In an odd way, even Elvis’s death aligned with his mother. Even Elvis’s father Vernon - who was also close to his son - appeared amazed by the tight-knit relationship between mother and son. Though many found his close relationship with Gladys heartwarming, others raised questions about how “unusually” close they were. And Priscilla would later note that Elvis’s mother was the true “love of his life.”
It’s even believed that he saw a resemblance between the two of them.
When he met his future wife Priscilla, he talked incessantly about Gladys. And many close to him said that Elvis changed irrevocably after Gladys’s death, grieving her loss for years and thinking about her in relation to just about everything he did.Īdam Fagen/Flickr Gladys Presley is buried at Graceland.Įven in death, Elvis Presley’s mother cast a large shadow in the singer’s life. I loved you so much.”Įlvis could barely walk after burying his mother. We loved you,” the singer said at Gladys Presley’s gravesite. “She was always my best girl.”Īt her funeral, Elvis was inconsolable. Though the cause was a heart attack, it was later found that one of the contributing factors was liver failure due to alcohol poisoning. On August 14, 1958, Gladys Presley died at age 46. Army and stationed in Germany, quickly traveled home to see her and arrived just in time. In August 1958, news spread that Elvis Presley’s mother was ill. The Devastating Death Of Elvis Presley’s Mother To her cousin, Gladys called herself “the most miserable woman on Earth.”ĭepressed, isolated, and bewildered by her son’s fame, Gladys Presley started to drink and take diet pills. “I wish we was poor again, I really do,” she once told a friend on the phone. At Elvis’s Memphis mansion, Graceland, neighbors mocked how Gladys did laundry outdoors, and Elvis’s handlers asked her to stop feeding her chickens on the lawn. Though she was proud of her son, Gladys found his fame hard to handle. Circa 1937.īut Elvis’s rise marked Gladys’s fall. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Gladys Presley, left, with Elvis and Vernon. That record proved to be a spark - which would eventually flare into superstardom. In 1953, at the age of 18, he went to Sun Studio in Memphis to record “My Happiness” as a birthday gift for Gladys. When Vernon briefly went to prison for forging a check in 1938, Gladys Presley and her son grew even closer.Īccording to Elvis, the first song he ever recorded was for his mother. Mother and son gave numerous pet names to each other, constantly communicated in baby talk, and even shared the same bed well into Elvis’s teenage years due to poverty. When he was a baby, she even dragged him in a sack beside her as she worked in the cotton fields. How Elvis’s Rise Triggered Gladys’s FallĪs Elvis grew up, Gladys Presley - perhaps traumatized by the loss of his twin brother - always kept him close. In the years to come, she would give Elvis twice the amount of affection, too. She allegedly believed that “when one twin died, the one that lived got all the strength of both.” To Gladys, this meant that Elvis absorbed all the potential that his twin brother would’ve had if he’d survived. Only the second boy, Elvis Aaron Presley, survived. Gladys had twins, but the first boy, Jesse Garon Presley, was stillborn. He was 17 years old when they got married, and she was 21.īut when it came time for her to give birth on January 8, 1935, tragedy struck.