The Heartbreaking Truth About Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley's Love Story

"There’s been so much that’s untruthful out there—things like Elvis is still alive and hidden somewhere,” Priscilla, 80, told People last year. “I wish he was still alive."

Because even though she divorced Elvis, Priscilla couldn't help falling—and staying—in love with him.

Her parents didn't like it at all, but when it became clear she wasn't going to stay away, Priscilla's stepfather insisted they at least meet the man. When Elvis came for dinner, dressed to impress in full uniform, Paul leveled with him: What do you want?

"'Well, sir, I happen to be very fond of her,'" Priscilla remembered the "Don't Be Cruel" singer, whose lower half was censored during his third appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, telling her father. "'She's a lot more mature than her age and I enjoy her company. It hasn't been easy for me, being away from home and all. It gets kinda lonely. I guess you might say I need someone to talk to. You don't have to worry about her, Captain. I'll take good care of her.'"

Despite their technically unconsummated relationship, they became "deeply involved," Priscilla told People. "Something in his Southern upbringing had taught him that the 'right' girl was to be saved for marriage. I was that girl. At the same time, he molded me into his woman. I wore the clothes, hairstyle and makeup of his careful choosing."

Early on, she also started to resent having to share him with so many admirers.

"It was only late in the evening, when we were in his bedroom, that I was truly happy," she told People. Where, she described, they'd kiss and talk for hours. Priscilla has maintained that they never had sex until their wedding night.

But she started to have trouble keeping up in school, and one night he gave her a handful of pills to help her stay awake the next day. She didn't take them, only finding out later it was Dexedrine—amphetamines, that is, which Elvis started using when he was in the Army.

When Elvis returned to the U.S. in March 1960, Priscilla was informed by paparazzi that Elvis had started dating Nancy Sinatra (the first of many stars he'd be linked to) before she got a call from him. Three weeks after he left Germany, he finally did get in touch, and so began Priscilla's "state of suspended animation," she told People, "waiting for his infrequent calls."

Sometimes it would be a few weeks, sometimes more. They hadn't talked in months or seen each other in two years, Priscilla recalled, when in February 1962 he invited her to fly out to Los Angeles. Once they'd convinced her dad, Elvis sent her a round-trip first-class ticket for a two-week stay.

Yet even after some cuddle time when she first arrived, he told her she couldn't stay overnight at his house and had a member of his entourage drive her to the home of some friends. Priscilla later found out that he had only recently shipped his supposedly former girlfriend Anita Wood back to Memphis, and he was trying to avoid his guest from out of town being present for any late-night phone calls.

But the visit, including a decadent road trip to Las Vegas, where Elvis bought her more clothes and let her know that he would know if she was with any guy other than him, was intoxicating enough.

Priscilla spent Christmas of 1962 at Graceland, and when she went back to Germany, she told her mother that Elvis wanted her to move to Memphis to finish high school.

Life at Graceland "was lonely" for her in those first years, Priscilla admitted to Closer Weekly in 2017. Elvis' controlling manager, Col. Tom Parker, didn't want it known that his valuable client had a steady girlfriend, for fear they'd give up their own hopes of being with Elvis and stop buying records, and there weren't even any pictures of the pair around the house.

Parker was "kind" to her, Priscilla added, but "he just didn't want [fans] to know I was 'the one.'"

And yet sometimes Elvis picked her up from school in a limo and flew her out to L.A. when he was making movies. "It was a life-style so outrageous," Priscilla told People in 1978, "that I'm just thankful I've come out sane."

Ultimately Elvis never veered from the course he decided on with Priscilla, getting down on one knee in her bedroom at Graceland shortly before Christmas in 1966 and proposing with a 3 1/2-carat diamond surrounded by 20 more diamonds, the ring by Memphis jeweler Harry Levitch.

Trying to keep everything under wraps as much as possible, Tom had Elvis and Priscilla fly from Palm Springs to Las Vegas at around midnight on May 1, 1967, their wedding day. Frank Sinatra loaned the couple his private jet.

They got their license at about 3 a.m., Priscilla remembered to Closer, and tied the knot in a room at the Aladdin Hotel in front of 14 people, the ceremony officiated by Nevada Supreme Court Judge David Zenoff. A quick press conference and a champagne breakfast for 100 guests followed downstairs. (They later threw a bigger party at Graceland.)

