In 1956 Elvis Presley was the most talked-about young man in America. He was 21, his records were everywhere, and he was hardly ever home. There were shows in one city and a screen test in another, and a first movie waiting for him out in Hollywood.
But a phone kept ringing back in Memphis.
That fall a New York reporter named Sidney Fields went looking for the real story behind the headlines. He sat down with Elvis’s parents, Gladys and Vernon Presley, for a five-part series in the New York Daily Mirror called “The Real Story of Elvis Presley.” Gladys was his mother. Vernon was his father. They had raised their only son with next to nothing in Tupelo, Mississippi, and now the whole country wanted a piece of him.
By then Elvis had moved them into a house on Audubon Drive, a quiet street in Memphis. The fame was new. The worry was not.
What Gladys told the reporter was simple. No matter where her son went, he found a way to reach them.
Vernon added a quieter thing about his boy. Elvis, he said, had a deep need to be liked. “And when he isn’t, he worries about it.”
You can hear the parents in that. They weren’t bragging about a star. They were talking about a son they still fussed over.
Here’s the part the caption held back.
When Gladys described those phone calls, she repeated the exact words Elvis used every time the line connected. He didn’t start with himself, or the crowds, or the long drives. He started with them.
“He phones us every other night, no matter where he is,” Gladys told Sidney Fields. “‘How’s my babies?’ he asks us.”
My babies.
For 21 years Gladys and Vernon had been the ones calling Elvis their baby. Now the boy was grown and famous and gone half the year, and he had turned it right around. From a hotel somewhere out on the road, the biggest name in the country was checking on his mom and dad like they were the ones who needed looking after.
Gladys came from a big family herself, one of eight children, so she knew what it meant to keep people close. She clearly treasured those calls. You can tell by the way she quoted them back word for word to a stranger from New York.
The photos from that year, taken around the Audubon Drive house, show the three of them together before everything changed. Elvis is leaning on his mother with Vernon close by, a family that still felt like a family even with the whole world watching.
Take a look at the pictures of Elvis with Gladys and Vernon in 1956, and you’ll see exactly why those every-other-night calls meant so much.