The Troubled Love Story Between Elvis and Priscilla Presley
Jacob Elordi and Cailee Speany, smiling and embracing in the first day of shooting of the biopic Priscilla, were posted on Instagram by Sofia Coppola. The movie tells the troubled love story between Elvis and Priscilla Presley, played by Elordi and Speany, based on the 1985 memoir Elvis and Me written by the former wife of the divo. The film, which will be released in American theatres in October and is expected to be previewed in Italy in September at the 80th Venice Festival, follows Priscilla Ann Wagner Beaulieu from the age of 15 to 27, in detail, narrating her stormy marriage with Elvis.
First Meeting Between Priscilla and Elvis
The first meeting between Priscilla and Elvis took place on September 13, 1959 in Friedberg, Germany, where the singer was doing his military service in the third armoured division and where Priscilla had followed her stepfather, a career military. He, already a divo, was 24 years old; she was ten years younger. He courted her for more than seven years, but in the meantime he did not stop granting himself different distractions. “Every night,” as actor Gary Lockwood, who met Elvis on the set of Blondes, Redheads, Brunettes in 1963, said, “he would organize parties with rivers of beautiful women” carefully selected by his most trusted men. The parties had a predictable ending: Elvis would take the girls to bed, “even three at a time”.
Elvis and Priscilla’s Wedding
Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding took place on May 1, 1967 at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. Their only daughter, Lisa Marie Presley (who died last January at the age of 54), was born exactly nine months later, conceived during the honeymoon in Palm Springs. Years later, Priscilla would tell that at the beginning things between her and Elvis were going well and that their life was very passionate, although the “king of Rock and Roll” needed to experience more and more daring things due to the influence of drugs. After the birth of Lisa Marie, however, Elvis confessed to his wife that he could not feel attraction for a woman who had had a child: he felt like making love with his mother. Priscilla was no longer the girl he had fallen in love with, so his interest had faded. The marriage became troubled, marked by Elvis’s continuous betrayals and his growing oddities. Among the various legends is the one according to which the singer, lost in love for Ann Margret, thought of having his wife killed with karate blows. The killer was to be his martial arts instructor Mike Stone, but the bizarre plan proved to be unachievable, so Elvis began to administer Priscilla with small doses of poison.
