Warning: this post contains references to trauma, abuse and neglect
It wasn’t difficult to get the number for a hitman in Vegas in 1973. Red West arrived at the hotel suite with a piece of paper with a name and phone number. He had been assigned the task a few days earlier and had delayed – hoping his boss would relax. But no, he was still asking. He still hadn’t cooled down since the incident. In the immediate aftermath, Sonny, another bodyguard, had been handed an M16 assault rifle and told to do the job straight away. “The man has to go. He’s destroyed everything and hurt me so much and nobody cares. Find someone who can wipe the sonofabitch out. He has no right to live!”1 But neither of them were going to kill a man directly – not even for Elvis Presley. In any case, why was this all of a sudden about Mike Stone, who had absolutely nothing to do with the men who had jumped up on stage and scared Elvis? Who was this man whom Elvis wanted dead? And why?
If we were to go back to January 8th, 1935, and a two-room shack in East Tupelo, Mississippi, we might find a small gathering around a woman giving birth at home to twins. Dr Hunt has been struggling for half an hour to deliver the second twin. As the parents have no money for doctors, Dr Hunt was only called when it became apparent that there were complications. But it is more than complicated. The first twin, named Jesse, is already deceased. He was probably still born, but some will ask whether Dr Hunt might have been able to save Jesse if there were no second birth. In any case, there is a struggle, and the mother is left in a terrible state. In the coming days, with friends and family gathering to comfort and console, Jesse will be buried. His mother will continue to haemorrhage, looking “close to death”2. After she is rushed to hospital for a three-week admission on the charity ward, visitors will find the surviving baby lying next to her. This twin that lives will be given his father’s middle name. So, it must then be coincidence, that the name given to this boy born on a frosty January day was an anagram of LIVES.
This blog looks at the lives of the iconically famous to ask what causes narcissism and how do these causes take effect in real life? What does it mean, that the very start of the life of a man who became an icon, is marked by the death of his twin? How might the same childhood experiences lead to both lifetime achievement awards and plots to murder? Most theories of narcissism point to a specific kind relationship between the child and their parents. What do we find in this well-documented life that might connect the death of a twin with world dominating talent?
It is difficult, as a parent, thinking about the impact we can have on children. Usually, we are doing our best with what we know, and what we have. We all make mistakes. We can take some comfort here in that we now know that Elvis was an outlier – an extreme case – of both success and perhaps also failure. Whatever contributions his family made to this are on a continuum with ordinary imperfect parenting. Let’s not be too harsh on ourselves.
Emotional poverty and narcissism
Many psychologists writing about the causes of narcissism focus on parents who are, for some reason, somewhat blind to the child’s emotions. This corresponds to the middle pair of roles on the map of narcissism (see below). The child initially turns to the parent to have their emotional needs met – needing comfort because they have no resource to comfort themselves. In narcissism, the child has a pivotal kind of experience: when they ask for comfort and to be seen emotionally, the response doesn’t come, or is unhelpful, or worse (see theory post). To be specific, the actual consequence of asking for comfort might be prolonged sadness, increased fear or desire which in turn is overwhelming3. The strategic decision of the ever-adaptable human child is to turn away from the attachment figure and abandon the strategy of dependence that works for so many luckier children. In turn this child must create distance from their feelings – which can no longer be looked after. Sadness, fear, humiliation and disappointment are the most avoided because of their connection to vulnerability. In turn, vulnerability will rarely now be seen in the child, by the outside world.
The map of narcissism4*
Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen puts it like this:
“To long for someone or to need someone leaves the person open to possible rejection and humiliation. Not wanting or not feeling desire is a defence against possible hurt.”5
Soon, a façade is constructed to create distance from vulnerable feelings. The façade must provoke admiration, approval, success – or at least vulnerability in others. The emotional care of the internal self has been replaced by validation and admiration of the external. In extreme cases, the façade becomes famous, even iconic. Let’s look at the background to the parenting of Elvis Presley.
