Priscilla Presley Shows Fans a Side of Elvis They’ve Never Seen in Her Memoir That’s a Must-Read Ahead of New Movie
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After last year’s Oscar-nominated biopic, Elvis, it was easy to forget that there was more to Priscilla Presley than the faithful, unwaveringly supportive and loving wife portrayed in the Baz Luhrmann biopic. However, before Austin Butler and Olivia DeJonge played the famous couple, Priscilla once shared her side of the story in a bombshell memoir.
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Priscilla’s 1985 memoir is the basis of Sofia Coppola’s new movie Priscilla, which is being praised for its more nuanced approach to some of the controversial aspects of Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship. Elvis and Me, which Priscilla co-wrote with Sandra Harmon, tracks the couple’s romance from the moment they met when Priscilla was just 14 years old to his death.
‘Elvis and Me’ by Priscilla Presley
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You can get free delivery on the book by signing up for Amazon Prime and there’s no better time to do it than during Prime Day, which is happening right now and ends at the end of the day on October 11. If you’re not a member just yet, be sure to sign up here to take advantage of all the great Amazon Prime Day 2023 deals you can score.
In Priscilla’s telling, it is evident that Elvis, for all his lack of grip on his own life, utterly controlled hers. “He taught me everything: how to dress, how to walk, how to apply makeup and wear my hair, how to behave, how to return love—his way,” she writes early in the book. “Over the years, he became my father, husband, and very nearly God.”
They meet in Germany, where both Elvis and Priscilla’s Air Force captain father are stationed. Already a celebrity, Elvis spends two hours alone in a bedroom with Priscilla during a house party, boasting to her about his life. Months later, his deployment ends and he returns to his relationship with actor Anitta Wood, telling Priscilla: “I want you to promise me you’ll stay the way you are. Untouched, as I left you.”
At 16, they reunite and by 17 she is living at Graceland while attending a local Catholic school during the day. Struggling to balance it all, Priscilla joins Elvis in taking sleeping pills and, later, diet pills. “Day after day I drove to school, attended classes till noon, then returned to Graceland to slip back into bed and cuddle next to Elvis, who was still sound asleep,” Priscilla writes. “I was leading a double life—a schoolgirl by day, a femme fatale at night.”
Priscilla writes that their relationship remained sexless until their marriage, due to Elvis’s preoccupation with her purity. He did, however, have sex with other women and Priscilla reveals some of the pretty shocking ways they were intimate while waiting for marriage.
Priscilla’s candid account of their tumultuous marriage, her decision to divorce him, her struggle to find her own identity and her grief at his passing makes for a heart-wrenchingly honest take on a relationship that has been immortalized and glorified many times over. In the current social climate with all our nuanced awareness of what abuse can look like, Priscilla’s memoir might make you Elvis in a light that even she doesn’t want us to.
Before you go, click here to see celebrity couples with significant age differences.
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