In biographies, evisceration is more acceptable. While I wait for Priscilla, Sofia Coppola's film about Elvis Presley's girlfriend-wife-widow, which has just been released to good reviews, I resort to a voluntary spoiler: a documentary about this somewhat toxic relationship, which was then presented in the cinema Media as a romantic story, which is very frightening from today's perspective. The film is called “Elvis & Priscilla: Conditional Love”, is streaming on Prime Video and we cannot rule out that it was designed to be a few months ahead of the film without wanting to compete with it in its ambitions.
The interesting thing about Conditional Love is that it brings together the memories of a number of witnesses to the coexistence between a girl who, as a teenager, was locked in the golden cage of Graceland, Elvis' mansion in Memphis, and rock music's first great star. A genre that he didn't create himself (but people like Chuck Berry, Little Richard or Sister Rosetta Tharpe), but that he broadened with his perfect voice, his beauty, his white skin and the way he moved his hips made accessible to the public. . These witnesses were members of the Memphis Mafia, as the circle of friends was called, who accompanied him everywhere, flattered him, worked for him as assistants or bodyguards, and (not entirely successfully) tried to look after him. Here speak those closest to him, the few who attended his wedding: Lamar Fike, Sonny West, Marty Lacker and the one considered his best friend: Jerry Schilling. Some of these conversations are old recordings, as the first three no longer exist.
Priscilla Ann Beaulieu Wagner was 14 years old, she had lost her father since she was little (by a pilot killed in a plane crash), and she had moved too often with her mother and her stepfather, an army officer at the US military base in Friedberg , Germany. There he was bored and lacking friends when Elvis Presley arrived at the age of 24 to do his military service and they met at a party. From what is said here, the rocker was more in love with her than in love. When he returned to Los Angeles, he convinced the girl's parents to take her with him. It wasn't long before he locked her up in Graceland while she was making films in Hollywood: Elvis had “more girlfriends than boyfriends” back then, the latter say.
She defined herself as “Elvis' living doll.” The singer wanted to have a virginal teenager at his side that he could mold as he wished; He had others to let off steam in bed. And the Mafia confirms their relationship was only consummated on their wedding night in 1967, after an eight-minute ceremony in Las Vegas. Elvis was pressured into this marriage by his sinister representative, Colonel Parker. The musician is told: “You are forcing me to get married”; It is said that he cried that day.
Lisa Marie was born nine months after the wedding: Priscilla didn't want to get pregnant so quickly, but Elvis wouldn't let her take the pill. Paradoxical, because before he incorporated it into the other pills (to stay awake, then to sleep) that he so often abused. They also didn't become very close after becoming parents: the documentary claims that Elvis wasn't attracted to any woman who was already a mother. When he settled in Las Vegas, he didn't take it with him either. According to her friends, she was the one who was married while Elvis lived as if he wasn't. Priscilla combated this loneliness with at least two short-lived relationships, with two teachers, one for dance and one for 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 to inquire if she was okay, Elvis became enraged with jealousy, even though he knew she was not well. When she accused him of his affair with actress Ann-Margret, he said to her: “I want a woman who understands that something like this can happen.” Are you that woman?†. There are scenes of violence here too, with lamps flying around in the bedroom, which the omnipresent friends can hear from the other side of the door. And the worst thing was that one day he raped her after not wanting to touch her for a long time.
They divorced in 1972, but with their image at stake, they left the courthouse holding hands. Elvis' companions openly recount the singer's downward spiral, as his physical and mental health deteriorated due to his drug addiction until his death in 1977. And yet they believe that after the divorce they had a better relationship and without ties a certain complicity arose. When Elvis died, Priscilla took the step to dedicate herself to managing his legacy. But he didn't keep everything he experienced to himself: in 1985 he wrote the autobiography “Elvis and I”, which brought his strokes of fate to light and is now being made into a film. Sofía Coppola says her film doesn't keep Elvis on a pedestal, but doesn't show him as a villain either. Who would rather not judge him?
The artist was, and still is, so great that we missed his darkest side. And it wasn't a secret, you just had to look closely.
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