Anita Wood, the 19-year-old singer who became Elvis Presley’s first serious girlfriend and the first woman to share his life at Graceland, has broken decades of silence with a harrowing account of the night she stood beside the King of Rock and Roll as he gazed into his mother’s open casket — a moment she says he never recovered from.
In newly surfaced testimony, Wood describes arriving at Graceland to find a shattered Elvis and his father Vernon sitting on the front steps, hours after Gladys Presley died at 3:15 a. m. on August 14, 1958, at the age of 46.
The cause was a heart attack brought on by complications from hepatitis. Elvis was inconsolable.
“He and his father were sitting on the steps of Graceland when I arrived,” Wood recalls. “And so, he took me into the music room where she was.”
What Wood witnessed inside that room has stayed with her for more than six decades. Gladys Presley lay in her coffin beneath a glass covering, but the lid had been raised fully so that her entire body was 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭. Elvis led Wood to the casket and began speaking softly about how beautiful his mother looked.
“And then he patted on the top of the table where her feet were, and he said, ‘Look at her little sweeties, little. Look at her little sweetie. She’s so precious,'” Wood says.
“That was so sad. And I don’t think he ever got over it.”
The account offers a rare, intimate window into the most devastating chapter of Elvis Presley’s life — the loss of the woman he called his everything, just five months after he was drafted into the U. S. Army and only months after he had moved into Graceland.
Wood, who met Elvis in July 1957 and dated him for five years, was uniquely positioned to witness the Presley family’s private grief. She knew Gladys and Vernon well and spent more time at Graceland with the family than any girlfriend before her. She describes a household bound by fierce affection and constant worry.
“I knew his parents very well. His mom and dad, they were very close-knit family, Mr. Presley and Mrs.
Presley and Elvis,” Wood says. “Mrs. Presley, of course, was in bad health a lot of the time.
So, she would retire to her bedroom early. She did not like the limelight at all.”
Gladys Presley’s health had been failing for years. Wood describes a woman suffering from a heart condition, carrying excess fluid that caused her ankles and legs to swell painfully. She was frequently uncomfortable and deeply anxious — not about herself, but about her only son.
“She never ceased to worry about Elvis. She was very concerned that he might get hurt in some way,” Wood says. “She just was overly protective of him.
She loved him so much. They loved each other so much.”
Inside Graceland, Wood says, the bond between mother and son was on full display. The family kidded around constantly, were openly affectionate, and even baby-talked with one another in a way Wood describes as an unusual and loving relationship. Gladys, she says, held out hope that Wood would one day become her daughter-in-law.
“She would often say, ‘I just can’t wait to see that little baby walking up and down the driveway, you know?'” Wood recalls. “Because she thought probably that Elvis and I would marry.”
Those hopes collided with history in March 1958, when Elvis was drafted. Wood was at the army induction center in Memphis with Elvis and his parents to say goodbye. Elvis, who came from a family with no military background, had no idea what to expect.
His mother was devastated.
On the day he entered the army, Elvis told a reporter plainly, “I hate to leave my mother.”
The anxiety only deepened at the end of May when the family learned Elvis would be sent to Germany in the fall for an 18-month tour. Elvis was first stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, and in July he brought his parents to a rented house nearby in Killeen. But Gladys’s health deteriorated steadily, and on August 8 she returned to Memphis with Vernon.
The next day she was rushed to the hospital by ambulance, her condition described as critical.
On August 12, Elvis was finally granted emergency leave and raced to Memphis to be at his mother’s side. He spent all day on August 13 at the hospital. Hours later, at 3:15 a.
m. on August 14, Gladys Presley was gone.
Elvis wanted to hold the funeral at Graceland, but Colonel Tom Parker advised against it over security concerns. The service was instead held on August 15 at the National Funeral Home in Memphis — and it was opened to the public.
“Mama loved my fans,” Elvis said at the time. “I want them to have a last look at her.”
A crowd of roughly 700 people, including relatives and fans — most of them women devoted to Elvis — filed past the casket. During the burial at Forest Hill Cemetery, Elvis collapsed at his mother’s gravesite, crying out, “Oh God, everything I have is gone. Goodbye, darling.
Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Gladys Presley’s original gravesite sat at the top of a hill in the older section of the cemetery. Elvis placed a statue of Jesus and a cross there, surrounded by two angels. The name Presley was engraved on the marker, designating the site as the family burial plot.
Six weeks after his mother’s death, Elvis was shipped off to Germany. Wood was devastated at the prospect of being apart from him for a year and a half. The two had been together for a little over a year, having met after Elvis saw her performing on the Memphis television show “Dance Party” and told a friend he wanted to meet the girl he had seen.
“He was the best-looking man I think I’ve ever seen. Very handsome. Such a gentleman,” Wood says.
Wood planned to visit Elvis in Germany, but Colonel Parker blocked the trip, unwilling to let Presley’s female fans read in the press that their idol had a serious girlfriend. According to the book “Elvis: The Army Years Uncovered,” Elvis dated several women during his first year in Germany while writing letters to Wood pledging his love.
In September 1959, Elvis met a 14-year-old named Priscilla Beaulieu, who was strikingly mature for her age. Elvis was smitten from the start, and the two dated over the next six months until he returned to the States. Though neither was certain they would meet again, they kept in sporadic contact.
Then, in 1961, Wood found a letter from Priscilla to Elvis — and everything changed.
“I found a letter that she had written to him, and in the letter it said something about her wanting to come over here, and that he would have to call her father and talk her father into it. All this was in the letter,” Wood says. “And so I confronted him with it when he came home.
We did have a real bad argument about that.”
The confrontation unfolded in the bedroom, and Wood remembers Elvis being visibly upset — she believes because she had discovered the letter. But the contents disturbed her just as deeply.
“And then the fact that this little girl was coming all the way over from Germany, I mean, I couldn’t believe that,” she says. “I didn’t like that either.”
Shortly thereafter, Wood made the decision to leave.
The story of Gladys Presley’s resting place did not end with her burial. In 1964, Elvis replaced his mother’s original tombstone — a generic marker reading Gladys Smith Presley — with a custom-designed marble gravestone. The new stone featured a cross on the right side and a Star of David on the left, honoring Gladys’s Jewish heritage.
It bore the words “Sunshine of our home” and renamed her Gladys Love Presley, replacing her maiden name of Smith with her middle name.
When the remains of Elvis and Gladys were both moved to the Meditation Garden at Graceland on October 2, 1977, amid security concerns, Vernon Presley ordered new inscribed stone slabs placed over each grave. Vernon chose not to display Gladys’s smaller gravestone with the Star of David at the Meditation Garden.
In 2018, on the 60th anniversary of Gladys Presley’s death, the tombstone Elvis designed for his mother in 1964 was exhumed from storage and placed permanently at Graceland’s Meditation Garden. It now sits beside the large cross, the angels, and the statue of Jesus that once stood at Forest Hill.
For Wood, the memories remain vivid — the grieving son on the steps, the open casket in the music room, the gentle pat on his mother’s feet. More than six decades later, her account stands as one of the most personal and painful portraits ever offered of the day the King lost his queen.
