Most couples have a movie night. Elvis Presley had movie nights that could run until the sun came up.
Priscilla Presley married Elvis in 1967, and she’s the mother of his only child, Lisa Marie. She has been sharing stories about their life together for decades, and the way she tells it, their evenings started late.
“We would have dinner about 10 p.m. every night, and sometimes we’d see one, two, three, four movies all night,” she said this February at the Old Bags Luncheon at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida. People magazine reported her remarks.
Four movies. In one night. After a 10 o’clock dinner.
In a 2024 fan video she added that they’d head out once Johnny Carson’s monologue was over.
Elvis wasn’t about to sit in the back row of a crowded show with a bucket of popcorn, of course. He rented the whole place.
Priscilla described it way back in 1973, in an interview with writer Sandra Shevey for Ladies’ Home Journal. “Elvis would rent an entire theater, invite friends, and we would talk loudly to each other,” she said.
That might be the best part. Nobody was going to shush the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He and his friends could talk over the screen as loud as they liked, because every seat in the house was theirs.
As for what played, she said Elvis “loved good, action-packed movies, some Westerns.”
Before we get to the rule, here’s Priscilla on the BBC’s Wogan show in 1985, talking about her life with Elvis, so you can hear how warmly she describes the man she shared those late nights with.
Priscilla talks about her life with Elvis on British TV in 1985
Now think about who was sitting in that dark theater. Elvis made 31 feature films. He was one of the biggest movie stars around, and he could have put any picture he wanted up on that screen.
You’d figure a few of his own would turn up now and then, with his pals hooting and cheering along.
They never did.
“No, Elvis never showed his own movies,” Priscilla told Ladies’ Home Journal.
Her reason was simple and very human. “He just didn’t want to see himself. He’s very self-critical.”
It’s a sweet, humble side of him. This was a man who could walk out in front of thousands of screaming fans. But watching his own face up on a big screen with his friends around him was something he’d rather skip, and he was probably harder on his own work than anybody else in those seats would ever be.
So the biggest movie star in the room was the one star you never saw on the screen.
Priscilla still thinks back on those long nights out. When she looked back on them in Palm Beach this year, she put it plainly: “We saw a lot of movies.”
Next time you settle into a seat at an old movie house, think about it for a second. Somewhere in Memphis, Elvis and Priscilla once had a whole theater to themselves, talking loudly over an action picture or a Western until the early hours, and not one frame of Elvis ever lit up that screen.