Forty years after her first memoir, Elvis and Me, revolutionized the modern-day lore surrounding the King of Rock & Roll and his young bride, Priscilla Presley has released a new book that picks up where her last one left off.
In Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, the actress and author known mononymously as Priscilla delves into the life she forged for herself in the decades after she met Elvis at age 14, married him at age 21, and left the music legend in 1972. 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.
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:
1. It was Elvis who first mentioned the possibility of abortion after Priscilla got pregnant
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.
2. Elvis once called while she was in bed with Robert Kardashian
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 leapt 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.”
3. She says Robert Kardashian wanted to marry, and Kim connected them before he died
Presley 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.)
Priscilla claims that when Kardashian was in the hospital, dying from esophageal cancer in 2003, Kim Kardashian called to connect the two one last time. “Robert and I had one last conversation before he died. He was the kindest of men, and I remember him with great affection,” Priscilla writes.
4. She considered Michael Jackson a “manipulative man”
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.”
5. Priscilla counseled Lisa Marie against having a baby with Jackson
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.
Lisa Marie filed for divorce from Jackson on Jan. 18, 1996, less than two years after the marriage. “She had begun to feel like the marriage was a setup. He didn’t want to be with her; he wanted to be with Elvis Presley’s daughter. If he’d wanted to be with her, he wouldn’t have been gone for most of their marriage.”
6. She says Lisa Marie’s bitter custody battle led to their estrangement
Priscilla writes that the year she had legal guardianship of her twin granddaughters, Harper and Finley, was one of “the best and most difficult” of her life. She cherished the time with the eight-year-old girls, but it only hardened Lisa Marie’s stance that she wanted sole custody of the twins amid a bitter divorce. In a “last-ditch” effort to fulfill her goal, Lisa Marie asked Priscilla to sign a deposition supporting her allegations that her estranged husband, Michael Lockwood, was unfit to be around them, Priscilla writes. (The memoir doesn’t specifically list the allegations, but Lockwood reportedly was investigated and cleared of claims that he had inappropriate photos of minors on his computer.)
According to Priscilla, her relationship with Lisa Marie suffered a devastating blow when she refused to sign the deposition. “I told her I couldn’t sign it, for I had never seen Michael behave in the harmful ways she was alleging. Signing it would be perjury,” Priscilla says. “In Lisa’s mind, I was the last hope to prove her charges. The court’s investigations of Michael had failed to reveal any wrongdoing or neglect on his part, so she had exhausted her legal options. Now I was refusing to back her up in court. To her, it was a betrayal.”
7. She suggests Scientology had a negative effect on Lisa Marie
In recounting Lisa Marie’s struggle with addiction, Presley says her daughter’s drug use climbed as high as 80 pills a day during her breakup with Lockwood. Lisa Marie was in a downward spiral, and she desperately needed professional help after stepping away from the Church of Scientology, Priscilla writes.
“Though she had left the church, she retained some of its beliefs, including a distrust of psychologists,” Priscilla says. “She was still opposed to therapy, which would have given her a potential outlet for her feelings.”
Lisa Marie went into rehab in 2016. In a Today show interview in 2018, she recounted her struggles. “I was not happy,” she admitted in the interview. “I have a therapist, and she said, ‘You are a miracle, you really are.’ She said, ‘I don’t know how you’re still alive.’”
