Most little kids celebrate a birthday with a cake, a candle or two and a few cousins running around the yard. Lisa Marie Presley’s early birthdays looked a little different.
Lisa Marie, Elvis Presley’s only child, was born on Feb. 1, 1968. That date turned out to be a tricky one for a busy dad. In the early 1970s Elvis spent his winters on stage in Las Vegas, playing a long season at the International Hotel, which later became the Las Vegas Hilton. Those shows ran from late January into February, so her birthday kept landing right around the time he was performing.
Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie’s mother, came up with a simple answer. If Elvis couldn’t come home for the big day, she’d bring their daughter to him.
She told the story years later in her 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me,” written with Sandra Harmon. Priscilla took Lisa to be with Elvis in Vegas for her birthdays, and those parties were no small affairs.
To get a feel for the little girl Elvis was celebrating, this report from Extra pulls together real photos and footage of young Lisa Marie with her dad.
Little Lisa Marie growing up as Elvis’s daughter
Now think about what a Vegas birthday party for a toddler might look like when your father is Elvis.
The presents piled up, and Priscilla remembered them well. Some were the kind of thing only that town could dream up for a tot. There were slot machines, which must have looked like big flashing toys to a girl her age.
Then came the gift nobody would ever guess. It came from Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s longtime manager and the man who ran the business side of his career.
The Colonel gave the birthday girl two Saint Bernard puppies.
Here’s how Priscilla put it in the book. She remembered “having huge parties in the suite, where she received everything from slot machines to two Saint Bernard puppies (a gift of Colonel Parker’s) to an entire room filled with balloons”.
Two of them. For a little girl who wasn’t even in school yet.
And Priscilla, writing as a mother, couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at it all. She summed up the haul as “everything, in short, a two- or three-year-old shouldn’t have and couldn’t appreciate.”
You can almost hear her laughing as she wrote it.
The book doesn’t say what the puppies were called or where they went after the party, so that part of the story stays a mystery.
Elvis’s Las Vegas suite was where those birthday parties happened, and this fan-posted film from 1970 gives a peek inside his private suite at the International after one of his shows.
An after-show party in Elvis’s private suite at the International Hotel in 1970
The book’s photo pages include a picture of the birthday girl with her father. Its caption reads: “Lisa and her daddy in Las Vegas on her birthday in 1973.”
For Priscilla, those trips were about family time more than fancy gifts. In the same pages she says it mattered to her that Elvis be home for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. “I didn’t want the furs and jewels … I just wanted him home,” she wrote.
So around each birthday she packed up their little girl and took her to Vegas. Lisa Marie got her dad on her birthday, along with a room full of surprises that would make any grandmother gasp.