Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Gladys.

  In rock-and-roll mythology, she is the proud, all-suffering Madonna, the commoner who birthed a king and died too soon, knocking his world off its axis. Like her famous son, her first name is all that’s needed. Elvis called her “my best gal,” but in the deepest psychological sense, she was not only his best gal, but also his only one.

  In the well-known images from the late 1950s, she appears a defeated figure, her eyes sad and ringed by bruised circles, her mouth perpetually turned down and set in a sorrowful scowl. At the height of her son’s notoriety, when she was ensconced in Graceland, the home and farm Elvis bought for her, surrounded by the kind of luxury she had never really wanted and rarely enjoyed, she spent her days as she always had—dipping snuff, drinking beer from a paper sack, staring out the window, and for a short time, until Elvis’s record company complained it wasn’t seemly, feeding her chickens out back. The hot-tempered woman who had been known to dump a pot of steaming beans on her husband’s head when he crossed her was now a fearful soul, afraid for Elvis’s safety (“She is always worried about a wreck, or . . . me gettin’ sick”), the way the women mauled him at his shows, and worse, how his stratospheric career had changed everything so fast, wrenchingly pulling him away from her and from everything they had always known. As if to reverse it all and find some comfort, she made monthly visits to the area surrounding the small town of Tupelo, Mississippi, where she had grown up.

  Earlier in her life, she had been an outgoing girl, a happy, joking person with a lifelong love of dancing. The Gladys of old had a light in her eyes, a future in her smile, and “could make you laugh when nobody else could,” remembered Annie Presley, the wife of Sales Presley, a first cousin to Elvis’s father, Vernon.

  That Gladys vanished once Elvis became famous. But one thing remained a constant: Gladys had always been so entwined with her son that it was hard to know where she left off and he began, even for the two of them. It came both from circumstances beyond their control, and from a need that was so great and pervasive as to be encoded in their DNA.

  She was born April 25, 1912, in rural Pontotoc County, Mississippi, the daughter of Robert Lee Smith and Octavia Luvenia Mansell Smith. Gladys’s mother was known by the name of Lucy and the nickname of Doll for her slim frame, porcelain skin, oval face, and small features. Not uncommon in farming families, the Smith children numbered eight, Gladys’s arrival falling after the first three girls, Lillian, Levalle, and Rhetha, and before Travis, Tracy, Clettes, and John. (A ninth child did not survive.) Her parents romantically gave Gladys the middle name of Love.

  At two, Tracy, who was already mentally impaired, contracted whooping cough and lost his hearing. But the real invalid of the family was Doll, Gladys’s mother, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis as a child. Doll, everyone knew, was a relentless flirt, and having been babied by her parents for her affliction and her birth order—she was the youngest of seven—expected the same from everyone around her. When she finally chose to marry, at age twenty-seven, she picked a younger mate, her first cousin Bob, a handsome man with dark, deep-set eyes that attested to his mix of Scots-Irish and Indian ancestry through the marriage of William Mansell and Morning Dove White, a full-blooded Cherokee.

  Gladys’s roots would prove even more fascinating.

  White Mansell, the son of John Mansell and grandson of William Mansell, was an Alabaman who moved to northeast Mississippi at eighteen to homestead. There, in 1870, marking an X for his signature, he married Martha Tackett, whose mother, Nancy J. Burdine Tackett, was Jewish. Among their children was Doll, Gladys’s mother. Since by Jewish orthodoxy the mother continues the heritage, Gladys was technically Jewish.

  Like many southern broods, the Smith family was strongly matriarchal. Doll’s illness rarely allowed her to leave her bed, but she ruled the family with her sickness. Her feelings of entitlement allowed her to keep a comb and mirror hidden beneath her pillow, while her children slept together on the floor on a mattress padded with crabgrass, held their flimsy shoes together with metal rings culled from the snouts of slaughtered hogs, and fashioned toothbrushes from the branch of a black gum tree. When the Smiths moved, as they often did, dotting the communities around Tupelo in Lee County, “She would be carefully carried on a trailer in a supine position, like a priceless artifact in a traveling exhibit,” as Elvis biographer and psychologist Peter O. Whitmer wrote in The Inner Elvis.

