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Leading to the "Elvis Story" |
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One Of Four In A Series Of Articles: Twins World Magazine (Exploring Early Twinloss)
Leading to the "Elvis Story"by Peter 0. Whitmer, Ph.D.
In the summer of 1928, Thornton Wilder addressed a packed auditorium at
the University of Michigan. The occasion was a whistle-stop
lecture tour across the country after winning the Pulitzer Prize for
his second novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In speaking to the
audience, he discussed the thought behind his creation of a character,
Esteban, and casting him as a twinless twin. A member of the
audience was intrigued, and asked the origin of such an unusual
individual. "I was myself a twin brother, though only for a
few hours," he told the gathering, referring to his twin, Theophilus,
who died shortly after birth. "The realization has remained with
me merely in the realm of amused and affectionate speculation as to
what it would be like to have an identical self going about the world
with one, writing perhaps, collaborating, perhaps. But before I
knew it, these tranquil speculations turned out in the book to be more
and more serious. But for me, the real thing I was interested in
throughout that chapter [Esteban] was the suffering of inarticulate
people." Thornton Wilder was one of five twinless twins whose
twin died at or very near birth, who became successful creative artists
in the 20th century. In addition to Elvis Presley and Wilder, they
include the science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, from whose works
the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall were made, the Mexican
Muralist, Diego Rivera, and the only other twinless twin with whom
Elvis Presley ever discussed his plight, Liberace.
Each of these artists and also many twinless twins whose loss comes as
an adult have demonstrated an unusual ability and drive - the twinning
motif. Their careers are dominated by a compulsion to bring
together different strands of creativity, and render something
completely new. By doing this, they are attempting - for a lifetime -
to seek a more fuller understanding of why they lived while their twin
died. It is their attempt to replicate, in life, what can only be
accomplished in death. Ultimately their life's most
profound driving force is toward becoming re-united with their dead
twin.
One of the first articles to
ever address the strange compulsion of a twinless twin was written in
1981 by George Engle, a physician at the University of Rochester. He
used himself and his late brother as a case study. Engel reviewed the
parallels in both personal and professional lives the two had shared,
noting that only after completing medical school did they go separate
ways. Unknowingly, they emulated each other's career. Both
combined previously unrelated areas of medical specialty into one. He
said, "Note that both of us held dual, or twin, professorships, unusual
in those days, and that both created new academic entities, virtually
simultaneously at that. Just as I at one moment could be a psychiatrist
and at another an internist, so, too, could [my brother] Frank be a
physiologist and then an internist. Each of us was preoccupied with
fusing two disciplines into a single entity. Such "twinning" behavior
is significant: The drive is always to be two, yet be unique from all
others."
For Thornton Wilder, nearly every
piece of his literature or drama dealt with the attempt to bring
together two fundamentally different themes: the praise of life, and
the possibilities and fascination with death. Repeatedly, in Wilder's
works one finds the theme of death, trying to understand death from the
point of view of the dead, and communication with the dead. From The
Bridge of San Luis Rey, through the play Our Town to his
autobiographical novel, completed at age seventy five, Wilder compared,
contrasted and investigated the fragile quality of human life that, he
felt, could only hold meaning when braided together like rope with
themes of death.
At the core of his novels
and plays was the core of Wilder himself; he spent a lifetime searching
for the part of him that was missing, and always came up empty
handed. His emotional reactions to his successes were pure guilt:
after winning his first Pulitzer Prize, he felt "a glib and graceful
hypocrisy" begin to emerge within him. He retreated to his mother
to be 'cured' and said of his sense of loneliness in the world, "I
don't belong."
In his journals, begun at
age fifteen, he ruminated incessantly on the theme of his twin as a
driving force in his creative life.
When only a few years older
than Elvis at the time of his move to Memphis, Wilder wrote his mother
about his high energy level and zest for life. He told her the reason
for his personality: "because I am a twin, and by his death an outlet
for my affection was closed." In mid-life, he struck up an intense
relationship with another twin, Montgomery Clift; they developed a
magnetic rapport when the two discovered both were twins. Clift
was cast in both of Wilder's Pulitzer Prizewinning plays, Our Town and
The Skin of Our Teeth. Clift's twin sister was alive, but the
relationship tormented the man, leaving him debilitated when apart from
her and "mystically close" when together. Clift told Wilder he
"experienced uncertainty as to which twin he was." Wilder counseled
him, saying, "All twins suffer from identity crises."
And in his life, Wilder would
constantly seek out people to continue this investigation: he visited
Sigmund Freud twice, once in Vienna, later in England. He spent time
with the occult philosopher Gurdjieff in Fountainbleu, France; with the
existentialist Jean Paul Sartre in Paris; with Carl Jung in Zurich and
with Albert Schweitzer in Aspen, Colorado. He was relentless in his
"seeking."
