The only woman Elvis really loved

Gladys Presley and her son were inseparable, but behind the pictures lay a darker truth, says Bethan Roberts

n the 1957 film musical Loving You, Elvis Presley’s alter-ego, Deke Rivers, performs Got a Lot o’ Livin’ to Do in a coast-to-coast broadcast that will win over the hearts of the American nation, even those who once dismissed our hero as a juvenile delinquent.

Captured on film in the audience is Elvis’s real-life mother, Gladys. She sits at the end of a row, clapping along, never missing a beat. When Deke leaps from the stage, she almost rises from her seat, unable to contain her excitement, just like the thousands of girls who attended Elvis’s shows. She’s considerably overweight and appears older than her 44 years, but for those few moments on screen, she looks every inch the proud mother basking in her son’s remarkable success.

Gladys was very much part of the Presley package, right from the start. Early magazine features often mentioned Elvis’s closeness to his parents, particularly his mother. His devotion was intensified, the stories suggested, by his being not only a God-fearing southern boy, but also an only child whose twin brother died at birth. Elvis told one interviewer that if he couldn’t sleep, his mother would rise from her own bed in order to talk through his worries with him, no matter how late the hour. However, behind the media image was a darker truth. Far from being transported into some blissful American dream by Elvis’s rise to superstardom, his mother was actually plunged into despair.

Gladys Love Smith was 21 when she met Vernon Presley in her home town of Tupelo, Mississippi, in the spring of 1933, and they eloped to be married that summer. Both lied about their age, Vernon adding four years to his 17 in order to make things legal, Gladys claiming to be 19 to even things up. It wasn’t long before this hot love affair cooled. In 1938, Vernon was sentenced to three years in Parchman Penitentiary for forging a cheque. While his daddy was away, three-year-old Elvis became the man of the house.

Gladys’s elder sister, Lillian, told of how he would comfort his mother, patting her on the head and saying “there, there, my little baby”. Even when Elvis was grown, mother and son shared their own baby-language: toes were “sooties”; milk was “butch”; Gladys was “Satnin”; and Elvis was “Naughty”. Never able to have more children, Gladys was reluctant to let Elvis out of her sight and told him that when one twin dies the other gets all his strength.

There must have been little doubt in his mind that he was precious, special – and more than a little responsible for his mother’s happiness. Gladys never tired of recalling how, even as a young boy, he promised one day to pay off the family debts and buy them fancy cars and a big house. After Vernon returned from jail, he never again held down a steady job, and Elvis took on the role of Gladys’s protector. From the age of 19, he was the sole breadwinner for the family.

Gladys is sometimes viewed as monstrously smothering, and her son as a helpless mama’s boy – or worse. No doubt Vernon’s second wife, Dee Stanley, had her own reasons for spreading the rumour that Elvis had sex with his mother. There’s no evidence for this – they certainly slept together sometimes when he was a child, but the Presleys rarely had enough mattresses to go around, let alone bedrooms.

If Gladys was over-controlling, she at least realised there was one area where she should back off: music. From around the age of nine, Elvis was going alone to join the live audience of local radio broadcasts and listen to just about any kind of music he could. After the family

Mother and son had their own language: Gladys was ‘Satnin’, Elvis was ‘Naughty’