In early 1956, Elvis Presley was 21 and on his way to becoming the biggest star in America. One of the first things he did with his new success was buy his mom and dad a house.
On March 12, 1956, he bought 1034 Audubon Drive in Memphis. Built in 1954, it had four bedrooms and two and a half baths. It was the first home the Presleys had ever owned in Memphis. Elvis also had a pool put in out back, and he added a fence decorated with music notes.
It became the family home for his mother and father, Gladys and Vernon Presley. They lived there for about a year before they bought Graceland.
That September, a newspaperman came calling.
Sidney Fields wrote for the New York Daily Mirror. Elvis was away in Hollywood, making his first movie, “Love Me Tender,” so Fields sat down with Gladys and Vernon at home. Their talk became a five-part series called “The Real Story of Elvis Presley,” which ran from Sept 23 to 27, 1956.
Fields liked them right away. “I like these people,” he wrote, and “They’re simple, neighborly, unaffected by the fame and fortune of their son, or the furor he has created.”
He noticed something else, too. “They do have a deep bond between them, which is nice to watch, and they express it in a quiet kindness.”
Gladys was proud of how close her boy stayed. “He phones us every other night, no matter where he is,” she told him.
Then she shared a small detail about that new pool out back. It’s the kind of thing only a mother would know.
“We’ve always been very close,” Gladys said. “Why, to this day he gets frightened when his father dives into the pool for fear he won’t come up. He was always that way about us.”
Here was the biggest new star in the country. And at home, he still got scared every time his dad dove in.
Gladys and Vernon gave other interviews that same month. This one is a different 1956 interview from the Fields series, but it lets you hear both of them talk in their own voices.
Gladys and Vernon Presley in their own words, September 1956
Gladys told Fields the worry went all the way back to when Elvis was 5. A neighbor’s house caught fire, and Vernon ran inside with some other men to save the family’s things. Little Elvis screamed. “He was afraid his father wouldn’t ever come out,” Gladys said. “I just told him, ‘Daddy will be all right, now. You stop that, hear!’ And he did.”
Sixteen years later, that same little boy had grown up and bought his parents a home with a pool of their own. Part of him was still waiting for his daddy to come back out.
Coming from Gladys, it sounds less like a worry and more like a mom bragging a little about how much her son cared. He phoned home every other night and fretted over his father in the pool, and to her that was just Elvis being Elvis.