Twins are everywhere in his
works. In his most important works a twin is always cast as a
character, but often subordinated to his main theme of investigating
aspects of death: its randomness; its commonness; its comfort and
magic. His last work Theophilus North, took its title from his dead
twin's name. In the book the twin lives, and goes through life as a
problem solver and a healer, patching together people and problems that
have been ripped apart. In his play, Our Town, one day in the existence
of a small village, twins are born on that day; the third act takes
place in a graveyard and explores how another character, Emily, fits in
with the village dead after she has died in childbirth. The
Bridge of San Louis Rey is about an investigation by a Catholic
Monsignor into the reason for the deaths of five particular people when
a bridge collapses in the Andes. In the first draft of the work, the
bridge collapsed on Wilder's birthday. His autobiographical portrayal
of one of the dead, the twinless twin, Esteban, was so convincingly
effective that, in 1928, a reader wrote him the following:
Dear Mr. Wilder,
I'm a woman fifty-five years
old. My twin sister died three months ago. My husband is a
good husband, but he does not understand. I even think he has
always been jealous of my love for her and now gets cross with me for I
can’t always hide my grief. My children, too, although they are
grown up and have children, do not understand. But from what you
write about twins in The Bridge of San Louis Rey, I know you do.
How do you know? Please send me a few words in your own hand....
The other twinless twins' creative efforts differ in nature from
Elvis Presley's, with the exception of Liberace’s fusion of classical
and pop music, done in an iconoclastic and exotically flamboyant
style. But all of the successfully creative twinless twins made a
life's work of devising a new art form by entwining different
components.
For Diego Rivera, it
was the fusion of art and politics. He created a democratized mural
form for everyone; too large for the museums, it had to be publicly
displayed, He felt a life-long sense of loneliness and failure, would
work himself to exhaustion, loved the "shock appeal" of his murals, and
called his style of frenzied effort while painting "sheer animal joy."
His works held a
potent, unavoidable message of social consciousness and the need for
societal reform that drew international attention to him. He became a
lightning rod of cultural redirection, if not revolution. In 1933 when
his mural in New York City's RCA Building, commissioned by John D.
Rockefeller, was found to contain a small portrait of Lenin, guards
blocked off the mural and mounted police restrained the public from
viewing it. The mural was demolished.
For Philip K.
Dick, the death of twin sister Jane, at age five weeks, was the single
driving force of his life. His own identity was so impacted by her
death that he suffered from attacks of panic all his life, fearing that
he might suddenly cease to exist. At the same age as Elvis Presley when
he left Tupelo, Dick wrote that for him, "the real fear is that you
yourself - which at one time did not exist - may again not
exist; fear inside you, flooding over you in wave after wave of panic."
Nine years before his death, established as a science fiction writer,
he wrote about a failed suicide attempt brought on by his difficulty in
forming an identity as an individual. "I am desperately trying to find
a center for/to my life," he wrote, "but I am failing. I am still
'stateless'." (State of going Twinless, Ed.)
His writings were about attempts to resolve dualist dilemmas: science
fiction versus mainstream writing; human versus android existence; fake
versus real life. At the center of his drive was this sister, she was
everything to him.
All
of the successful twinless twins, and all of those who were part of the
author's Twinless Twin Study Program show a remarkably clear-cut
behavioral paradigm that, as the individual grows older, plays an
increasingly predominate role in their lives. As an adult, the power of
this paradigm is tyrannical and the psychological pain nearly
unbearable; the suicide rate among twinless twins is seven times that
of the general population.
The twinless twin: it would be decades before research would illuminate
the impact of this phenomenon. No one in the Presley family had an
objective understanding of the life forces that had been unleashed, but
Elvis and his parents knew of its powers instinctively. His entire life
had its taproot in this rare, but psychologically seminal event. To be
born a twinless twin is a potent birthright that spins one's life off
in a certain direction, like being born with musical or mathematical
genius, or growing quickly to a height of seven feet.
~~' The hallmarks of the twinless twin are clear. Those
who have lost a twin at or near birth share reactions that forge the
personality in strikingly similar ways. Both the surviving twin and his
family show the imprint. The impact and its lifelong psychological
repercussions mold these individuals with a common, defining character.
In early life, the pressures stemming from this initial loss are felt
as identity confusion and an aura of strangeness. *
The sensations of alienation and
isolation ‘ from others crystallize as the person ages. There is a
psychic pain that not only endures for life, but also becomes more
severe as time passes. To deal with an adult twinless twin is to
experience a person suffering the extreme inner torment of unresolved
grief
Some aspects of the twinless twin
paradigm involve the entire family system. Some involve just ‘
the surviving twin. But always the bond between mother and child
becomes electric. After the simultaneous birth and death, the parents
continue to think of themselves as parents of twins but often the
father is put at an emotional distance. He is made a pariah while the
mother and the surviving twin develop a relationship that is unusually
close, enmeshed and of an abnormal intensity. Such mothers usually
think of the survivor twin not as an individual, but as a twin; in some
sense both children are always present. Having had the ineffable
experience of going through a birth and a death at the same time,
survivor's mothers' become suffocatingly protective. They do more than
just worry the way normal mothers do; they obsess over issues of safety
and health. Fears of injury and death permeate the remaining child's
world. Survivors internalize these concerns, which, often emerge late
in the form of sleep disorders and nightmares.
