Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [7]
By her late teen years, Gladys was well over her fear of boys, and now it was she who chased them. Years later, Pid Harris, who dated her in her youth, reported she was “fast” and “liked to play,” which, of course, was a scandal. He remembered her fighting with another girl, the two of them slapping and hitting—“We had to pull them off of each other”—evidently over a man. But one by one, her older sisters were leaving home to marry, and now Gladys felt the pressure. Her impulsiveness—coupled with her desire to escape the oppression of toiling the fields and caring for her mother and younger siblings—led her to elope with a young farmer when she was in her late teens. Her embarrassment knew no bounds when she learned the man was married. In two days’ time, she was back, morbidly ashamed and heartbroken.
Gladys’s emotional state grew more fragile in 1931 with the tragic and sudden death of her father from pneumonia. The family was stunned with disbelief—Doll had always been the sickly one—and so unprepared they had to borrow a winding sheet from Mrs. Irwin, the coproprietor of the general store, to wrap the body for placement in an unmarked grave in Spring Hill Cemetery. But rather than stepping up and taking charge, nineteen-year-old Gladys seemed to crumble. Coming so soon after her failed elopement, the loss of her father was a double blow. Bob Smith had been the one stable man in her life.
His death immeasurably increased Gladys’s responsibilities with her mother, three younger brothers, and twelve-year-old sister. But try as they might, they could not bring in the crop, and the family’s sudden reversal of fortune meant that they would lose the new house and farm. Worse, the family would be split up, with Doll going to live with Levalle and her husband, Ed. Gladys, feeling responsible for the rest of the family, would have to find a full-time job in a town that offered little employment outside of the cotton mill and textile plant.
In the weeks that followed, Gladys fell into a complete and total collapse. At first, she seemed to revert to the lethargy that had so annoyed Lillian when Gladys was an adolescent. But then she began displaying the classic symptoms of what psychologists call conversion hysteria, in which grief becomes manifested in physical ailments. A friend remembered she became so anxious that she could not walk. “Gladys got herself into such a state that her legs would start shaking every time she was fixing to go out of the house.” Finally she took to the safety of her bed, unable to move without the help of others, replicating the state that her mother had manifested for decades.
“Conversion hysteria acts to block the mental pain from conscious awareness, and also provides the benefit of allowing its victims to avoid unwanted responsibilities,” wrote psychologist Whitmer.
In short, Gladys, overburdened with grief and unable to deal with reality, infantalized herself.
Ten years later, in the winter of 1941, she had a similar reaction to another tragedy. This time, conversion hysteria rendered her mute. Annie Presley, Gladys’s cousin and neighbor, heard a knock and opened the door to find Gladys in such a high state of anxiety that “she could not move. She just stood there, saying nothing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was wringing her hands over and over.” It was only from a neighbor that Annie learned that Gladys’s older sister, Rhetha Smith Loyd, had died a terrible death.
“Back in them days, we had woodstoves, and she went to build a fire in the stove to cook dinner, and thought she had got all of the sparks out from the one before. She poured a little coal oil in it, and it flamed up and caught her on fire and burned her.” Rhetha lingered a few agonizing hours before expiring.
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