  Her husband, Bob, desperate to scratch out a living from a land where poverty was the norm, demonstrated no love of farming, especially tenant farming, by which he fed his family. He also relied on handouts. Mertice Finley Collins remembered her mother, Vertie, would say to the Smith children, “Bring a bucket,” and then “she’d put the leftovers in it for the Smith children to eat.” Years later, once Elvis became famous, the press labeled the whole Presley clan “white trash.” The Smiths still bristle at the term, even though rumor had it that Bob provided the extras Doll wanted from a less respectable trade.

  “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re white trash, even if you’re a sharecropper,” insists Billy Smith, Gladys’s nephew through her brother Travis, a hard drinker with a violent streak for fighting. “I guess you couldn’t be the son of a bootlegger and not drink. Because that’s what my granddaddy Robert was, a bootlegger, even though he farmed, too.”

  It wasn’t just Bob who catered to Doll, but her children, too. Though Lillian, somewhat Gladys’s rival, reported her sister to always be “lazy as a hog,” shirking her housework, she could rise to the occasion. By her teenage years Gladys was industrious, making her own clothes on her friend Vera Turner’s sewing machine when she wasn’t taking care of her mother or the crops. The harsh reality of life in Tupelo—the year Gladys was born, the town had only one short expanse of sidewalk, and no paved streets, let alone electricity—made death, religion, and sheer survival in unstable times the central themes of existence.

  The late Janelle McComb, a lifelong Tupelo resident, remembered the kinds of tenets that helped most folks cope. “Old Dr. [William Robert] Hunt who delivered Elvis was my Sunday school teacher, and he was one of my granddaddy’s best friends. When I was a little girl, he told me one day that I was going to heaven, and that I would walk upon streets of gold and have a mansion. I walked a dirt path, so I couldn’t imagine that. My granddaddy ran a grocery store, so I walked in there and I said, ‘Granddaddy, Dr. Hunt says that when I die I’m going to heaven, and I’ll have a mansion.’ Then I looked up and said, ‘But, Granddaddy, how am I going to get there?’ He closed the store and he walked outside with me. There was a chinaberry tree in the yard, and he put my hand on it and he said, ‘My child, the timber you send up is what your mansion will be made of. Don’t ever send up bad timber.’ That stayed with me all the days of my life.”

  Still, what got most people through day to day was the rural code of solidarity.

  “This tiny impoverished community somehow survived by mutually sharing good fortune,” the late Elaine Dundy, author of Elvis and Gladys, said in 2004. “The one existing home-owned Kodak became the communal camera, as did the few radios on the streets.” If a few folks chafed at the idea, they hid it well and maintained their standing “by practicing the art of good manners with an almost ritualized politeness and having an attitude of optimism in spite of everything.”

  Dave Irwin, his son Len, and wife, Lily Mae, ran a general store in East Tupelo, and remembered that though the Smiths might be poor, they still found money to buy things—especially after Bob got a loan from the bank and moved the family to an untenanted farm of thirty acres and a house with hedge roses growing around the front door. To Len, “It seemed like the Promised Land to him.” Gladys, particularly, held her head high. She looked nice—showed off her new homemade dresses—kept her clothes clean, and seemed to come into the store sixty times a day, often in the company of her younger sister, Clettes. First it might be a box of snuff to keep hunger at bay, then next trip maybe a rope of licorice
or a Nehi soda, and on subsequent visits a bottle of Grove’s Chill Tonic for Doll, and then perhaps some peppermint sticks.

  By all accounts, Gladys was a lively, passionate young woman who hoped to make a good impression and be accepted by others. She loved to buck dance for the neighbors on Saturday night and dreamed of being either a singer like Mississippi’s own radio star Jimmie Rodgers, or an actress like Clara Bow, whose new talking pictures Gladys watched on a makeshift movie screen on the back of a flatbed truck. But for all her gaiety, her ire could flare like a firestorm, and no one wanted her wrath. Gladys had inherited not only her father’s deep-set eyes, but also his irritability.

