Graduation day is supposed to belong to the graduates. Priscilla Presley knew that, and she also knew what happened whenever Elvis walked into a room.
So she asked him to stay away.
This was 1963, and the graduation was hers, from Immaculate Conception High School in Memphis. It was an all-girls Catholic school, and the big day was meant to be about the girls walking across that stage.
Priscilla tells the story in her 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me,” and she’s honest about why she said no. “I did not want him to come to the actual ceremony,” she wrote. “It would attract a lot of attention.”
That’s putting it mildly. If Elvis Presley had strolled down the aisle of a school auditorium, nobody would’ve been looking at the stage.
Here’s the sweet part. Elvis agreed right away, and he came up with a plan that let him keep his promise and still be there for her.
“I won’t come in,” he told her, as Priscilla recalls it. “I’ll just be outside in the car waiting for you. That way I’ll kinda be there.”
So that’s what he did. While the ceremony went on inside, Elvis sat out in the car with some of his friends, the guys Priscilla called “the boys.” The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, parked outside a girls’ school, waiting for Priscilla to come out with her diploma.
Of course, it didn’t stay quiet for long.
When Priscilla finally walked outside, a crowd had already gathered around Elvis. Anyone would guess it was a pack of teenage girls. It wasn’t.
“Around them a group of nuns were clamoring for Elvis’s autograph,” Priscilla wrote.
Yes, nuns. Sisters from a Catholic girls’ school, gathered around the King’s car on graduation day and asking him to sign something. He’d stayed outside so he wouldn’t steal the show, and the show came out to find him anyway.
If you’d like to hear Priscilla herself talk about Memphis, the city where she finished school and where this whole scene played out, this clip is a nice place to start.
Priscilla Presley talks about Elvis’s Memphis
And Elvis? The moment he spotted Priscilla, the autographs could wait.
“When he looked up and saw me, he began applauding along with the boys,” she remembered. He gave her a hug and told her how proud he was of her. Then he wanted to see the real thing. “He had me unroll the diploma so he could see it.”
It’s such a small moment. A guy in a car clapping for a graduate and asking to look at her diploma. But it says a lot about Elvis. He kept his word about the ceremony, and the second she walked out the door, he made sure the attention went right back to her.
Priscilla put the whole scene in her book more than 20 years later, nuns and all. It’s a funny little story, sure. It’s also a pretty good picture of a proud Elvis, waiting in the car for her.