Elvis was a chronic cheater and, eventually, Priscilla told Closer, she stepped out, too. She tried to ignore what was happening for "as long as I could," she said. "But I did know that there was some finagling going on."

His prescription drug use also became more of a problem, and Priscilla said on Good Morning America that seeing the scene in Elvis in which her younger self (played by Olivia DeJonge) tells her husband to seek help for his "dependency" touched a nerve.

"It was getting more and more frightening as time went by," Priscilla recalled, "where he just was like, rebelling."

When their divorce was finalized in 1973, they left the courtroom hand in hand. Priscilla was still only 28.

Priscilla brought Lisa Marie to one of Elvis' Las Vegas shows later that year, and as part of a long off-the-cuff monologue that had become part of his act of late, the entertainer paid tribute to his ex ("She's a beautiful chick, I'll tell you for sure, boy") and told the audience they remained "the best of friends."

"Our divorce came about, not because of another man or another woman," he continued, "but because of the circumstances involving my career. I was traveling too much, gone too much...I didn't think it was fair to her."

He joked about their $2 million divorce settlement, after which he gave her a white mink coat—and she gave him, he bragged, a $42,000 Rolls Royce.

"That's the type of relationship we have," he quipped.

"We never thought he'd pass," she reflected to Entertainment Tonight in 2017 ahead of the 40th anniversary of Elvis' death. "We just never, ever had that in our minds."

That day she was headed out on an errand with her sister when their father called and told her that Elvis' longtime road manager Joe Esposito was trying to get in touch with her.

"The first thing I thought about was [Lisa Marie], because my daughter was visiting and was supposed to come home that day because school started, so I was trying to rush home," Priscilla said. "I think I ran every red light. I felt this urgency, so when I pulled into my driveway, my phone was ringing and I ran in and could hardly get the key in the door trying to get to the phone. And then it was Joe and he told me the news, and it was so devastating that I just went to my room and tried to contemplate how this happened, and what happened, and just stayed there until they sent a plane for me.

"They sent a jet to come, and going into that house and hearing all the people—especially his father, who I will, to this day, still remember him crying in such grief, howling—that it still resonates the loss and the impact."

Priscilla became a co-executor of the "King of Rock and Roll's" estate after the death of the singer's father, Vernon Presley, in 1979. Until it passed into Riley's hands after Lisa Marie's death, Priscilla was instrumental in keeping Graceland—where Elvis' parents and grandmother are also buried—open as a tourist destination/pilgrimage site. Elvis also remains one of the highest-earning deceased celebrities of all time.

In life, Elvis Presley was one of the biggest musical artists of all time. And the "Don't Be Cruel" singer remained a towering star after his untimely death from heart failure—due to cardiovascular and hypertensive heart disease exacerbated by prescription drug abuse—at the age of 42 in 1977.

When he was 23, he met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu in 1959 while he was stationed in what was then West Germany during his time serving in the U.S. Army. While Priscilla has maintained that they had a relatively chaste relationship until she turned 18, she accepted her famous boyfriend's invitation to finish high school in Memphis, ostensibly living with Elvis' father Vernon Presley and stepmother Dee Presley but spending most of her time at Graceland.

Elvis and Priscilla got married on May 1, 1967, at the Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas. Nine months later, daughter Lisa Marie Presley was born on Feb. 1, 1968.

"I loved taking care of Elvis very much," Priscilla, who was 21 when she married the King of Rock and Roll, told People in 2021. "I loved tending to him. I loved feeding him. We would baby talk, because you have to have your own language when you have that many people around. It was a good life. It was different, but it was ours."

Their life as husband and wife ended when they separated in February 1972. After their divorce was finalized the following year, Elvis candidly sharing during one of his Vegas shows that they split up because he was "traveling too much, gone too much."

While Priscilla moved to Los Angeles with Lisa Marie, they would still spend time at Graceland as a family, the matriarch telling People in 1978, "That helped Lisa to feel stable. There was never any arguing or bitterness."

When Elvis died on Aug. 16, 1977, Priscilla was devastated. "I could not face the reality that I would never see him alive again," she wrote in her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. "He had always been there for me. I depended on him, just as he depended on me. We had a bond."