  “Everybody in that family was scared of Gladys and her temper,” says Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis’s entourage, the Memphis Mafia, who came to know Gladys well. “She ran all those kids, even her eldest sister Lillian. Everybody knew not to mess with her much. With a couple of exceptions, the Smith family was just wilder than goats. By God, they were tough! Tougher even than the Presleys, and they were violent people.”

  Coupled with her muscular build, her big, wide shoulders making her resemble a man at times, Gladys’s temper made her a force to be reckoned with, even as a child working on Burk’s farm, where sharecroppers, “getting a little for themselves and making a whole lot more for someone else,” as Billy Smith puts it, were regarded as little more than animals.

  “Aunt Gladys was a strong-willed individual. If you scared her real bad or made her mad, she’d lash out at you. In Tupelo, they still talk about when she was sharecropping with her family. The guy who owned the farm come by on a horse with his high-topped leather boots and a whip. And he jumped on her father and her sisters with it. Gladys was ten or eleven years old, but she ripped a plowshare off and took the point and hit him in the head with it. Damn near killed him.”

  Still, Gladys had her vulnerabilities, most of them emotional. Though she attended religious services—worshipping at the Church of God and Prophecy—Gladys held to primitive superstitions, and not even her faith could completely quell the anxiety and impulsivity that plagued her from the time she was a small child. In Lillian’s view, the young Gladys was “very highly strung, very nervous . . . She was frightened by all kinds of things—by thunderstorms and wind. She was always hearing noises outside at night and imagining there was someone in the bushes.”

  In time, her uneasiness with life would escalate to full-blown phobias. Once she moved to East Tupelo—which sat across Town Creek from the more prosperous Tupelo proper—she had all the bushes around her house cut down, terrified that “dark things” were moving in them. Her anxieties came and went without warning. She seemed better with the promise of social outlets, when she had something to look forward to, something that would take her mind off the dreariness of existing hand to mouth.

  And one of the things that most stirred her imagination was the opposite sex. As a young child, Gladys seemed scared of boys. Her sister Lillian recalled that the first time a boy asked if he could walk her home from school, Gladys took off her shoes and ran. When he caught up with her, he walked way on one side of the road, and she way on the other. Such an extreme reaction may have been in response to her parents’ teachings, as her father forged a rigid code of courtship, ruling that the boys who came calling on his daughters go no further than holding hands. Kissing was strictly forbidden, as it inevitably led to other things.

  By her late teen years, Gladys was well over her fear of boys, and now it was she who chased them. Years later, Pid Harris, who dated her in her youth, reported she was “fast” and “liked to play,” which, of course, was a scandal. He remembered her fighting with another girl, the two of them slapping and hitting—“We had to pull them off of each other”—evidently over a man. But one by one, her older sisters were leaving home to marry, and now Gladys felt the pressure. Her impulsiveness—coupled with her desire to escape the oppression of toiling the fields and caring for her mother and younger siblings—led her to elope with a young farmer when she was in her late teens. Her embarrassment knew no bounds when she learned the man was married. In two days’ time, she was back, morbidly ashamed and heartbroken.

  Gladys’s emotional state grew more fragile in 1931 with the tragic and sudden death of her father from pneumonia. The family was stunned with disbelief—Doll had always been the sickly one—and so unprepared they had to borrow a winding sheet from Mrs. Irwin, the coproprietor of the general store, to wrap the body for placement in an unmarked grave in Spring Hill Cemetery. But rather than stepping up and taking charge, nineteen-year-old Gladys seemed to crumble. Coming so soon after her failed elopement, the loss of her father was a double blow. Bob Smith had been the one stable man in her life.

  His death immeasurably increased Gladys’s responsibilities with her mother, three younger brothers, and twelve-year-old sister. But try as they might, they could not bring in the crop, and the family’s sudden reversal of fortune meant that they would lose the new house and farm. Worse, the family would be split up, with Doll going to live with Levalle and her husband, Ed. Gladys, feeling responsible for the rest of the family, would have to find a full-time job in a town that offered little employment outside of the cotton mill and textile plant.

