[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Just before the release of Priscilla Presley‘s memoir, Softly, as I Leave You: Life After Elvis, we have one more devastating excerpt to share.
Priscilla and Elvis Presley‘s controversial relationship is the stuff of legend. Even back then, their age gap meant they had to keep the nature of their relationship secret for a long time. When they first met she was just 14 years old — Elvis was 24 and serving in the Army. She first stayed over with him when she was 16 and moved in just before her 18th birthday. They were married when she was 22, something she thought “meant I could finally come out in the open.”
But Elvis was insanely possessive. Despite his own infidelities, he went crazy at the thought of her with another man. But after the many, many girls he bedded, she did cheat on him. She was having an affair with her karate instructor, Mike Stone, and Elvis found out.
His response? He was so furious he tried to hire a hitman to murder Stone, Priscilla recalls, per Page Six, who got an early copy. She got him to calm down and not go through with the murder-for-hire. But her? He wasn’t merciful with her.
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She claims in the book that he “forced” himself on her. She doesn’t use the term “marital rape,” apparently, but that’s what it sounds like. She writes about him forcing himself on her “the way he imagined a karate master doing it.” A horrible thought. And a horrible final time having sex with her husband, who she left afterward. She recalls:
“…it left me with an unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis.”
That was in 1972. They’d been married less than five years. She writes about leaving:
“As difficult as it was, I never regretted my decision to leave Elvis. But I never ceased to mourn it.”
She also was unable to truly live freely, even after she was technically single.
For a while in the ’70s Priscilla dated a lawyer who would, decades later, become a household name thanks to his famous daughters: Robert Kardashian. We learned from a biography of the Kardashians a few years ago just how serious it was, that he even wanted to marry her! But she told him:
“Look, I’m not going to marry anyone until Elvis dies.”
Well, we have a lot more context for why that was now…
She says Elvis was still very much a part of her life — and still incredibly possessive. So even in 1975, years after their divorce, he would have been angry she was with another man. She writes, in an excerpt obtained by The US Sun, that Elvis once called her at 2 a.m. to talk about his concert… and she was in bed with Kardashian at the time! That part she kept from Elvis, letting him tell her all about his show as Robert lay there and listened. Why?
“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.”
JFC! That’s upsetting… It’s like she was still in a cage even after “leaving”.
To learn more, you can get Softly, as I Leave You: Life After Elvis starting on Tuesday.
[Image via Patricia Schlein/ITN/WENN.]