Lisa Marie, 9 years old at the time, was at Graceland when her father died.

"I was always worried about my dad dying," the rock scion wrote in her memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, which was posthumously released in 2024. "Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, 'I hope my daddy doesn’t die.'"

And the day he passed, she noted in the book, "my life as I knew it is completely over."

Lisa Marie went on to become a singer-songwriter in her own right, releasing her debut album To Whom it May Concern in 2003.

She married musician Danny Keough in 1988 and their union produced daughter Riley Keough and son Benjamin Keough before they divorced in 1994.

Lisa Marie swapped vows with Michael Jackson on May 26, 1994, less than three weeks after her divorce was finalized. Their headline-making marriage lasted less than two years, but Lisa-Marie told Oprah Winfrey in 2010—a year after Michael's shocking death—that they had continued to see each other on and off for years, that she'd "never felt like that around another human being."

Lisa Marie married avowed Elvis fan Nicolas Cage in August 2002. He filed for divorce that November but it wasn't finalized until May 2004.

In a statement, the actor vowed to not talk about their breakup, but said he loved Lisa Marie, who in turn stated at the time, "I'm sad about this, but we shouldn't have been married in the first place. It was a big mistake."

The bride's ex-husband Danny served as best man when Lisa Marie married musician Michael Lockwood in January 2006. They welcomed fraternal twin daughters Harper Vivienne Ann Lockwood and Finley Aaron Love Lockwood in 2008.

Lisa Marie filed for divorce in 2016 and the proceedings turned messy, resulting in the twins temporarily living with Priscilla. The split was ultimately finalized in May 2021.

Two days after attending the Golden Globes in support of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, starring Austin Butler as the titular legend, Lisa Marie died on Jan. 12, 2023. The cause was determined to be a small bowel obstruction caused by scar tissue from previous bariatric surgery. She was 54.

Priscilla welcomed son Navarone with then-partner Marco Garibaldi Garcia on March 1, 1987. A musician like his half-sister, Marco fronts the L.A.-based band Them Guns.

He married longtime girlfriend Elisa Achilli in 2022 on the grounds of a 16th-century castle-turned-luxury hotel in Switzerland.

"They've been together for four years," Priscilla told People at the time, "and we've all been waiting patiently for this day."

Riley was born May 29, 1989, to Lisa Marie and her first husband, Danny Keough. A model, singer and actress known for The Girlfriend Experience, Daisy Jones & the Six and films including Magic Mike and Logan Lucky, she became the sole owner of Graceland after her mother's death.

She also set out to complete Lisa Marie's unfinished book, telling People upon its release in 2024, "What she wanted to do in her memoir, and what I hope I’ve done in finishing it for her, is to go beneath the magazine headline idea of her and reveal the core of who she was. To turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatized, joyous, grieving, everything that she was throughout her remarkable life."

Riley married Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen in 2015. They share daughter Tupelo Storm, born in August 2022 via surrogate, and another child they quietly welcomed in early 2025.

Benjamin died by suicide in July 2020 at the age of 27. A rep for Lisa Marie said at the time that she was "completely heartbroken, inconsolable and beyond devastated but trying to stay strong for her 11-year-old twins" and Riley.

While Lisa Marie candidly wrote about her grief, noting in a 2022 essay for People that "you do not 'get over it,' you do not 'move on,'" the depth of her loss came into sharper focus after her own death.

She revealed in her memoir that she preserved Benjamin's body on dry ice for two months on her L.A.-area property before she was ready to let him go. He was eventually laid to rest at Graceland in October 2020.

Lisa Marie was buried next to her son less than three years after his death.

Harper and Finley, born Oct. 7, 2008, lead relatively private lives living with their dad Michael, who became their legal guardian after Lisa Marie died.

The teens don't post much to their respective Instagram accounts, but they paid tribute to their mom on the second anniversary of her death in 2025. Finley posted a pic to Instagram Stories of her and her sister as babies in Lisa Marie's arms, writing, "2 years...i love you always." Harper shared a snap from when they were toddlers, writing, "I can't believe it's been 2 years. I miss you and love you so much mama."

This story was originally published on Saturday, June 25, 2022 at 5 a.m. PT.