Turning the page! In her new memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, Priscilla Presley opens up like never before about the end of her fairytale marriage to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and the years that followed their headline-making divorce. “I did not leave Elvis because I no longer loved him. I loved him as much on the day I left as on the day we married,” the 80-year-old writes. “I left Elvis because I needed a life of my own.”
Pregnant Pause
Shortly after marrying Elvis in 1967, Priscilla fell pregnant with Lisa Marie. It should have been a happy time for the newlyweds. Instead, they “worried in silence about what was to come,” she writes. At her lowest point, Priscilla wondered how she’d feel if she miscarried. “I felt so guilty… having these thoughts,” she says. When Elvis asked her if she wanted to have an abortion — “he told me he’d support whatever I wanted,” Priscilla adds — it was a wake-up call. “The enormity of it hit me head-on, and I began to cry,” she recalls. “I told him, ‘No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!’”
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Lonesome Nights
The Naked Gun star, who met Elvis when she was just 14 and he was 24, reveals that he lost interest in her sexually once they welcomed their only child, Lisa Marie, in 1968. “He had never been able to make love to a woman who’d had a child,” she explains. “He had put his mother on a pedestal, and after Lisa was born, he put me on one, too. It is impossible to make love on a pedestal.” The new mom wore sexy negligees, did her makeup and even tried to initiate things in the bedroom. “Nothing worked,” she writes. “Elvis remained flirtatious and very affectionate with me, but that was all.”
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Dating A Kardashian
Following her split from Elvis in 1973, she was introduced to Robert Kardashian.“[He] was a sweet man, and I liked him,” she writes of the high-profile attorney, who died in 2003. But, “there was still Elvis to deal with, complicating things.” One night, while Priscilla and Robert were in bed, the King called at 2 A.M. to chat about his performance that night. “It had… never occurred to him that I might be with another man,” she notes. “Despite our divorce, he still couldn’t wrap his head around my being with someone else. He’d have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom. Elvis always carried a loaded gun, sometimes more than one.”
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Lisa Marie’s Bad Marriage
Priscilla didn’t just disapprove of her daughter, who died in 2023, marrying Michael Jackson in 1994. “I was appalled,” she writes. “I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty.” Priscilla suspected that the King of Pop, who died in 2009, was using their daughter for good PR after battling child molestation charges the year before. “Michael was a manipulative man,” she alleges. “I didn’t trust his motives.” Lisa Marie would soon question them, too. “She had begun to feel like the marriage was a setup,” Priscilla says, adding that when Lisa Marie filed for divorce in 1996, “I could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief.”
The King’s Crutch
In 1977, Elvis died at the age of 42 from heart failure, brought on by, among other factors, his abuse of prescription drugs. “Most people think his drug problem started with the stimulants the army gave him, to keep him awake on patrol,” Priscilla writes. “But in reality, the problem had started much earlier.” The singer began self-medicating as a teen, taking his mother Gladys’ “little pink pills” for his own depression and insomnia. “By the time Elvis was in his thirties, the dangers of the drugs were well understood, but that didn’t keep doctors from prescribing them,” says Priscilla. “His doctors gave him anything he wanted. He was Elvis Presley.”