Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s Full Relationship Timeline

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Following the success of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis last year, director Sofia Coppola has adapted Priscilla Presley’s 1985 autobiography, Elvis and Me, for the screen. Priscilla stars Cailee Spaeny in the lead role, with Jacob Elordi playing the iconic King of Rock and Roll. While Luhrmann’s epic tracked the musician’s rise to fame, Priscilla centers the story on the woman who would become Elvis’s wife.

Here, we explore Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s relationship, from how they met until the singer’s untimely death.

September 1959: Elvis meets Priscilla in Germany

According to the official blog for his legendary mansion Graceland, Elvis first met Priscilla Beaulieu in Germany in September 1959. The singer was serving in the U.S. Army, and Priscilla’s stepfather, Captain Joseph Paul Beaulieu of the U.S. Air Force, was also based in West Germany, per Time.

Of their first meeting, Priscilla would later tell People, “When we met, I was an impressionable 14 years old. He was 24.” The pair were introduced when Priscilla was taken to a party at Elvis’s house, where they exchanged small talk about her age. “Why, you’re just a baby,” the singer said.

After their first meeting, Elvis invited Priscilla to his house on multiple occasions. “[T]hen, on the third visit, after Elvis had finished singing, he came up to me,” Priscilla recalled to People. He told her: “I want to be alone with you, Priscilla. Will you come upstairs to my room?” There, they had their first kiss. Before she left, Priscilla told the outlet, the “All Shook Up” singer told her, “We have plenty of time, little one.”

March 1960: Elvis returns to America

Priscilla’s parents were understandably concerned about her burgeoning relationship with a much older celebrity, but she was firm about what she wanted. “My parents were really beside themselves,” Priscilla told The Hollywood Reporter in August. “I basically threatened them and told them, ‘If you don’t let me go, I’ll find my way.’”

After dating for several months, Elvis and Priscilla found themselves facing a long-distance relationship when the superstar left Germany for the United States. Recalling their last night together, Priscilla told People, “I could not bear the thought of the night ending and us saying goodbye for what I thought would be the last time. I wept and wept. … For the last time I begged him to consummate our love … But he quietly said, ‘No. Someday we will, Priscilla, but not now. You’re just too young.’”

While Priscilla continued attending school, she heard rumors that Elvis was dating Nancy Sinatra, People said. But three weeks after leaving, Elvis called Priscilla, starting a regular if sporadic ritual of romantic phone calls.

Summer 1962: Priscilla visits Elvis in the U.S.

After speaking on the phone on and off over a two-year period, Elvis arranged for Priscilla to visit him in America. Priscilla’s parents agreed to the trip only under the strict proviso that she write to them daily, that she fly first-class, and that they remain informed of her activities. But according to Priscilla, Elvis found ways around her parents’ rules, and the pair traveled to Las Vegas. “Since I had promised my parents a daily itinerary, I prewrote letters for the time we were gone and had them mailed daily from Los Angeles,” she told People.

Despite spending so much time together, Elvis and Priscilla reportedly didn’t have sex. As Priscilla recounted to People, the singer told her, “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.” While Priscilla returned to Germany after two weeks, they reunited for Christmas at Graceland in 1962.

1963: Priscilla moves to Memphis for school

Realizing they didn’t want to be apart any longer, Elvis contacted Priscilla’s father and persuaded him to let her move to Memphis, where she’d attend Immaculate Conception High School. “Elvis assured him that if I was permitted to move to Memphis, I wouldn’t live with him at Graceland but with his daddy, Vernon, and his wife, Dee,” Priscilla told People. “Elvis promised to enroll me in a good school—he’d choose it himself—and make sure I graduated.”

While the pair initially lived separately, Priscilla told People that she started leaving more and more of her possessions at Graceland, until she was all but moved in. “Elvis was still in Los Angeles filming Fun in Acapulco, and by the time he suggested that I move into Graceland, I already had,” she said.

“It was a different time,” Priscilla would later tell The Hollywood Reporter. “I lived in his world. I wanted to please him. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to have fun with him. I wanted to see what it was that he liked.”

Christmas Eve 1966: Elvis proposes to Priscilla

After living together for a few years, Elvis proposed to Priscilla in December 1966. Elvis gave Priscilla a 3.5-carat diamond ring—which featured an additional 20 removable diamonds surrounding the center stone—purchased from jeweler Harry Levitch, the Graceland blog says.

Recalling the proposal, Priscilla revealed to Closer Weekly that Elvis said to her, “‘Remember when I told you when the time was right we’d get married? Well, the time is right.’ It was just before I was 21.” She also told the publication that, up until that point, their relationship had largely been kept under wraps, with Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, not wanting news that the singer had a girlfriend becoming public.

May 1967: Elvis and Priscilla marry in Las Vegas

After a short engagement, Elvis and Priscilla tied the knot at the Aladdin Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. The couple managed to keep their wedding a secret from the press, Country Music Family notes, but did take part in a press conference after the eight-minute wedding ceremony, at the behest of Parker.

The lavish nuptials featured everything from a $22,000 wedding cake to a $10,000 breakfast buffet that included oysters Rockefeller, lobster, and Southern-fried chicken, per Country Living. Priscilla’s 13-year-old sister, Michelle, served as her maid of honor. Following the wedding, Elvis and Priscilla honeymooned in Palm Springs.

February 1968: Lisa Marie Presley is born

Priscilla revealed to the Orlando Sentinel that Elvis asked for a trial separation when she was seven months pregnant, but the split lasted for only two days. “I later realized he too had questions about how a baby would affect his life,” she said. “Would his public accept him as a father? He wasn’t even sure whether his fans had adapted to his becoming a husband. How loyal would they be?”

On February 1, 1968, exactly nine months to the day since their wedding ceremony, Elvis and Priscilla’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was born. Prior to going to hospital, Priscilla applied her makeup and was adamant about keeping two pairs of false eyelashes on, the Orlando Sentinel noted. Lisa Marie was born at 5:01 p.m. Priscilla told the newspaper, “Elvis came into the room and kissed me, thrilled that we had a perfectly normal, healthy baby. He was already in love with her.”

February 1972: Priscilla and Elvis divorce

Following an affair with her karate teacher Mike Stone, Priscilla told Elvis in February 1972 that she was leaving their marriage. The affair came in the wake of Elvis allegedly cheating on her. As she told Australian news show Sunday Night, “He wasn’t faithful. Not that he had someone special, but when you’re in the entertainment business, there is always that. And I tried to turn my back to that, but I just didn’t want to share him. Simple as that.”

Of the breakup, Elvis’s friend songwriter Mae Boren Axton told People, “It hurt his ego, and it hurt his heart.” Priscilla received $1.7 million in the divorce settlement, along with $8,000 a month for 10 years. The divorce was finalized on August 15, 1972.

In spite of the split, Elvis and Priscilla remained close, with vocal coach and singer Charlie Hodge telling People, “Even though there was a divorce, they were like two high school kids. They still called each other and told each other everything they were going to do.”

August 1977: Elvis dies

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1972, at the age of 42. The cause of death was hypertensive heart disease, and coronary artery heart disease was an additional contributing factor. Upon learning of Elvis’s death, Priscilla was distraught, writing in her memoir, “I wanted to die.” Although they were no longer romantically involved at the time of his death, it is clear that Elvis and Priscilla still had a lot of love for one another, right until the end.

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