‘Uncomfortable’ sex and visits to the morgue: what Priscilla doesn’t tell you about life with Elvis
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Sofia Coppola’s new film Priscilla is caught in a bind. How is it possible to be true to Priscilla Presley’s story without significantly tarnishing the Elvis legend that Priscilla herself has worked so hard to promote? And how do you ask an audience to relate to a woman who has made it her life-long business to remain unknowable, even in the memoir on which the film is based, 1985’s Elvis and Me?
Priscilla’s late daughter, Lisa Marie, who died last year, seems to have been well aware of the problem. A couple of months before the film’s release, it came out in the press that Lisa Marie had read the script and written to Coppola in September 2022 to voice her concerns. “My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative. As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character,” she wrote, adding, “I am worried that my mother isn’t seeing the nuance here or realizing the way in which Elvis will be perceived when this movie comes out.”
She was right to be worried. Some have viewed the film as a horror movie in which a princess is trapped in a gilded cage, her lover a monster. But there is a paradox: despite the abuses shown on screen, Priscilla, an Executive Producer on the film who has publicly praised it, remains steadfastly loyal to the Elvis legend. A loyalty obvious in the film itself, from the passive way Priscilla mutely observes her bizarre life as if it is happening to somebody else, to a lack of resistance until the day she finally walks out on Elvis.
Despite Cailee Spaeny’s sensitive performance as Priscilla, we cannot quite feel our heroine’s pain or understand how she found the guts to leave the man she called “my father, husband, and very nearly God.” Lamar Fike, a long-term member of Elvis’s entourage, perhaps put it best: “I’ll give you Elvis’s relationship with Priscilla in a nutshell. You create a statue. And then you get tired of looking at it.”
Curiously, Priscilla’s memoir, Elvis and Me, is more shocking than the film, revealing the Priscilla paradox to be even starker. She was a 14-year-old American girl newly arrived on her father’s army base in Germany when one of Elvis’s army pals suggested he drive her to Presley’s house. Her parents, apparently charmed by the 24-year-old star, agreed. Soon he was inviting her up to his bedroom, where he kissed her passionately but told her, “We have plenty of time, Little One.”
Two years later, Priscilla was living with him at his mansion, Graceland, at the age of 17. Elvis taught his teenage girlfriend the ‘correct’ way to walk, dress and behave. “I was Elvis’s doll,“ she writes, “his own living doll to fashion as he pleased.” He bought her guns to match her outfits: “while my classmates were deciding which colleges to apply to, I was deciding which gun to wear with what sequined dress.”
Among many gruelling details, the memoir describes Elvis knocking Priscilla out for two days by giving her an overdose of sleeping pills, kickstarting her routine of taking uppers and downers, like him, in an effort to keep up with his lifestyle. He isolates her at Graceland, banning visits from outsiders and forbidding her to work (“It’s either me or a career, Baby”). He taps her on the head if she frowns because he doesn’t want her to get wrinkles. One night, after watching the horror movie Diabolique, he says, “I’m going to take you somewhere that will scare the fire out of you” and the two of them take a trip to the local morgue.
The memoir also documents Elvis’s violent temper. He socks Priscilla in the eye during a pillow fight and she has to wear dark glasses to cover the bruising. He throws a chair at the wall, narrowly missing Priscilla’s head. When he informs her in late 1966 that “we are going to be married”, there is no question asked. Pregnant with their daughter, she goes on a diet because Elvis says “women use the excuse of their pregnancy to let themselves go”.
By the early 1970s, with Elvis constantly touring and enforcing a “no wives on the road” rule, they hardly see one another. The final straw comes when, after a Vegas show in 1972, he invites her to his room only to throw her on the bed where, as Priscilla writes, he “forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time. I wept in silence.”
Yet, despite these revelations of emotional and physical abuse, Priscilla maintains that Elvis was a loving, sensitive, generous spirit, calling him her “soul mate” and the love of her life. In fact, she divorced him, she later said, because she loved him. Elvis and Me is a book of contradictions, and makes Priscilla impossible to pin down. What does she truly think?
An early life-changing moment in Elvis and Me may explain her position. Priscilla briefly describes her early life as the daughter of an authoritarian army captain whom she discovered, aged 13, was not her real father. Her mother asked her to keep the secret in order to protect her step-father’s pride. The incident is never mentioned again, but it seems to colour everything that follows: Priscilla was perfect for Elvis because she was already good at keeping her mouth shut.
Known as “the prettiest girl in school”, she was crowned Queen of Del Valley Junior High. As an Air Force child, she had lived in six different cities by the time she was 11. “Fearful of not being accepted,” she writes, “I either kept to myself or waited for someone to befriend me”. Even before she met Elvis, Priscilla had learned a way to survive: keep up appearances, keep your head down and your eyes open.
This is what Priscilla has done since Elvis’s death in 1977. The woman who applied her false eyelashes before going to hospital to give birth was never going to be caught appearing out of control, and Priscilla has pulled off an impressive double act in making the most of her status as keeper of the Elvis flame even while laying bare the darker side of her marriage to him. Ever since his death, Priscilla has been a tireless promoter of the Presley image and also a brilliant businesswoman.
Elvis’s father, Vernon, named her as one of the executors of the Presley estate after his death, and under her guidance Graceland was opened to the public in 1982, which saved the dwindling Presley fortune and saw it grow to an estimated $300 million. She was also the executive producer of two albums which remastered Elvis’s music with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and she co-created and produced Agent Elvis, an animated fictional series about Presley. Without her, the Elvis industry would look very different.
But she tended to her own aspirations too – starring in Dallas as Jenna Wade (1983-1988) and in the Naked Gun franchise, as well as several pantomimes – all the while maintaining a certain mystique, such as her rumoured affiliation with the controversial Church of Scientology. But perhaps what she’s most renowned for, even now, is her unreadable appearance, which remains doll-like, her face pale and unmoving, her voice whispery with awe whenever she speaks of Elvis.
More recently, Priscilla has experienced shattering tragedy. In 2020 she lost her grandson, Benjamin, to suicide, and in 2023 her daughter, Lisa Marie, died aged just 54. It’s hard to imagine, after the hell that must have been the last few years, that Priscilla will ever let go of the Elvis story that seems to have become her life’s work. In recent weeks, she’s announced her intention to be buried at Graceland, alongside her ex-husband. Perhaps the ‘love story’ of Priscilla and Elvis is what will remain of her complex, contradictory life.
Priscilla is in cinemas now
