Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [13]
In fact, Vernon, who had so held his young bride’s affections, would in short order seem more like a boarder in the house, as he would for the remainder of the Presleys’ life together.
As Lamar Fike says, “Gladys ruled her house when she married. But when Elvis came along, he and Gladys ruled that roost together. You had a wife who dominated the whole thing, a husband who didn’t like to work, and an only child who was doted on by his mother. A child who listened to his mother and father argue all their lives. That’s what molded Elvis into what he was. It was one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever seen.”
Any mother who lost one of her twin babies as Gladys had would have naturally feared losing the surviving child, as Gladys did as long as she lived. Leona Moore, a former nurse at the Tupelo Hospital, told author Elaine Dundy that Gladys miscarried another child when Elvis was seven. Billy Smith doubts it, saying he would have heard that in the family. But true or not, Gladys apparently was not capable of having other children, which further contributed to her overprotection of Elvis. “My mother,” the adult Elvis would say. “I suppose since I was an only child that we might’ve been a little closer than . . . I mean everyone loves their mother, but . . . Mother was always right with me all my life.”
During Elvis’s formative years, a number of events collided to cement her relentless hold on him, more for her comfort and solace than his.
The first occurred nine months after Elvis’s birth, when Gladys’s grandmother, Ann Mansell Smith, mother of Bob and the matriarch of the Smith family, died. Far worse, in a matter of weeks, Gladys’s own mother, the tubercular Doll, expired at fifty-nine. Her passing marked three deaths in the immediate family in eleven months, reawakening Gladys’s fears, phobias, and abandonment issues. She clung to her son tighter than before, almost as if he were a shield against a treacherous and mercurial world, where disaster could strike at any second and take away all that mattered.
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,