Elvis’ Friends Shared 1 Major Difference Between Priscilla Presley and Linda Thompson

After Elvis and Priscilla Presley divorced, he began a relationship with Linda Thompson. These were among the most significant romantic relationships in his life. His bodyguards liked both Priscilla and Thompson, and they got to know them well enough to take note of the differences between them. They said Thompson was more comfortable with Elvis’ lifestyle than Pricilla. 

Elvis’ friends said there was a key difference between Priscilla Presley and Linda Thomspon

Priscilla met Elvis when she was 14 years old and entered into an over-ten-year relationship with him. She moved to Graceland in the early 1960s and quickly began to feel lonely and confined. This feeling grew more intense over the years. Elvis was away from her for weeks at a time and, when he was home, he kept nocturnal hours and liked to stay in the house. She began to feel that she could never grow as a person if she was in the relationship. 

“I was confronted with the harsh realization that living the way I had for so long was very unnatural and detrimental to my wellbeing,” she wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “My relationship to Mike [Stone] had now developed into an affair.” 

In the eyes of Elvis’ entourage, Thompson did not have as big of a problem with Elvis’ lifestyle.

“The average girl couldn’t take Elvis’s lifestyle, particularly now when he stays in his room for a week and two weeks at a time without coming out,” bodyguard Red West said in the book Elvis: What Happened? by Steve Dunleavy. “Linda doesn’t seem to mind. That kind of life didn’t appeal to Priscilla, but Linda seems to take it in her stride.”

They understood why Priscilla didn’t want to live that way

Elvis’ bodyguards were extremely devoted to him, but even they understood why Priscilla had to leave her marriage.

“We knew it was going on when he didn’t even know,” West said. “Now I don’t blame her for leaving Elvis. She had a life that no normal woman could put up with.”

They even helped her keep her affair with Mike Stone quiet. After Priscilla had been gone all day, bodyguard Sonny West warned her that Elvis had been asking questions about her whereabouts.

“I think she saw right then that us guys were pretty loyal to her and weren’t about to go tattletaling,” he said. “She knew that we understood what she had been going through. He wasn’t spending any time with her at all.”

Priscilla Presley allegedly wasn’t a fan of Linda Thompson

According to Thompson, her relationship with Elvis did not see her stuck in the house with him. She said he took her with him everywhere, which allegedly bothered Priscilla. Lisa Marie Presley informed Thompson that Priscilla did not like her.

“My mommy says it’s because when she was married to my daddy, he didn’t take her anywhere, but my daddy takes you everywhere,” Thompson recalled Lisa Marie saying in her book A Little Thing Called Life (via Express). “You are always with my daddy, and my mommy never got to be with my daddy. So that’s why.”