered to take him hunting, a southern rite of father-son bonding, Elvis begged off. “Daddy,” he said, “I don’t want to kill birds.”

  Now Gladys turned to the salesman, Forrest Bobo, who lived in East Tupelo and knew the Presley family.

  “Is this a dangerous thing?” Gladys asked.

  “Sure, it’s dangerous. It’s a twenty-two. You could kill somebody with it, or you could get killed by it.”

  And so, only a few months after Elvis’s competition at the Tupelo Fair, Gladys tried a different tack.

  “Son,” she suggested, “wouldn’t you rather have a guitar? It would help you with your singing, and everyone does enjoy hearing you sing.”

  According to Billy Booth, who owned the store and heard the story directly from Bobo, Elvis threw a temper tantrum—he didn’t want a guitar. He wanted a rifle. Gladys threatened a spanking for such a public scene, and then she told him he’d get nothing for his birthday if he didn’t straighten up. Bobo, by his account, went back and brought out a midgrade guitar that Elvis would later identify as a Gene Autry model.

  “The papers always said it was $12, but it wasn’t—you got a real good guitar back in those days for $12—but this was only $7.75, I believe. Of course, we had a two-cent sales tax.”

  Bobo handed it to him, and then took Elvis behind the counter and sat him down on a shell box. Elvis tried to pick out “Old Shep” and reckoned he would have it after all.

  “He got the bike, too, later on,” Billy Smith remembers. “Then he wrecked it and broke his arm, so he couldn’t play the guitar for a while.” He also got a rifle, though it had probably been grandfather Jessie’s to start with, as the initials JD were carved on the stock. But Elvis took full ownership, carving his own initials, EAP, as well as th
e name of a mysterious young lass: JUDY.

  After Elvis became famous, numerous people around Tupelo took credit for teaching him the guitar, including his uncle Johnny Smith and Hubert Tipton and Hubert’s brother, Ernest. Reverend Frank Smith, the new pastor at the Assembly of God church, recalled that Elvis already had a lesson book to show him where to put his fingers between the frets to form the chords. “From there,” the minister said, “I taught him to make his runs.”

  In contrast to Gaines Mansell, “a real humble type of seller who just tried to lead you to God, but didn’t try to make you do nothing,” as Annie Presley put it, Reverend Smith was outspoken in his belief of the twin poles of sin and salvation. And one thing Elvis did not learn from Smith or anyone else connected with the Assembly of God church, the pastor emphasized, was his sexually suggestive stage moves. “We had some body movements, very outgoing demonstrations, but nothing like what Elvis did. He did all that himself. He never copied anyone.”

  The statement was not precisely true, though Reverend Smith might not have known it. Elvis would have a number of influences, starting in July 1946, when Vernon, who struggled to make the payments on the Berry Street house, was forced to deed it over to his friend Aaron Kennedy. It was then that the Presleys moved from East Tupelo into Tupelo proper.

  At first they settled on Commerce Street but then moved to Mulberry Alley, a tiny lane that ran near the Fairgrounds, the railroad tracks, the city dump, and—of incalculable importance to Elvis’s musical development—the black neighborhood of Shake Rag. Just as the whites divided their social strata by Highway 78, there was a similar split in the black section of Tupelo. The prosperous blacks dwelled “on the hill,” reports Roy Turner, while the rowdier, less fortunate lived “across the tracks,” in Shake Rag.

  The sounds that young Elvis heard coming from the black porches—the wails, the bent notes, the low king snake moans of the blues, and the high-pitched gospel hosannas—meshed to form half of the bedrock of his musical education. But the nasal whines of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and of local country singer Mississippi Slim on radio station WELO also found a place in Elvis’s heart, especially as Slim, aka Carvel Lee Ausborn, whose music bridged the blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers and the honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb, had encouraged Elvis’s own singing. He studied him, along with Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, and early crooner Gene Austin.

  About that time, Mertice Finley Collins remembered, “Elvis would pick up and sing in front of the Tupelo Hotel, which was almost across from the radio station on South Spring Street. People would give him five cents, ten cents, or sometimes a twenty-five-cent piece. When he got a quarter, he would run down to the laundry where his mother worked and give the quarter to her, then hurry back to the hotel.”

  The idea of making money from music, particularly so his mother wouldn’t have to work, became the engine of his dreams.

  “Elvis’s biggest fantasy in Tupelo was to one day be big enough to have his own radio show on Saturday mornings on WELO, just like his idol Mississippi Slim,” said Bill Burk, who covered Elvis’s career for the Memphis Press-Scimitar and wrote extensively of Elvis’s roots in Mississippi.

  But the records of the black Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who took the Lord’s songs from the choir and congregation to the nightclubs and cabarets, enchanted Elvis in a different way. It was Tharpe, with her sharp talk about “backsliding,” or sinning, and the calculated way she used her guitar that particularly ignited young Elvis.

  Whether playing single-note solos as deftly as any male, or wielding the instrument as a prop, she used the guitar both as an extension of herself and as a vehicle for sexual innuendo (“Come on, daddy . . . plug me in,” she said once electric guitars became the vogue). Outrageous in every way, a spiritual cousin to Elvis’s future manager Colonel Tom Parker, she hawked perfume and stockings as well as records, and charged admission to her wedding. Musically, she also pioneered—crossing the lines from gospel to blues, to jazz to boogie, to big band to country—and she did it all with greasy aplomb.

