Elvis’ Girlfriend Said Romantic Relationships With Him Were ‘Adolescent’ Until He Expected You to Become His Mother

Elvis Presley’s wife, girlfriend, and relative all spoke about the musician’s desire to have them treat him like a child. He had an extremely close relationship with his mother and, after her death, seemed to want the women in his life to fill her role. His girlfriend, Sheila Ryan, said that their relationship had almost felt adolescent in its innocence until he started asking her to baby him.

Elvis’ girlfriend said he wanted her to treat him like a child

Just one day after meeting Ryan, Elvis bought her a new wardrobe and told her that he saw her as his girlfriend. They began spending time together, and Ryan said she found it surprising that he was so innocent.

“Then, I spent a couple of nights with him, and, you know, the sexual thing was never a big deal to him, you would think it was, but it wasn’t,” she said, per the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “It was very unimportant — I mean, we had sex, but what he liked best was the petting, the kissing.”

She said it was almost as if they had a teenage romance. That was, at least, until he began expecting her to behave like his mother.

“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.”

Elvis’ girlfriend said he still tried to be romantic, but she found that awkward

Though Elvis seemed to want a mother and nurse out of his relationships, he still made room for romance. 

“There was still part of the relationship that was romantic, I suppose, for him — he was into the romance, you know,” Ryan said. “We would go out on the balcony, and he would sing songs to me, but it was never really romantic for me.”

She said that she found his excessive gift-giving a bit awkward. She was in her early twenties and felt uncomfortable with how quickly the relationship grew serious.

“I had no concept of what love was,” she said, “I was embarrassed by the gifts and wasn’t able to be gracious about it — that was the downfall of our first month together.”

Priscilla Presley said she loved to baby Elvis

Before Elvis began a relationship with Ryan, he relied on Priscilla Presley to baby him. She said she was happy to do this.

“I loved babying Elvis,” she wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “He had a little boy quality that could bring out the mother instinct in any woman, a beguiling way of seeming utterly dependent. It was this aspect of his charm that made me want to hold him, shower him with affection, protect him, fight for him, and yes, even die for him.”

She made sure cooks prepared his food to his liking, and that Graceland was comfortable for him.

“Anything I could think of doing for him, I did,” she wrote. “I made sure Graceland was always warm and inviting, with the lights turned low, as he preferred them, the temperature in his bedroom set to his exact desire (freezing), and the kitchen filled with the aroma of his favorite meals.”