Pamela Clarke Keogh

“Jessie Garon,” excerpted from the book

People are fascinated with twins, one of the strongest, most inexplicable bonds between two people; for there are some loves that go beyond luck or mere attraction, standing outside the world and all it asks of us. Imagine: someone you’ve known forever. Holding hands, listening to your secrets. The first voice you hear and also, quite possibly, the last. Someone who understands your need and your fear, your ambition, your jokes, the ticking of your psyche because he shares so precisely the same inclinations.

A twin—someone to care about more than anyone you will ever know. It is almost a dream, isn’t it? That perfect love to shut out the world.

But where there is love, there is fear. And the death of a twin, or worse, having to be the surviving partner, is every twin’s greatest nightmare.

Jessie Garon, Elvis’ older twin, was stillborn. The only sibling of one of the most recognized men in the world was buried in a pauper’s grave in Priceville Cemetery, Mississippi, without a headstone, so the Presleys were never sure, exactly, where he rested. With his sure sense of the dramatic, Elvis decided he and Jessie had to have been identical—alike in every way, as opposed to fraternal twins; although in 1935, in that very rudimentary two-room house, this could never be tested or confirmed.

Elvis loved the idea of being a twin. It was his secret against the world. Perhaps along with his voice, his charisma, or his remarkable rise to fame, this was something else that set him apart from others. Like the son of a king who is temporarily a pauper, he carried this specialness, this perception of himself, the rest of his life. He loved daydreaming about Jessie, a boy—and later a man—with his walk, the sound of his voice. Someone he has known forever. Someone who understands him even better than he understands himself.

For us, trying to conjure up a twin of Elvis—a man so singular, so absolute in his talent and the way he viewed the world, we almost can’t perceive it. It is unimaginable that there could be another one of him. His friend Liberace also had a twin who died at birth; perhaps—along with stagecraft—they discussed this when they met in Vegas. Imagine two Liberaces: all that gilt, all those candelabras.

Was Elvis “obsessed” with Jessie, as the common press would have us believe? When he was out in California making movies, one of the tabloids concocted a story that he had long conversations with Jessie, and this hurt him deeply. His boyhood friend Jerry Schilling said that Elvis never spoke of his brother. Ever. “I think all that stuff’s bullshit.” His wife, Priscilla, says the same thing, “Elvis hardly ever spoke about Jessie.” In 1964, Larry Geller, a friend with twin sisters, had long conversations with Elvis about his deceased brother. Perhaps the truth, like most truths, lay somewhere in between. One of Elvis’ great gifts, after all, was always being able to read his audience.

Did he feel guilty that he was the surviving twin? Did he ever wonder why he was here, with his ridiculous success—greater, perhaps, than anything he had ever imagined—and Jessie was not? “I always felt a bit lonely when I was little. I suppose it might have been different if my brother had lived. A lot of things might have been different,” he mused. “But he didn’t live and I grew up alone.”

Elvis never looked in his brother’s eyes, heard his voice, or held his hand. With Jessie dead at birth, he did not even have a picture of him. For Elvis, and for us, too, Jessie was a myth, an idea in his mind. Still, from this loss he held one thought: He knew what it was to love, and to lose that love. This loss, it was said, haunted him his whole life. He searched for that love, that connection—in Priscilla, in women, in his audience—always.

And yet, in an odd way, Jessie was always with him. His mother believed and told Elvis that “when one twin died, the one that lived got all the strength of both”—a devilish burden that would roil the calmest psyche, almost guaranteeing a future spot on Oprah. But in his quiet way, Elvis carried Jessie’s energy—his imagined love, his concern for his well-being. That voice he never knew.

In the end, Elvis’ twin was a ghost. A phantom. Having died before he lived, Jessie was perfect. He would never grow old or make his way in this flawed world of ours. Instead he was consigned, forever, to the benign grace of Elvis’ heart.

As someone whose faith was as strong as his voice, Elvis never had any doubt that he would see Jessie in heaven. Part of his life was here—with his new RCA contract and Colonel Tom Parker, his mama’s pink Cadillac, the girls, and all the rest—but part of it was attuned to the world after this one, where he would surely see Jessie again.

There were many mysteries in Elvis’ life, and for him, Jessie was just another one. Farther along we’ll know all about it. Farther along we’ll understand why.