Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [11]
In the predawn morning of January 8, 1935, Gladys awoke to intense labor pains, and rallied her husband from sleep. “Vernon,” she said, shaking him. “I think it’s time. You’d best get your mama over here. And go call the doctor.” Vernon lit the oil lamp, took one look at his wife’s face, beaded with sweat, and then raced across the yard to his parents’ house and pounded on the door. “Mama! Papa! Come quick! Gladys is in labor!”
Minnie Mae and Jessie rushed over in their nightclothes, Jessie still hung over from the night before. Minnie Mae asked Gladys some questions, and then also implored her son to get the doctor. He took off running to Highway 78 and the nearest telephone, dialing the four numbers that connected him to sixty-eight-year-old Dr. William Robert Hunt, the poor man’s physician, who had been practicing in Tupelo since 1913, the year he received his Tulane University medical degree. Minnie Mae somehow sent word to the midwife, Edna Robinson, and began boiling a large pot of water on the wood-burning stove.
By the time Dr. Hunt arrived, steering his Model T Ford the mile and a half across the levee to the Presley home, Gladys was about to deliver. Jessie Garon appeared first, around 4 A.M. Then a hush fell over the room, and Dr. Hunt announced that the child was lifeless, stillborn. Gladys let out a long, piercing wail as the midwife carried the dead infant out into the back room.
Vernon, too, was crying, but according to the story Billy Smith heard down the years from the family, “Jessie, drunk out of his mind, thought Vernon was laughing. He went in and said, ‘Gitchy, gitchy, goo!’ And ‘Oh, ain’t it a beautiful baby!’ The baby didn’t respond, of course. So Jessie just kept going ‘Gitchy, gitchy, goo!’ Vernon was hurt to the bone, so finally he yelled out, ‘Oh, goddamn, Daddy! The baby is dead!’ Jessie got this funny look on his face and just said, ‘Oh, oh!’ About the time all that was happening, about 4:35 A.M., Elvis was born.”
Precisely what happened to Jessie Garon is open to speculation. Vester wrote in his book, A Presley Speaks, that Gladys and Vernon had been in a car accident just months before the twins were born, and that, in fact, they’d paid the rent on their little two-room house with their settlement money. Might Jessie have been injured in the accident?
And then there’s front porch gossip. According to the oft-repeated story, Dr. Hunt had his coat on to leave when Gladys insisted there was another baby. But a doctor who was about to record his 919th and 920th births would have recognized the signs of a second child, particularly the fact that Gladys’s uterus was still swollen. One variation of the tale has it that the first baby could have lived, that Dr. Hunt was, indeed, surprised by the second birth and had spent too much time attending to Elvis when something as routine as clearing Jessie’s windpipe might have saved him.
Vernon, in a story he told for the rest of his life, saw the tragedy as God’s will. Just before the births, he said, there were two identical medicine bottles setting on the mantel of the fireplace. Just as Gladys was giving birth, one of the bottles inexplicably burst, while the other remained intact. After Jessie was pronounced dead, Vernon interpreted the exploding bottle as a sign from heaven. When Jessie died, he said, Elvis took over his soul and spirit.
No matter what the cause of the baby’s death, Gladys, friends said, looked “more than half dead” from blood loss, and Dr. Hunt, who billed the Presleys only fifteen dollars as a “labor case,” sent her to the Tupelo Hospital, where she would stay for two weeks. Elvis, who was being breast-fed, went with her. The weekend after Elvis’s birth, Dr. Hunt announced in church that the Presleys had had twins, and that one had died. The community may have been poor, but it looked after its own, Janelle McComb reported. “Some of the congregation went to visit and took