CHAPTER 1
LAMAR FIKE: I’ve been thinking about the Meditation Garden. Have you ever noticed the way the graves are laid out? You’d think Elvis would be between his mama and daddy. But he’s between Grandma and his daddy. I figure that’s so he can keep an eye on Vernon—see what he’s up to—and not be distracted. Otherwise, those graves would be spinning like a circle saw. Because while Gladys was alive, they got into it pretty good. 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.
BILLY SMITH: In 1981, Albert Goldman wrote a book called Elvis. The man’s dead now, and you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. But he had a way of writing that made me mad as hell. The book was degrading. By the time he finished talking about my family, I’m sure everybody thought, “That’s white trash.” But I’ll tell you what—that four-eyed son of a bitch should have walked down that road one time. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re white trash. Goldman thought if you come from Tupelo, Mississippi, and you’re a sharecropper, you couldn’t be too damn good, especially if there’s talk of incest in your family. I understand where people would think that. But Goldman just took it to the extreme.
My daddy, Travis, who was Gladys’s brother . . . well, I guess you couldn’t be the son of a bootlegger and not drink. Because that’s what my granddaddy, Robert, was, a bootlegger, even though he farmed, too. But Goldman said Elvis’s great-grandfather on the Presley side was a horse thief. I’ve done some research on my own. And there’s a question whether that was him or somebody else.
LAMAR FIKE: There was nobody in the world who could research like Albert Goldman. I deplored the hateful tone of that book, but even though I was one of his main sources, and shared in the royalties, I couldn’t control Albert. What I liked best about that book was the research because I learned so much about what caused Elvis to be what he was. I went into the libraries and the Tennessee Museum and tracked his family all the way back to Ireland. His name was originally “Pressley.”
BILLY SMITH: This stuff about Elvis being Irish, and that funny spelling of the name, that’s all bunk. Elvis was Scottish.
LAMAR FIKE: If you look in Elaine Dundy’s book, Elvis and Gladys, you’ll see that John Mansell, Elvis’s great-great-grandfather on the Smith side, was half Scots-Irish, half Indian. She says he grew up “wholly ‘wild Injun’” One thing that made Elvis so interesting is this interplay of Irish genes and Indian genes. Gladys’s side of the family were Indians. Elvis’s great-great-great grandmother was Morning Dove White. She was Cherokee. Full-blooded. Born about 1800, died 1835. Buried in Alabama. She was married to William Mansell.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis knew that he had Indian blood in him. He liked that. He said that’s where he got his high cheekbones.
LAMAR FIKE: Gladys was just like her father. She was more like a man with those big, wide shoulders. That’s where Elvis got them, not from Vernon. And, of course, Elvis got his temper from her, too.
BILLY SMITH: Aunt Gladys is the biggest key to Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: The Dundy book says that Gladys had some Jewish blood on her side. Ever hear of White Mansell? He was the son of John Mansell, Elvis’s great-great-grandfather, who had a couple of wives simultaneously and kids by both, and a girlfriend, too. White married a woman named Martha Tackett, in 1870. Dundy says that Martha’s mother, Nancy J. Burdine Tackett, was Jewish. She credits Elvis’s third cousin, Oscar Tackett, with this information. Anyway, White and Nancy had a bunch of kids. One of the girls was Lucy, otherwise known as Octavia Luvenia, or Doll. Doll was Gladys’s mother. Since, by Jewish orthodoxy, the mother continues the heritage, Elvis was Jewish. If you want to believe that.
BILLY SMITH: That’s totally untrue. My grandmother Mansell was French. My ancestors were French and Indian. Elvis and Gladys has some good research. But there’s no Jewish there. Never has been.
MARTY LACKER: Maybe she was a Jewish Indian. No, really. Billy could be forgetting there’s such a thing as a French Jew. Jews are everywhere.
BILLY SMITH: I’m not forgetting nothin’. She’s just not. I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. There just wasn’t any Jewish blood in our family.
