In September 1956, Elvis Presley wasn’t in Memphis. He was in Hollywood, making his very first movie, “Love Me Tender.” That film premiered in New York on Nov. 15, 1956, which means it turns 70 years old this Sunday.
While Elvis was on a movie set, a newspaperman from New York went looking for the real story behind him.
His name was Sidney Fields, and he wrote a column for the New York Daily Mirror. Fields traveled to Memphis in early September 1956. With Elvis away, he talked with the two people who knew him best, his mother Gladys and his father Vernon. They invited him into their home.
That home was the house at 1034 Audubon Drive, the first house Elvis bought for his parents. The family had moved in that May.
Fields turned those visits into a five-part series called “The Real Story of Elvis Presley.” It ran in the Mirror from Sept. 23 to 27, 1956.
He came away liking them. Fields wrote that all the fame hadn’t changed Gladys and Vernon one bit.
Fields’s visit was for the printed page. But Gladys and Vernon sat down for a different interview that same month, and this is your chance to hear their real voices as they talked about their famous son.
Gladys and Vernon Presley speak in a 1956 interview
At some point in those Memphis conversations, talk turned to the future. Elvis was still a young man. Someday he’d find a wife and start a family of his own.
Plenty of mothers would get a little teary about that. Gladys didn’t sound worried at all.
“And even when he gets married, part of him will always be here,” she said.
Vernon backed her right up. “This is Elvis’ home,” he said. “He’s never had no other home except with us.”
Then Gladys summed up the whole family in a few plain words. “We’re country folk. He’s a country boy, and always will be.”
It’s easy to hear the pride in that. Their son was the talk of the whole country, and his parents still saw the same boy who’d grown up at their table.
On Sept. 26, 1956, the date that interview was recorded, Elvis played a homecoming concert in Tupelo, Mississippi, and this footage from the show gives you a sense of how big a deal their country boy had become.
Elvis at his homecoming concert in Tupelo, 1956
As it turned out, Gladys had her son figured out.
The very next year Elvis bought Graceland. He didn’t move in by himself. His mom and dad came with him, and so did his grandmother Minnie Mae, Vernon’s mother, who lived with Elvis and his parents in every one of their Memphis homes.
So Vernon’s words held up. At Graceland, his folks lived under the same roof as their son.
Keep that in mind if you catch “Love Me Tender” this weekend for its 70th birthday. The young man on the screen had a mom in Memphis who was sure part of him would always be right there at home.