Priscilla Presley visited Elvis in Los Angeles during high school summer vacation. Priscilla’s parents, who weren’t sold on their daughter’s relationship with the older musician, laid out a set of rules for the trip. Almost immediately, Elvis and Priscilla broke them. In order to get away with it, Priscilla had to think of a way to trick her parents.
Priscilla Presley was supposed to write letters to her parents while staying with Elvis
Priscilla and Elvis began a relationship while he was in Germany with the Army. After several months together, though, he returned to the United States. They spoke sporadically on the phone for two years before he invited her to LA to see him. Her father agreed, but only if Elvis and Priscilla followed his rules.
“Once again, Elvis met every one of Dad’s demands,” Priscilla wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “That we wait until I was out of school for the summer, that Elvis send me a first-class round-trip ticket, that he send my parents an exact itinerary of my daily activities for the two weeks I’d be in Los Angeles, that I’d be constantly chaperoned, and that I write my parents every day.”
After just one day, though, Elvis decided to bend the rules. He wanted to take Priscilla to Las Vegas, breaking the set itinerary. As any letter she sent would have a Las Vegas postmark, it seemed unlikely that they’d be able to get away with it. Priscilla quickly thought of a way around this.
“How would I explain Las Vegas postmarks?” she wrote. “I couldn’t. But I could prewrite letters for the time we were gone, number them one through seven, and have Jimmy mail them from Los Angeles daily. My problems were solved! On to Las Vegas!”
This wasn’t the only time Priscilla was dishonest about her relationship with Elvis
Later, Priscilla had to conceal the truth of her relationship with Elvis when her parents visited them. She was living with him, but they were under the impression that they were not sharing a bedroom. This was not the case. Because of this, when her parents insisted on seeing the house, she had to rush to rearrange things.
“I ran into the house in a panic because I knew I’d have to show them around,” she wrote. “I certainly couldn’t tell my parents that I slept with Elvis, and I decided to try to fool them into believing that I had my own room.”
She grabbed as many of her belongings as she could and put them in an employee’s room. She accidentally left one of her shoes out in Elvis’ room, but nobody seemed to notice. If they did, they didn’t mention it.
“Amazingly, the entire evening came off without mishap,” Priscilla wrote. “Although my parents never questioned the story about my own room, I’m sure they never believed it either.”
Her parents were curious about her musician boyfriend
Priscilla was highly protective of her relationship with Elvis. As a result, she felt she had to keep it a secret from her parents.
“I felt their probing was an invasion of my privacy, my personal life, and I gave them guarded answers,” she wrote. “My parents didn’t appreciate my attitude or my defensiveness. They were just showing a natural interest in me, and a concern for my well-being, when they asked how I’d done in school, what kind of grades I’d gotten, and if I’d brought my report card.”
While she loved her parents, she saw them as a threat to her relationship, particularly in the early days. As a result, she did not believe honesty was the best policy when it came to discussing Elvis.
