Priscilla Presley Looked ‘Absolutely Petrified’ on the Day She Married Elvis

Priscilla Presley was with Elvis Presley for years before they married. She was thrilled to marry him but found their wedding day stressful and disorienting. According to the judge at their ceremony, she didn’t hide her distress well. He said Priscilla was visibly terrified on her wedding day.

Priscilla Presley looked incredibly nervous on the day she married Elvis

To avoid media attention, Elvis and Priscilla had a small, rushed wedding in Las Vegas. Both members of the couple were incredibly nervous ahead of their ceremony.

“My pre-ceremony meeting with Elvis was probably the most impressive part of the whole experience,” Judge David Zenoff said, per the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. “I was simply amazed by the boy’s modesty. He was low-key, handsome as a picture, very respectful and very intense … and so nervous he was almost bawling.”

Zenoff said Priscilla seemed even more apprehensive. She couldn’t even speak around her nerves.

“Then I was taken over to meet Priscilla,” he said. “She was absolutely petrified. She couldn’t open her mouth — just stood there staring at me and nodding a little bit when I explained things to her.”

Priscilla admitted she felt overwhelmed on her wedding day

Priscilla did not deny this. She wholly admitted that she’d been incredibly nervous throughout the ceremony.

“We were both so nervous,” she said. “I don’t think either of us was aware of who was there and who was not.”

Because of this, she found her wedding day disappointing. The day went by too quickly, and not all their loved ones could attend.

“Elvis and I followed the Colonel’s plans, but as we raced through the day, we both thought that if we had to do it over again, we would have given ourselves more time,” she wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “We were particularly upset at the way our friends and relatives ended up being shuffled around. The Colonel even told some of the boys that the room was too small to hold most of them and their wives, and that there wasn’t time to change to a bigger room.”

One of Elvis’ friends was so upset that he didn’t score an invite to the wedding that he refused to attend a later reception at Graceland.

The marriage between Priscilla and Elvis Presley fell apart

Not long after Elvis and Priscilla married, the cracks in their relationship began to show. She quickly became pregnant, and he began to treat her differently. He became practically unrecognizable to her after she gave birth.

“Now I was a mother and he was uncertain how to treat me,” she wrote. “He had mentioned before we were married that he had never been able to make love to a woman who’d had a child.”

Suddenly, Elvis did not want Priscilla joining him on his long stretches away from home. She grew increasingly worried about his infidelity and eventually began affairs of her own. The couple divorced in 1973.