Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [10]
Yet Jessie’s relationship with Vernon was also often strained, and when the boy was fifteen, his father sent him away for a year to sharecrop on the farm of a relative, likely as a disciplinary action. But Jessie also may have been jealous of Vernon’s physique and good looks, and considered him a sexual threat, for Jessie took pride in his own appearance and was known around the county as a womanizing dandy.
“When he’d get off of work on Friday,” Annie Presley remembered, “you’d see him go home and take a bath and dress to a T, and then you wouldn’t see him ’til Sunday evening late.”
Given to dapper suits, he cut such a handsome figure that women were said to stare at him as he strutted down the road.
Jessie may have also seen something else of himself in Vernon, as Vernon was the “bad” son to Vester’s “good,” just as Jessie had been compared with Noah. But Vernon did, in fact, demonstrate an aversion to three things: responsibility, conflict, and work. For a while, he and Vester—shorter, scrawnier, and no competition with the ladies—tried farming a little truck patch together, planting cotton, corn, and soybeans. But Vernon hated getting up before the sun and soon resorted to odd jobs, including working for Orville Bean.
Gladys’s paycheck kept them going, and Minnie Mae, who called Vernon her favorite, saw how they struggled to get by. They needed a house of their own, Minnie told her husband, and they could build it right next to theirs on East Tupelo’s Old Saltillo Road, on Bean’s property, located above Highway 78, which shuttled travelers between Tupelo and Birmingham, Alabama. Vernon borrowed $180 from Bean to buy lumber for a little two-room, wood-frame shotgun house, with the understanding that he would pay him rent to retire the loan with interest. Jessie, who was a skilled carpenter, helped his son with the construction, as did Vester. The three, mindful of the floods that raged through the area in the spring, raised the little house off the ground with stone piles. When it was finished, in 1934, it resembled housing constructed for mill villages around the area and was solid enough to last a hundred years or so, if not especially fancy, with no indoor plumbing or ceiling, just the roof. The two families shared a cow and some chickens out back.
The image of the Presleys’ first house would be seared in Elvis’s mind forever. In the fifth grade, he would write a poem in a classmate’s autograph book:
Roses are red, violets are blue,
When a chicken gets in your house,
You should say, “Shoo, shoo, shoo.”
When you get married and live in a shack,
Make your children clothes out of toe sacks.
By the end of June 1934, Gladys realized she was pregnant, and around her fifth month she told everybody she was having identical twins. Not only was she uncommonly large, all swollen up and heavy, and her legs hurting her, but also with time, she could feel two babies kicking inside her. Besides, twins ran in the family on both sides—Gladys had identical twin cousins, Elzie and Ellis Mansell, and Sales Presley had a fraternal twin, Gordon. Annie and Sales’s daughter would also have twins, and Travis and Lorraine Smith would sadly lose a set of twins. For her baby shower, Gladys received the usual items that comfort newborn infants, but also two sheets and thirty dollars in cash. Her friends and family were concerned that Vernon would drink it all up.
Gladys had always wanted a house full of children, all of them around her all the time, and she and Vernon were giddy with the news. (“Vernon thought he was a stud,” remembers Lamar Fike. “Elvis used to say that Vernon knew when Elvis was conceived, because afterwards, he blacked out.”) They picked out rhyming names—Jessie Garon for the firstborn, and Elvis Aaron. “Jessie” was to honor Vernon