Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Such a calamity came dangerously close on April 5, 1936, when the fourth deadliest tornado in United States history roared through Tupelo, taking 235 lives, injuring another 350 residents, and decimating forty-eight city blocks.

  “It sounded like a bunch of freight cars running together,” Magnolia Clanton remembered. “It just hit and you heard people screaming in the streets and you didn’t know which way you were going or which way you were going to go because you went crazy.”

  As the storm first gathered, the winds tearing through the trees and the sky darkening to an ominous shade, Noah Presley ran for his school bus. He drove to Jessie and Minnie Mae’s home, gathering his parents and then Vernon and Gladys next door, so they could all be together at his house, which was stronger and larger than anyone else’s. Gladys held one-year-old Elvis close up against her, climbed on the bus, and the family then hurried to the Baptist church, where Vernon’s sister, Little Gladys, as he called her to differentiate her from his wife, was in worship. Jessie rushed to the back of the church and issued the storm warning to the congregation, and then they were off to Noah’s.

  There, the men braced themselves along the planks on the south wall for added strength while the women prayed. In a comical scene, Minnie Mae fainted, then came to, and fainted again, over and over, while Gladys huddled in the corner, too frightened to speak, a death grip on her blond-haired, blue-eyed baby. However she, too, nearly lost consciousness when she returned home. The Methodist church directly across the street had been totally leveled, yet the storm had left the little homemade house untouched.

  Again Gladys turned to her faith to sustain her, and to praise God for her family’s being spared. The following year or so, she gave thanks for a new place to worship when her uncle, Gaines Mansell, became the preacher at the newly built Assembly of God church, about a block from the Presleys’ home. One day Gladys testified to a vision she’d had, in which Elvis was going to amount to something special. More than that, he would be a great leader of men.

  She told her family the same thing and believed it with all her heart. He was special, having the power of two people because of the dead twin. Elvis would be infused with all the positive attributes that Jessie might have had, as well as his own. That gave him twice the looks, twice the personality, twice the talent, twice the intelligence, and twice the spiritual connection.

  Precisely what kind of charismatic services the Presleys attended at the new Assembly of God church is largely left up to the imagination, except for Annie Presley’s description.

  “The services would start about seven, seven-thirty at night. Sometimes you got home long after midnight. They’d have the altar call and after that, they’d pray for two or three hours and shout and sing. You’d be praying and you’d just get so happy till you’d just jump up and go to shouting. Some of them would get to talking in tongues. There’d be shouting all over the building. ‘Praise the Lord!’ ‘Hallelujah!’ ‘Glory!’ ‘I love you, Lord.’ Anything like that.”

  In the early 1980s, when Roy Turner assisted author Elaine Dundy in tracing Gladys’s path in Tupelo, Corene Smith, the wife of Reverend Frank W. Smith, who took over the church when Elvis was ten or eleven, suggested that if the researchers wanted to see religion the way Elvis experienced it, they would have to go to the county—the city churches had become too sophisticated. And so Turner and Dundy drove out to Pontotoc County.

  “After about three hours of the service in hot, Mississippi, humid, July weather in a little church with ceiling fans whirling and windows opened, we left,” Turner recalls. “The service continued until way into the night. The people had danced around the entire sanctuary, shouting, writhing, fainting, wailing to exhaustion. Elaine remarked, ‘I feel like I have been to an Elvis concert.’ ”

  Dundy was, in fact, witnessing the grassroots of the entire Elvis Presley phenomenon, from the music to the reaction of his fans. And it took hold early. Once Elvis became famous, Gladys would recall one particular Sunday in the Assembly of God church when two-year-old Elvis, normally a quiet and reserved child, squirmed off her lap to make his way up on the platform to try to sing with the choir. Soon it got to be his habit. “It was a small church, so you couldn’t sing too loud,” the grown-up Elvis said.

  “Gladys used to laugh about it,” Harold Loyd, Rhetha’s son, remembered. “The preacher and all of ’em thought it was cute, so they got to where they would let him stand up there and sing with ’em.”

