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As Elvis Presley spent more and more time away from home, Priscilla Presley grappled with how to keep their marriage alive. She felt a growing distance between herself and her husband and eventually reached her breaking point. Priscilla revealed the final conversation she had with Elvis after she told him she was leaving.

Priscilla Presley shared the conversation she had with Elvis when she asked for a divorce

In Las Vegas, Elvis called Priscilla up to his suite while she was at a dinner with friends. When she arrived, he “forcefully” had sex with her and told her, “This is how a real man makes love to his woman.” Afterward, she realized that the man she married had become a stranger to her. Though she still loved him, she knew she had to end the marriage. 

She packed her belongings and, when Elvis woke up, told him that their marriage was over.

“‘This is probably the most difficult thing I’m ever going to have to say.’ I took a long pause, hardly able to get the words out,” Priscilla wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “‘I’m leaving.’” 

Priscilla and Elvis Presley stand in the open door of an airplane.
Priscilla and Elvis Presley | Bettmann/Contributor via Getty

At first, Elvis could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“Are you out of your mind?” he asked her. “You have everything any woman can want. You can’t mean that, Sattnin.”

Eventually, though, he realized she was serious. Priscilla hugged him as they both wept. Then, she told him she had to go or she’d “never leave.”

“‘Cilla,’ Elvis called. I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘Maybe another time, another place,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe so,’ I replied, looking back. ‘This just isn’t the time.’ And I walked out the door.”

Priscilla Presley and Elvis had a similar conversation several years later

Though Elvis and Priscilla finalized their divorce in 1973, they remained fixtures in each other’s lives. In 1977, not long before Elvis’ death, he expressed his regrets to Priscilla. He told her that he hadn’t realized how much he valued his family until he lost them. 

“I wondered if there was some way we could make it work,” Priscilla wrote. “‘Maybe it was just too early in life for us, Sattnin,’ I said. ‘Maybe one day there will be a time for us.’”

Elvis agreed, offering a vision of a future with Priscilla.

“‘Yeah,’ Elvis laughed. ‘When I’m seventy and you’re sixty. We’ll both be so old we’ll look really silly, racing around in golf carts.’”

She said that leaving her husband was the hardest thing she’d ever done

Priscilla knew that leaving Elvis was the right decision, but that didn’t make it easy. She still loved him, even though she felt they’d grown apart.

A black and white picture of Priscilla and Elvis Presley holding hands and sitting at a table. She wears a wedding dress and veil and he wears a tuxedo.
Priscilla and Elvis Presley | Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Related

Priscilla Presley Said Elvis’ ‘Greatest Fear’ in Their Relationship Led Him to Pull Away From Her

“It took every bit of strength that I could conjure up to leave because I still loved him, you know?” she said on Larry King Live. “It wasn’t about not liking, it wasn’t about not loving. It was a lifestyle. I was having a daughter. It was not being able to raise a daughter and a lifestyle of bachelors and not only that, they were married — some were married and there was a lot of unethical relationships going on.”

Neither Elvis nor Priscilla ever married again.

How to get help: In the U.S., call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.

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