Personal relationships of Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley had many close relationships throughout his career. The strongest of all the personal relationships of Elvis Presley, by far, was that he had with his mother Gladys, as described below.

In a newspaper interview with The Memphis Press Scimitar, Elvis himself was open about the close relationship to his mother. "She was the number-one girl in his life, and he was dedicating his career to her." Throughout her life, "the son would call her by pet names," and they communicated by baby talk. Presley even shared his mother's bed "up until Elvis was a young teen," simply because the family was so extremely poor that they couldn't afford the luxury of two beds. According to Elaine Dundy, "it was agony for her to leave her child even for a moment with anyone else, to let anyone else touch Elvis." Presley himself said, "My mama never let me out of her sight. I couldn't go down to the creek with the other kids." His father, Vernon Presley, talked about Elvis's close relationship to his mother "after his son became famous, almost as if it were a source of wonder that anyone could be that close."

During Presley's rising career, Gladys became despairing, depressed and lonely and began to neglect her health. She put on weight and began to drink every day. She had wanted Elvis to succeed, "but not so that he would be apart from her. The hysteria of the crowd frightened her." Doctors diagnosed liver problems, and Gladys's condition eventually worsened so much that she was admitted to hospital in August 1958. At that time, Elvis was in Fort Hood, Texas, to fulfill his military obligations, but he got emergency leave to see her, and a special plane was chartered to bring him home on August 12. Gladys died on August 14. Elvis and Vernon were deeply upset by her death, with Elvis "sobbing and crying hysterically," and eye-witnesses relate that he was "grieving almost constantly" for days. During and shortly after the funeral, Judy Spreckels and Nick Adams, Presley's best friends at that time, attempted to comfort the singer.

Presley's early experiences being teased by his classmates for being a "mama's boy" had a deep influence on his clumsy advances to girls. He didn't have any friends as a teen. Beginning in his early teens, Presley embarked upon the "indefatigable pursuit of girls," but was totally rebuffed. At school, anyone wishing to provoke a little girl to tears of rage had only to chalk "Elvis loves -" and then the girl's name on the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room." However, according to Greil Marcus, Elvis, "whatever his mother might have thought," seems to have spent some time "as a teenager in Memphis's black neighborhoods, having sex with black girls."

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