The Heartbreaking Truth About Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s Love Story

He had a tendency toward excess, as his flamboyant home decor and bespoke wardrobe would later attest, but he was also a mama’s boy with an old-fashioned streak—especially when it came to ladies acting like ladies (even while boys would be boys). The death of his mother, Gladys Presley, on Aug. 14, 1958, when she was only 46 was a huge blow that many close to him said he never got over.

In a first-person account for People in 1985 coinciding with the release of her memoir Elvis and Me, Priscilla recalled being introduced to Elvis at his rental house near the Army base in Bad Nauheim. The rock and roll star asked her, “Well, what have we here? What are you, about a junior or senior in high school?” When she told him she was in ninth grade, he chuckled and said, “Why, you’re just a baby.”

Then he strolled over to the piano and started singing. “I saw Elvis trying to get my attention,” Priscilla remembered. “I noticed that the less response I showed, the more he began singing just for me. I couldn’t believe that Elvis Presley was trying to impress me.”

She was just wearing “a little sailor dress” that night, she later remembered to UPI, because she could still barely believe she was going to meet Elvis.

Priscilla was invited back to his house for another gathering. And another. On that third night, he invited her upstairs to be alone, she recalled to People, assuring her, “I swear I’ll never do anything to harm you. I’ll treat you just like a sister.”