SUSPICIOUS MINDS
A new Hollywood biopic adapted from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis And Me is set to take us behind those Graceland gates. Vintage Rock gets the inside story.
He’s not like you imagine,” Priscilla Presley tells her concerned mother at one point in Priscilla, the new biopic from acclaimed director Sofia Coppola.
“He needs me, mom.” The ‘he’ in question is, of course, the King Of Rock’n’Roll, played in the movie by 26-year-old Jacob Elordi, who puts in a portrait of Elvis Presley like no other. Adapted from Priscilla’s bombshell 1985 autobiography, which was written with the late author Sandra Harmon, this is a collection of scenes from the other side of that infamous marriage. And it’s one in which Elvis emerges as shy and somewhat insecure, a young man frozen by fame. He’s adrift after the death of his beloved mother, Gladys, and his career looks uncertain amid his Colonel-sanctioned stint in the Army.
Priscilla opens with a close-up of our heroine’s feet sinking into a soft, pink carpet as she enters Graceland. It’s an image steeped in luxury but also one that hints at some kind of descent, as though she’s departed the outside world to go deep, deep, deep into a den of untold wealth that will leave her perilously removed from reality. The infamous estate is here depicted as a claustrophobic yet intoxicating realm of luscious textures and pastel hues. Indeed, when Priscilla enters Graceland, Coppola reportedly told production designer Tamara Deverell, it should feel as if she’s walking “into a wedding cake”.
The action then rolls back to 1959. Priscilla Beaulieu (played by 25-year-old Cailee Spaeny) is a 14-year-old Army brat whose domineering stepfather has uprooted the family from Texas to West Germany, where he’s been appointed as a captain in the Air Force. Coppola, who adapted the screenplay in consultation with Priscilla herself, establishes her fish-out-of-water narrative from the off. In the first proper scene, the teenager attends a party where she’s invited to meet the world’s most celebrated rock’n’roller, who’s been stationed in Bad Nauheim. It’s a dream come true that sets the course for the rest of her life.
Priscilla shares an instant connection with the 24-year-old Elvis but, after friendship blossoms, she must endure two agonising years in which she remains
Priscilla premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on 4 September
in Germany after his return to the US. The lovelorn adolescent listens to the star’s records and moons over his magazine cover shots until they’re reunited in 1962, when he flies her out to meet him in Los Angeles. Cue high-living in Las Vegas (and all the pills, late nights and gambling that went with it) before he implores her to move into Graceland, a turn of events that naturally horrifies her parents, who eventually comply.
“Her story raises many questions,” Coppola has noted, “because she was so young, and you wonder how her parents could even have allowed her to leave Germany to live with Elvis while she was still in high school. But I wanted to be very open and empathetic, and to really hear from her what her experience was like, and to reflect that honestly. To me, it is an extreme experience of what it was like to be a woman in that era – but also of growing up in general.”
This second adaptation of Elvis And Me (following a slightly hokey 1988 TV two-parter) doesn’t shy away from Elvis’ sometimes shocking treatment of Priscilla, nor their age gap, but it is largely sympathetic to the King. The filmmaker found that Priscilla’s perspective had evolved in the four decades since she wrote the book. In this respect, the film is softer than the source material.
Priscilla’s tome recounted his terrible temper tantrums – evident when he once threw a chair in her direction – and reckless use of pills (early on in their dalliance, he administered her a misjudged dose; she woke up two days later). While her tone was warm throughout, the troubling events seemed to speak for themselves. In the film, though, Coppola is sure to have Elvis quickly apologise for his mistakes and their intimacy is conveyed by a sequence that depicts them cloistered in his room for days, with Graceland staff leaving their meals on trays outside the door.
As in the book, Coppola’s film emphasises the fact that, upon Elvis’ insistence, the couple did not consummate their relationship until their wedding night, which occurred when Priscilla was 21. To a modern viewer, however, the inbuilt power-balance between a teenager and worldrenowned rock’n’roller might seem obvious and overwhelming. Priscilla finds herself marooned in Graceland while he’s on tour and subjected to press reports of an affair with Viva Las Vegas co-star Ann-Margret. Elvis, meanwhile, takes it upon himself to style his soulmate: “Black hair and more eye make-up,” he insists in one scene. “It’ll make your eyes stand out.” Even that intimate bedroom sequence ends in a druginduced playfight that gets out of hand.
