Elvis’ Friend Coached Sheila Ryan On How to Be the Perfect, ‘Phony’ Girlfriend for Elvis
In the early 1970s, Elvis Presley began dating actor Sheila Ryan. Ryan was significantly younger than Elvis and found the relationship overwhelming. He quickly piled expectations on her when she wasn’t even sure what she wanted out of the relationship. Elvis’ friend eventually began coaching her on how to date the musician. While she followed his instructions, she admitted it made her feel like a fraud.
Elvis’ friend had to coach Sheila Ryan on how to date the musician
Elvis tried to bring romance into his relationship with Ryan, but she found it uncomfortable.
“We would go out on the balcony, and he would sing songs to me, but it was never really romantic for me,” she said in the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “I had no concept of what love was. I was embarrassed by the gifts and wasn’t able to be gracious about it — that was the downfall of our first month together.”
Elvis’ friend, Joe Esposito, took note of this and tried to teach Ryan how to act around the musician.
“Joe liked me being with Elvis,” she explained. “There were women I think that didn’t get in because Joe and the boys didn’t like them. But Joe was saying, ‘Now, Sheila, part of Elvis is giving, and he loves to give, and if you don’t show him some sort of reaction, it’s hard for him.’ So I tried to learn that, you know.”
Ryan said she listened to Esposito, but the behavior did not feel authentic.
“He gave me a car, and I remember going, ‘Oh, God, it’s beautiful, I love it!’ And feeling like such a phony,” she recalled. “I mean, it was me, not him. Here I am, twenty-one years old, and I’ve never owned anything in my life, and this man is giving me a brand new Corvette, and I’m like, ‘Thank you,’ without emotion. There is something wrong there.”
Elvis wanted Sheila Ryan to bend to his will
Ryan felt phony because much of the behavior that Elvis expected from her did not come naturally. When she failed to meet his expectations, he grew angry, even in the earliest stages of their relationship. She did not spend the night in his suite after their first date, which caused a disagreement.
“‘Goddamnit, where are you? Boss is furious. How come you left?'” Esposito asked her on the phone when Elvis woke up. “And I was — half of me knew what was going on, and the other half wanted to be independent. I knew, kind of, that was what he expected: he expected me to be there when he woke up. But I was this little rebellious thing.”
She found it shocking that Elvis could be so angry with her after one date, but she agreed to return to the suite.
She said the relationship was nothing like she’d expected
Elvis had been famous for almost all of Ryan’s life, and she could scarcely believe he was showing interest in her. When they began a relationship, she admitted it wasn’t what she expected.
“It was adolescent — until all of a sudden you graduated into Mother,” she said. “You were expected to take care of him, and basically that’s what the role was — that’s what my role very quickly became: to get him things in the middle of the night. He needed water, he needed pills, he needed Jell-O, he needed to be read to. That was what I did.”
Still, she said she eventually relaxed into the relationship.
“And gradually, I stopped looking at the relationship from the outside and became more relaxed with who he was — I mean, he was a very unusual person, he had unusual circumstances, he was just trying to be comfortable, it wasn’t really at anybody’s expense,” she explained. “You gave, and you got.”
