With biographies, gutting is more accepted. Waiting for PriscillaSofia Coppola’s film about Elvis Presley’s girlfriend-wife-widow, which has just been released in theaters to good reviews, I turn to a spoiler voluntary: a documentary about that somewhat toxic relationship, which was then presented in the media as a romantic story and which, with today’s eyes, is very shocking. Is called Elvis & Priscilla: Conditional Love, It is on Prime Video and we cannot rule out that it was designed to get ahead of the film by a few months, without aspiring to compete with it in its ambition.
The interest of Conditional Love It is that it compiles the memories of a series of witnesses of the coexistence between a girl locked up as a teenager in the golden cage of Graceland, Elvis’ mansion in Memphis, and the first great rock star. A genre that he had not created (but people like Chuck Berry, Little Richard or Sister Rosetta Tharpe), but that he brought to the masses with his perfect voice, her beauty, his white skin and the way he moved his hips. These witnesses are members of the Memphis Mafia, as the circle of friends who accompanied him everywhere, fawned over him, worked for him as assistants or bodyguards and (they did not completely succeed) tried to take care of him. Those closest to him speak here, the few who attended his wedding: Lamar Fike, Sonny West, Marty Lacker and the one who considers himself his best friend: Jerry Schilling. Some of these conversations are old recordings because the first three are dead.
Priscilla Ann Beaulieu Wagner was 14 years old, she had lost her father since she was little (a pilot killed in a plane crash) and she had moved too many times with her mother and her stepfather, an air force officer installed at the US military base in Friedberg, Germany. There she was bored and lacked friends when Elvis Presley, at 24, arrived to complete his military service and they met at a party. From what is said here, the rocker was more infatuated than in love with her. When she returned to Los Angeles she convinced the girl’s parents to take her with him. It didn’t take long for her to lock her up in Graceland while she filmed movies in Hollywood: at that time Elvis “had more girlfriends than friends,” the latter say.
She defined herself as “Elvis’s living doll.” The singer wanted to have at his side a virginal teenager whom he would mold to his whim; To let off steam in bed she had others. And the Mafia confirms that they did not consummate their relationship until their wedding night in 1967, after an eight-minute ceremony in Las Vegas. Elvis was pushed into that marriage by his sinister representative, Colonel Parker. He puts it in the musician’s mouth: “They force me to get married”; It is said that that day she cried.
Lisa Marie was born nine months after the wedding: Priscilla didn’t want to get pregnant so soon, but Elvis wouldn’t let her take the pill. Paradoxical, because he had previously introduced her to those other pills (to stay awake, then to sleep) that she abused so much. They also didn’t become very close after becoming parents: the documentary maintains that Elvis was not attracted to any woman who had already been a mother. When he settled in Las Vegas, he didn’t take her with him either. According to his friends, she was the one who was married, while Elvis lived as if he were not. Priscilla fought that loneliness with at least two short-lived relationships, with two teachers, one of dance and the other of karate.
This couple’s relationship was unhealthy from start to finish. At some point, Mafia members say, she wanted to take Elvis away from them, for which she had reasons. However, when Schilling approached Priscilla, asking if he was okay, Elvis would become enraged with jealousy, even though he knew that he was not okay. When she reproached him for her affair with actress Ann-Margret, he told her: “I want a woman who understands that things like this can happen. Are you that woman?” Scenes of violence are also told here, with lamps flying around the bedroom, which the omnipresent friends heard from the other side of the door. And, worst of all, after a long time in which he did not want to touch her, one day he raped her.
They divorced in 1972 but, since image mattered, they left the courthouse holding hands. Elvis’ colleagues are frank in recounting the singer’s plummet, his physical and mental health deteriorating due to his addiction to drugs, until his death in 1977. And yet, they believe that after the divorce they had a better relationship, that now without ties a certain complicity arose. When Elvis died, Priscilla took a step to dedicate herself to managing his legacy. But she did not keep everything she experienced to herself: in 1985 she wrote the autobiography Elvis and me, which brought their misfortunes to light and which is now being turned into a film. Sofía Coppola says that her film does not keep Elvis on a pedestal, but it does not show him as a villain either. That she prefers not to judge him.
The artist was so great, he still is, that his most sinister side escaped us. And it was no secret, you just had to look closely.