Elvis And Me caused some consternation in 1985. In an interview to promote the book’s publication, journalist Barbara Walters boggled: “So this is this bizarre life of being able to have or buy anything you want. Loneliness. Days...”
– she drew the word out – “of being alone with him in darkened rooms. Pills. And you loved him? Was he good to you?”
“Very,” Priscilla replied firmly.
“Was he also bad to you?” pressed Walters.
“When you say ‘bad’ to me,” Priscilla started, “I don’t think there’s… He wasn’t bad to me in a way that was intentionally bad. Elvis went through an awful lot and I think the communication that we had was very difficult and different.” Later, she concluded: “Nothing was harmful. Nothing was done with bad intent.”
The film, like the book and that Barbara Walters interview, is Priscilla’s story – critics be damned. Naturally, the birth of Lisa-Marie,
“It’s an extreme experience of what it was like to be a woman in that era – but also of growing up in general” SOFIA COPPOLA
her only child with Elvis, proves a pivotal moment in the tale. In the book, Priscilla recalls the moment he first met his daughter: “The man in my hospital room that day was the man I loved, and will always love. He didn’t have to try to be strong and decisive or sexy, he wasn’t afraid to show his warmth of vulnerability. He was just a man, my husband.”
It’s perhaps her fondest portrait of the King, and yet this was in many ways the beginning of the end. After years of making lucrative yet unfulfilling movies, Elvis returned to rockin’ with his legendary TV concert, which came to be known as the ’68 Comeback Special. He rehearsed intensively for two full months, Priscilla wrote, working “harder than on all his movies combined”.
The fact that she described this as “the most important event in his life”, rather than the birth of his daughter, speaks volumes. With her husband cresting the wave of his rejuvenated career, playing Vegas and – alas – playing the field, too, the new film charts Priscilla’s discovery of her own passions, which include karate and the attentions of her karate instructor (the real-life Mike Stone, played here by Evan Annisette). One time-leap sees Priscilla enter the frame to wave off Elvis’ tour bus; having discarded the heavy make-up and beehive hairdo he favoured, she looks like an entirely different person – herself.
As she progresses, he regresses. Elvis’ descent into pill-popping confusion leads to the heartbreaking scene, in his gaudy Vegas hotel room, when Priscilla ends the marriage. He might get the best line (“Maybe another time, another place…”) but it’s clear she’s taken charge of her life. The book uses Elvis’ death as a framing device that, tellingly, Coppola does away with, focusing the tale back on her titular character. The film begins and ends with Priscilla.
Perhaps controversially, none of Elvis’ songs appear in the movie – the result of a spat with his estate. Of their decision to decline Coppola’s request, a spokesperson snipped to gossip site TMZ: “It feels like a college movie. The set designs are just horrific – it’s not what Graceland looks like.” In response, Coppola told The Hollywood Reporter: “[Elvis’ representatives] don’t like projects that they haven’t originated, and they’re protective of their brand.”
Intentionally or not, the film’s resulting soundtrack, with its emphasis on era-evoking tunes such as a cover of Frankie Avalon’s Venus, steers the narrative even further away from Elvis, making Priscilla fairly unique in the canon of movies about the King.
As Coppola has put it: “Elvis was such a vital part of American cultural history, but Priscilla’s life is equally part of that history… Priscilla has traditionally been this minor character in the Elvis story, but she saw the whole history through a fascinating and completely different lens.”
It’s a history that Priscilla pays tribute to with empathy and panache; an alternative title could have been Escape From Graceland.
Towards the end of that TV interview in 1985, Walters noted that Priscilla and Elvis’ marriage fell apart after they “both changed”, asking her interviewee: “How did you change?” Without missing a beat, Priscilla replied: “I wasn’t living in the real world; I was living in a bubble. And I found that I had my own taste; I had things that I liked that weren’t Elvis’. I found Priscilla.” ✶
• Priscilla gets its UK release in January 2024
“Elvis was a vital part of American cultural history, but Priscilla’s life is equally part of that history” SOFIA COPPOLA