The most famous singer in the world got married on a Monday morning, and he was a bundle of nerves about it.
Elvis Presley, the Memphis singer the whole world called the King of Rock and Roll, married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. The ceremony started at 11:41 in the morning, in front of Nevada Supreme Court Justice David Zenoff. It was quick and small. By then the two of them had known each other for about six years, going back to when Elvis was serving in the Army in Germany.
Then came the part Elvis didn’t love. The press.
Right after the vows, reporters and photographers crowded into a room for a wedding press conference. The cameras kept flashing. People kept shouting at him to smile for the pictures, the way folks do at any wedding. Elvis had spent ten years in front of cameras by then, so you’d think he was used to it. This time he gave them an answer nobody expected.
Here’s the newsreel that caught the newlyweds coming out on the big day in Vegas.
The 1967 British newsreel of Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding day
This is what the reporters in the room heard him say. When they pushed him to look happy, Elvis asked them a simple question right back. “How can you look happy when you’re scared?” Then he laughed and called out for the one man he wanted beside him. “Daddy, help!” he yelled, looking for his father, Vernon Presley, who handled most of Elvis’s personal affairs and had raised him through some very lean years.
Someone asked why a man who could’ve had anyone had waited so long to settle down. Elvis kept it short. “Well, I guess it was about time,” he said. He added that the life he led had made waiting the smart thing. “With the life I had, I decided it would be best to wait. You know, all of the shows and record engagements.”
His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, the old-school showman who steered Elvis’s whole career, couldn’t resist a line of his own. “Remember,” he said, “you can’t end bachelorhood without getting married.”
Elvis told the room the couple would most likely live in Memphis, back home at Graceland.
There’s no sound of any of this. Those lines come from the reporters who were sitting there in 1967, not from a recording. What you can actually see is the footage, and it says plenty on its own.
This color film gets you up close, the two of them still in their wedding clothes.
Silent color footage of the Presleys right after the ceremony
Watch his face in those first minutes as a married man. For a guy who’d stood in front of millions without blinking, he looks like any young groom who can’t quite believe the morning is real. The nerves he joked about are right there on camera, and so is the grin he couldn’t hold back.