Priscilla protects the King’s legacy
When your ex-husband has sold more albums than any artist worldwide, alive or dead, every shop, elevator and taxi might well be blaring out the soundtrack to your life.
“It’s always worse in the buildup to Christmas, for some reason,” says Priscilla Presley, smiling. “I’ll be in a store, and White Christmas will be playing, and hearing his voice still has an impact. Because, even after all these years, I can visualize where we both were when I first heard it, and I’ll carry those memories with me always. Then I’ll look up and realize that all eyes are on me,” she says and laughs, “and that can be very awkward. So it kind of takes the moment away.”
At 71, Presley has been holding on to that moment for almost half a century. Elvis was her first love, and he was The King, but most importantly he was her daughter Lisa-Marie’s father. So despite their divorce in 1973, after six years of marriage, it was she who devoted herself to keeping Elvis’s musical legacy alive following his death, turning Graceland into one of the top U.S. tourist attractions and working with producer Don Reedman and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to release a new album, If I Can Dream, last year, on what would have been his 80th birthday.
Boosted by the album’s success — Presley is about to release a second compilation, The Wonder of You.
The daughter of a U.S. navy pilot, she was only 14 when she met and fell in love with Elvis — then 25 and serving in the U.S. army — at a party in Bad Nauheim, Germany.
“I wasn’t a typical teenager,” she explains, soft-voiced and demure. “I mean, I was really very mature for my age, and honestly, when we first met I think Elvis just felt comfortable talking to me.” Presley was no groupie. “I hadn’t even known that he had a fan club, but a friend told me you could join it for 25 cents, and so I did, not really knowing what I was going to get for that 25 cents. But I remember flicking through this Elvis magazine when I was 12 to see a picture of him signing his name across a girl’s breasts, and I was appalled! Absolutely appalled! That seemed so wrong to me.”
Yet, being moved into the east wing of Elvis’s famous Graceland mansion in Memphis just a few years after they met, somehow didn’t seem wrong — either to Presley or her Catholic parents. When I ask whether it was her purity he was drawn to, she murmurs: “Oh yes. As rock and roll as Elvis was, he was very old-fashioned and very traditional in many ways — particularly when it came to his own personal beliefs.”
Which is presumably why — as she has always maintained — despite Elvis being demanding and controlling in every other aspect of their relationship, he didn’t sleep with her until their wedding night in 1967, when she was 21.
“I did grow up too fast,” she says quickly — clearly anxious to move on now. “And I was put in very adult situations as a young girl, for sure. But then, I learned who I am because of Elvis. I learned so much from his music and how he lived: his fears, his loves and his beliefs became mine as well. So much so that when it ended, I really had to find out who I was.”
In the early ’70s she became a dress designer to celebrities such as Barbra Streisand and Natalie Wood. She was a good actress, too, with natural comic timing, as anyone who caught her in the Naked Gun films or playing plucky Jenna Wade in Dallas can attest to. She was a devoted mother to her two children: a son, Navarone — the product of a 22-year union with Italian screenwriter-director Marco Garibaldi — and Lisa-Marie, despite disapproving of her ill-fated marriage to Michael Jackson in 1994.
Now single and living near her daughter in Los Angeles, she’s also a hands-on grandmother to Lisa-Marie’s seven-year-old twins.