Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (26 page)

Overwhelmed and more than a little frightened by the fate of her family, the peasant mother set off for the palace in the forbidden city of Lhasa. Later in her autobiography she wrote, “Ever since I went to live in Lhasa, I tried to become Diki Tsering, with all the social forms and graces that go with that name.” But it wasn’t easy to take the unspoiled peasant girl out of the new Amala, which turned out to be a darned good thing.

Diki Tsering lived in the palace where she was treated like a queen—but she soon longed for her hard life on the farm. She disliked being idle while servants did all the work. She valued simple honesty and hated the devious court intrigues for power. She missed her son, as his Holiness had to live with the monks in a monastery.

And oh, those impractical royal fashions! Government officials gave Diki Tsering garments laden with pearls and coral. Scorning the heavy gowns, she wore her comfortable, peasant
hari
, a simple embroidered overdress. Haute couture was definitely not her style.

While Diki Tsering adjusted to a queenly lifestyle, danger swirled around her. The young Dalai Lama was a regent and the men that ruled in his stead were constantly fighting. One of those ruling officials even assassinated the regent’s father. Feeling alone and helpless without her husband, the Amala soon had to help her son face a new threat from Communist China, which was imprisoning and killing Tibet’s religious leaders.

By 1950, the Chinese forced the Dalai Lama and his family to flee to India, where they set up a government in exile. In India, the Amala spent the rest of her life helping Tibetan refugees and fostering Tibetan traditions, keeping them alive despite the destructive efforts of the Chinese. The exiled Tibetans grew to love and revere her. The Dalai Lama praised his mother’s calm kindness and credited her with helping the royal family to be compassionate while never forgetting their humble origins.

Infighting, death, warfare, and exile: it wasn’t exactly a fairy-tale ending to her Cinderella story, but the Amala coped just as she had when she was a peasant bride. Diki Tsering thought of herself as an ordinary wife and mother, but those who experienced her compassion or were inspired by her humility and strength of character—they considered her extraordinary.

Good guys got a good thing goin’ with mom.

H
e’s strong, he’s suave, and women go weak in the knees when he walks into the room. And of course he’s close to his mom.

Huh? Do “ladies’ man” and “mama’s boy” go together?

You bet they do. Researchers have investigated how a guy’s relationship with his mom might affect his relationship with his significant other—and they came up with some surprising results.

Researchers at Ferrum College in Virginia found that when a woman was highly satisfied with her man, he tended to get along well with his mother. They questioned couples, asking the women about their relationships with their husbands and boyfriends and surveying the men about their relationships with their mothers. The findings showed significant correlations between the way a man feels about his mother and the way the woman feels about him.

Overall, it’s good news for men who are valued and respected by their moms. Turns out that the men who thought highly of their mothers were also close to their wives and girlfriends. Their mates rated these guys as affectionate and good communicators, calling them both good lovers and best friends.

Sarah Roberts, who ran the study, noted that in many homes the mother is a child’s first experience with femininity, as well as his first influential teacher. A son who has a happy maternal experience may be more open to a woman’s affection. Men who had a high-quality relationship with the first important female in their lives seemed to be able to go on to have high-quality relationships with females in their love lives too.

But can a man be too close to his mom? What about the guy who treats his mom so well that he makes his girlfriend second best? The study may have spotted that guy too.

Men who rated moms as their “best friend” didn’t get such a strong nod of approval from their honeys. These men were rated as “less than considerate” by their mates. So for mom and son, it seems to be a question of degree. When mom and son are too close, wives and girlfriends aren’t as happy.

How close is too close? That’s a question only a woman can answer. (Seriously, we’re not touching that one.)

Millions of girls got all shook up over sexy Elvis, but here’s the story of the King’s greatest love

I
n 1956 Presley-mania swept the country. You couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing “Heartbreak Hotel.” Millions of TV viewers tuned in to
The Milton Berle Show
to watch a sultry teenager with slick-backed hair and sideburns rush onstage to belt out “Hound Dog” while accompanying his bluesy singing with a pelvic bump and grind that drove the girls and the TV censors wild. Some authorities declared it the end of civilization. Others said, nah, it’s just the birth of rock and roll.

