The worst time of Elvis Presley’s life was in August 1958, when his beloved mother, Gladys died following a heart attack at the age of 46. Elvis, by then aged 23 and already a world-famous music star, was inconsolable. Even allowing for her young age, Elvis’ reaction was surprisingly strong. At the funeral, he threw himself on his mother’s coffin, crying out, “Oh God, everything I have is gone. I lived my life for you. I loved you so much,” and “she’s not dead.”
The King was devoted to his mother and devastated by her death, but his sorrow was aggravated by his father’s marriage to a younger woman two years later.
After his mother’s funeral Elvis could barely walk. “It broke my heart,” he said later. “She was always my best girl.” But more anguish was still to come. In 1960, his father Vernon Presley remarried. His bride was Dee Stanley, a woman destined to go down in history as ‘Elvis’ wicked stepmother’. Elvis stayed away from the wedding. He was furious with his father for remarrying so soon and deeply unhappy with his choice of bride.
The other woman
The woman destined to become ‘the second Mrs Presley’ had been born Davada Mae Elliot in Waverly, Tennessee in 1925. A decade older than Elvis, by 1958, she was living in West Germany with her husband, Billy, a master sergeant in the US military and their three sons. Elvis was stationed in West Germany too as part of the Third Armoured Division. One day during the winter of 1958/59, she called up Elvis and asked if he fancied joining her for coffee.
Elvis was, of course, no ordinary American abroad, but a world-famous rock and roll star who had been drafted at the height of his fame. Some accounts suggest Dee had become infatuated with Elvis since first seeing him perform in Virginia in 1955, a year before his big breakthrough. She would not have been alone. Many people were obsessed with Elvis at this time. Many people still are.
Three’s a crowd
Elvis did not feel the same way, however and, in a move he would come to bitterly regret, sent his father, Vernon, then aged 42, to meet Dee in his place. Vernon was drinking heavily at this time and, much to his son’s disgust, had already been seeing a number of younger women in the months since his wife’s death. Now, he succumbed to Dee’s blonde-haired charms very easily indeed. Elvis was not impressed. “Elvis didn’t like Dee from the start,” said Marty Lacker, a member of Elvis’ entourage. “He doubted her sincerity.”
Things got serious very quickly as Vernon and Dee moved between Europe and America. The situation was awkward, but at one point Elvis relented. Why shouldn’t his lonely father have someone after all? But relations soon soured when Vernon and Dee moved into the room next to Elvis’ sitting room. The sound of Dee during the couple’s noisy bouts of lovemaking could soon be heard all over the house. This was incredibly embarrassing for Elvis, particularly when he had guests. Sometimes he would be forced to play his guitar in a bid to drown out the noise.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that Dee was already married. At first, and rather bizarrely, Vernon, Dee and Dee’s husband, Billy Stanley, all got on well together. But the mood darkened as Billy increasingly wanted his family back. Elvis was also under pressure from his manager, Colonel Tom Parker who reminded him the revelation that Elvis’ father was having an affair with a married woman could prove damaging to the singer’s career. A solution needed to be found.
“They literally had to buy Bill out,” Elvis’ colleague Lamar Fike said. In exchange for agreeing to end the marriage and remain silent on the subject, Bill was granted $250,000 and a new car every year. Vernon and Dee married in July 1960, less than two years after Gladys’ death.
Peaceful coexistence
In the years ahead, Elvis would buy a home for his father and stepmother, close to his mansion in Graceland. Before Elvis married her in 1967, the young Priscilla Beaulieu lived there with the couple.
Opinion varies as to how close Elvis was to Dee’s three sons, but he seems to have recognised they were not to blame for their mother’s marriage. He bought them generous Christmas presents and when they grew up he gave them all jobs among his entourage. But he always kept them at arm’s length. As Elvis grew older, the Stanley boys took on a less savoury role, procuring drugs for him.
In August 1977, Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. It had been almost 19 years since his beloved mother had died.
Elvis had never reconciled himself either to Dee or his father’s second marriage. Some might think this harsh. Close as Elvis had been to his mother, surely his father was entitled to find love again after his first wife died at such a young age? Unfortunately, Dee’s behaviour following Elvis’ death seemed to more than vindicate every doubt Elvis had ever had about her character.
Vernon and Dee divorced only a few months after the King’s death. Vernon himself died in 1979. At this point Dee began to unleash a torrent of poisonous and seemingly unfounded allegations about the singer, over the course of a series of interviews and two books.
She blamed Elvis for the failure of her marriage to Vernon. “Vernon was more married to Elvis than to me. He is ultimately what caused the deterioration of my marriage. He was incredibly selfish,” she claimed in a 1980 interview, “like a black hole that totally sucks in everything around it”.
More sensationally, she went on to claim that Elvis had been involved in an incestuous sexual relationship with his own mother. It was also claimed he had had a homosexual affair with Nick Adams, an Oscar-nominated actor, who had died of a prescription drug overdose in 1968. Strangely, she also now claimed Elvis had taken his own life after learning that he had incurable bone marrow cancer.
Dee’s unsubstantiated claims provoked an outcry. Elvis had shared a bed with both his parents during his youth, but this had been as a result of poverty and nothing else. The other allegations simply ensured that by the time of her death in 2013, Dee’s status as a gold digger prepared to say anything to generate publicity was guaranteed.
When accused of exploiting him for personal gain, her response was feeble: “How could I exploit it any more than it has already been exploited?” she argued. “And besides, we all gave our lives to Elvis. Now maybe we’re just trying to take a little something back.”
Today, however, it is her own reputation and not Elvis’ that is held in very low regard. Dee Stanley is destined to be remembered as Elvis’ ‘wicked stepmother’ forever more.
By Chris Hallam