Elvis and Priscilla Presley's 'Wild' Romance and the True Story Behind “Priscilla” (Exclusive)

Writer-director Sofia Coppola's new movie 'Priscilla' depicts the Presleys' tumultuous relationship

The story of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s romance, depicted in the new movie Priscilla, seems almost too fantastical to be true.

The biggest celebrity on the planet bonded with a shy teen and whisked her away from her parents into his chaotic world. When they met, she was 14, he was 24. He made her the envy of women everywhere. She made him the center of her universe.

“He became my father, husband and very nearly God,” Priscilla explained in her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. Though he had many faults, Priscilla overlooked them — until one day she couldn’t. She was, she wrote, “blinded by love.”

Oscar-winning writer-director Sofia Coppola — who adapted the script from Elvis and Me and consulted Priscilla — shows the complicated dynamic from Priscilla's perspective.

Coppola depicts the bond between the pair but doesn’t shy away from the darkness, including Elvis’s temper and his wandering eye.

Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla opposite Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, calls the Presleys’ relationship “a wild fairy tale that has all these ups and downs.” Here’s a look at key moments from their 14 years together.

Priscilla moved to Graceland as a teen

Elvis met Priscilla Beaulieu in West Germany in 1959, where Priscilla’s stepdad worked as a U.S. Air Force captain. Elvis, who’d been drafted into the U.S. Army in 1957 when he was already a superstar, was stationed nearby.

The two began a then-chaste romance after connecting at a party. “I was more of a listener,” Priscilla said before the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. “Elvis would pour his heart out to me.”

After Elvis was discharged in 1960, he and Priscilla kept in touch by phone for two years until he invited her to visit him in the U.S. She took two trips — which gave her a front-row seat to his over-the-top lifestyle: Vegas trips, popping pills, sleeping all day.

Then he invited her to be with him at Graceland, his mansion in Memphis. After both Elvis and Priscilla pleaded with her reluctant parents, they acquiesced. If they hadn’t, she recalled, “I might never forgive them.”

To ease the Beaulieus’ minds, Priscilla initially lived with Elvis’s father and stepmother, Vernon and Dee, down the road from Graceland but spent nights at the legendary estate anyway.

Related: Sofia Coppola's 'Priscilla' Trailer: See Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi Fall in Love as the Presleys

She became his “doll”

By day Priscilla was a student at the local Immaculate Conception all-girls high school. By night she was Elvis’s pupil.

“He taught me everything: how to dress, how to walk, how to apply makeup and wear my hair, how to behave,” Priscilla wrote in Elvis and Me, later adding, “I was Elvis’s doll, his own living doll.”

Their lavish shopping trips, during which Elvis showered her with gifts, also showed his moody side. According to Priscilla, he liked solid colors only (no prints) and discouraged her from cutting her hair. “When I did something that wasn’t to his liking, I was corrected,” she wrote.

Elvis’s temper led to frightening moments

The movie depicts Elvis’s short fuse, including a scene in which a playful pillow fight turns violent when Elvis — who relied on prescription meds like quaaludes to sleep and Dexedrine to wake up — gets aggressive.

Priscilla has said the incident left her with a black eye, a bruised arm and an unsettling feeling that Elvis had an addiction.

Priscilla was an active participant in bringing the story to life. “There were times we’d be doing different parts of the film and [Coppola] ... would sort of disappear, but she was talking to Priscilla, and they would go through the script,” producer Youree Henry said at the movie’s New York Film Festival premiere in October.

Related: Priscilla PEOPLE Review: Sofia Coppola Explores How Marriage to Elvis Presley Became a Heartbreak Hotel

Their sex life was on Elvis’s terms

Priscilla remains adamant that Elvis never took advantage of her while she was underage. Or even before they were married. “People think, ‘Oh, it was sex.’ No, it wasn’t. We never had sex,” she said in Venice, referring to her teen years with Elvis.

Priscilla wrote in her book that she often pushed to go further with Elvis. But the “Love Me Tender” singer would inevitably pull away and tell her, “Let me decide when it should happen.”

According to Priscilla, they didn’t consummate their relationship until their wedding night on May 1, 1967, when she was 21.

Elvis asked for a separation when she was pregnant

Priscilla quickly got pregnant — which scared her. “I was still uncertain about how my unexpected pregnancy would affect our marriage,” she wrote in Elvis and Me. “This was supposed to be our time alone.”

Elvis had other ideas. When Priscilla was in her third trimester, he said he wanted time apart. Within two days he changed his mind.

Related: Priscilla Presley Is 'So Nervous' for People to See Her Life Story in New Film: I 'Pray That They Get It'

Elvis cheated — and so did Priscilla

Early on in her relationship with Elvis, Priscilla found intimate correspondence between him and actress Anita Wood.

Later the press reported on his affairs with costars like Viva Las Vegas’s Ann-Margret. If Priscilla brought up his infidelity, arguments ensued.

“I always had an eye on him because everyone in the world was after him,” she told PEOPLE in 2021. She was so distraught at one point, she contemplated suicide, she wrote in Elvis and Me.

But as betrayed as she felt, Priscilla had her own affairs with a dance teacher as well as her karate instructor Mike Stone.

Elvis had withdrawn sexually from Priscilla after she gave birth to their only child, Lisa Marie (who died in January at age 54), which frustrated her.

The movie doesn’t depict the brief dalliances, but they were part of a turning point for Priscilla, who was coming in to her own.

She ultimately left Elvis in 1972, five years before his death from cardiac arrest at 42. But she never stopped loving him. Their life together, she told PEOPLE, “was different, but it was ours.”

Priscilla is in theaters now.

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