Feet were “sooties.” Milk was “butch.” Teeth were “toophies.” Love was “yuv,” and little was “yittle.” This was not a game between a mother and a small boy. This was a private language that Elvis Presley and his mother, Gladys, spoke to each other throughout her life, and which he continued to speak, as a grown man, to everyone he loved. Long after he was the most famous person on the planet, the King of Rock and Roll was still calling milk “butch.”
Priscilla Presley documented the vocabulary in her own book. She describes arriving at Graceland and hearing Elvis call out to his grandmother, “Look who’s here. It’s little Cilla. She’s come a long way, Dodger, to be with little us.”
As Priscilla explains it, “His mother had raised him on this sweet talk and Elvis spoke it with those he cherished.” In tender moments he would shift into the third person entirely: “Him yuvs you and her yuvs him.” He also had a name for his mother that everyone around the family knew — “Satnin,” said to come from the soft, satin-like feel of her skin.
Elvis Had A Secret Language With His Mother
To understand why the bond ran so deep, you have to know the history. Gladys gave birth to twins, and the first baby, Jesse Garon, was born dead. Elvis lived. Then, when he was three, Vernon was sent to prison, and Gladys lost their house. For eight months, she and Elvis struggled. Those years strengthened their bond.
How intense was it? Elvis described it himself in one sentence: “My mama never let me out of her sight. I couldn’t go down to the creek with the other kids.” Biographer Elaine Dundy put it even more starkly, writing that “it was agony for her to leave her child even for a moment with anyone else, to let anyone else touch Elvis.” In desperately poor households of that era, mother and child sharing a bed was entirely ordinary, and the Presleys had almost nothing. What was less ordinary was that the closeness never loosened as he grew up.
Elvis’ Mother, Gladys Presley
Then came fame, and it did something cruel to her. Gladys had wanted her son to succeed — she just had not understood that success would mean he was never home. As one account puts it, she wanted him to make it, “but not so that he would be apart from her,” and “the hysteria of the crowd frightened her.” She grew lonely and depressed in a mansion she had never asked for. She began drinking daily and neglecting her health. Doctors found liver problems. In August 1958, with Elvis away at Fort Hood in the Army, she was admitted to the hospital.
She died that month. She was 46. Elvis was 23, and by every account of everyone who knew him, he was never the same again. He was inconsolable at the funeral. Vernon later spoke about the closeness between his wife and son almost with bewilderment, as though he could not quite understand how anyone could fail to be that close. And Elvis kept the language. For the next nineteen years, whenever he spoke tenderly to somebody he loved, he was using words a poor woman in Mississippi invented for a little boy who was supposed to have been one of two.