At Presley’s performances, girls screamed, cried, fainted, and tore off his clothing—behaving in a highly unladylike manner. As for Elvis, he loved his female fans. But he always declared that his greatest fan and the woman with the deepest hold on his heart was Gladys, better known as his mama.

Gladys Love Smith was a descendant of sharecroppers and moonshiners who lived through hard times that never seemed to improve much. A striking woman, family said Gladys owed her dark-haired good looks to her Cherokee great-great-grandmother. Folks in her hometown of Tupelo praised Gladys’s singing talent. And Gladys could
move. In the dance halls, friends stood back to gawk open-mouthed when the girl hip-swiveled into buck dancing, a frowned-upon 1930s version of dirty dancing. Nobody shook up Tupelo like Gladys.

Alas, Gladys’s partying days were short-lived. She came of age in the Great Depression and dropped out of school early to help care for seven brothers and sisters. She worked 12-hour days in a garment factory, and her marriage to Vernon Presley didn’t improve her chances for enjoying leisure time. Vernon might have been handsome, charming, and funny, but he was poorer than Gladys and was said to be allergic to steady work.

Vernon borrowed money and built the young couple’s first home, a two-room shotgun shack. In that little house in Tupelo, a pregnant Gladys went into labor. On January 8, 1935, Elvis entered the building.

The night of Elvis’s birth was at once the happiest and the most tragic of the young mother’s life. She delivered twin sons, but one, Jessie Garon, was stillborn. The loss of one baby made Elvis all the more precious to her. She took to heart the folk belief that if one twin died it meant that the “one that lived got all the strength of the other.” But the trauma surrounding her son’s birth left Gladys fearful for his safety. Along with her powerful faith that Elvis could do great things out in the world, his mama was always terrified that the world might destroy him.

Vernon managed to support their little family, with Gladys taking on jobs like picking cotton to help out. Family
friends, church meetings, and tent revivals dominated their social life, making the Presleys an “average” Tupelo family. That is, until Daddy got arrested for forgery.

Vernon and two companions had placed an extra zero on a four-dollar check they’d received from the Presleys’ land-lord in payment for a hog. They were all sentenced to three years in prison. Gladys, left alone with a two-year-old to support, was dealt a second blow when the landlord evicted her from her home for lack of payment.

Somehow, Gladys managed. She stayed with relatives, got a job in the laundry, and cared for her son. While Vernon was locked up, Gladys and Elvis were two against the world. They loved and protected each other fiercely, spent all the time they could together, and even invented a language that only the two of them understood—and which they would communicate in for the rest of their lives. Elvis became the man of the house before he was three. He often called his mother “baby” and vowed to one day make her life easy. Most kids forget promises they make when they’re young, but not Elvis.

Believe it or not, there was a time when people actually wanted Elvis Presley not to sing. Once Gladys noticed that her boy loved music, she gave him his first guitar and even arranged for him to take lessons. Elvis practiced that guitar everywhere and sang to everyone. He was an immediate success with his teachers and classmates, but his tendency to sing the same songs over and over caused some pals to beg him to stop!

Mama never tired of hearing Elvis sing his favorite songs like “Old Shep.” As for Elvis, he noticed the way kids who
had once looked down on him suddenly admired him when he sang. Maybe with music, Elvis could give his mama everything she’d ever wanted.

The Presleys moved to Memphis after Vernon was released from prison, but unfortunately, Vernon still had problems holding down a steady job. Gladys came to the rescue again and took on odd jobs to make sure her son didn’t have to drop out of high school. In fact, there were few limits to Gladys’s support of her boy. Coeds might one day swoon when Elvis shook his locks, but at Humes High the girls turned up their noses at the shy, polite boy from Tupelo. They didn’t like his weird sideburns or hairstyles that looked shot from a grease gun. It was loyal Gladys who understood Elvis’s search for his own look; she even home-permed his soon-to-be-famous pompadour when Elvis asked for a Tony Curtis style.