Elvis Broke 42 Years of Silence on His Last Birthday — What He Said Left the Room in Tears

In more than three hundred interviews across a twenty-two-year career, Elvis Presley was asked about nearly everything. There was exactly one subject he never once discussed in front of a camera or a microphone: his identical twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, born thirty-five minutes before him on January 8th, 1935, who never drew a single breath. On January 8th, 1977 — the last birthday Elvis would ever have — he drove to a small frame house outside Tupelo, Mississippi, to meet a seventy-one-year-old woman named Ruby Calhoun. She had been the midwife in the room the night both boys were born. And for forty-two years, at his mother Gladys's request, she had been keeping something for him in a small wooden box at the back of a closet, waiting to find out whether he would ever come asking. What was inside that box — and the letter Gladys wrote three weeks after the births, for a grown son she wasn't sure she'd live long enough to talk to herself — is the reason Elvis carried a small leather folder in his jacket pocket for the last seven months of his life. Subscribe for more true and untold stories from the life of the man they called the King.