There are other
aspects of the mother-survivor relationship that can seem even more
bizarre to the uninitiated. Mother and surviving twin will routinely
discuss the dead twin. Together, they will "converse" with the dead
twin, often looking for the deceased's response in myriad superstitious
ways. The relationship between the three can be occult, like some
strange theological trinity. In the best sense, this sort of
communication can be seen as a form of natural therapy to ease the loss
and allow grief to be expressed. Carried to extremes, of course, the
negative impact clearly outweighs the positive benefits. Under any
circumstances, to outsiders, such behavior can appear odd and
preternatural. Consequently, mother and child keep it a secret, thus
tightening their bond even further.
As youngsters, twin
survivors are aware of an uneasy, poorly articulated, yet pervasive
emotional sense of 'feeling different' from others in their age group.
When informed they
once had a twin, these feelings suddenly make sense and crystallize as
part of their identity. With this intellectual awareness, their sense
of "feeling different" is validated at which point, two opposing forces
emerge. The tension created by this inner psychological conflict is
driving compelling, relentless, often more personal than public, and
painful in the extreme. The twinless twin wants to prove his
uniqueness, to stand as an individual. Yet he is also powerfully pulled
toward being re-united with the dead twin.
The over arching
mythical nature of the twinless twin's predicament is particularly
ironic and unresolvable. To win the mother's love, they must grieve for
the dead twin. Yet at the same time, to establish self-love and their
own security, they must compete with the very person they are compelled
to mourn. The compulsion to be unique defines a life-long attempt to
prove that they are a separate and whole person. Surviving twins
constantly strive to demonstrate their autonomy and completeness. They
look to others around them for indications of their success in this.
Simultaneously, the opposing force, the tug to be re-united with their
lost twin, surfaces, to be powered by survivor guilt. Twinless twins
blame themselves for their sibling's death. They reproach themselves
for having deprived their mother and father of the special status that
is attributed to parents of twins.
Thus begins an emotional
pendulum swing. At the mercy of complex and conflicting
motivations, the twin strives to assert his uniqueness through behavior
designed to demonstrate to others just how special he is. The more
successful he becomes in achieving attention and recognition from those
around him, the more guilty he feels. Deep down, he is
convinced he should be sharing the wealth because he does not deserve
to succeed. He believes he should be condemned rather than commended
for having reached such levels of achievement. Gradually, this pendulum
of emotions swings out of control - farther and farther in each
frustratingly contradictory direction.
These two forces - to prove one's
individuality, and to become re-united with the other twin yet always
in view of the mother - make it extremely difficult for twinless twins
to develop normal relationships with others because they are already
intimately involved. Self-imposed alienation is the normal. Yet by
definition, the relationship with the dead twin is incomplete and never
fully satisfying. Real human closeness is almost impossible, and the
sense of pain and isolation becomes intense.
Another characteristic of the
twinless twin is an unusually high energy level. The playwright
Thornton Wilder wrote his mother about this when he was twenty years
old. Saying, "I suppose that everyone feels that his nature cries out
hourly for it knows not what, but I like to believe that mine raises an
exceedingly great voice because I am a twin, and by his death an outlet
for my affection was closed. It is not affection alone, but energy, and
in it I live and because of it I believe I seem to see my life as more
vivid, electric, and marvelous than others . . .1 am perpetually
enthusiastic." The science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, was
tormented, driven and inspired by his sister’s loss for his entire
life. He spoke of her powers over him, saying "She (Jane) fights for my
life & for hers, eternally ... My sister is everything to me. I am
damned always to be separated from her/& with her, in an
oscillation."
In the summer of 1956, the
performer Liberace first met and discussed with Elvis his feelings due
to having lost his twin at birth. He felt this had fueled his
compulsion to perform. Further, he described what he called his need
"to work in a frenzy." In the process, he gave Presley the first of
numerous lessons about how to flaunt his uniqueness, especially through
style and dress. Liberace called it "showmanship." Both
called it success.
Early in Elvis' career,
Gladys spoke of her son’s source of talent, drive and energy. She
pointed to his birth and his twin's, Jesse', death as the crucible
which forged Presley's "destiny to do great things. He is living for
two people," She proclaimed. "He has the power of two people."
Elvis himself would refer to his dead twin as his "original
bodyguard." He sought communion and re-union with the twin, sensing
that the dead brother was a spiritual guide who directed him to search
for meaning in life. He did this through meditation, numerology,
compulsive study of both the Bible and numerous other spiritual tracts
and, ultimately, through drug use.
Twinless twins can live a
lifetime with most of the people in the world completely unaware of
their operative core dynamic. They inhabit, in a sense, the ultimate
private world. One speaks with, seeks guidance from, and feels
constantly in some form of contact not Just with an invisible being -
but with a genetic carbon copy of one's self, in fact, who occupies an
almost God-like position in this twisted but profoundly spiritual
mental relationship. This is not the kind of stuff suitable for open
discussion.
Editor’s Note: This confusion and aura of
strangeness of which Dr- Whitmer writes has been evidenced to me in the
hundreds of interviews conducted and letters received by me.
Dr. Raymond Brandt
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