Despite decades of revealing interviews, books and big-screen movies based on the Presley family dynasty, matriarch Priscilla has kept a few secrets up her sleeve for her new memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis.
Decades after her romance with the singing superstar captivated the world, Priscilla has recalled the tumultuous breakdown of her marriage and didn’t hold back when it came to discussing Michael Jackson – who had a short-lived marriage to her late daughter Lisa Marie Presley, who passed away in 2023, aged just 54.
Here, we break down five biggest bombshells from the woman who has spent her life both in the spotlight and in the shadows of those who share her iconic last name…
The honeymoon is over
After meeting Elvis when she was just 14, while he was stationed in Germany with the US Army, Priscilla married the singer who was a decade older than her when she was 21. However, their days of newly wedded bliss were over very quickly after she became pregnant on their wedding night.
“I was so excited. But when I got pregnant on my wedding night, those dreams fell apart,” Priscilla wrote. “Neither Elvis nor I was ready for a child.”
The couple even discussed not going ahead with the pregnancy.
“[Elvis] looked at me one day and asked if I wanted to have an abortion. He told me he’d support whatever I wanted. His words were a wake-up call. The enormity of it hit me head-on, and I began to cry. I told him, ‘No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!’”
Their daughter was born in February 1968 and the couple “fell hopelessly in love with” Lisa Marie.
An imperfect match
When Lisa Marie tied the knot with Michael Jackson in May 1994, her mum admits she was “appalled”. With the timing coming shortly after he’d been accused of child abuse, she felt the pop star had ulterior motives.
“I didn’t believe he loved her,” Priscilla wrote. “He married her at a time when he desperately needed good publicity that depicted him as a desirable heterosexual man.”
Priscilla further described the singer, who died in 2009 at age 50, as “a manipulative man”. “The childlike innocence he projected was part of his public mask.”
Kardashian connections
Robert Kardashian, patriarch of the reality TV family, is lucky to have escaped unharmed after he struck up a romance with Priscilla in 1975. She admits to taking a phone call from her ex at 2am one morning while the lawyer was in bed beside her.
“He’d have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom,” Priscilla wrote. “Elvis always carried a loaded gun, sometimes more than one.”
The pair split thanks to his “demanding” job. However, they stayed in touch, with Kim Kardashian phoning her from the hospital so they could speak one last time before her father’s death from cancer in 2003.
Priscilla also recalled she was the one in the firing line when Elvis discovered she’d been having an affair with a karate instructor, Mike Stone, four years into their marriage, just before their split.
She wrote that her husband “forced” himself on her “the way he imagined a karate master doing it … it left me with an unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis.”
While Priscilla added that she didn’t regret leaving Elvis, she also “never ceased to mourn” the end of their marriage.
Grave revelation
In Lisa Marie’s 2024 memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, that was finished by daughter Riley Keough following her death, details of the alleged sexual abuse at the hand of Priscilla’s ex Michael Edwards were revealed. He denies the allegations.
Priscilla says at the time when she was a child, Lisa Marie had told her a different version of events with the actor coming into her room and lifting her bed covers to look at her, which made Priscilla kick him out of the house. Four decades later, Lisa Marie shared further details that he had molested her.
“I struggled to make peace with Lisa’s words because I didn’t hear them until after her passing, we never got to talk about it together,” Priscilla wrote. “I know I will never have closure.”
In his book, Priscilla, Elvis and Me, Edwards wrote about his “sexual obsession” with Lisa Marie. “I was encouraged to embellish a harmless anecdote about Lisa Marie in my memoir from the 1980s and now regret that I did,” he told Page Six.
The hardest goodbye
Lisa Marie died at the age of 54 from complications of a small bowel obstruction in January 2023.
“I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone,” Priscilla wrote, which forced her to make the terrible choice of having to turn off her daughter’s life support.
“She was hooked to a machine that was breathing for her, and she had a heartbeat. There was little brain activity. Her spirit, always so vital, wasn’t there.”
Priscilla revealed that her granddaughter, “Later told us that while she was still on her flight, she had felt her mother’s spirit pass.”
Priscilla’s business associates made accusations in court last month that she “pulled the plug” against Lisa Marie’s wishes.