LAMAR FIKE: This Jewish rumor got perpetuated when a reporter named John Heilpern at the New York Observer went down to Memphis. He may have been tongue-in-cheek about it, but he came to the conclusion that Elvis was Jewish, for three reasons. One, [Presley friend] George Klein told him Elvis’s grandmother was Jewish and said there was a Star of David on the left side of Gladys’s original memorial stone, that Elvis had gone back years after her death and had the Star added. Well, that stuff about the stone is true, but there’s also a cross on the right. Two, he thought Elvis was Jewish because the Dundy book seemed to back George up. And three, he thought Elvis was Jewish because Elvis sometimes wore a Hebrew chai pendant—the symbol of life—with his cross.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis wore the chai because he liked to cover all the bases. He said he didn’t want to be kept out of heaven on a technicality. But I can tell you the whole story of the footstone because I’m the one who had it made. Elvis was just hung up on all the religions. And he believed Jews were God’s chosen people.
I’m Jewish, and we were talking one day, and he said, “I’d like to change the footstone on my mother’s grave.” And he told me he wanted the cross and the Star of David.
So I went to White Monument, over on Bellevue and South Parkway, and I had it made, and he and I went out there to look at it. He stood in front of it, and tears came to his eyes. Then he turned and looked at me and said, “I want you to call Harry Levitch,” the jeweler, who was Jewish. It was like he was wanting to show Jewish people, “I’m not prejudiced” or “I care.” I don’t know where the stone is now. Knowing Vernon, who was anti-Semitic as hell, he probably destroyed it.
BILLY SMITH: That footstone’s up at Graceland, in the garage, best I remember.
LAMAR FIKE: It was a very strong matriarchal family. On both sides and way on down the line. All the Smith women were domineering, and they all married weak husbands. Doll, Gladys’s mother, was tubercular and never left her bed, but she ruled that family with her sickness.
BILLY SMITH: Doll was definitely the focus of that family. Robert, her husband, was a go-getter, and he bought her everything she wanted. He catered to her like a baby, and so did the kids. Elvis saw it in the Presleys, too. Maybe it goes back to Rosella Wesson. She was Elvis’s great-grandmother, Vernon’s father’s mother. That’s Jessie’s, or J.D.’s, mother. She supposedly had all these children by a couple of different guys. One was part Cherokee Indian. She was definitely an “I’ll do what I want to do” kind of woman. Her father, Dunnan Presley, Jr., run off when she was little, and she never knew him. So when she had ten kids, she never told any of them who their daddy was. She was a sharecropper. One of these Presley women ended up in the insane asylum. I don’t know which one.
LAMAR FIKE: Minnie Mae, Vernon’s mother, was a tough old bird. Tall, skinny, and peppery. Elvis called her “Dodger” because he threw a ball once and it missed her face by a fraction of an inch. She was certainly more dominant than Jessie. He up and deserted her ass in 1942. Went to Mobile, Alabama, and then Louisville. He filed for divorce in 1946, claiming Minnie deserted him, after he begged her to leave Tupelo and come to Louisville. Whether he asked and she wouldn’t or he never told her, he was shacked up with some woman up there in Louisville, a retired schoolteacher named Vera K. Leftwich.
Jessie’s legal file has some interesting stuff in it. Like the deposition where he insists he tried to get Minnie Mae to come to Louisville. He claims she “abandoned me October 19, 1942.” There’s also two letters in it, both written in longhand, which support Minnie’s desertion claim.
Dear Sirs,
I am writing to you about the letter I received from you last week concerning a divorce. I didn’t desert my husband. As a matter of fact, he deserted me, and has been living with another woman and he hasn’t sent me any money in over a year, and I am not able to make a living. We have five children and they are all married and have families of their own and I have to depend on them for a living. I want you to send me the papers to fill out and if you want my husband’s record you can write to the Chief of Police Elsie Carr of Tupelo, Miss.
Sincerely yours,
Mrs. Jessie Presley
LAMAR FIKE: Two months after Grandma wrote that letter, her daughter, Delta Mae Biggs, took exception with Jessie’s petition in equity.
