Everybody has an opinion about the women in Elvis Presley’s life. Fans argue about it endlessly. Biographers have built whole books on it. But there is one person whose verdict carries a weight nobody else’s does, and he gave it publicly, in print, only months after his son died. Vernon Presley — Elvis’s father — was asked about the women who shared the final years of his son’s life. And he picked one.
The interview ran in Good Housekeeping in January 1978, five months after Elvis’s death. Vernon was 62, grieving, running his son’s estate, and with about a year and a half left to live himself. He had watched the whole thing from the inside, from a two-room house in Tupelo to Graceland.
His answer was direct: “A lot of people have asked about the girls who shared the final years of Elvis’ life. Of them all, I think Linda Thompson was the best for him.”
Elvis and Linda Thompson love affair: Rare interview
Linda Thompson was 22 and had just been crowned Miss Tennessee when she met Elvis in July 1972, shortly after he separated from Priscilla. She stayed for four and a half years.
And Vernon’s reason for choosing her is not romantic at all. It is about care. “She was always with him, caring about him.”
He was not exaggerating. Linda has described what that actually looked like, and it is exhausting to read. She barely slept properly for years: “I would wake up constantly while we were sleeping to check on him. I was exhausted.” When Elvis went into hospital for eighteen days in 1973, she did not visit — she moved in, and the hospital bent its rules and put a cot in his room for her. Her rule was total: “Whenever he went to the hospital, I went to the hospital.” Memphis Mafia member Marty Lacker described the same thing: “She wouldn’t fall asleep at night until after Elvis did. If something happened while he was sleeping, she’d be up in a minute.”
Vernon Presley Reveals the Truth About Elvis in Rare 1978 Interview
But the most interesting part of what Vernon said is the bit that follows, because he turns it around on itself. He admits he does not know why they broke up — and then wonders aloud whether the very thing that made her best for Elvis was what drove him away.
“And, though I don’t know why they broke up, that may have been one of the reasons. Possibly Elvis felt that her love was beginning to choke him.”
That is a remarkably honest thing for a grieving father to put in print. He is saying his son was so difficult to look after that being properly looked after may have felt like suffocation.
Linda’s own explanation is different and gentler. She left because she wanted a life — specifically, to be a mother — and she knew she could not bring a child into that world. “As much as I loved him, I knew I wanted more.”
She left in 1976. Elvis died eight months later. And people who knew them both have said something that gives Vernon’s verdict real force: without Linda Thompson beside him during those years, an earlier death was a genuine possibility.
She has never disputed the smaller version of that. “I know I did take very good care of him and probably extended his life by a few years.”