Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [18]
In other words, Elvis shifted all of his feelings for his twin onto his mother. These emotions would have been symbolic because they occurred before the acquisition of real language.
Yet Elvis and Gladys would come to communicate in a secret language all their own. Milk, for example, was “butch.” Ice cream was “iddytream.” And Elvis’s pet name for his mother was Satnin’, which according to Billy Smith means “a real condensed round of fattening. Elvis would pat her on the stomach and say, ‘Baby’s going to bring you something to eat, Satnin.’ ” Gladys, for her part, called him “Elvie,” and sometimes “Naughty,” as in, “You’re a naughty boy.”
They kept it up for life. In the late 1950s, when Lamar Fike would be with the Presleys at Graceland, “Elvis would rip through a paragraph of that, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But Gladys could. And Vernon could, and Elvis would baby talk him, too. I used to sit at that breakfast bar and wouldn’t understand a damn word they said, especially since Elvis had that little stutter. It was like a foreign language.”
Indeed, twin language is often described as “like speaking in tongues,” indecipherable to anyone but the twins themselves. Such behavior is not uncommon—in fact, surviving twins develop a secret language more often than not. And if the other twin isn’t there, the lone twin will speak it with anyone with whom he has a close, meaningful relationship, including his mother.
Even as a small child, Elvis would have had a moral uneasiness with his relationship with Gladys, precisely as he felt responsible for her. It would have left him always needing to be under the control of someone else and yet wanting to be in control of himself and others.
His perpetual need for imposing control also probably resulted from stuck grief, a phenomenon in which an individual, for whatever reason, is incapable of getting over a tragic event, such as the death of a relative or spouse. Such individuals show the same profundity of emotion over time and through the stages of grieving, as delineated by the Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the pioneering book On Death and Dying.
Elvis’s grief for his dead twin and his lethal enmeshment with Gladys left him incapacitated to develop in a normal way, so that he became psychologically truncated in his ability to take on true adult responsibilities. “He couldn’t do it on his own, because he didn’t know who he was—he’d never been able to individuate,” as Whitmer put it in an interview. The grown-up Elvis would always need to rely on someone else to really help out—first Gladys, then his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, his entourage the Memphis Mafia, and various women in his life. In short, at the core, he wanted to be infantalized, to regress, if not back to the womb then back to childhood, to be cared for and nurtured. Says Lamar Fike, “Elvis’s thing with women was that they had to baby him and take care of him.”
This, of course, would play eternal havoc with his relationships with the opposite sex. He would forever be insecure with females his own age—feeling safer and more comfortable around younger people in general—and not really know how to interact socially or recognize the proper boundaries and borders. Because of his stuck grief, particularly after Gladys’s death in 1958, he would always feel as if a part of himself were missing. This would become the most important motivator in his life.
As psychologist Whitmer explains, “It’s not so much the idea that being with another woman meant he was cheating on the mom. It’s more the whole issue of, ‘Mom had control of me. I enjoyed Mom’s having control of me. I enjoyed being enmeshed with my mom, and by the way, that’s why I can never emotionally mature to anything more than fourteen or fifteen years old. I just can’t go any further.’ ”
On the