Dear Sir:
I am writing in behalf of Mrs. Minnie Mae Pressely [sic], which is also my mother. Tell Pressley [sic] he can have a divorce if he will give Mama $200 cash. She won’t ask for alimony. If he doesn’t want to do that she will not give him a divorce. He told a falsehood about several matters to you. He has (5) children not (3). He also deserted Mama.
Thanks
Delta Mae Biggs
LAMAR FIKE: After that, the attorney wrote Grandma that her husband refused to pay anything for settlement or for alimony, even though Jessie made $30 a week as a cabinet maker. Jessie told his attorney to go ahead with the divorce, and he got it in 1948.
MARTY LACKER: Jessie just didn’t give a damn. Minnie was two years older than he was, and I don’t think he ever did much except father children. When he got married, he was slim and handsome and about six feet tall. He was known as a hellraiser. He liked nice clothes and he liked to cat around. Somebody in the family said that’s where Elvis got it. Except Jessie liked his booze, too. He’d buy the house a round of drinks to get everybody to think he was a good guy. Meanwhile, his kids did without the things they needed.
LAMAR FIKE: Jessie remarried as soon as his divorce came through. On all of his affidavits and depositions, and on his second marriage certificate, Jessie signed his last name “Pressley.” If you look at Grandma’s letter in the divorce file, though, she used “Presley.” I don’t think anybody knows exactly when the family changed the spelling, but Vernon used the double “S” on his Social Security card.
Jessie died of heart disease in 1973, and he’s buried in Louisville. His tombstone says “Presley.”
MARTY LACKER: In 1958, after Elvis got famous, Jessie cut a record called “The Roots of Elvis” for some fly-by-night company there in Louisville called Legacy Records. He called himself Grandpa Jessie Pressley. That year, he went on I’ve Got a Secret. His secret, of course, was that he was Elvis’s grandfather. He was sixty-two years old. He sat in a rocking chair and sang, and the show’s emcee, Garry Moore, backed him on the drums.
Jessie told a Toronto newspaper that he specialized in “religious and working songs” that he learned as a cotton picker in Mississippi. He also said he didn’t like rock ’n’ roll and that he didn’t want Elvis to help him. He said, “I want to make it on my own.”
LAMAR FIKE: Jessie came out to a show we did in Louisville once, in 1971. I met him backstage. He was real country, quiet. Elvis wasn’t close to him at all, although when he played Louisville in ’56, he went out to Jessie’s little bungalow and had lunch with him and gave him a Ford Fairlane, and a TV, and a hundred-dollar bill. But on the whole, it was a rather frosty relationship. Grandma called him a son of a bitch. The South has a tradition of being matriarchal. Historically, there were always great women in the South. There were great men, too, but the women held the family together while the men were more concerned with providing. I’ve always thought that women were much stronger than men in the long run, that when the world ended, the women would be standing long after the men hit the ground. Elvis and I used to talk about this, and he didn’t agree. He always had that macho thing, that he was the man of the house and ruled. But maybe a strong woman was what he was really searching for. Because Gladys ruled her house when she married. But when Elvis came along, he and Gladys ruled that roost together.
BILLY SMITH: Aunt Gladys was a strong-willed individual. If you scared her real bad or made her mad, she’d lash out at you. In Tupelo, they still talk about when she was sharecropping with her family. The guy who owned the farm come by on a horse with his high-topped leather boots and a whip. And he jumped on her parents and her sisters with it. Gladys was ten or eleven years old, but she ripped a plowshare off and took the point and hit him in the head with it. Damn near killed him.
LAMAR FIKE: Everybody in that family was scared of Gladys and her temper. There were nine boys and girls, and she ran ’em all, even her eldest sister, Lillian. Everybody knew not to mess with her much.
Except for Billy, and maybe one or two others, the Smith family was just wilder than goats. By God, they were tough! Tougher even than the Presleys, and they were violent people.
BILLY SMITH: I took more from my mama’s side of the family when it come to fighting. I don’t like it. But my daddy went through the worst that any man can go through, and he wasn’t scared to fly in there and hang with it. He and Uncle Johnny come close to death after they moved to Memphis. Five guys jumped ’em, and they cut Daddy down the side of his face and stabbed at his back. They stabbed Uncle Johnny all the way down his chest and just did miss his heart. Daddy was bleeding and laid open, but he was running across the street after them as best he could, and then he collapsed. He laid in the middle of the street yelling, “You sons of bitches! I know who you are! Goddamn, you better kill me! If you leave me alive, you’re going to know it!”
