To the world, they looked like royalty. Elvis Presley — the biggest entertainer alive — and Priscilla, the beautiful young wife he had married in Las Vegas in 1967. Then on 23 February 1972, Priscilla packed her things and walked out of the marriage. And here is the first thing most people get wrong about it. Elvis did not leave her. She left him.
The reasons had been building for years, and they were not really about love. Priscilla has been remarkably clear about that. “I did not divorce him because I didn’t love him,” she said in 2016. “He was the love of my life, but I had to find out about the world.” The problem was that being married to Elvis Presley meant not having a life of your own. She has described it in one blunt sentence: “You lived his life.” You watched the films he wanted to watch. You kept his hours, which meant sleeping through the day. And she was still remarkably young — she had met him at 14, married him at 21, and had never had an ordinary adult life at all.
There were harder things too. Elvis was away constantly on tour and on film sets. He was unfaithful, which she has confirmed publicly. And she found out in the worst possible way: on a visit to their Palm Springs house, she checked the mail and found letters from women thanking Elvis for inviting them over, some of them describing far more than that.
The Truth About Elvis Presley’s Relationship With Priscilla
So she looked for something of her own. She started dance classes, in her words, “to break out a little bit.” Then she took up karate — and here is the detail that makes the whole story so painful. Her instructor was a man named Mike Stone, and Elvis was the one who introduced them. The affair that ended his marriage began with a man he had brought into her life himself.
When she told him she was leaving, Elvis was blindsided. Friends have described him as utterly heartbroken and then, very quickly, dangerously angry. Priscilla has written about it herself: “Elvis found the thought of me with another man unbearable. In the weeks after my departure, he told the guys that ‘Mike had to die.’” He asked members of his own circle to find a hitman. They talked him out of it. He eventually let it go.
What he did instead was sing about it. Weeks after she left, in March 1972, he went into a studio. He recorded “Separate Ways” — a song about a couple splitting up and having to explain it to their little girl — and “Always on My Mind”, which is one long apology from a man who took a woman for granted. They came out as two sides of the same record. “Separate Ways” was written by Red West, Elvis’s oldest friend, who had watched the whole marriage from the inside.
Elvis Presley – Separate Ways
The legal side was settled with real generosity. Priscilla’s first agreement, signed in August 1972, gave her $100,000 plus three of his cars — a 1971 Mercedes, a 1969 Cadillac Eldorado and a 1971 Harley-Davidson. She later hired new lawyers who told her to ask for more, and the final figure came to around $725,000, plus a share of the income from their California properties and joint custody of Lisa Marie, then five years old. Elvis’s reported instruction to his people was four words: “Give her whatever she wants.”
The divorce became final on 9 October 1973 in Santa Monica. And what happened outside that courthouse is the reason people still talk about them. They walked out arm in arm, smiling. Elvis kissed her goodbye. The photographs from that day look nothing like a celebrity break-up. Dolly Parton has since said Priscilla told her that Elvis sang “I Will Always Love You” to her as they left the building.
He died four years later, on 16 August 1977, aged 42. Priscilla has spent the decades since running his estate, saving Graceland from being sold, and protecting his name. She never remarried, and her reason is short: “No one could ever match him.” The marriage lasted six years. Whatever they had underneath it outlasted him.