When Priscilla Presley moved to Memphis for good in the middle of March 1963, she was two months away from her 18th birthday. Her parents had agreed to let her go. She was still finishing high school, and she was living at Graceland, Elvis’s famous home.
From the outside it sounds like a dream. Priscilla has been honest that it wasn’t always easy.
She talked about those days in February 2026 at the Old Bags Luncheon at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida. People magazine reported what she said.
“I was struggling, to be honest,” she said.
According to People, she kept those feelings from Elvis because he had a lot going on in his own life. She didn’t want to add to it. “I dealt with it,” she said, and then, “You know, I had to.”
CBS 12, a local TV station in Palm Beach, also sat down with Priscilla for a long talk about her life, and it’s worth hearing her tell her story in her own voice.
Priscilla’s long Palm Beach TV interview about her life
Life at Graceland ran on Elvis time. Priscilla remembered how late the nights went. “We would have dinner about 10 p.m. every night, and sometimes we’d see one, two, three, four movies all night.”
Then she laughed about what that did to her school mornings. “I was always late for school, I’m sure,” she said.
But a teenager can’t keep everything inside. Priscilla needed somebody, and she found her right there under the same roof.
It was Elvis’s grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley.
Minnie Mae was the mother of Vernon, Elvis’s father, and she lived at Graceland with her grandson. Fans know her by the nickname Elvis gave her, “Dodger.” To Priscilla, she was simply grandma.
“I would be with grandma and we would talk and laugh, and she would tell me all her stories about when she was growing up,” Priscilla said.
People reported that the grandmother also told her about how close she’d been with Elvis’s mother, Gladys. For a young girl far from her own family, that must have been a window into the Presleys she couldn’t get anywhere else.
She has opened up about those years on TV too. In this chat with talk show host Stephen Colbert, she looks back on life with Elvis, calls it a guy’s world and admits she sometimes felt a bit left out.
Priscilla tells Stephen Colbert what life with Elvis was like
It makes those talks with grandma easy to understand. While the house was busy with Elvis and his crowd, Priscilla had a quiet corner where she could just be a girl hearing old family stories.
She has kept writing about her life over the years. Her 2025 memoir is called “Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis.”
If you’d like to know more about the grandmother who became Priscilla’s quiet listener, this short film looks at Minnie Mae’s place in Elvis’s life.
The story of Minnie Mae Presley, Elvis’s grandmother
All these years later, it’s sweet that Priscilla still talks about Minnie Mae with such warmth. In a house full of music and late nights, the person she trusted most was the one who’d sit with her, laugh and tell her what life was like when she was young.