About a year and a half later, Daddy saw one of them, Doyle Pruitt, coming down the street. We had just come from a movie. Mama said, “Travis, don’t do it!” But Daddy said, “Go on in front of me. And don’t look back.”
When Pruitt crossed the alley, Daddy stepped out and knocked that son of a bitch down and stomped his face. I thought he never was going to stop. He disfigured that guy like you wouldn’t believe. Broke his ribs, his cheekbones, knocked his teeth out, and put out one of his eyes. Aunt Gladys hid him out. Later, he got two more of those guys. Daddy was easygoing, but he would kill you if he had to.
LAMAR FIKE: Travis was very funny and benevolent. You just didn’t want to cross him, especially when he was drinking.
BILLY SMITH: Our family has always been a little unusual. My grandfather and grandmother, Bob and Doll, were cousins. Elvis and Gladys says they were first cousins. But I think they were second or third. Gladys had Mansells on both sides of her family.
And you’ve got this double first cousin thing. A set of brothers—Daddy and Uncle Johnny—married sisters, Lorraine and Lois. So their kids and my brother, Bobby, and me were double first cousins.
You’ve got double first cousins on the Presley side, too. Vernon and Vester were brothers, and they married sisters, Gladys and Clettes.
LAMAR FIKE: In some ways, Gladys and Vernon were a good match, but in other ways, they were terrible. Vernon had a hell of a time keeping a job because he just didn’t like to work, and he wouldn’t get up early. Gladys got things done. She put her age back four years when they married. He was seventeen, and she was twenty-one, but claimed to be seventeen. I don’t think Elvis ever realized that. He always thought she was younger.
BILLY SMITH: Vernon might have been lazy and uneducated, but he wasn’t stupid. He was real handsome when they married. Vernon was flashy in his dress, and he carried himself well. And he acted like he had good manners, especially around women. Back then, a lot of people married to get away from home. By the time Gladys was a teenager, her father had died, and the kids had to carry the load. Aunt Gladys had done moved out and was running a sewing machine at the Tupelo Garment Center when she met Vernon. But she still felt responsible for the rest of the family. They eloped two months after they met, in 1933.
LAMAR FIKE: Vernon thought he was a stud. Elvis used to say that Vernon knew when Elvis was conceived, because afterwards, he blacked out.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis had a story about his birth, too—that the sky had this strange blue light or a blue ring around the moon. But I don’t guess that morning was really any different from any other.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis felt he was put on earth for a specific purpose. He didn’t know what the purpose was, unless he had a lot of pills in him.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis was born at home on January 8, 1935, at 4:35 A.M., according to the records. Jessie, named for Vernon’s father, was born first, around four. Dr. William Robert Hunt delivered the babies. Gladys went into labor, and the family had some concern because Gladys was having problems.
Dr. Hunt had no Idea it was twins, although Gladys knew because she’d picked out the rhyming names—Jessie Garon and Elvis Aaron. “Elvis” is Vernon’s middle name. I don’t know where the “Garon” come from, but they give Elvis the “Aaron” for Aaron Kennedy, one of Vernon’s friends there in Tupelo.
Vernon’s father, Jessie, come in about the time Gladys was in labor, and he was drunk out of his mind. Jessie Garon had just been delivered, and he was dead. They brought him out to another room, and Vernon was just coming out as Jessie was going in. Vernon was crying, but Jessie thought he was laughing. He went in and said, “Gitchy, gitchy, goo!” and “Oh, ain’t it a beautiful baby!”
The baby didn’t respond, of course. So Jessie just kept going, “Gitchy, gitchy, goo!” Vernon was hurt to the bone, so, finally, he yelled out, “Oh, goddamn, Daddy! The baby is dead!” The story goes that Jessie got this funny look on his face and just said, “Oh, oh!” About the time all that was happening, Elvis was born.