Priscilla Presley met Elvis when she was 14 years old, living in Germany where her stepfather was stationed with the US Air Force. She moved to Memphis as a teenager, lived at Graceland, and married him at 21. From the outside, it looked like every young woman’s fantasy. From the inside, as she has spent forty years explaining, it was something much harder — a decade of trying to hold onto a man that the entire world had a claim on.
The first real crisis came in 1963, when Elvis went to Hollywood to film Viva Las Vegas with an actress named Ann-Margret. She was a genuine star in her own right, nicknamed “the female Elvis,” and the chemistry between them was obvious to everybody who saw the footage. Priscilla was 18, living at Graceland, and reading about it in magazines.
Elvis denied it. He told Priscilla that Ann-Margret was actually having an affair with the film’s director to get more close-ups. Then, according to Priscilla, Ann-Margret took matters into her own hands and announced to the Los Angeles press that she and Elvis were engaged. Every major newspaper in America carried it.
When Priscilla Presley Confronted Elvis About His Affairs
What tipped Priscilla over the edge was not the story itself. It was what Elvis said next. He told her that he and Colonel Tom Parker thought it best if she went back to Memphis until things calmed down.
Her account of that moment, in her memoir Elvis and Me, is the most famous passage in the book. “Suddenly, all the months of unbearable silence broke and I screamed, ‘What’s going on here? I’m tired of these secrets. Telephone calls. Notes. Newspapers!’” Then: “I picked up a flower vase and hurled it across the room, shattering it against the wall.”
And then Elvis answered her, and his answer defined the next ten years of her life. “I want a woman who’s going to understand that things like this might just happen. Are you going to be her — or not?”
Elvis and Priscilla Divorce
She went back to Graceland the next day. She decided she would be that woman. Two weeks later, Elvis came home, admitted the affair, and promised it was finished.
But the pattern was now set, and she has been honest about it. Whenever she pushed him about other women, he would threaten to send her home to her parents. She started traveling with him because leaving him alone made her frantic. She even describes changing her own clothes, hair, and makeup to look like whichever woman she suspected of having his attention, hoping it would keep his attention.
The final break came at their house in Palm Springs, while Elvis was performing in Las Vegas. Priscilla went to collect the post — and found letters from women thanking Elvis for inviting them over, with some describing exactly what had happened. When she rang him about it, he did not apologize. He was angry that she had opened his mail.
That was the moment. Not because she stopped loving him — she has never once said that — but because she finally understood what she was being asked to accept permanently. She has put it very simply since: “I did not divorce him because I didn’t love him. He was the love of my life, but I had to find out about the world.”
She left in February 1972, and the divorce was final in October 1973. They stayed close until he died in 1977, and she has spent the decades since protecting his home and his name. She never remarried. Her reason is four words long: “No one could ever match him.”