Elvis Presley Would ‘Literally Babble’ About the Way His Father Betrayed Him

In 1958, Elvis Presley’s mother died, and two years later, his father remarried. Elvis saw this as a terrible betrayal. He had been extremely close with his mother and did not like his father’s new wife, Dee Stanley. The future Priscilla Presley met Elvis during this period of his life. She said that he often spoke to her about the way he felt his father, Vernon, had hurt him.

Elvis Presley felt his father betrayed him by getting remarried

Not long after Gladys Presley’s death, Vernon began a relationship with Stanley. Elvis had been close with his mother and couldn’t believe his father wanted to remarry. He began to doubt Stanley’s intentions.

“What’s Dee trying to do?” he asked Priscilla, per her book Elvis and Me. “Make him into some dude he’s not? Why can’t she just accept him the way he is? I’ve never seen him so lovesick. She meets him at some restaurant and exchanges love notes all day.”

Elvis felt his father betrayed his mother and himself by jumping into a new relationship. He often talked to Priscilla about this.

“I saw him raw, totally raw, I saw him as he really was after he lost his mother,” Priscilla said, per the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “We talked so much, he shared his grief with me, he was very insecure, and he felt very betrayed, that he would even fall for such a woman [as Dee Stanley]. He used to literally babble about how this couldn’t be his father, about how ‘This will pass, once we get away from Germany, this will go away …'”

Elvis Presley did not attend his father’s wedding

In 1960, Vernon and Stanley married. Elvis declined to attend the wedding. According to Guralnick, he told Vernon that he didn’t want to take attention away from Stanley on her wedding day. In reality, though, he didn’t want to attend the ceremony when it caused him so much pain.

The day after the wedding ceremony, Elvis went to the cemetery to pray at his mother’s grave. Despite this, he only spoke positively about Vernon and Stanley in public.

The ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ musician was very close with his mother

According to Priscilla, Elvis was uniquely close to his mother. He saw her as the love of his life and believed they shared a psychic connection.

“It was Elvis’ habit to phone Gladys every day,” Priscilla wrote. “I was surprised to learn that up until the time he began entertaining, he never spent a night away from home.”

The distance between Elvis and Gladys when he joined the Army contributed to her early death.

“Elvis believed that his mother had eventually given up on life,” Priscilla explained. “Her health had begun to deteriorate when he was drafted. Her love for Vernon and Elvis was so great that she could never face the loss of either of them and often said she wanted to be the first to go.”