  Psychologist Whitmer, an expert on twinless twins, or twins who have lost their mirror image, whether fraternal or identical, isn’t surprised. “While pregnant, Gladys spent hours every single day at the Assembly of God church. If you look at in-utero imaging, in the last trimester you see twins hugging, punching, kicking, and dancing to music. Sound is incredibly important.”

  Elvis, then, instinctively began moving to music before he was born. He learned to communicate, to feel good, through instruments and voices. While he was still in the womb, music became a dynamic and primary way of expressing himself in his relationship with his twin, his mother, and all that defined his world.

  At the end of 1937, just before Elvis’s third birthday, another seminal event occurred in the Presley family, one that had tragic consequences for all involved. On November 16, 1937, Vernon, along with Gladys’s brother Travis Smith and their friend Lether Gable, were criminally charged with “uttering a forged instrument.” The story goes that they had altered a four-dollar check from Vernon’s usurious landlord and part-time employer, Orville Bean, in payment for a hog. Vernon was enraged—the hog was worth at least fifty dollars, and he’d been expecting the much larger sum. Besides, he needed the money. And so the three talked it over.

  Exactly what happened next has been muddied through the years. Aaron Kennedy always said that Vernon changed the amount to either fourteen or forty dollars, but the courthouse records do not include the details. However, in a newly discovered letter from 1938, Orville Bean said that Vernon allowed the two others to copy Bean’s signature and forge checks on him, Vernon receiving fifteen dollars for his trouble and silence.

  “They were drinking, and just did it on a whim,” says Billy Smith, Travis’s son. “Vernon got to thinking about it, and the more he thought about it, the madder he got. And they said, ‘Well, we’ll fix him.’ And Daddy was always ready to do any and everything, and he was easily persuaded by people.

  “From what my mama told me, they lived high for a time. Daddy and Lether went down to Texas to try to find a job. Mama said Daddy had this idea he was really going to be ‘Mr. It.’ But all they came back with was a new shirt, a new pair of pants, and a big hat. And as soon as he stepped off the train, they were waiting for him, and hauled him right on off. They’d already gotten Vernon by this time. He was in jail.”

  Initially, none of the three men could post bail, set surprisingly high at $500 each. Then on January 4, 1938, two bonds were filed, the first for Lether, and the second for Travis. As no record exists for Vernon’s bail, he was apparently left to cool his heels for six months in custody awaiting trial. But the galling news was that Vernon’s own father had gone in on the bail for Travis. Whether he feared angering his landlord Bean, whose land he still sharecropped, isn’t known. Annie Presley believed that Noah Presley eventually posted bond for Vernon, but J.D. first intended to let his son rot in the Lee County jail, later having a change of heart.

  “Maybe J.D. thought he was going to teach Vernon a lesson,” muses Billy Smith. “But to be honest, I think he just liked Daddy better than he did Vernon. Vernon was likable, but my daddy, you couldn’t help but like him. He was a whole lot like Aunt Gladys.”

  At the trial, emotions still ran high. Bean shouted out at one point, calling Vernon “long hungry,” local slang for a glutton who’d steal from the mouths of his own family to gorge himself. There was no greater insult, and Elvis would hear it the rest of his days.

  On May 25, 1938, Vernon and Travis were sentenced to three ye
ars in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the legendarily cruel institution where prisoners were routinely bullwhipped and put on chain gangs as terrifying lessons in the evils of defying authority. Yet surprisingly, Vernon got a reprieve, of sorts. Shortly after he arrived on June 1, the warden made him a trustee, which afforded him a room at the warden’s house for conjugal visits, according to Annie Presley. While Gladys, with Elvis in tow, would make the five-hour trip whenever she could—Noah Presley drove them every third Sunday—Vernon’s time away would be a watershed event.

  By the time he returned, all three Presleys would suffer from sleepwalking, or “action nightmares,” as one cousin put it in southern parlance. And Vernon would be but a stick figure in the lives of his wife and child. Elvis and Gladys would be so fatalistically close that anyone else amounted to an intruder. Elvis belonged to her, and Gladys to him. They were one. And no one else would ever make the other feel whole again.

