On Feb. 1, 1968, Priscilla Presley gave birth to a baby girl named Lisa Marie. Out in the hospital waiting room, Elvis wasn’t alone.
His friend Jerry Schilling was sitting with him. And Jerry very nearly missed the whole thing.
He was getting ready to leave when Elvis stopped him. “He looked at me and he said, ‘You’re not gonna stay for the birth of our daughter?’ I said, ‘I guess I will!'”
So he stayed. And that little girl ended up being part of his life for decades.
If you don’t know Jerry, he goes way back. He first met Elvis in 1954, when Jerry was only 12 years old. He grew into one of Elvis’s closest friends for life. He was part of Elvis’s inner circle, the small group of buddies Elvis trusted most. Inside the Presley family, Jerry even has his own nickname. They call him “Rev. J.”
Hearing Jerry talk about Elvis is the best way to meet him, and in this clip he does just that at the premiere of “EPiC,” Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis concert film.
Jerry Schilling talking about his friend Elvis at the “EPiC” premiere
Jerry has said that he and Lisa Marie “spent a lot of time together” when she was a girl.
Then she grew up. When she was 18 or 19, he offered her a job at his office on Sunset Boulevard. Years later he would manage her career, too, but this first job was a lot more down to earth.
Just don’t call it a secretary job.
“She became my secretary, and any time I said that, she’d always correct me: ‘I’m your assistant!'” Jerry told People.
One of her duties was answering the office phone. That turned out to be funnier than anybody planned, because people kept calling Jerry to talk about Lisa Marie. They had no clue who was on the other end of the line.
“She had many responsibilities, one of which was to answer all the phone calls that would come in to me,” Jerry said. “Every couple of weeks, she would come in with a very disgruntled look on her face: ‘Somebody else wants to talk to you about Lisa Marie.’ They had no idea they were talking to her on the phone!”
You can almost see the look on her face.
That same spark is behind the names they had for each other. Jerry had his own name for her, and it came straight from her personality.
“I always call Lisa Memphis. She had that attitude,” he said.
And she never called him plain old Jerry. Not as a little girl and not as a grown woman working in his office.
“And she always called me Jerry Schilling, always in that cadence,” he said.
His first and last name together, said the same way every single time, by a girl who’d known him since her very first day.
When Jerry thinks back on her, it’s the easy, ordinary moments that come to mind. He has talked about “hanging out with her late at night, especially in Hawaii, and her laugh and that little smile.”