Priscilla Presley is 81 now, and this fall she’s been touring Europe with her one-woman show, “An Evening with Priscilla Presley.” Between the theaters and the meet-and-greets, the questions get personal fast.
This past weekend, in Gothenburg, Sweden, one of them stopped the room.
She told Swedish reporters she was asked whether her love for Elvis had changed. Almost 50 years have gone by since he passed away. Half a century. Long enough, you’d think, for feelings to fade or soften.
Priscilla didn’t dress it up. Her answer was two short sentences, and you’ll see them in a moment.
But first, a little about where her head was. She also talked about the early days at Graceland, back in the 1960s, when she was often there alone. She told another Swedish paper how she filled those long, quiet hours. The house was big and the days were slow, and sometimes, she said, there was nothing on TV. Once in a while the set didn’t even work.
So she went shopping. It’s a funny, human detail from a woman most of us only picture in headlines.
Then came the harder question, the one about love. Here’s what she said: “I still love him the same way. It hasn’t gone away.” That was it. She didn’t make a speech out of it. And when someone asked why she never married again after Elvis, she gave an answer just as plain: “I had already found ‘the one.'” (translated from Swedish)
There’s no camera footage of that quiet exchange in Sweden. But if you want to actually feel what “the same way” sounds like, there’s a better place to go than any interview.
Here’s Elvis himself, young and in black leather, singing the ballad he saved for the end of almost every show.
Elvis singing the love song he closed his shows with
Watch his face in those last few seconds. This is the man she’s talking about, and the song is “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which says in a single line what took her two sentences.
People carry a lot of opinions about Priscilla. Some believe she’s kept Elvis’s memory alive out of pure love. Others have their doubts. What she said in Sweden won’t settle that for anybody, and maybe it was never meant to.
But there’s something about a woman in her 80s, still being asked about a man she married when she was barely out of her teens, answering without a flicker of hesitation. She could have given a polite non-answer. She didn’t.
Fifty years is a long time to hold on to one feeling. Watch the clip, then tell us whether you believe her.