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When Priscilla Presley began writing her memoir, Softly, As I Leave You, the 80-year-old knew she had to tell her story before someone else did. “Writing another book has been on my mind for a few years, and to finally get through it feels good,” Presley tells Sunday Life over Zoom ahead of a speaking tour later this month.
“I was in my 70s when I thought, ‘Gosh, if I don’t write this story, I’m going to really regret it.’ The thought of something happening to me before I got a chance to do another book felt very real,” says Presley. “I had to do it while I still have my head and my thoughts intact.”
Presley turned to truth-telling as a means of grieving the sudden loss of her daughter, Lisa Marie, in 2023 and the memoir follows her 1985 book, Elvis and Me. This latest offering navigates everything from falling in love as a teenager to the abundance of grief she has experienced, told from the perspective of a woman who has lived a full life. She also reflects on how that life changed after she married the king of rock ‘n’ roll, Elvis Presley, in 1967.
She was just 14 and Elvis was a superstar almost 10 years her senior when they first met in Germany, where Elvis was serving in the US army. After spells living with Elvis and his family in Los Angeles and Graceland, the home he’d built near Memphis, they married when Priscilla was 21.
“I started living Elvis’ life when I was young and that was hard for me,” she says. “The people around him, the fame he carried, who he tried to be, and what he had to do to maintain it, was all encompassing. To see someone as famous as he was and how he handled it, well, I saw the good and the bad of it. He came out of it a different person.”
Leaving Elvis after less than five years of marriage, with four-year-old Lisa Marie in tow, wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the right one, she says. She packed more into those years than most people could in a lifetime, but for all the bright lights and fame, she felt lonely and unseen.
If Presley has learnt one thing, it’s that pain and loss can’t define the rest of your life. Even so, she misses Lisa Marie terribly and says some days are harder than others.
“The experiences you go through make you stronger,” she says. “In life, whether you’re famous or not, we all go through confronting things. I have always been the sort of person who confronts all the things that come my way. But being in the limelight, there are many expectations of you, and I’ve learnt that it’s about having people you can trust around you that gets you through the very hard times.”
A 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu plays an Elvis record in Germany, where they first met.Credit: BETTMANN ARCHIVE
The memoir begins with Presley summoning the courage to leave Elvis. It’s well-documented that she left him for karate instructor Mike Stone in 1972, but Presley sets the record straight by saying it was the catalyst for the split but not the entire reason.
“I had to leave Elvis because I got lost and I needed to find out who I was again,” she says. “I needed to find myself because I was living his life. I loved him, cared for him and worried about him, but something was missing for me.”
In 1968, Presley had started taking dance classes, which had opened her eyes to an existence beyond Graceland. “All of a sudden, I was discovering who I was and what I wanted to do and was a little more in charge of my life,” she recalls. “It was outside the life I was living – a little bit of freedom, realising I had my own friends and my own life to live. I learnt a lot about myself during that time.”
Presley remained close to Elvis after they split, the couple sharing custody of Lisa Marie. Their daughter, by then aged nine, was at Graceland on the day her father died in 1977 and Presley was flown there in her ex-husband’s private jet when the news broke.
In the memoir, Presley gives readers plenty of glimpses into who Elvis was away from the headlines – a deep thinker who read passages of the Bible out loud, even at 2am. He was intrigued by philosophy and human existence, perhaps querying his own destiny as a star.
“I tried so hard to live it with him and be interested,” says Presley of her husband’s religious and philosophical interests. “We’d be in bed at 2am, and he’s still reading, and he’s reading to me. I’d be so tired but didn’t want him to see I wasn’t interested. It was so deep, but I was so young I had to fake it.”
Presley in Beverly Hills in 1980, less than three years after Elvis’ death.Credit: Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
One of the first meals she cooked for Elvis – a bowl of spaghetti that was her own mother’s signature dish – became the last she ever made for him. “The noodles were stiff, it was a mess,” she says, laughing. But it was after she gave birth to Lisa Marie that Presley says Elvis changed towards her. Becoming a mother meant he saw her differently to other women around him.
“In the South, women didn’t work much – they took care of their family and their husbands, and that’s what I did for Elvis,” she says. “I quickly learnt how different the South was from California – a world with a lot of divorces. You didn’t hear much about divorces back then.
“But I wanted to do all the things I did for Elvis. Nobody made me do them. It was of its time and what women did.”
These days, Presley lives with a cousin and her two dogs in a Californian mansion where she regularly catches up with her granddaughter, 36-year-old Riley Keough (one of Lisa Marie’s four children). And last month she was in the UK promoting her new book with her son Navarone, 38, from Presley’s 22-year relationship with Marco Garibaldi.
“I try to stay with people who are ‘up’, people who aren’t dreary or wear you down – it makes all the difference in the world,” she says. “We all have issues, we’ve all got problems, but we have to move out of that mindset.
“If you can’t solve your problems, don’t forget you still have hope, love and friends. And if you have a good friend, trust them – they’ll be the ones who help you get things off your shoulders. We all need someone to talk to, someone who understands us.”
The late Lisa Marie Presley (left) and Priscilla in Las Vegas in 2011.Credit: WireImage
She talks about Lisa Marie’s relationships in her memoir and her disapproval of Michael Jackson’s proposal. She would have liked to see Lisa Marie’s marriage with actor Nicolas Cage work out, but says they were too alike, both hot-tempered. She also notes how the 2020 suicide of grandson Benjamin Keough destroyed Lisa Marie.
“I really felt my daughter didn’t want to be here after she lost her son,” says Presley. “He was everything to her, and when he passed, that’s when you saw her sinking because she missed him and grieved him so much. I honestly do believe she is in a better place.”
The death of Lisa Marie could have sent Presley spiralling too, but she remained strong. In her book, she also talks about helping Navarone with addiction to heroin and fentanyl.
“In a way, the book has been therapy for me,” she says. “My daughter’s death was unexpected, and I don’t wish for anyone to experience the loss of a child. I still carry it with me, but I still have my son and other family I have to take care of.
“I never had a desire to take drugs to deal with pain because I saw what my loved ones went through. I saw Elvis go through it. I saw Navarone go through it. A friend has just gone through it. I don’t have it in me to go down that road.”
See An Evening with Priscilla Presley in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, November 23-25.
Lifeline: 13 11 14.
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