Elvis – 13 Years In Priscilla

It is on Depeche Mode‘s smoldering masterpiece Violator (1990) where you find Personal Jesus, released as the album’s lead-single and becoming the biggest-selling 12-inch single in Warner Bros. history to that point. According to Johnny Cash a ‘gospel’ and “the most evangelical song I have ever recorded”, it remains to this day the perfect song Nick Cave still wishes to write and re-enacts on his TV-preacher-style concert shows.

But Personal Jesus is not about said one from the Bible, it is a song about being a Jesus for somebody else in a love relationship, and it is even inspired by a prominent real life couple: Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Martin Gore was admittedly inspired to write the song after reading ‘Elvis and Me‘ (1985) that Priscilla wrote with the little help of her ghostwriter Sandra Harmon. “It’s about how Elvis was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships – how everybody’s heart is like a god in some way, and that’s not a very balanced view of someone, is it?” Gore explained.

Being a massive Elvis fan, I have read his ex-wife’s highly fictional biography when I was a young teenager, and just re-read it recently- it is one of the coldest and cruelest books that I have ever read. Not just because of its shallow and trashy character, but because it all concluded in a fact that is never discussed when examining Elvis Presley’s troubled existence and state of mind: he had to deal with a horrible psycho that brought him really down.

It is all true: Equipped with an unhealthy desire for purity and innocence, Southern boy Elvis found himself a very young Southern girl. Priscilla was 14 when she met GI Elvis in Germany. Heavy petting paved her way to becoming his bride in 1967, enhanced by the fact that she and her highly accepting parents threatened Presley to expose his relationship with a teenager and ruin his career if he did not espouse said teenager. They also kept up the lie that it was not until the wedding night that Priscilla lost her innocence to the King of Rock’n’Roll with 22 years.

Priscilla describes their relationship as Elvis’ highly controlling attempt to train and model a young girl after his taste, in her looks and behaviour. ‘I was someone he created,’ she writes. ‘I was just a kid and I was consumed by him. All I desired was not to disappoint him.‘ Priscilla gave birth to their daughter Lisa Marie and started an affair with Elvis’ Karate teacher Mike Stone in 1972, which concluded in the Presleys’ separation and divorce in the same year. Elvis’ interest in virginal girls never stopped, and so he began dating 14-year-old Rebecca Smith and several other young women after his divorce and until he died in 1977. Priscilla? To this day claims to be Elvis’ widow although having been separated 5 years prior to his death. To this day living of the King’s legacy, selling him out, telling sugar-coated stories of a fairytale love until the end, and how Presley’s ghost regularly visits her and talks to her.

This is basically the version of Elvis and Priscilla that is being widely told and I will not challenge all of it. But Priscilla involuntarily delivers another truth with her book, that one being that Elvis made a truly bad decision among many bad decisions by sharing his life with Priscilla. Blinded by beauty and a promise of innocence – “he was committed to my purity“, as Priscilla puts it- Elvis married a woman with the IQ of an amoeba. Our long-time partners change us, their influence does something to us, and the question should be allowed: to which extend was Priscilla responsible for Elvis’ increasingly desolate state? Because the close look into her mind through this biography reveals: emptiness, selfishness, lovelessness.

The first thing you realize is that Priscilla, despite all her abysmal shallowness, is very reflected and calculated. She knows exactly who she is dealing with, enjoying the attention she gets as a young girl- not just from Elvis, but from the other young girls around her. “They were all jealous of me” she writes with great satisfaction numerous times, only to tell you how she stopped talking to all the girls and ran around with her nose up the air and stubbornly followed her ambitious plan to become the Queen of Graceland. Note that Elvis had long departed back to the US by then, and countless rumors about his newest flings and affairs started reaching her. But Priscilla dismissed and outlived them all stoically, solely focused on the goal of marrying the planet’s biggest star. I wouldn’t call that a weak and innocent girl.

It gets worse. Priscilla moves to Graceland and is miserable there, having no own interests and hobbies within her personality (later she starts to ride horses… and towards the end of her marriage she starts to free herself and develops an identity by taking dancing lessons…). Elvis and Priscilla marry, and the true mayhem starts.

Prestige and what the people said was always most important to Priscilla, and she operates after the principle ‘He might cheat on me endlessly… but it’s ME who he is married to!‘. But the jealousy drives her insane nevertheless, and her revenge on Elvis is cruel. One of the unforgettable passages in the book is about how she is in Vegas with Elvis, childishly jealous about the attention that he gets, and feeling insulted by his lack of attention for her new dress after one of his triumphant, sold-out Vegas shows.

Then Priscilla shares her thoughts and measures of faking her suicide to finally grab Elvis’ attention with the reader. Which would be just the right amount of pills to knock her out without killing her? Which dress should she wear? How should she arrange herself on the hotel bed for the moment when Elvis would find her? It is true, she writes all of this in an incredibly long, revelatory fever-dream, an exercise in evil naivety. She runs into the bathroom to get her hair and make-up done, fantasizing about how devastated and remorseful Elvis would be once he found his beautiful suicide- bride. All would be good after that. It is horrible and hard to endure. It is not the definition of love, but that of having a very heavy millstone around your neck.

The book for me reaches its vile climax when Priscilla is talking about the spiritual side of Elvis- his musical side by the way remains almost completely unmentioned in her memories, Priscilla is simply not into the topic or interested in her husband’s outstanding and groundbreaking musicianship. She does not even like him.

Challenged by a new generation of bands like The Beatles and fed up by the poor career decisions the shady and sinister Colonel Tom Parker made for him, and whom Priscilla praises as ‘good man that wanted all the best for Elvis’ throughout her entire book, Elvis turned himself into spiritualism and philosophy, dragging an uninterested Priscilla with him. It was not until 1977 until she developed some kind of interest in such topics- by joining Scientology and making her daughter follow. It is a terrible cruelty of fate that the gospel-singing King’s fortune for large parts goes to a sect that worships Xenu, an alien galactic ruler who threw hundreds of billions of people in volcanos, in which he then lowered H-Bombs and detonated them to get rid of the overpopulation.

Elvis tried to share his books and thoughts with Priscilla, but she was not having it and recalls Elvis saying “Things will never work out between us, Cilla, because you don’t show any interest in me or my philosophies.” Who could disagree. But not only did she show no interest, she teamed up with Colonel Parker to exorcise the golden boy. Priscilla put a full stop to her husband’s aspirations on personal and spiritual growth, when she made Elvis burn all books and magazines he had collected on the subject in a bonfire. Yes, you did read that right: Priscilla held her husband’s hand while watching his books burn in the chilliest of all bonfires, and told him that it all is for his best. It is like reading the fucking Ku-Klux-Clan-Chronicles, and Priscilla has *zero* regrets about it.

After reading Elvis and Me, you re being left with the impression that the King’s unfortunate faible for virginal teenagers backfired to him with the utmost rigour and disproportionate and excessive punishment, dooming him to a life with a completely unintellectual, unloving, never-content bimbo. We know that you are finished when you get into the wrong person and relationship, s/he can destroy you, mutilate your mind, prevent your development and growth, make you die inside. It happened to Elvis, and some might consider this as fair punishment, but it is equally heartbreaking and endlessly tragic. All that could have been-
It is time to acknowledge his marriage to Priscilla as the greatest tragedy in Elvis Presley’s 42 year old life.

by Saliha Enzenauer