Now 80, Priscilla Presley is trying again on a life formed by love, loss and legacy.
In her new memoir, Softly, as I Depart You: Life After Elvis, she displays on the unraveling of her six-year marriage to Elvis Presley. The ebook strikes past the parable of Graceland to disclose Priscilla’s most candid confessions but, providing an unvarnished have a look at her marriage, her regrets and the difficult ties that formed her lengthy after the singer’s dying.
The pages span the whole lot from her transient romance with Robert Kardashian to her fractured relationship with daughter Lisa Marie Presley. Listed here are seven of the ebook’s most revealing moments.
Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson pose on the Chateau de Versailles on September 5, 1994, in Versailles, France. (Stephane Cardinale/Sygma by way of Getty Pictures)
“I used to be appalled by the wedding. I knew in my bones that Michael [Jackson] wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty.”
Priscilla disapproved of Lisa Marie’s relationship with Jackson. She writes that she “didn’t consider he liked” her daughter and believes the “manipulative” singer had ulterior motives as he wanted good press amid baby abuse allegations.
“The King of Pop was allying himself with the King of Rock and Roll,” Priscilla says. “Images of him with Elvis’s daughter carrying the massive diamond engagement ring he’d had made for her? That picture was pure gold.”
Priscilla claims Jackson reached out to Lisa Marie when the kid abuse costs went public. “I believe that’s how he hooked her to start with,” she continues. “She felt sorry for him, and naturally, she believed in his innocence. No person desires to consider these sorts of allegations towards somebody they know.”
Jackson, who was accused of kid molestation in 1993, denied the costs. He and Lisa Marie wed the next 12 months and cut up in 1995.
“He’d have gone ballistic, possibly actually, if he’d identified Robert was in my bed room… Elvis all the time carried a loaded gun, typically a couple of.”
Two years after her cut up from Elvis, Priscilla discovered herself in a short however memorable romance with Robert Kardashian. The 2 started courting in 1975, lengthy earlier than Kardashian turned a family identify as a high-powered legal professional and father to the well-known household.
In her new ebook, Priscilla reveals that Elvis was nonetheless calling her late at evening — typically with out realizing she was now not his. She remembers one occasion when the telephone rang round 2 a.m., whereas she was in mattress with Kardashian. “Happily, [Robert] was a sound sleeper,” she writes, noting how she scrambled to seize the receiver earlier than it woke him. She tiptoed down the corridor to take the decision in one other room, listening to Elvis’s acquainted voice. Neither man ever knew concerning the different.
“Regardless of our divorce, he nonetheless couldn’t wrap his head round my being with another person,” Priscilla writes of Elvis, who died in 1977.
Kardashian, who died from esophageal most cancers in 2003 at age 59, dated Priscilla for a few 12 months. Although she described him as “a candy man” she genuinely favored, their relationship finally unraveled. His demanding work schedule stored him away for lengthy hours, and Priscilla admits they have been in other places in life. “Robert needed to get married, however I knew it wouldn’t work,” she remembers. “I wasn’t able to marry once more.”
“I thought of my lady, my wild, rebellious, passionate lady, mendacity in a vegetative state for the remainder of her life. I mentioned what I needed to. ‘Take her off the machine, Physician.’ My voice was barely above a whisper.”
Probably the most heartbreaking passages in Priscilla’s memoir recounts her last moments together with her daughter. Lisa Marie died in 2023 at age 54 from a small bowel obstruction, a complication linked to prior bariatric surgical procedure.
Priscilla says she knew the reality the second she walked into her daughter’s hospital room. “She was hooked to a machine that was respiration for her, and he or she had a heartbeat. There was little mind exercise,” she writes. “Her spirit, all the time so very important, wasn’t there.”
She describes spending hours at Lisa Marie’s bedside with household, clinging to hope till docs delivered the phrases they’d been dreading: “Priscilla, I’m so sorry, she’s gone.” The grief, she writes, stays insufferable. Lisa Marie had by no means absolutely recovered after dropping her son Benjamin Keough to suicide in 2020, and Priscilla believes her daughter longed to be reunited with him. “She needed to be with Ben,” she says.
