In ‘Priscilla,’ Sofia Coppola Imagines Priscilla Presley's Inner Life. Presley's 1985 Memoir Reveals It

Graceland is smaller than you think it’s going to be, smaller than “17,552 square feet and 23 rooms” implies. Every surface inside hints at the idea of a long and dreamless nap: deep shag carpet, heavy drapery, and mazes of pillowy sofas evoke an endless February afternoon. This past spring I toured the premises, shuffling its mirrored halls in lockstep with tourists of dubious motivation snapping lopsided photos of the Jungle Room. For a moment I flashed to my grandmother’s house where I hated to go as a kid, whose abundance of angel figurines and dismal upholstery made death feel horrifically near. Even removed from the thought of Dead Elvis, the Presley estate gives “funeral parlor,” and in a way, it always was one, designed to the tastes of his mother who died of heart failure in 1958, the year after the family moved in.

For much of Priscilla, the latest Sofia Coppola joint, its namesake — the teenage Priscilla Beaulieu — floats aimlessly through this funeral home like a well-mannered antebellum ghost. She paces the powder-white living room, waiting for Elvis to return from filming in L.A., where reports of a fling with his co-star Ann-Margret are greatly exaggerated (he says). When Elvis is home, she awaits his emergence in late afternoon from their bedroom, which is done up like Dracula’s lair, revealing his mood and thus setting the tone for the day. By night she loiters the Memphis Fairgrounds, cheering as Elvis’ entourage try to kill one another with bumper cars. “After a few hours my own enthusiasm waned,” wrote the real Priscilla Presley in Elvis & Me, her 1985 memoir, which Coppola adapted. She is brainwashed enough by Elvis to dress as his twin, and to start her days with Dexedrine and end them with Placidyl, but not enough to vanquish the cool, canny observations that give Presley’s account its special nuance.

It’s got what Sofia Coppola masterpieces are made of: a young woman waiting around. Forget the cocky self-determinism of that High Fidelity line, the one that says you are what you like. In Coppola’s films, where you are is what you are. Graceland is not so far off from the Michigan home of The Virgin Suicides’ Lisbon sisters, where the only escape was through records or the photos in travel brochures, nor the room in the Park Hyatt Tokyo where, for a good bit of Lost in Translation, Charlotte stares out the window while her husband’s off doing whatever it is that he does. Inside the Presley manor is every shortcut to happiness a young person could ask for — race cars, amphetamines, a short-order cook — all out of reach until Elvis descends the stairs. (There is another movie to be made revolving around the “Memphis Mafia,” the secret-keepers, babysitters, wingmen and hangers-on suspended in perma-adolescence from the fifties til Elvis’ death.)

We (you know who you are) love Coppola for her perfect arrangements of the sacred stuff of girlhood — objects with great aesthetic appeal, suffused with great private meaning. The world of Priscilla abounds with beautiful things, but not the things of girlhood. Instead they represent boyhood taken to its flamboyant extreme — fireworks and bulldozers, go-karts and guns — or the baffling kitsch of the nouveau riche, or the things that a man in his twenties thinks a girl in her teens ought to love. And mostly Priscilla does love them — the shopping sprees, the Vegas weekends, the golf cart races on the lawn — because, I mean, they’re fabulous, and because Elvis is there. She loves the days spent in the dark, bedroom windows blacked out with tinfoil, pillow-fighting and watching TV. “We always seemed to be more in love when we were alone,” she wrote in Elvis & Me. “I loved those times, when he was just Elvis, not trying to live up to an image or a myth. We were two people discovering each other.”

There’s a song about this Coppola should’ve optioned, a ballad called “Video Games,” the first single from then-unknown Lana Del Rey (who, years later, reportedly declined Coppola's invitation to contribute to the Priscilla soundtrack.) The song tells a story that echoes Priscilla’s back then, a story about a woman who is living with a man. The woman puts on perfume and a nice dress, fetches two beers and opens them, and the man plays World of Warcraft. Sometimes they go to the bar. “Heaven is a place on earth with you,” the woman sighs. “It’s better than I ever even knew.” There are a few ways you could read this, but the singer doesn’t weigh in; she presents the story how it happened, or how she wished it did. Reviews of the song made it seem dead depressing — an unfulfilled woman in a troubling relationship, operating under the influence of serious delusion — though its lyrics suggest nothing short of bliss, and maybe some boredom now and then.

“I loved babying Elvis,” wrote Priscilla in Elvis & Me. “He had a little-boy quality that could bring out the mother instinct in any woman, a beguiling way of seeming utterly dependent.” He’d been coddled intensely by his own parents, with whom he’d slept until adulthood to curb his sleepwalking habit. She accepted that while Elvis was the love of her life, his own great love was his mother, whose sudden death had affected him more than anyone but Priscilla could know. “Since Gladys’ death, there were no boundaries for Elvis,” she came to recognize. “Now that she was gone, he was continually in conflict between his own personal ethics and the temptations that surrounded him.” As for Elvis’ role in her own life, she saw it clearly: “That of lover and father, and with neither could he let his guard down and become fallible or truly intimate,” she wrote. “Lost in our separate miseries, we were unable to give each other strength or support. He was controlled by his inability to take responsibility for his own life and for compromising his own standards — and I was controlled by him, compromising mine.”

