15 Takeaways From Priscilla Presley’s Fascinating New Memoir

4. Elvis’ other women were a source of constant, deep anxiety for her.

Priscilla heard rumors about her husband’s relationships with female costars while filming his movies, and she read the celebrity gossip pages about the glamorous women who appeared by his side. When Elvis started touring full time, she writes, “my anxiety deepened. I rarely saw him and couldn’t help obsessing about the girls throwing their room keys on the stage for him nightly.”

It didn’t help that after she gave birth to Lisa, “Elvis lost interest in me sexually.” Adding insult to her anxiety, Elvis would sometimes invite girls into their home to talk and flirt with them.

5. Priscilla had an affair.

Eager to escape her lonely house, Priscilla began taking lessons with karate instructor Mike Stone and developed increasing confidence as she improved. Karate events also took her out into “the outside world,” where she saw that, contrary to her experience, other couples “exchanged opinions freely with their mates.”

Her friendship with Stone turned romantic after she visited her and Elvis’ Palm Springs, California, home and discovered a mailbox full of letters from women that confirmed Elvis' rampant infidelity.

6. She left Elvis even though she still loved him.

At 27, Priscilla left Elvis and took 4-year-old Lisa with her, even though “I loved him as much on the day I left as on the day I married.”

It wasn’t because of her relationship with Stone, although that was “one catalyst.” After years of “living his life,” she wanted to find out who she was and give Lisa the attention she needed. While Elvis loved his daughter, Priscilla writes, he had no interest in helping to care for her, yet still expected his wife to devote herself fully to his needs. “Just as Lisa needed me to be there for her during the day, Elvis expected me to be there for him all night. It was exhausting and ultimately impossible.”  

7. Elvis wanted to have Priscilla’s boyfriend killed.

When Elvis later found out about Stone, he “felt emasculated” and “needed to prove to himself, to me that he could make love ‘like a real man.’  ” That meant, according to Priscilla, that “Elvis made love to me forcefully, not forcibly,” without his usual tenderness. Meanwhile, “he told the guys that Mike had to die” and asked if his friend Joe could find a hit man. Elvis eventually calmed down, she writes, “and gave up the idea … thank God.”

8. Lisa was tough to parent.

“She was a little terror,” Priscilla writes of Lisa as a child. She attributes some of her daughter’s wildness to Elvis’ parenting (or lack thereof). When Lisa would go to Graceland to visit her father, there were no rules. “Bathing had been optional,” and little Lisa would boss everyone around (the staff, playmates) and revel in lavish gifts from Elvis, including “a tiny mink coat and a diamond ring.”

In her teen years, Lisa failed her classes at school, was preoccupied with bad boys on motorcycles and developed a drug problem, which would be an issue throughout her life.

9. Priscilla remained emotionally attached to and worried about Elvis after they split.

After their divorce was finalized, Priscilla bought a house in Beverly Hills near Elvis’ house because “I wanted to be nearby in case Elvis ever needed me” and to keep the family close. He’d often call out of the blue or drop by her house to talk, and she felt that “the relationship was better because we were now free.”

She grew alarmed when Elvis’ health began to deteriorate. He’d become bloated, exhausted and distracted, a downturn she attributes to his pill intake, which included “a staggering amount of prescription opioids and barbiturates.”

His death devastated her. She felt “that a large part of me had died with Elvis… I was frightened to be in a world without Elvis in it.”

10. Other family members have struggled with drug addictions.

Lisa grew addicted to painkillers after she gave birth to twins Finley and Harper Lockwood in 2008 (their father was her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood). By 2014, she was also mixing cocaine and alcohol and “lived in a tornado of drug-fueled emotion.”

Lisa’s son, Benjamin Keough, who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020, also had a history of drug abuse. Priscilla’s son, Navarone Garibaldi (whose father was Priscilla’s then-boyfriend Marco Garibaldi), 38, began experimenting with heroin by age 15 and later became addicted to fentanyl. Priscilla supported him through a few excruciating home detox efforts. (Navarone almost died in 2023 when a camel bit his head, but that’s another story.)

11. Priscilla says she didn't know that her boyfriend was sexually abusing Lisa.

Priscilla had a six-year relationship with a model, Michael Edwards, who moved in with her and Lisa when Lisa was 10. “Next to Elvis, [he was] one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen,” Priscilla writes. “He seemed like the perfect man.”

But he had a dark side. Lisa told her mom that Edwards had lifted her covers to look at her in the middle of the night, which was disturbing. But Priscilla says she didn’t know Edwards had physically molested her daughter until she read his memoir, written four years after they split up. In the book, “he openly admitted that he’d had a sexual obsession with Lisa since she was 12 years old.”

She learned other disturbing details about his abuse when she read Lisa’s 2024 posthumously published memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown. (You can read AARP’s highlights from the book.)

12. She and Lisa found solace in Scientology.

John Travolta introduced Priscilla to the Church of Scientology when she was looking for spiritual guidance after Elvis’ death. She liked the church’s philosophies, including that “it’s up to you to change your own life” and that loved ones “will come back in another body.” She concedes that her positive feelings may have had to do with the superior way that celebrities like herself are treated within Scientology. Lisa would also become involved with the church before both eventually rejected it.

13. Priscilla was “appalled” by Lisa’s 1994 marriage to Michael Jackson.

She thought Jackson courted Lisa to distract the public’s attention from his recent child abuse charges and because of her connection with Elvis. “I didn’t believe he loved her,” Priscilla writes. He was also pretty weird around his mother-in-law, avoiding her at all costs, and spent many days away from Lisa, with no explanation. Lisa filed for divorce after less than two years of marriage (her second of four).  

14. She’s still on the go at age 80.

Priscilla says that her staff calls her the Energizer Bunny and that she “can still read the small print without glasses” and “manage a decent karate kick.” And she won’t let herself be weighted down by the deaths of her loved ones. “Although I have suffered deep losses, I choose to focus on what remains,” she writes, pointing to her three granddaughters, siblings, son and beloved animals. (She’s taken in rescue dogs throughout her life.) 

15. Elvis will always be the love of her life.

“People long for true love, the kind where you fall deeper and deeper until you realize it is bottomless,” Priscilla writes. “I found it before I was old enough to understand it.”

Why did she never marry again? “The answer is simple: I never wanted to. Even though we divorced, Elvis and I remained together spiritually until he died,” and “he is still with me.” She’ll be buried next to him at Graceland.