The fortunes of agricultural labouring families in the deep south at the end of the 19th Century were unpredictable. But physical beauty could arrive in the poorest household. ‘Lucy’ Octavia Mansell, was described as both beautiful and a flirt. She became known as ‘Doll’ before she married her cousin Bob Smith. Doll would go on to have nine children. But by the time her fourth child, Gladys (Elvis’s mother), was born, Doll had since the first birth, taken to her bed with illness. She stayed there till her death at 59. Doll was described as someone who “enjoyed bad health”2, with her daughters taking care of the family and home and bringing to their mother various products for the care of her appearance. The children would “look to her for joy, and she would give them sorrow and anxiety.”2 Gladys and her siblings were the emotional carers of their mother.
So, what was Gladys’s experience of motherhood? Emotional roles of carer and cared for were reversed. And having children spelt the end of your health, youth and freedom in a devastating way.
Little Gladys became an anxious child. For a time, in an echo of her mother’s condition, she refused to leave the house except to go to church. But there was another less reclusive side to Gladys that developed – one that attempted to take control and escape her situation in a less spiritual way. When the 22-year-old later eloped to a neighbouring county to marry a 17-year-old farm boy (17 was under the legal age to marry), it was not the first time she had eloped. The first abortive elopement had been with a married man and had lasted two days. The partner for the second elopement – the 17-year-old (22 on the marriage certificate) was Vernon Presley and she would die married to him. She seemed to expect of Vernon only that he be a “ravishingly handsome…unambitious loafer2. She wanted children – someone “to be around her all the time”.
Vernon Presley had had his own childhood adversity. At 15 he was finally kicked out of his home by his drinking, promiscuous and sadistic father, Jessie. But Vernon, coming out of this childhood into adulthood, was generally described as a drinker but a sensitive soul not prone to violence.
So, Gladys, born of a beautiful but emotionally needy mother, might not have been ready to pay attention to her son emotionally. On top of this, no mother is ready for a traumatic birth, in which her first child is still born. There was grief and physical injury. And for her own mother childbirth had seemed to signal the end of any meaningful life.
If we were to go back to 1938 and the shack in which Gladys and three-year-old Elvis spent so much time together, we would find two different sized human beings in in their two-room shack. One would be sat still on the porch. The other would be described by neighbours busying themselves back and forth, regularly stopping to pay attention to the other – patting or stroking them on the head and saying “there, there my little baby”2. What is relevant to this blog is that it was the three-year-old who had learned to stroke and say “there there…” The child was the parent, in an echo of Gladys’s own relationship with her mother.
When friends and neighbours looked back and described Gladys’s relationship with Elvis there are descriptions of a “strange reversal of roles between parent and child.”2 In this family, vulnerability belonged to Gladys, not her child. It also perhaps belonged to someone else. Jesse had not survived, and I wonder if little Elvis got a sense from his parents, that Jesse’s kind of vulnerability was one that he could never competed with. In a queue to get emotional vulnerability recognised in a family, even an only child can be close to the back. But something else had happened when Elvis was two- something that intensified his role with his mother. He found his father taken away to prison, convicted of forgery. Little Elvis, when the situation had sunk in, “bawled so hard he couldn’t catch his breath”.2 Biographer Elaine Mundy concludes about the little boy, that
“Thereupon he became the father and Gladys the child who needed him to get her a drink of water…to pet her gently on the head, stroke her face…to watch over her and comfort her”2
Later on in his childhood, Elvis made a promise to his mother that has often been cited as confident, prophetic, ambition. But I suspect he had no idea that as a child, he had already been asked to do too much:
“When I grow up mama, I’m gonna take care of you”1
A two-year-old Elvis with his parents Gladys and Vernon.
So, these different events and family histories collided to find the emotional needs of this particular toddler invisible. The vulnerability of an anxious, bereaved mother whose husband had been taken away in shame, whose first child might have survived if they had paid for a good doctor, was consuming. As one narcissism author puts it,
“The child has been [emotionally] neglected and now their “primary goal is never to be vulnerable again”6
How will this affect Elvis Presley’s adult relationships? His wife Priscilla would later explain how, in his idealised adult persona, he had to totally deny his own vulnerabilities:
“If [he] was crying for help, he didn’t know it. He never would he was the centre of his own world. He never asked anyone for any kind of help. He was Elvis. He was the one who gave the help.”1
This could be said of some doctors and psychologists. But Elvis chose a different path. His strategies for gaining distance from vulnerability - his priority in life - included facade, performance and fame.
