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However, the larger sense of shame—and guilt—would have come from the death of his brother, or more specifically Elvis’s having survived when his mirror image died. While he would have taken pride in the fact that he had triumphed, that he was the stronger one, the superior one, and been singled out, “Twinless twins blame themselves for their sibling’s death,” writes Whitmer in The Inner Elvis. To win Gladys’s love, Elvis knew “he must grieve for the dead twin.” Jessie’s death was yet another trauma that mother and son shared, and Elvis would have felt fear and pain that he had “denied” his mother her other child.

As if to make it up to her and assuage his own feelings, Elvis reversed the role of parent and child—behavior typical of twinless twins whose mothers are smothering and overprotective. At the age of three, with Vernon out of the house, he felt responsible for her happiness and became Gladys’s caretaker, substitute spouse, and primary source of intimacy. Robbing himself of his childhood, he tried to fill her emptiness in every way. Visitors were often surprised that such a small boy was so solicitous of his mother, Elvis repeatedly asking her if she needed a glass of water or a chair, or otherwise seeing to her every creature comfort.

In a bizarre scenario that clearly demonstrates how boundary violations occurred in the family, the toddler would become both parentified and sexualized. As Lillian Smith recalled, “Elvis was just learning to walk and talk. He would walk very, very fast through the house, and every time he came to Gladys, he’d reach up and pat her on the head and call her baby. ‘There, there, my little baby,’ he would say.”

It was a term he would use for her all her life, and, in fact, he referred to both his parents as his “babies” well into his early fame. In a sense, by including Vernon, he desexualized his father as his competition for Gladys’s affections.

All of these factors would have collided to influence Elvis’s sexuality. With trauma that comes early, and is both prolonged and extreme, biochemical changes can occur in human development, particularly in sexual dimorphism, or the biochemical determinants of masculinity and femininity, the estrogen-androgen balance, which results in the physical differences between the sexes.

Elvis would grow up to be a beautiful, not a rugged man, with softer, somewhat female characteristics—full lips, sleepy eyes, and very little body hair, especially chest hair—that in part accounted for his androgynous sex appeal. Socially he would also behave in ways that didn’t fit the contemporary norms of the times. He gave himself Toni home permanents, went to a beauty shop instead of a barber, and sometimes modeled eye makeup in his teens, even before he was regularly onstage. In the 1960s he often wore pancake makeup when he wasn’t making movies.

Whether Gladys introduced him to makeup (“You’re the prettiest thing on the face of the earth—put a little eye color on”), Elvis wasn’t homosexual. His testosterone levels, coupled with his grounding in the importance of the southern male, never tempted him to act out sexually with another man. Furthermore, he was wonderfully capable of compartmentalizing all of his behavior and building walls. The adult Elvis saw no conflict in his desire to wear mascara (or dye his eyelashes) and carry a gun—the symbolic phallus—at the same time.

While the toddler Elvis and Gladys symbiotically turned to each other to meet nearly all their emotional needs, Elvis had more to work out through the relationship. He took the fact that he had a “twin toe”—a bit of webbing or extra skin that connects the second and third digits into nearly one unit—as a sign that he had been an identical twin. His grief for his brother grew into a yearning for a sense of completeness with another human being.

As Whitmer writes, “Given what is known about the lifelong importance of intrauterine bonding, the enmeshed relationship that gradually became obvious between mother and son had