The movies once again have Elvis fever. From the late ‘50s into the ‘60s, the King wasn’t just a Billboard chart-topper. He was a star of the silver screen as well. Those movies tended to be silly junk. (Except when they weren’t. Flaming Star, a mostly music-free 1964 Western by Dirty Harry’s Don Siegel, is a totally solid oater.) Now he’s more respectable. Last year saw Elvis, a plus-sized biopic from the bananas Baz Luhrmann that earned eight Oscar nods and made Austin Butler a star. This year finds the more quiet, subtle Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s film about Presley’s first and only wife.
But what happened to Priscilla Presley after she left Elvis — other than becoming a co-lead in the Naked Gun trilogy, that is? Did she ever remarry?
The answer is, like Elvis himself, nope. She wed the biggest pop star on the planet, then after the divorce in 1973 never did again.
That’s not to say Priscilla Presley never found love again. After leaving Graceland, she quickly rebounded with karate instructor Mike Stone. Alas, that didn’t long. By 1975 the two had also split. Her on-again-off-again relationship with model and actor Michael Edwards — perhaps best known as the older John Connor in the opening of Terminator 2: Judgment Day — had one unfortunate caveat: Years after their split, he published a tell-all memoir in which he confessed to being attracted to Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. She later complained he made “inappropriate” drunken advances on her.
Though they never married, Priscilla had a long-term partnership with Marco Antonio Garcia, aka Marco Garibaldi, a Brazilian screenwriter and computer programmer. They had a son, Navarone, in 1987. At the time she was a cast member on Dallas, and the pregnancy was written into the show. They broke up in 2006.
Priscilla is now in theaters, and if you’re wondering if it distorts the truth, as Lisa Marie felt it did, then take heed that Presley, after some hesitation, gave it her seal of approval.
