In early September 1956, a New York reporter named Sidney Fields sat down with Elvis Presley’s parents at their home in Memphis. Elvis was the biggest new singer in America that year, and Fields wrote for the New York Daily Mirror. His series was called “The Real Story of Elvis Presley.” He wanted to know what the boy had been like long before the records and the screaming crowds.
Elvis’s mother, Gladys, did most of the talking. She was a quiet woman who’d spent years working hard for very little, and she doted on her only son. Money had always been tight, first in Tupelo where Elvis was born, and later in Memphis where the family moved to start fresh.
What she told Fields that day has stayed with Elvis fans ever since.
She said Elvis kept making her the same promise when he was tiny, over and over, out loud, where other people could hear him. He was hardly four years old. The family had almost nothing back then.
She remembered it almost word for word.
“When he was hardly four, he’d tell me: ‘Don’t worry, baby. When I’m grown up I’ll buy you a big home and two cars. One for you and Daddy and one for me.’ All his life he’d say out loud what he was going to do for us, and he’d say it in front of other people. And you know, I believed him.”
A little boy with holes in his shoes, telling his mama about a big house and a pair of cars like it was already settled.
And he meant it.
The two cars part might be the sweetest. Elvis grew up and bought his mother a Cadillac, one of the most famous cars in the world, and Graceland keeps it to this day. Graceland’s own team walks you through the cars he bought for his family, including the one everybody still comes to see.
Inside Graceland’s car museum, where the cars Elvis bought his family are still parked
Vernon was Elvis’s father, the “Daddy” in that promise. The “big home” turned out to be Graceland, the Memphis mansion Elvis bought for all of them in March 1957. That was only months after Gladys sat and told the reporter her story. The little boy had been right the whole time.
There was a quieter side to it too. Gladys said that even in high school, long before any of the fame, Elvis would slip in and pay the family grocery bill himself. Twenty-five or thirty dollars at a time. He never made a show of it. Just a teenage boy quietly making sure the lights stayed on and the table stayed full.
He just wanted to take care of them. He’d been saying so since he was four.