The two had met in Germany when he was a lonesome soldier of 24 and she a lonesome Army brat of 14, a fact in whose shadow a less sympathetic film than Coppola’s would disappear. Back then Presley wondered why she had been chosen, but later on she understood. “I had everything that Elvis had been looking for in a woman: youth and innocence, total devotion, and no problems of my own,” she wrote. “And I was hard to get.” What’s more, she had mystique, the way Coppola’s girls always do — in her case, a manner of discretion which is all but extinct today. At school, she told no one of her near-nightly visits to the superstar’s house. What made her so judicious? A scene early on in the book helps explain. Rummaging through keepsakes, the pre-teen Priscilla finds a flag of the sort that is gifted to servicemen’s widows, and a photo of her mother, a strange man and an infant—herself. She had unearthed a family secret: her “real” father, a Navy pilot, had been killed in a crash returning home on leave when Priscilla was half a year old. Her mother, who had remarried two years later, advised her to keep her discovery hidden so as not to threaten their family’s bond.

There’s a point at which every Elvis story subtly hinges: the start of his mid-1960s spiritual awakening, around the time of his 30th birthday and Priscilla’s 20th. Through his barber, the man raised on hellfire and brimstone is introduced to Buddha, Muhammad, and Moses, meditation and metaphysics and numerology and LSD. In Priscilla’s most beautiful scene, the couple drop acid on twin sugar-cubes and witness their gloomy master suite become a kaleidoscope. It’s even lovelier the way Presley recalls it: “It was early morning when Elvis and I went downstairs and walked outside. Dew came down, creating rainbows in the mist, glistening on the trees and the lawn. We studied the leaves, trying to count each dewdrop. The veins in the grass became visible, breathing slowly, rhythmically. We went from tree to tree, observing nature in detail.” Fearful of getting carried away, they never tried it again.

In truth, Elvis’ quest for meaning was a threat to the people around him. Studying esoteric texts about God’s master plan distracted him from the party downstairs, and from Priscilla, who he expected to search for answers as fervently as he did. (“We have to control our desires so they don’t control us,” he explained one night in bed as his sleeping pills kicked in. “If we can control sex, then we can master all other desires.”) Sometimes she would find him in the backyard of their Bel Air home, watching the sky for hours in the early morning darkness. At other times he’d stare intently at the sprinklers watering the golf course next door. “Do you see them?” he’d ask. “The angels, out there… They’re trying to tell me something.” His career was in shambles, and mysticism became the scapegoat. Through Coppola’s lens, his vindicated entourage gathers behind Graceland to watch Elvis burn his books. Really, it was him and Priscilla: “We poured gasoline over the pile, lit a match, and kissed the past goodbye.” Maybe he died right there.

But both of them were searchers. She couldn’t possibly understand him, though not for lack of trying. Such is the way of Coppola films, which have been described as tone poems on the mysteries of girlhood. But Coppola’s girls aren’t so mysterious, though she views them from remove; the truth is no one seems to even try to get to know them, not without a motive. In one passage from Elvis & Me which Coppola presents in part, Elvis hosts a Bible study group inside their home, reading scripture to his own young and beautiful disciples. Watching Elvis indulge them, Priscilla storms off; in the movie, that’s where the scene ends. But her memoir goes much deeper: to win back his attention, she makes a suicide attempt. She starts with just two sleeping pills: “That way I could take a quick shower, redo my makeup, put on my prettiest camisole, and still have time to position myself dramatically on the bed before I consumed the rest of the bottle.” She swallows several more and thinks of writing him a note with all the things she couldn’t say: “I’d tell him how I feared his violent temper, which robbed me of my freedom of expression; and how I wished that he’d have tried to understand me as I’d desperately tried to understand him.” From outside the bedroom door, she hears him and the girls laughing, and her adrenaline-charged fury counteracts the sleeping pills. Later on he comes to kiss her, and her anger disappears.

In such diminished scenes as this one, I feel the limits of Coppola’s style of suggestion. The notion of a young woman’s fathomless mind-palace seemed increasingly inadequate as a chasm widened between the unsustainable events of Priscilla’s life and how she processed them — the counterpoint to all that interiority being the book itself, the lively and complicated thoughts therein. I wondered whether the filmmaker had found herself in a bind: if her allegiance to Priscilla as executive producer had simplified a story that doesn’t really end when Mrs. Presley packs her things and leaves. (Her masterpiece, Marie Antoinette, is so for the courage with which it rejects its foundational text.) In the years after their separation, Priscilla found an identity of her own, embracing ordinary pleasures as Elvis spiraled deeper into unreality. But they remained best friends and confidants, closer as the time passed than they’d been in married life. “We had even talked of one day…” she trailed off in the memoir, letting the thought float away. “Love is very deceiving.” She encountered him at Graceland in the spring of ‘77, a few months before his death, unrecognizable and paging through Cheiro’s Book of Numbers. “That night he read to me, searching for answers, just as he had done the year before and the year before that and the years before that.”

It’s strange how relationships like that of “Video Games” age; I find that all the ways they’re wrong are not what you remember most. (When asked in 2011 what had inspired the song, Del Rey replied, “A boy. I think we came together because we were both outsiders. It was perfect.”) As for me, what I remember are the smoke breaks on the balcony, the mattress on the floor, the Law & Order episodes as eternal background noise. Those endless afternoons, you felt like nothing ever happened, and in that moment, you became yourself.

Originally Appeared on GQ