  “She would dye her hair flame-red, giving her the onstage appearance of a constantly exploding corona or a halo from hell,” Peter O. Whitmer wrote. “She would wear blue jeans and high heels, or wrap herself in fur boas and billowing caravan robes. And whenever she took the stage, she carried her guitar, slung over her shoulder, and perfected a style of bending notes and phrasing words that was inimitable.”

  This original soul sister was, in short, Elvis’s most important musical role model, as influential for her personal style as for her genre-bending sound, her appearance setting up an androgynous ideal in a young boy’s heart.

  In September 1946, Elvis entered the sixth grade at a new school, Milam Junior High. His classmates remember him as an odd boy in overalls who didn’t fit in anywhere, not with the “in” group with money, or even the “out” group, which was poor. The girls considered him crazy because he flirted with nearly all of them, particularly Carolyn Brewer, whom he nominated for the “Most Beautiful” contest. Elvis was such a pest in that regard that some of the girls starting leaving home early for school to try to avoid seeing him on the street, and pleaded with their sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Camp, to make him behave. “Anyone wishing to provoke a little girl to tears of rage had only to chalk ‘Elvis loves—’ and then the girl’s name on the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room,” Elaine Dundy wrote. “The very idea that this goof, this clodhopper, would single you out for his affection was intolerable.”

  Yet again, Elvis stood out for his passion for music, whether it was hymns or hillbilly tunes. Maude Dean Christian remembered that the teachers closed the door and all the windows when he sang, even during the hot months, so the other kids wouldn’t hear him playing guitar and want to come and listen. He trotted out “Old Shep,” of course, and performed it so often that it got to be something of a joke. When he’d take his place in front of the group for the morning prayer program, several of his classmates would yell out, “Oh, no! Not another round of ‘Old Shep’ today!” Still, he persisted. At recess, classmate Shirley Lumpkin noticed, he would go out to the bicycle shed and sit and pick the guitar, almost always by himself. Elvis knew he was powerful only when he sang, and that he would have to win over tough audiences in the future if he was really going to be a singer.

  The family was experiencing a number of changes, and few of them good. By 1942 Elvis’s grandfather, J. D. Presley, had deserted his wife, the flinty Minnie Mae, going first to Mobile, Alabama, and then settling in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, four years later, he filed for divorce, claiming Minnie Mae had deserted him in the fall of 1942, and that he’d begged her to join him in Louisville, where he worked primarily as a carpenter.

  Minnie Mae refused to take it lying down and answered the divorce petition with a letter written in longhand.

  Dear Sirs:

  I am writing to you about the letter I received from you last week concerning a divorce. I didn’t desert my husband. As a matter of fact, he deserted me, and has been living with another woman and he hasn’t sent me any money in over a year, and I am not able to make a living. We have five children and they are all married and have families of their own, and I have to depend on them for a living. I want you to send me the Papers to fill out and if you want my husband’s record, you can write to the Chief of Police Elsie Carr of Tupelo, Miss.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mrs. Jessie Presley

  Two months later, their daughter, Delta Mae Biggs, took exception with Jessie’s petition in equity, and wrote a letter of her own in scrawled penmanship.

  Dear Sir:

  I am writing in behalf of Mrs. Minnie Mae Pressely [sic], which is also my mother. Tell Pressley [sic] he can have a divorce if he will give Mama $200 cash. She won’t ask for alimony. If he doesn’t want to do that she will not give him a divorce. He told a falsehood about several matters to you. He has (5) children not (3). He also deserted Mama.

  Thanks,

  Delta Mae Big
gs

  When the divorce became final in 1948, Jessie seemed to reform. He stopped drinking, became active in his Baptist church, building the pulpit there, and married a retired schoolteacher, Vera Kinnard Leftwich, with whom he’d live the rest of his days. His stepgranddaughter, Iris Sermon Leftwich, considered them a good match. “They used to play little tricks on each other, and had a lot of fun. They each brought out the youth in the other.” Jessie and Minnie Mae stayed at loggerheads—she never called him by name, only “that son of a bitch”—but he mended his relationship with Vernon, who kept in touch by phone and letter, and visited with him on numerous occasions, especially during Jessie’s illnesses.

  Once Elvis’s career took off, he, too, resumed relations with J.D., and the two exchanged birthday cards and notes. During a trip to Louisville for an appearance in 1956, Elvis bought his grandfather a snazzy new two-tone Ford Fairlane and a television, and peeled off a crisp $100 bill to go with them.

  Jessie, liking a taste of fame, made a three-song record of his own, “The Roots of Elvis,” and in 1958, he won a spot on the television show I’ve Got a Secret. There, the sixty-two-year-old, seated in a rocking chair, sang “The Billy Goat Song” in a high, thin tenor as host Garry Moore backed him on drums. The elder Presley, who would last work as a night watchman at the Louisville Pepsi-Cola plant, told a Toronto newspaper reporter that he didn’t like rock and roll, preferring the religious and working songs he learned picking cotton in Mississippi. And no, he didn’t want Elvis to help him. “I want to make it on my own,” he said. Elvis was amused, and the two remained friendly until J.D.’s death from heart disease in 1973.