Twisted Tales: Happy Birthday to Elvis -- and His Twin, Jesse Garon Presley

Posted on Jan 9th 2009 5:00PM by James Sullivan
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The real unsung hero of rock 'n' roll would have celebrated his 74th birthday this week. Not that he ever got to celebrate his first: The inscription on his grave marker gives just one date for birth and death alike -- January 8, 1935. That's because Jesse Garon Presley was stillborn.

Jesse, of course, was Elvis Aron Presley's twin brother, delivered just after 4 a.m., 35 minutes before the baby who would become the worldwide face of rock 'n' roll. Their father, Vernon Elvis Presley, was just 17 when he married Gladys Love Smith, four years his senior, in 1933. The couple lived in a two-room shotgun shack Vern built in Tupelo, Miss., next door to his parents' house. Vern's father, Jessie, inspired the name of the stillborn twin. Elvis' middle name, Aron, was a tribute to a friend of Vern's named Aaron Kennedy.

The impoverished Presleys laid their dead son to rest in an umarked grave in Priceville Cemetery in Tupelo. (By some accounts, he was buried in a shoebox.) As a boy, Elvis visited his lost twin's gravesite often. His mother was convinced that her surviving son was blessed with superhuman abilities due to the loss: When one twin died, she believed, the other "got all the strength of both." She was also known to declare that whenever Elvis did the right thing, he had Jesse's conscience to thank.

In the 1997 "psychological biography" called 'The Inner Elvis,' clinical psychologist Peter Whitmer speculated that Elvis' torment over the brother he never had was critical to his identity. Any "twinless twin," the author argued, wants to "prove his uniqueness, to stand as an individual." But Elvis was also marked by dualities: his synthesis of black and white music styles, the doctor claimed, could have only come from a twinless twin. Even the King's early- career habit of dressing in the garish color combination of black and hot pink could be attributed to his dead brother, according to Whitmer: "The color pink, soft as an infant, and black, harsh as death."

Nice theory. Even if Elvis didn't dwell inordinately on the loss of his brother, as many of his close friends claimed over the years, it's an obvious piece of his puzzle. Graceland visitors know that Jesse is memorialized in the yard with an inlaid marker (which gives the name Vern's father's spelling, "Jessie," just as Elvis' middle name is rendered "Aaron" on his marker, à la his namesake family friend). As long as there are Elvis fanatics, some of them will keep the memory of the singer's stillborn twin alive. There are bandleaders, Elvis impersonators and radio disc jockeys who've all adopted the name Jesse Garon. In the credits of his movie 'Coffee and Cigarettes,' Elvis obsessive Jim Jarmusch paid tribute to the lost brother. And in 'That's Alright, Mama: The Unauthorized Life of Elvis's Twin,' novelist Gerald Duff imagined a life for Jesse, had he lived. Elvis and Jesse, the writer explained, were "two halves that never could join up right to make one." For a while, though, they did all right together.