Elvis Presley’s Girlfriend Said He Was ‘Furious’ He Couldn’t Control Her After Just 1 Date
Elvis Presley met Sheila Ryan in the early 1970s and immediately expected her to be his girlfriend. He had recently ended a relationship with Linda Thompson and threw himself into the romance with Ryan. She explained that after just one day of knowing each other, he began making demands of her. She found it shocking that he could be furious with her for not listening to him when they barely knew each other.
Elvis Presley wanted to control his girlfriend immediately after they met
Elvis met Ryan for the first time in his Las Vegas suite between shows. She found it unbelievably bizarre that she was spending time with Elvis Presley. She said the whole thing felt like an out-of-body experience until Elvis fell asleep.
“[H]e fell asleep,” she said, per the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “I don’t know if he gave me pajamas, but we certainly didn’t come close to having sex — it wasn’t that kind of thing, it was just getting to know him. But I still was expected to stay the night, which I didn’t want to do.”
So, Ryan waited until Elvis was asleep and slipped out. The next day, she returned home from a shopping trip to a call from Elvis’ road manager, Joe Esposito.
“‘Goddamnit, where are you? Boss is furious. How come you left?'” Esposito asked her. “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.”
Esposito angrily insisted that she return to Elvis’ suite. Ryan couldn’t believe that Elvis was angry with her when they hardly knew each other.
“Joe is furious: ‘You better get back here right away — ‘Here I’d met this man once, and he’s already furious with me,” she said. “But I went back, and he was having his breakfast, and he was irritated and I was quiet — I was always very quiet, just kind of took it all in.”
Elvis Presley’s girlfriend said she chose not to fight with him
Once Ryan returned to the suite, Elvis got to work shaping her into his ideal woman. The night before, he’d made a comment about the fact that she was wearing pants. He bought her an entire new wardrobe to prevent this in the future. Though the clothes were for her, she had little say in what he purchased.
“I would go in and try something on, and if he liked it, he’d get it, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t,” she said. “I was kind of like, ‘What’s the matter with my clothes?’ and he was very gentle in saying, ‘Nothing, they’re fine, but you’re my girl, you got to go into this place, and people will be looking, and I’d like you to look a certain way, is that okay?’ And, you know, I guess it was okay, kind of.”
He admitted to another girlfriend that he had tried to ‘train’ her
This was Elvis’ typical routine: when he met women, he wanted to mold them. When his girlfriend, Kathy Westmoreland, said she wanted to end their relationship, he grew irate about the time he had put in to “train” her.
“Does that mean I have to get someone else, train them just like I want them?” he asked her.
Westmoreland could hardly believe what she was hearing.
“Am I some kind of dog or puppy that you housebreak?” she asked him. “I’m a woman, a human being … You will just have to find yourself another Gladys.”
