Priscilla Presley has walked through the front door of Graceland more times than anyone could count. She was still a teenager when the place first became home. And all these years later, she says the house still does something to her the moment she steps inside.
She was 17 when she moved to Memphis for good in March 1963. Elvis was already the most famous singer in the world. Priscilla, meanwhile, was a schoolgirl, enrolled at Immaculate Conception, an all-girls Catholic school in town. Before long she was living at Graceland full time.
Life in that house ran on Elvis’s clock, not anybody else’s. Dinner was around 10 at night.
And after dinner? Most nights, that meant the movies.
“We saw a lot of movies,” Priscilla told the crowd at the Old Bags Luncheon at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., this past February, as People reported. She explained that the theater would call, and they could ask for whatever film they wanted to see. When it was over, it was back home to Graceland in the small hours, long after the rest of the city had turned in.
TODAY’s cameras followed Priscilla as she opened the doors and walked the rooms herself, so you get to see the house through the eyes of the woman who actually lived there.
Priscilla gives TODAY a tour of Graceland
So what is it about that one room?
Priscilla opened up about it in a December 2023 interview with FOX 32 Chicago. The holidays came up first, and she made it clear how much they meant to Elvis at Graceland. “Yes, that was his special time,” she said.
Then she described what happens every time she comes back.
She told FOX 32: “I walk in the front door and I look over where the piano room is at the end of the living room.” And when she does, she says she can “just hear the music that he played after we’d come home from the theater at 2 in the morning.”
It’s the piano. After those late movie nights, Elvis would play, and that sound is what Priscilla still hears when she looks toward the end of the living room. The memory she keeps is a plain night at home, with music drifting out of the next room at an hour when most people were sound asleep.
If you’d like to hear Priscilla talk about Graceland in her own voice, this TODAY interview is a good place to start, because she shares her memories of Elvis right there in the house.
Priscilla shares her memories of Elvis at Graceland
There’s something sweet about the way she tells it. Most of us have a sound like that tucked away somewhere, maybe a parent humming in the kitchen or a radio playing down the hall when we were kids. Hers just happens to be Elvis at the piano.
And for an even older look at the house, this 1984 home video puts Priscilla in the role of tour guide, showing Graceland as it looked more than four decades ago.
Priscilla’s 1984 video tour of Graceland
Priscilla still goes back to Graceland. When she walks in, she looks to the end of the living room first, and she’s said it brings those 2 a.m. evenings right back to her.
So if you ever take the tour yourself, glance over to that end of the room for a second and think of a teenage Priscilla, home late from the movies, listening.