“I didn’t go away Elvis as a result of I now not liked him. … I left Elvis as a result of I wanted a lifetime of my very own.”
Priscilla is frank concerning the unraveling of her marriage to Elvis, writing that she “liked him as a lot on the day I left as on the day we married,” however the relationship had been deteriorating for years.
Motherhood introduced new layers of guilt and distance. She admits to feeling jealous of a nanny who tended to Lisa Marie in the midst of the evening, a job she believed she ought to have been filling. On prime of that, intimacy between her and Elvis light after the delivery of their daughter.
“He had by no means been capable of make like to a girl who’d had a toddler,” she remembers. To Elvis, girls who turned moms belonged on a pedestal — together with Priscilla. “It’s not possible to make love on a pedestal,” she writes.
Though Elvis remained “flirtatious and really affectionate,” Priscilla says their bodily relationship largely ended, other than one last time after she determined to depart. Elvis suspected her affair with karate teacher Mike Stone was the rationale for the divorce, however Priscilla is obvious that Stone was “only one catalyst.” She claims Elvis “compelled” himself on her after discovering out about Stone. Their marriage was marred by infidelity on either side.
Lisa Marie Presley and Priscilla Presley. (Mike Guastella/WireImage)
“My daughter was a conundrum, difficult and difficult.”
Describing Lisa Marie as “a free spirit, a decided and stressed soul,” Priscilla opens up about how her daughter was left “so damaged” after Elvis’s dying. Priscilla admits she was the one who first launched her daughter to Scientology, by way of pal John Travolta, a choice she now calls “naive.”
Lisa Marie, she writes, struggled via years of economic bother and dependancy, at one level consuming as many as 80 drugs a day. Nonetheless, she was a fierce persona who owned her identification as Elvis’s solely baby, typically calling herself “Lisa Marie F—ing Presley.” It was each a protect and a burden: “an identification that each enamored and haunted her for the remainder of her life.”
Priscilla additionally displays on her personal early motherhood. She turned pregnant with Lisa Marie on her wedding ceremony evening, a flip that upended her goals and left each her and Elvis feeling unprepared. “Neither Elvis nor I used to be prepared for a kid,” she remembers. For weeks, they silently anxious about what was forward, and Priscilla even admits she as soon as puzzled if a miscarriage may spare them. At her lowest level, Elvis requested if she needed an abortion, promising to assist her it doesn’t matter what.
At that second, Priscilla writes, was a wake-up name. “The enormity of it hit me head-on, and I started to cry. I advised him, ‘No! We will’t do this. That is our child!’”
“Signing it might be perjury. … To her, it was a betrayal.”
Priscilla writes concerning the deep rift that fashioned between her and Lisa Marie throughout her daughter’s contentious divorce from Michael Lockwood. In 2017, Lisa Marie accused Lockwood of abuse and misconduct, although he denied the allegations, and a courtroom investigation discovered no proof to assist them.
Lisa Marie apparently requested her mom to signal a deposition declaring Lockwood unfit for custody of their twin daughters, Harper and Finley. Priscilla refused. “I had by no means seen Michael behave within the dangerous methods she was alleging,” she says. Priscilla says she knew in that second their relationship would by no means absolutely get better. “With a stab to my coronary heart that she would by no means fully forgive me,” she writes. “And he or she by no means did.”
Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley’s wedding ceremony photograph taken in Might 1967. (Smith Assortment/Gado/Getty Pictures)
“Folks lengthy for real love, the sort the place you fall deeper and deeper till you notice it’s bottomless,” Priscilla writes. “I discovered it earlier than I used to be sufficiently old to grasp it.”
Priscilla hints that there was a time when reconciliation with Elvis didn’t really feel not possible. One Christmas after their divorce, as he was leaving her home, he kissed her brow, paused, and mentioned softly, “Sometime. Possibly sometime.”
She admits that Elvis stays the rationale she’s by no means remarried or pursued one other critical relationship. “I misplaced the possibility to search out it once more with Elvis,” she writes. “As a result of he by no means had the possibility to develop previous.”
