Priscilla Presley revealed why she never made the decision not to remarry after the collapse of her six-year marriage to Elvis Presley.
During a Q&A event at the South Point Casino in Las Vegas on Friday, the actress, 78, seemingly confirmed the rumor that she made a vow to never marry again as long as her ex-husband was alive.
“I just don’t think that he could handle that,” she said of the late rock music icon, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973.
Even though Elvis died in 1977, Priscilla kept that promise over the past four decades. “To be honest with you, I never wanted to marry after him. I never had any desire,” she said. “No one could ever match him.”
Priscilla also explained why she and Elvis chose not to have more children after welcoming their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, in 1968. “Elvis felt he had a very busy schedule and he did have a bit of guilt that he wasn’t around that much when Lisa was younger,” she told the audience.
“With his scheduling and his touring, he just felt he wasn’t around enough to give a lot of attention to having another child.”
In a separate conversation with British journalist Piers Morgan for TalkTV on Thursday, Priscilla acknowledged that Elvis’ sudden death at age 42 still profoundly affects her all these years later. She said she still vividly remembers his road manager, Joe Esposito, breaking the horrible news to her over the phone.
She told Morgan, “I can still hear Joe Esposito’s words, ‘Cilla, Elvis is dead’, and that was like, I just couldn’t imagine him ever, especially at his age and all, still so young and wanting to do so much and had so much planned, and not having him, not talking to him, not having him be the father of our child.”
“My big fear was Lisa, and how do I tell her,” she added. “She was only 9 at the time.”
Priscilla also disclosed what attracted her to Elvis, including his sharp sense of humor. The couple first met at a party in West Germany in 1959 when she was 14 and he was 24.
She explained of his captivating presence, “He would walk into the room and it was like, ‘Whoa’. I mean, he didn’t realize what he had as far as his appearance or what he felt or his charisma, but there were a few times when he came around and he said, ‘Damn, I’m good-looking,’ kiddingly, when he would be in his bathroom and he would be getting ready to go somewhere, but he had a great sense of humor.”
She also remembered the “Jailhouse Rock” singer as exceptionally caring, defining a time when he drove by a car dealership in Memphis and noticed a woman looking at the automobiles. In an unexpected gesture of generosity, he shocked the woman by buying her a brand-new blue Cadillac.
Priscilla said, “That’s him, that’s what he would do. Anyone in trouble, he would give them money. Anyone who had a problem, with anything really and they couldn’t afford it, even with some of the guys who needed medical care, he would pay for it.”
Elvis and Priscilla’s storied romance is chronicled in the new biopic Priscilla, which premiered in theaters on Friday. The movie, directed by Sofia Coppola, stars Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi.
Priscilla praised Coppola for her honest rendering of her personal story. She said in her TalkTV interview, “I think she did some homework. I mean she and I, we talked about it, and living with Elvis Presley, people think, ‘Oh how wonderful, it’s great, it’s Elvis Presley,’ but I went through the ups and downs with him in a very crucial part of his life.”
She continued, “His ups and downs, his struggles, his fears, so when you are living with someone so famous, and you have been through it with them, it’s that part of privacy that is hard to give up, it’s hard to share. I don’t want to give out too much because I want some of that myself, that’s just for me.”
