Priscilla Presley didn’t see Elvis live until after they were married.
Priscilla Presley didn’t see Elvis live until after they were married
The 79-year-old actress tied the knot with the late King of Rock n Roll – who died in 1977 at the age of 42 – in 1967 but by this point, he had already been on the music scene for a number of years and she was taken aback by just how “crazy” things were by the time she got to see him.
She told People: “You see all the girls lined up, all the fans going nuts, and I’m looking at this going, ‘Wow’. And he’d take his scarf off his neck and he’d give it to someone right there by the stage, and they would go crazy. It was really a treat. It was a trip, a great trip.”
Priscilla went on to have the late Lisa Marie – who died in 2023 at the age of 64 following a sudden cardiac arrest – with Elvis, but they split in 1973, had she later had Navrone, 37, with computer programmer Marco Garibaldi Garcia.
But the concert Priscilla had first attended came as a major comeback after several years out of the spotlight for the ‘Hound Dog’ rocker, and she recalled that her then-husband was “very nervous” despite his superstar status.
She said: “He was nervous because he hadn’t appeared [on stage] in so long. People would think, ‘How could he be nervous? He’s Elvis Presley.’ He was very nervous, but he did his homework. He would go and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.”
The comeback special for NBC became the highest-rated broadcast of the year for the station, and Elvis’ friend Jerry Schilling explained that was a completely unexpected feat.
Speaking in the new Netflix documentary ‘Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley ‘, he said: “He did not know what the public was going to think of that. It wasn’t until we saw it live on television with the rest of America that he realised it was good. Phone calls started coming in from special people he knew, and that was the first time he really relaxed and knew it was good. He was beaming at that point. That led to everything after.”