Priscilla Presley New Book: Things We Learned From New Memoir

  The new book, released Tuesday, is filled with heartache and loss. It follows the once deeply enigmatic first lady of Graceland from Memphis to Hollywood, through several subsequent relationships, and into the depths of her sorrow over the 2023 loss of her daughter, Lisa Marie, her only child with Elvis. (Rolling Stone)

While much of the book takes readers through the well-worn milestones of Priscilla’s highly scrutinized life, several passages give intimate new details. Here’s what we learned:

When Priscilla ended up getting pregnant on the couple’s wedding night, she was “stunned,” she writes. “Neither Elvis nor I was ready for a child. He worried about what fatherhood would do to his career. His fans were still adjusting to him being a married man,” she says.

Priscilla confesses she was concerned, too, worrying what parenthood would mean for her fledgling marriage. “There would be no traveling, no romantic interludes for us to focus on each other. For weeks, Elvis and I worried in silence about what was to come,” she writes. She even fantasized about how she’d feel if she miscarried. But, according to the book, “it was Elvis who finally brought things to a head.”

“He looked at me one day and asked if I wanted to have an abortion,” she reveals. “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!’” After Lisa Marie was born, “we fell hopelessly in love with her. We could not imagine our lives without her,” she writes.

Priscilla famously dated Robert Kardashian, father of reality star Kim Kardashian, in 1975, a few years after her divorce from Elvis. She writes that Elvis would have been jealous of the relationship, so she concealed the fact she was in bed with the telegenic lawyer when Elvis called one night at 2 a.m. to boast about a performance. She leaped out of the covers and tiptoed down the hall to take the call in private.

“Despite our divorce, he still couldn’t wrap his head around my being with someone else. He’d have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom,” she writes. “Elvis always carried a loaded gun, sometimes more than one. I put my hand over my mouth to stifle the sound of my yawn while Elvis continued to talk.”

Priscilla says Kardashian wanted to tie the knot, but they weren’t a good match. Twenty years later, when Kardashian defended O.J. Simpson in his murder case, Priscilla believed it was crushing for the famed attorney, who was incredibly loyal. “The realization that his friend had committed the murders nearly destroyed him,” she writes. (Simpson was acquitted at his criminal trial but later found liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, at a civil trial.)

When Lisa Marie married Michael Jackson in a secret ceremony on May 26, 1994, Priscilla was “appalled,” she writes. She believed Jackson, who was 10 years older than Lisa Marie and a big fan of Elvis, was using her daughter for positive publicity as he battled allegations of child molestation.

“I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty. The King of Pop was allying himself with the King of Rock & Roll. I didn’t believe he loved her,” Priscilla writes. “Michael was a manipulative man, and I think he had his sights set on her long before she realized it.”

During a walk on a beach in Hawaii, Lisa Marie allegedly turned to her mom and confided, “Michael wants us to have a child.” Priscilla immediately opposed the idea, recommending her daughter take things slow, she writes.

“I didn’t trust his motives. A child would be a proof of virility. And I couldn’t help wondering if he wanted to have Elvis’s grandchild,” she says, adding that Lisa Marie told her the newlyweds did indeed have a physical relationship, but that she “hardly” saw her new husband.

“Michael says that if I don’t want to have a baby, Debbie Rowe will have one with him,” Lisa Marie purportedly told her mom, according to the memoir. “Oh, boy. Big red flag. Thank God, Lisa agreed with me that it was better to wait,” Priscilla writes.