Every family has a story about the day the baby came. Elvis Presley’s family has a great one, and Priscilla Presley is the one who tells it.
Elvis and Priscilla got married on May 1, 1967. Their daughter, Lisa Marie, arrived nine months to the day later, on Feb. 1, 1968, in Memphis.
Elvis wanted to be ready. He arranged his schedule so he could be home at Graceland with Priscilla during her last month, and the two of them even ran practice drills for the trip to Baptist Memorial Hospital. Everybody knew the plan.
By the end of January, the baby could come any day. This fan-shared clip is labeled as Priscilla at the gates of Graceland on Jan. 31, 1968, the eve of the big day, so it’s worth a look before you hear what happened next.
Priscilla at the gates of Graceland, January 1968
Early that morning at Graceland, Priscilla knew it was time.
She was all set. While Elvis woke up and rounded up his group, she did her hair and makeup. Then she waited for the man of the house.
And waited.
Priscilla later described the scene in the book “Elvis by the Presleys,” and you can hear the laugh in it. “Elvis is moving around the house in slow motion while I’m crossing my legs.”
So what was the holdup?
Cigars. Elvis had bought a box of cigars to hand out at the hospital when the baby arrived. Now nobody could find them.
“No one knows. No one can find them. Elvis won’t leave without the cigars,” Priscilla remembered.
She asked who on earth cared about cigars at a moment like this. Elvis had an answer ready. “I do. I need to pass out cigars at the hospital.”
The cigars turned up at last. But Elvis wasn’t done. “He finally finds his cigars, but now he’s lulling around the kitchen, getting a bite to eat.”
Priscilla had heard enough. “I’m having this baby in the car if we don’t get to the Baptist hospital.”
To keep fans from following, a decoy car went out first. Then the real car pulled out with Elvis and Priscilla inside.
All those practice runs should have made the next part easy. They didn’t. As Priscilla told it: “Then we took off, but despite the rehearsals, we headed straight for the wrong hospital.”
The driver was Jerry Schilling, one of Elvis’s friends, and nobody had told him they’d switched to Baptist Memorial. Luckily, another friend was riding along. “Charlie Hodge saved the day, convincing Jerry it was Baptist Memorial, not Methodist. Luckily, we arrived in time.”
They made it. Lisa Marie was born that day, and Elvis was smitten.
“He was already in love with her. He watched me holding her and his eyes misted with happiness,” Priscilla wrote in her memoir “Elvis and Me.” “He was in awe, saying, ‘I can’t believe that I made part of this beautiful child.'”
When it was time to bring her home, the cameras were waiting. This real footage from February 1968 shows the new parents leaving Baptist Memorial with their baby girl.
Elvis, Priscilla and baby Lisa Marie leave the hospital
For a man who had rehearsed the drive, it was quite a morning. The cigars went missing and the car pointed the wrong way, and Priscilla still got there in time.
When she tells the story, though, she doesn’t stop at the mix-ups. She ends it with Elvis in awe of their brand new daughter, hardly able to believe he’d helped make her.