ANN-MARGRET
THE SCREEN ICON OPENS UP ABOUT HER LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE KING — AND WHY IT WASN’T MEANT TO LAST
Inside the Viva Las Vegas star’s whirlwind romance with Elvis Presley.
Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret first met on the set of their film Viva Las Vegas in 1963, and before long they were nearly consumed by their electric attraction. Ann-Margret recalls blocking one dance scene: “The moment the music started, Elvis and I just started to move. We covered the entire room, bumping into the furniture, shoving it aside, circling each other like a couple of caged animals.”
The passion between the fiery, 23-year-old star of Bye Bye Birdie and the sexy, 28-year-old King of Rock ’n’ Roll seemed inevitable. “Elvis was taken with her the moment he laid eyes on her,” author and radio host Michael St. John, who shared a 21-year friendship with Elvis, tells Closer. They embarked on a yearlong affair, but despite the intensity of their love, obstacles — Elvis’ commitment to 18-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, Ann-Margret’s independence and ambition — proved too strong to overcome. Still, they remained friends until Elvis’ untimely death in 1977. And even now, AnnMargret, 76, finds it painful to talk about her lost love. “Our relationship was very strong and very serious and very real,” she says. “We went together for one year and he trusted me — I do not want to betray his trust, even in death.”
Elvis and Ann-Margret both immediately recognized what she calls a “kindred soul,” even though “I realized Elvis was as shy and ill at ease with meeting new people as I was.” Still, it didn’t take long for them to get comfortable. “I knew
what was going to happen once we got to know each other. Elvis did, too,” she admits in her biography, Ann-Margret: My Story. “We both felt a current…that went straight through us. It would become a force we couldn’t control.”
MIRROR IMAGES
Though St. John insists, “They didn’t hop into bed right off the bat,” their attraction was undeniable. “There was certainly good chemistry there,” Viva Las Vegas actor Kent McCord tells Closer. Whenever Ann-Margret was around, “He lit up like an incandescent light,” says Elvis’ hairdresser and pal Larry Geller. The Swedish-born starlet felt the same. “He had touched something deep within my psyche,” she says. “He was happy and fun. He was also loving and good.”
As Elvis played race car driver Lucky Jackson, who woos Ann-Margret’s swimming instructor character Rusty in the film, their real love grew. They were “eerily similar,” says Ann-Margret — who’d even been dubbed the “female Elvis.” Some likenesses “were obvi- ous,” she explains, “such as a love of motorcycles, music and performing. We’d both also experienced meteoric rises in show business, we liked our privacy; we loved our families; we had a strong belief in God.” The couple would talk until the wee hours or ride their Harleys “all over LA, unrecognized.”
They seemed made for each other, but both stars sensed their love would be fleeting. “Elvis and I knew he had commitments, promises to keep,” Ann-Margret recalls. “No matter how much we loved each other, no matter how strong our bond, we weren’t going to last.”
It’s likely Ann-Margret was savvy enough to realize Elvis wasn’t faithful to the women in his life. “Elvis didn’t love just one person, he loved numerous people,” Sandy Martindale, a dancer in Viva Las Vegas who also dated Elvis, tells Closer. “When I first started dating him, he was dating other women.”
Even so, Elvis didn’t shrug off his commitment to Priscilla. He’d fallen for her in Germany when she was only 14, and had moved her into his home. “Someday I’ll live up to my promise to her,” Elvis told Geller. “Priscilla reminds me of my mom. She wants to be a mother and raise children. She doesn’t want a showbiz career.”
Priscilla fit his ideal: She was impressionable and seemed willing to be molded into what he wanted. Elvis’ friends suspected Ann-Margret’s ambition would get in their way. “She had her own successful career, which she wasn’t about to throw over for anyone,” says Geller. “She wouldn’t take a submissive role.”
Elvis had been warned to stay away from showbiz women. “The Colonel [his manager, Tom Parker] said that, and even Elvis’ mother said that before her death,” Alanna Nash, author of Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him, tells Closer. Of course, Elvis ignored their advice. But all Elvis’ women understood he was taken. “He was a couple with Priscilla,” insists Sandy.
Col. Parker also “clearly wanted
HEARTBREAK HOTEL
Elvis back home with Priscilla,” says St. John, and he held tremendous control over Elvis. He didn’t want AnnMargret stealing his client’s spotlight: He even cut two duets from Viva Las Vegas so the movie focused more on Elvis. But professional rivalry wasn’t a major factor in their parting.
After filming on Vegas ended, they continued to see each other, but Elvis seemed uncertain. He told Geller while making Girl Happy, “I don’t think things would work out with Ann and me. Two egos like ours, two careers. There’s bound to be conflicts.”
Then, during a press conference for 1963’s Bye Bye Birdie, Ann-Margret got bombarded with questions about Elvis. “I tried to be straightforward,” she recalls. “‘We’re seeing each other,’ I said.” But reports circulated that they were engaged, angering both her and Elvis. “Our relationship…shifted gears,” she says, and a year after they began dating, “everything halted.”
Elvis married Priscilla in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. Ann-Margret married actor Roger Smith a week later, on May 8, also in Vegas. “I knew he would protect me,” Ann-Margret has said of Roger. “I knew I could depend on him.” She accepted the split from Elvis and didn’t look back. “Ann is a realist, probably more than Elvis ever was,” St. John says. “She moved on.”
They remained friends until his death, but some question whether Elvis felt he’d made the right decision. “I think he always carried regrets,” St. John says. “She wasn’t the one who got away — he let her get away.” Still, they spoke several times a year, and on Ann-Margret’s Vegas opening night in 1967, Elvis began a tradition of sending her a flower arrangement shaped like a guitar.
By the 1970s, “both were struggling personally,” St. John says. “Ann with alcohol, and Elvis with pills. You just wondered if they had been together whether they could have pulled each other out of it.”
Ann-Margret overcame her demons, but when she opened in Vegas on Aug. 15, 1977, “there was, for the first time, no guitar-shaped flower arrangement from Elvis,” she says. The next day she learned Elvis had died. “I was so distraught,” she says, but she went to the funeral, to “say goodbye in person.”
To this day, their connection remains powerful. “They brought out the best in each other,” St. John tells Closer. “In his whole life there wasn’t another woman he could talk to more openly than Ann.” For her part, AnnMargret and Roger, 84, just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. And while she is happily married, she still can barely bring herself to speak of her lost love. “I will never recover from Elvis’ death. He is a part of me, of my happiness and my sorrow, and that will never go away,” she says. “It’s rare to have such a friend…such a soulmate.” — Reporting by Katie Bruno, Amanda ChampagneMeadows & Jaclyn Roth
“We looked at each other move and saw virtual mirror images.”
— Ann-Margret
AFTER ELVIS