In 1934, Vernon Presley, age 18, recalled blacking out at the instant of his son’s conception; then, regaining consciousness, he had seen the night sky thronged with brilliant blue stars. Elvis Aron’s twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. The future King’s God-fearing mother, Gladys — who herself almost died in the delivery — believed he had inherited Jesse’s soul, and was “the One.”
Years later, Gladys would suffer a miscarriage, making her all the more protective of her only surviving child.
“My mama never let me out of her sight,” said Elvis.
Vernon told biographer Peter Guralnick (Last Train to Memphis): “He never spent a night away from home until he was seventeen. The three of us formed our own private world.”
The security of that world was shattered when Vernon was convicted of check fraud on a hog sale and was sent to Parchman, the most medieval of the Mississippi penitentiaries. Her husband’s imprisonment galvanized Gladys’s obsessive fear that loved ones could without warning be taken from her or senselessly stricken down.
When she was 18, her father, Bob, died suddenly of pneumonia. Months after the birth of Elvis, her mother, Doll, was claimed by tuberculosis. Her parents had been first cousins. Many of her other siblings were stricken with mental and physical disabilities. Gladys, Vernon, and Elvis were sleepwalkers and all suffered from terrifying nightmares of impending doom.
Gladys Presley had once been a vivacious and fun-loving party girl and buck dancer. But after all the family losses, protecting her only son became her life. She slept with Elvis until he was 13. For his eleventh birthday, Elvis had wanted a bicycle but, fearing that he might get run over on the way to school, Gladys gave him a guitar instead.
Elvis called his satin-skinned mother “Satnin” and the two communicated in a babytalk no one else could understand. “Elvis saw his parents as his ‘babies,’” recalled his friend and future manager, Lamar Fike (Elvis and the Memphis Mafia). “He called his mother his baby.”
In 1953, Elvis, now a truck driver for Crown Electric, gave Satnin a special birthday gift: his first recording, “My Happiness,” for which he paid the studio two dollars. The next year, “That’s Alright, Mama” put him on the charts and soon he was rich beyond his wildest dreams.
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