WHY DID PRISCILLA PRESLEY leave Elvis? Did the 14-year-old girl he fell in love with when he was 24 realize as she grew into a woman that they had little in common except for their daughter Lisa Marie who was born February 1, 1968, exactly nine months after their wedding.
Four years later, on February 23, 1972, having endured Elvis’ multiple affairs, most notably with Ann-Margaret, and her own affair with her karate instructor, Priscilla left the marriage.
In Sofia Coppola’s new film Priscilla, there is a scene in which Elvis listens to some subpar demo records in his home office and then asks Priscilla her opinion. She’s not impressed.
Elvis’ hair-trigger temper explodes, and he flings a chair at her, hitting a wall barely inches from her face.
Priscilla wrote about the incident in her 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me” on which Coppola based her film. But according to Coppola, when she and Priscilla discussed the incident for adaptation into the screenplay, Presley was insistent that Elvis “didn’t ever throw a chair at me. It was at the wall next to me.”
In publicity interviews promoting the film, Coppola repeats Priscilla’s insistence that Elvis
didn’t actually try to hurt his wife, “but he lost his temper.”
“A lot of the movie you’re in his more gentle, more vulnerable side,” Coppola explains. “We want it to feel like you’re always in Priscilla’s point of view, and it to be shocking when someone’s mood shifts like that.”
Marriages and romantic relationships, of course, are always complicated and dicey. And careers and lasting reputations and legacies are often at stake, for men today especially, at just the mention of domestic violence and abuse.
So the idea of Elvis losing his cool and hurling a chair that just misses his wife would seem to be a damning indictment on its own.
And Elvis did have a famous temper, according to numerous friends and sources, and even Priscilla herself as she revealed the challenges — including his temper — that her marriage to Elvis had to endure in its six years.
“If he saw somebody he didn’t like on the TV, he’d get his gun out and blow it up,” Priscilla told People magazine. “Then he would tell his daddy to go get another TV.”
“When he was angry, it was like the roar of thunder,” she wrote in her memoir. “No one could challenge his biting words. We could only wait until the storm passed. When Elvis calmed down, he made excuses — he hadn’t had enough sleep, he had too much sleep, or he hadn’t had his morning coffee yet.”
So what does Priscilla have to say in her memoir about the chair throwing incident?
“Once, we were going through a stack of demo records for an RCA soundtrack album, and his distaste for each song grew increasingly apparent,” she writes. “Finally, he found one that held his attention and asked me what I thought. I truly thought our relationship had developed to where I could tell him my honest opinion.”
“‘I don’t really like it,’ I said.”
“‘What do you mean, you don’t like it?’”
“‘I don’t know. There’s just something about it, a catchiness that’s missing.’”
“To my horror, a chair came hurtling toward me. I moved out of the way just in time, but there were stacks of records piled on it, and one of them flew off and hit me in the face. Within seconds, he had me in his arms, apologizing frantically.”
Tony Castro, the former award winning Los Angeles columnist and author of CHICANO POWER (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. CHICANO POWER will be republished in a 50th anniversary edition in 2024. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