  Elvis and Magdalene Morgan, outside her home in Tupelo, after Sunday church, date unknown. The wooden building in the background had once been her playhouse. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)

  Chapter Two

  An Ideal Guy

  Vernon would be released from Parchman with a six-month suspension of his sentence on February 6, 1939, largely because he demonstrated good behavior and an appropriate degree of remorse for his crime. He had served nine months. Gladys had done her part, too, literally walking door to door in Lee County, gathering signatures on a petition to vouch for his character, and cajoling Orville Bean into writing a letter to Governor Hugh White pleading for leniency: “The money was repaid to me and this man realizes the mistake he has made and I believe he has been sufficiently punished. He is a splendid young man. . . .” (See endnotes.)

  Gladys also wrote at least two missives, both on lined tablet paper, lobbying for a pardon or a six-month parole. She insisted Vernon had never been in any trouble with the law (“he has never even been drunk in his life”), and that he had simply been “persuaded into selling some boys a signature off of a check” and didn’t understand the consequences. In the first letter, on October 29, 1938, she argued on behalf of herself and Minnie Mae. (“His mother is sitting here brokenhearted beside me.”) But in the second, dated November 25, 1938, she spoke powerfully about her own personal hardship. (“My health is bad and . . . I have no mother or daddy and no one to look to for a living. I have a little boy three years old. Please send [my husband] home to his wife and baby.”

  Until Vernon returned, however, Gladys went back to work in the fields. By each September, the cotton crop was in, and Gladys would hire out along with nearly everybody else in East Tupelo, her fingers bleeding as she picked the soft white bolls from the prickly burrs, her back bent into the stalks, two rows at a time. It was grueling work, especially when the sun beat down upon her. But it paid real money—$1.50 per hundred pounds of cotton. And she could take her baby with her—little Elvis, wearing overalls and a brimmed hat to shield him from the sun, riding on her six-foot duck sack as she pulled it along the rows. He never forgot it, saying years later he had seen her put stockings on her arms or pour buttermilk on them to quell the sunburn when she went into the fields.

  But no matter how much cotton she picked, or sewing or laundry she took in, Gladys couldn’t keep up the payment schedule to Orville Bean. (“He wouldn’t wait on you—if you didn’t have the rent, he’d tell you to move right quick,” remembered one resident.) Before long, she and Elvis would have to leave. “Aunt Gladys made the rounds, staying at different people’s houses,” Billy Smith recounts. At one point, she moved in with her first cousin Frank Richards. Elvis, clutching his teddy bear, Mabel, would sit on the porch “crying his eyes out because his daddy was away,” a relative recalled. Gladys, too, suffered mightily, a friend said. “After [Vernon] went to prison, she was awful nervous.”

  Before the move, at night, in the front room of the house her husband and father-in-law had built with their own hands, she and her son would share the little iron bed that the three of them had occupied when Vernon was there, Elvis tucked under her arm. Awaiting sleep, after a spare supper of beans, potatoes, and maybe a little side meat, they would lie there and listen to the battery radio as a light breeze blew through the curtains. Gladys would speak of Jessie, telling Elvis of the brother he never knew.

  From an early age, “He’d run up to you as soon as you’d come into the house,” Annie Presley remembered. “He could tell you right quick, ‘I had a brother.’ ”

  During the months that Vernon was incarcerated, Elvis and Gladys bonded in the unhealthy state that psychologist and Elvis biographer Whitmer terms “lethal enmeshment, a normal developmental reality for the twinless twin.” Several factors contributed to it, starting with the fact that Elvis and Gladys slept in the same bed. While such a practice was hardly unusual in impoverished households of the South, the end result was that Elvis could never differentiate from his mother, and that he remained a part of her. Such nonsexual or covert incest contributed to a sense of shame, sexual confusion, and conflict.