  In the weeks that followed, Gladys fell into a complete and total collapse. At first, she seemed to revert to the lethargy that had so annoyed Lillian when Gladys was an adolescent. But then she began displaying the classic symptoms of what psychologists call conversion hysteria, in which grief becomes manifested in physical ailments. A friend remembered she became so anxious that she could not walk. “Gladys got herself into such a state that her legs would start shaking every time she was fixing to go out of the house.” Finally she took to the safety of her bed, unable to move without the help of others, replicating the state that her mother had manifested for decades.

  “Conversion hysteria acts to block the mental pain from conscious awareness, and also provides the benefit of allowing its victims to avoid unwanted responsibilities,” wrote psychologist Whitmer.

  In short, Gladys, overburdened with grief and unable to deal with reality, infantalized herself.

  Ten years later, in the winter of 1941, she had a similar reaction to another tragedy. This time, conversion hysteria rendered her mute. Annie Presley, Gladys’s cousin and neighbor, heard a knock and opened the door to find Gladys in such a high state of anxiety that “she could not move. She just stood there, saying nothing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was wringing her hands over and over.” It was only from a neighbor that Annie learned that Gladys’s older sister, Rhetha Smith Loyd, had died a terrible death.

  “Back in them days, we had woodstoves, and she went to build a fire in the stove to cook dinner, and thought she had got all of the sparks out from the one before. She poured a little coal oil in it, and it flamed up and caught her on fire and burned her.” Rhetha lingered a few agonizing hours before expiring.

  In both instances, the only thing that freed Gladys from psychological paralysis and restored her to normalcy was her religious faith, particularly after she began participating in Pentecostal services at the tiny Assembly of God church in the economically deprived East Tupelo, sharply divided from Tupelo by a levee and cotton fields. There, in a tent pitched on a neighborhood lot, some thirty worshippers gathered each Sunday to pray, sing, and feel the spirit take hold way down inside them. Later they moved to an old building up on the highway. Annie Presley termed it a tabernacle.

  “Just a roof and a couple of sides. Didn’t even have a front. No pews or chairs. Just things set up with long planks across them. They called ’em benches.” The congregation also met in an old movie house, ironic, since the Assembly of God frowned on picture shows, if not music.

  “In all of our church services, music and singing were very meaningful parts,” recalled Reverend Frank W. Smith, who became pastor at the church about ten years later. “We would always begin our services with congregational singing. Not loud
singing, but worship singing. We had a song leader, and everyone would join in and sing along together. Sometimes there would be no worshipful expressions during this part of the service, just singing.”

  As in other Pentecostal churches, the Assembly of God revered speaking in tongues as evidence that the Holy Spirit talked through the parishioners. Both the speakers and the interpreters of the sounds, variously called “the barks,” “the jerks,” and “the Holy laugh,” were held in the highest esteem.

  Four months after the horrific trauma of Rhetha’s death, Gladys attended yet another tragedy and demonstrated previously unseen emotional strength. Annie’s third baby, Barbara Sue, delivered at home, died eight hours after birth from asphyxiation from too much mucus in her lungs.

  “Gladys was in and out all day, but she had been there from about five o’clock on that evening, because the baby was strangling pretty bad, and we called Dr. [Robert] Pegram about three times, and he wouldn’t come. By the time he got there, she was dead. Gladys was the one that took the baby out of my bed and put it over on another bed when she died. She stayed right with me.”

  Annie, only nineteen, was too weak and distraught to go to the graveyard, so Gladys stayed with her then, too, while everybody else went. “Your belief in God will get you through,” Gladys told the devastated mother over and over. “Look to God.”

  Gladys’s faith in a higher power brought her more than spiritual salve, however, for it was in that East Tupelo church in the spring of 1933 that Gladys Love Smith, who had just turned twenty-one and operated a sewing machine at the Tupelo Garment Company for two dollars a day, first laid eyes on Vernon Elvis Presley. He was blondish, fine featured, well mannered around women, and with full lips that curled into an easy sneer, he looked like a backwoods Romeo straight out of Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell’s classic novel of sex and violence among the rural poor.