The special connection
The second kind of relationship described in narcissism theory is the special relationship. Alexander Lowen describes a parent who has emotionally neglected the child (most likely not intentionally) focussing now instead on external achievement and characteristics – offering admiration to the child in a way that is not based on the child’s individuality. Instead, the admiration is prompted by the parent’s own fantasy of a child that will bring to them admiration and self-esteem7. This is one way in which narcissism in the parent is passed on. It corresponds to the admiring pair of roles on the map of narcissism. The child who has abandoned their authentic emotional needs, starts to perform for the parent the role of being a specially talented or beautiful child – in response to a kind of closeness that is offered in return. They begin constructing a ‘false self’ or facade.
It seems that by this time Gladys had a sense of her boy being special. She was terrified of losing him, but after the severe tonsillitis at the age of six (the doctor thought he would die), Gladys “was convinced that his survival had been a message from God, her proof that her boy really was special,”1
As a child Elvis was prompted by his mother’s anxiety to say,
“Don’t you worry none, baby. When I grow up, Im going to buy you a fine house and pay for everything you owe at the grocery store”8
The subtle difference between the reactions from each of his parents is I think revealing. Vernon laughed. Gladys smiled. For her, there was nothing to laugh about. If it was Gladys’s ambition that Elvis become a star, we can see her feelings about her plan becoming reality on film. During the last song on the film Loving You, Elvis jumps off stage and into the theatre isle. Sitting at the end of the third row is Gladys – clapping with arms stretched out, reaching towards her son.
Elvis third from left at a talent contest aged 10 or 11
The superhuman baby
But before this arrangement of roles in which the child is admired as special, there is another kind of special relationship. For a few months of our lives when we were the most vulnerable – ordinary human babies have an experience close to being superhuman. The infant, when upset, cries and comfort just appears. The infant cannot tell that their comfort comes from a separate person. It’s not at all clear that they need anyone at all. They seem to be the only resource. The realisation, at some point, that this supply of comfort comes from another person, who might be on the phone when emotions or hunger strike, is eventually a wakeup call. The infant has to make a transition from a life of illusion – that they are self-sufficient and god-like – to a reality – that they are not in total control. They are vulnerable to another. The outcome of this transition depends on just how being dependent on this particular parent turns out to be.
When this ‘symbiotic’ relationship is over, is being vulnerable with this parent tolerable? The child who is unable to make this transition might struggle later with being stuck in the superhero mode, in which “illusions…become the necessary price for contact and relation” with his parents3. In order to feel emotionally safe, the infant must be in one of two extremes: they must feel merged with the other (no separateness), or they must feel a separateness with a superhuman lack of need, that they are in complete control of. In the latter, grandiosity and idealisation, instead of vulnerability, become “the vehicle for intimate connections with others.”7 This is relevant to Elvis in more than one sense.
A number of friends and neighbours noticed a lack of separation between Gladys and the little Elvis that despite his career, never fully faded. For a long time, they had a private pet language. At Gladys’s funeral, Elvis would stumble forward, crying out, towards the open grave, only to be pulled back by a member of his entourage, who said only “people are watching!”
We like to think of icons focussed on their success. Those aspects that were not ‘success’, we define somehow as side effects of success and not as impacts of difficult emotional experiences that also motivated success. Fame is not really what we like to think it is. In the childhood of Elvis I have described some experiences of unsafe vulnerability, and one example of Elvis, as an adult, taking up extreme power. In part B, I will focus not so much on the iconic persona that we know, but on Elvis’s adult relationships and search for a life worth living. This will bring us back eventually to Mike Stone.
Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.
*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.
References
1. Connolly, R. (2016) Being Elvis: A Lonely Life. Weidenfeld & Nicholson
2. Dundy, E. ( 1985). Elvis and Gladys. Futura.
3. Mitchell, S.A. (1986). The wings of Icarus. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 22, 107-132.
4. Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.
5. Lowen, A. (1997). Narcissism. Denial of the True Self. Touchstone.
6. Malkin, C. (2015) Rethinking Narcissism. Harper Wave
7. Diamond, D., Yeomans, F.E., Stern, B.L. & Kernberg, O.F. (2022) Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference Focussed Therapy. Guildford.
8. Guralnick, P. (1994) Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Abacus.