• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Another incident from that era shows how young Elvis linked dancing and sex.

“When he was four or five,” Billy Smith reports, “my mama and Aunt Clettes were dancing together to some music. They were up on a trunk, waving their skirts around, so they were flying up. Elvis was in the room. And the more they danced, the more excited he got. He grabbed my mama by the leg. And he said, ‘Oh, my peter!’ Well, Gladys went wild. She yanked him up and yelled out, ‘You all quit that damn dancing!’ She pointed at Elvis and said, ‘Look what you’re doing to him!’ When my mama told me that, I liked to died.”

That formative memory would lead to one of Elvis’s strongest sexual charges as an adult, that of two women together. And as he grew older, he would have a new name for his penis: Little Elvis.

In the fall of 1941, Elvis entered first grade, attending Lawhon Elementary School on Lake Street, where he would spend the first years of his education. Starting school is a huge and often traumatic step for any child, and for Elvis, it was doubly hard being separated from Gladys for most of the day, especially since Vernon had lost his Federal Works Project job and traveled throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee on construction jobs, working mostly as a carpenter.

Elvis never really knew when his father would be home—the family was now living in a rental house on Maple Street in East Tupelo—and Vernon’s absence, along with the experience of leaving his mother during school hours, bound mother and son anew. They often visited Jessie’s grave together. Relatives would recall that Gladys urged and joined her young son in talking with the lost twin, a practice that originated from her daily prayer to Jessie for guidance. He became her mental embodiment of perfection, first in her mind alone, and then in Elvis’s.

After such sad outings, Gladys, wanting to cheer Elvis up, often bought little treats for him and made him cakes with butter frosting. He had his special cup, glass, and eating utensils, too, and sometimes refused to use any other.

Part of it had to do with a phobia about germs, particularly about eating food that anyone else had touched. Even as an adult, Elvis would drink from the side of a coffee cup, near the handle, thinking it was cleaner, since most people drank from the middle. He routinely refused to eat if someone else reached over and got something off his plate, even if it was an immediate member of his family, as Billy Smith noted.

“Elvis used to carry a knife and fork in his back pocket because he didn’t like to eat with anybody else’s. He’d eat from your dishes, but not with your silverware. He didn’t break that habit until he went into the army. Used to take that knife and fork to school with him. He didn’t eat or drink after anybody and he didn’t want you to drink after him.”

Attending school and meeting new children opened Elvis up to a new world—something he desperately needed, given his insular family situation and the fact that he was a shy, dreamy child. Yet being with so many boys his age would have naturally underscored his grief in not having Jessie by his side. Sometime after Elvis started school, but before he was old enough to know the facts of life, Gladys inadvertently pulled a cruel trick on him, perhaps not realizing how it would affect him.

Barbara Hearn, who dated Elvis during his early fame, first became a family friend when the Presleys lived on Alabama Street in Memphis. She and Gladys found an easy friendship, sitting and talking. “If you were shelling peas or something, you’d get into some pretty deep conversation,” she relates. One day Gladys told her about the time in Tupelo when she was sick and the doctor paid a house call.

“Elvis saw the doctor leaving, and he came running into her bedroom, saying, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ Gladys had doubled a pillow up and put a blanket around it, and she said, ‘Oh, Elvis, come and look what the doctor’s left!’ It looked just like a baby lying there, and he was so happy.