  Shame was something that the three-year-old was already grappling with on two other fronts. While Vernon would never be a strong father figure, his absence, and Elvis’s witnessing his father in the frightening prison garb at Parchman during family visits, would have left such a sensitive child with a sense of disgrace. Elvis’s Tupelo playmates report that he never discussed his father’s incarceration as he grew older. As a tiny child, only his mother’s comfort could have alleviated his anxiety.

  However, the larger sense of shame—and guilt—would have come from the death of his brother, or more specifically Elvis’s having survived when his mirror image died. While he would have taken pride in the fact that he had triumphed, that he was the stronger one, the superior one, and been singled out, “Twinless twins blame themselves for their sibling’s death,” writes Whitmer in The Inner Elvis. To win Gladys’s love, Elvis knew “he must grieve for the dead twin.” Jessie’s death was yet another trauma that mother and son shared, and Elvis would have felt fear and pain that he had “denied” his mother her other child.

  As if to make it up to her and assuage his own feelings, Elvis reversed the role of parent and child—behavior typical of twinless twins whose mothers are smothering and overprotective. At the age of three, with Vernon out of the house, he felt responsible for her happiness and became Gladys’s caretaker, substitute spouse, and primary source of intimacy. Robbing himself of his childhood, he tried to fill her emptiness in every way. Visitors were often surprised that such a small boy was so solicitous of his mother, Elvis repeatedly asking her if she needed a glass of water or a chair, or otherwise seeing to her every creature comfort.

  In a bizarre scenario that clearly demonstrates how boundary violations occurred in the family, the toddler would become both parentified and sexualized. As Lillian Smith recalled, “Elvis was just learning to walk and talk. He would walk very, very fast through the house, and every time he came to Gladys, he’d reach up and pat her on the head and call her baby. ‘There, there, my little baby,’ he would say.”

  It was a term he would use for her all her life, and, in fact, he referred to both his parents as his “babies” well into his early fame. In a sense, by including Vernon, he desexualized his father as his competition for Gladys’s affections.

  All of these factors would have collided to influence Elvis’s sexuality. With trauma that comes early, and is both prolonged and extreme, biochemical changes can occur in human development, particularly in sexual dimorphism, or the biochemical determinants of masculinity and femininity, the estrogen-androgen balance, which results in the physical differences between the sexes.

  Elvis would grow up to be a beautiful, not a rugged man, with softer, somewhat female characteristics—full lips, sleepy eyes, and very little body hair, especially chest hair—that in part accounted for his androgynous sex appeal. Socially he would also behave in ways that didn’t
fit the contemporary norms of the times. He gave himself Toni home permanents, went to a beauty shop instead of a barber, and sometimes modeled eye makeup in his teens, even before he was regularly onstage. In the 1960s he often wore pancake makeup when he wasn’t making movies.

  Whether Gladys introduced him to makeup (“You’re the prettiest thing on the face of the earth—put a little eye color on”), Elvis wasn’t homosexual. His testosterone levels, coupled with his grounding in the importance of the southern male, never tempted him to act out sexually with another man. Furthermore, he was wonderfully capable of compartmentalizing all of his behavior and building walls. The adult Elvis saw no conflict in his desire to wear mascara (or dye his eyelashes) and carry a gun—the symbolic phallus—at the same time.

  While the toddler Elvis and Gladys symbiotically turned to each other to meet nearly all their emotional needs, Elvis had more to work out through the relationship. He took the fact that he had a “twin toe”—a bit of webbing or extra skin that connects the second and third digits into nearly one unit—as a sign that he had been an identical twin. His grief for his brother grew into a yearning for a sense of completeness with another human being.

  As Whitmer writes, “Given what is known about the lifelong importance of intrauterine bonding, the enmeshed relationship that gradually became obvious between mother and son had its origins before birth. Elvis simply and naturally transferred all his tactile and sensory needs from Jesse [sic] and invested them in his mother. . . . His sense of being joined with Jesse was replaced by being ‘one’ with Gladys.”