27 Facts About The Real-Life Priscilla And Her Relationship With Elvis Presley

You may have heard that Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is now out in theaters. A biopic about Priscilla Presley and her relationship with Elvis, the movie stars Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi as the iconic, if troubling, couple.

Of course, a list can only capture so much of a life — but here are some facts about the real couple beyond the screen:

Note: While this post doesn't contain movie spoilers per se, it does detail the Presleys' relationship and their split. If you know little about the couple and want to keep it that way until you watch the movie, it might be best to skip this one. 

As there aren't many photos of Priscilla's early life publicly available, I'll also be using stills from the biopic. 

1.Priscilla's biological father, James Wagner, died in a plane crash when she was 6 months old. Paul Beaulieu, who is depicted in the movie, was her adoptive father, and she would go on to take his name. She had five younger half-siblings, one of whom she was with when she was first approached to meet Elvis.

2.It was Priscilla's father who gave her her first Elvis record — his debut album — when she was 11 years old. Priscilla later wrote that her father said, “I don’t know what this Elvis guy is all about [...] but he must be something special. I stood in line with half the armed forces at the PX to get this for you; everybody wants it.”

3.Of course, Elvis and Priscilla met in West Germany, when her father was assigned to the Air Force base there and Elvis was doing his military service. They met through a friend of Elvis's who approached her and asked her if she wanted to meet him. "I didn't dress up; I just wore a little sailor dress because I still didn't believe it," Priscilla later said of their meeting.

4.Some lines of dialogue in Priscilla are lifted directly from her retelling, such as Elvis telling her, "Why, you’re just a baby" when they first met and she said that she was in the ninth grade.

5.Priscilla's parents, especially her father, were very skeptical of Elvis. Another bit of dialogue that appears in the trailer for Priscilla and is lifted from her narrative is when her father said to him, "Let’s face it: You’re Elvis Presley. You have women throwing themselves at you. Why my daughter?" Elvis's response in the film also matches her account.

6.Elvis was Priscilla's first "real kiss," when she was just 14 and he was 24. It happened alone in his bedroom after he told her how much he missed his recently deceased mother.

7.When Priscilla began to suffer in school as a result of staying up with Elvis, he offered her Dexedrine — a stimulant typically prescribed to treat ADHD. She said she did not take it then but later did take amphetamines to keep up with his partying.

8.Elvis did indeed have a huge influence on — or control of — Priscilla's style that went back to their time in West Germany. As she wrote in 1985, "He molded me into his woman. I wore the clothes, hairstyle and makeup of his careful choosing."

9.While Priscilla was visiting Elvis in the US for the first time at age 16, he took her shopping in Las Vegas. While there, he said of her hair, "There’s nothing wrong with it, honey. It’s just that this is Las Vegas. Everyone has their hair done. You need to apply more makeup around your eyes — make them stand out more. They’re too plain naturally. I like a lot of makeup."

10.Before the Vegas trip, Priscilla pre-wrote letters to be mailed from LA so that she could convince her parents that they were following an approved itinerary. Later, when Priscilla moved to the US to finish high school in Memphis, at Elvis's request, she did so on the condition that she wouldn't live in Graceland. But after briefly living with Elvis's father and his wife — as she had promised her parents — she ended up living in the mansion anyway. She actually moved her things in "almost unnoticed," as Elvis was away on set.

11.Priscilla and Elvis did not have sex until they were married. She has spoken about wanting to have sex earlier, writing that on one occasion he told her, “Not yet, not now. We have a lot to look forward to. I’m not going to spoil you. I just want to keep you the way you are for now. There’ll be a right time and place, and when the moment comes, I’ll know it.”

12.Elvis and Priscilla did discuss getting married, but his proposal was fairly unspectacular. "One day, he showed me the ring and simply asked me to marry him," she said in an interview in 1972. "Even though we were perfectly content the way we were, at that time it wasn't nice for people to live together."

13.When Priscilla went shopping for a wedding dress, she would don a pair of sunglasses and go with a male friend, who would pretend to be the groom, so as not to be recognized. She said last year, “This was such a well-kept secret because we wanted it to be our wedding with our friends and not loaded with paparazzi."

14.Elvis didn't want Priscilla taking birth control pills, and she said that she initially wanted "to be alone with Elvis, without any responsibilities or obligations," for their first year of marriage. Elvis asked for a "trial separation" when she was seven months pregnant, but didn't bring it up again later.

15.Lisa-Marie was born nine months to the day after their wedding. She later said of his behavior after her labor, "The man in my hospital room that day was the man I loved and will always love. He didn't have to try to be strong and decisive or sexy; he wasn't afraid to show his warmth or vulnerability. He didn't have to act the part of Elvis Presley, superstar. He was just a man, my husband."

16.Priscilla's huge hair in the '60s took an hour and a half to create once a week — and maintaining it was quite the challenge. "That was my hair. Not all of it — I had a little bump underneath and my hair went on top of it,” she said of the look last year. “And I did this especially for Elvis. He had gone away to do a movie, and I wanted to surprise him. There was a lot of teasing in this hair, a lot of teasing. That was huge in the ’60s."

17.Elvis had many affairs, despite preaching the importance of women's fidelity. Shortly before they separated, Priscilla took up karate — which she reportedly said in her memoir allowed her a new sense of independent "confidence" — and she had an affair with her then-married instructor, Mike Stone.

18.According to Mike, he was with Priscilla for four years, and Priscilla was the one to tell Elvis about the affair. Elvis reportedly wanted to kill him.

19.Priscilla said that leaving Elvis in 1972 meant that she "found Priscilla." Their divorce — finalized when Priscilla was 28 — was amicable, and they even walked out of the courtroom hand in hand. She even once said, "It was like we were never divorced" when it came to visiting Graceland with Lisa-Marie.

20.In her first post-split interview, Priscilla said that Elvis would often be away and that she would be "alone." She further said of leaving him, "In mid-1972, I finally realized that things were not going to change — and that we had separate lives completely." In the same interview, she said that there were "no hostilities whatsoever" between their families.

21.After the split, Priscilla opened a boutique called Bis & Beau — named after her business partner, Olivia Bis, and Priscilla's own previous name. The shop closed three years later, and Cher, Liza Minnelli, and Natalie Wood were all apparently regulars.

22.Elvis died in 1977. Priscilla told People magazine the following year that his death “was a shock" and that she even went back to Memphis when she saw his "health failing." She further said of their relationship, “With Elvis, my life was his life. He had to be happy. We never disturbed him. My problems were secondary. [...] I want to grow. I want to do things.”

23.Priscilla had an acting career in the '80s and '90s, with roles in Dallas and The Naked Gun. "I was just starting to get into it when Elvis died. Then I realized that I would have to wait a year. I didn't want people to say that I was capitalizing on that," Priscilla further told People in 1978.

24.Priscilla was put in charge of Elvis's estate after he and then his father died in the late '70s. From near-bankruptcy, she turned it into one of the most popular celebrity tourist attractions. She reached a settlement over Lisa-Marie's trust earlier this year after a dispute with granddaughter Riley Keough.

25.Priscilla has dated a number of men since Elvis, including Robert Kardashian. Her longest relationship was with music producer Marco Garibaldi.

26.Priscilla has a son with Marco called Navarone Garcia. Born in 1987, he's the lead singer of the synth-rock band Them Guns. Lisa-Marie died of a bowel obstruction resulting from weight loss surgery complications in early 2023.

27.Finally, Priscilla's 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, is the basis of the movie Priscilla. “When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,” Priscilla said of seeing Sofia Coppola's movie. “At the end, I actually, I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’"

Priscilla is in theaters now.