The Women Who Loved Elvis

Although a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu refused to shell out a quarter to join the Elvis fan club, she admittedly adored “Blue Suede Shoes” before she become the love of its singer’s life. When the two finally met in 1959—Priscilla’s Air Force captain father was stationed in Germany along with Elvis—the King was still mourning the loss of his mother. But he was smitten from the moment he laid eyes on his future child bride, who bore a resemblance to his late mother. As recounted in Let’s Play House, Presley reportedly told friends he’d “been looking for someone like that all of his life.” Priscilla eventually moved to Graceland and married Presley in 1967 at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. But six and a half years of drug use, affairs, and one baby girl later, their rock 'n' roll marriage ended in divorce in 1973.

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Presley’s affair with Ann-Margret was one of his most serious outside of his marriage to Priscilla, leading a friend of the singer to say, “Ann-Margret was really the love of his life.” The two connected immediately after meeting on the set of Viva Las Vegas and the actress later wrote about the relationship in her memoir Ann-Margret: My Story, saying “It was a very strong relationship, very intense.” Though it was widely known that Elvis at one point presented her with a round, pink bed as a gift, Ann-Margret was notoriously tight-lipped on the details of their sex life, and once said in an interview, “he trusted me, and I do not want to betray his trust even in death.” The couple eventually split when Elvis chose to stay with Priscilla, reportedly worried that his ego would clash with the redheaded vixen, who was dubbed by many “the female Elvis.”

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Not all of Presley’s exes were as discreet as Ann-Margret; Cybill Shepherd went very public with the details of her 1972 affair with the singer in interviews and in her book Cybill Disobedience. Though she is quoted as calling him “a wonderful lover, very sexy,” the former Miss Teenage Memphis famously claimed that she taught Presley about oral sex. (Though the King’s inner circle laughed off this claim.) Like other women he was involved with, Shepherd says she was pressured to take the same cocktail of sleeping pills Presley took every night and told Larry King, “It could never have worked with Elvis and I, because I saw the drug use in Las Vegas.”

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Natalie Wood was one of many women to publicly criticize Presley for his sub-par sexual technique, and once stormed out of his bedroom complaining that he was “all hands and no action.” The two met after Presley invited her to visit him on the set of Love Me Tender in 1956, and after disappearing into a back room together at a party, Wood shouted in front of the other guests, “I thought he was supposed to be the king of the sack! But he doesn’t want to screw me!” Even so the two later went on G-rated dates and Wood said, “It was like having the date that I never had in high school. I thought it was really wild!” Presley was equally surprised by Wood’s wild-child ways, eventually giving her the nickname “Mad Nat.” By all accounts, Wood was more infatuated than Presley, who continued to date several other women throughout the relationship.

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Years after their brief 1971 relationship, actress Peggy Lipton joined the long list of women who took to their memoirs to talk about the King. In her 2005 autobiography Breathing Out, Lipton discussed her sex life (or lack thereof) with Presley, saying “He kissed like a god, but that was about it. He didn’t feel like a man next to me—more like a boy who’d never matured.” Due to his drug use, the actress said that Presley was “virtually impotent” around her, but added that she found him “smart and considerably savvy, despite his hillbilly ways.” In spite of rumored tensions over her devotion to Scientology, it was reportedly Lipton who broke off the relationship after Presley woke up in the middle of the night and vomited dozens of pills on himself.

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Elvis was anything but a hound dog when he met June Juanico after one of his early concerts in Biloxi in 1955. The man who would be the King eyed the then-17-year-old Juanico in a crowd full of screaming female fans, asking her to show him around her hometown. That night, the two shared their first kiss—“nothing too sloppy… a little pecking here and there, a nibble, and then it serious bite,” she recalls in Let’s Play House. The 18-year-old Juanico eventually took a trip to Memphis where she reunited with Presley and the two became inseparable, matching motorcycle hats and all. But as his fame rose, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker suggested Elvis be seen with a leggy Las Vegas showgirl instead of the girl next door. Juanico stopped seeing Presley in 1956, but couldn’t help her lifelong feelings. “I have just never been able to stop loving Elvis,” Juanico, now a grandmother, told Ladies Home Journal of their never-consummated relationship.

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Presley first eyed the tiny 19-year-old blonde on Wink Martindale’s WHBQ Top 10 Dance Party in July 1957 and close friend George Klein said he could get him an introduction. A few days later, the King went on his first date with his soon-to-be serious girlfriend. The Tennessee-born teenager was raised by strict Southern parents who didn’t allow her to date, but she couldn’t turn down “absolutely the best-looking man I’ve ever seen,” she recalls in Let’s Play House. They headed to Graceland, where he introduced Wood to his parents. Though Wood rebuffed his initial moves in the bedroom, his mother, Gladys, told her son not to let Wood get away. King showered Wood with extravagant gifts like a diamond ring and a car. Though he was seen with other women, Presley convinced Wood that those were “just publicity stunts… Elvis could make you believe anything,” she recalls. But when she overheard Presley discussing deciding between her and Priscilla in the summer of 1962, she made that decision easy. “I’m going to leave,” she told the King.

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Restaurant critic Gael Greene had a taste for something other than food in 1956 when the then-21-year-old reporter for United Press in Detroit met Elvis. Donning a black shantung dress, patent leather pumps, and “little white kid gloves,” Greene wrote in her 2006 memoir, Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess. Though she was at his hotel to interview him, their relationship reportedly moved from professional to sexual when Presley led her to his bed, with fans chanting “We want Elvis” 24 floors below. “I don’t remember the essential details,” Greene wrote. “It was certainly good enough.” What Greene remembers most from their roll in the sheets was that afterward, he asked her to call room service and order him a fried-egg sandwich. “At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet,” she writes. And now she has a memento to remind of that fateful night. “Love the friend who sent me this dish towel embroidered ‘Elvis Parsley,’” she tweeted in July.

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Presley met Anne Helm on the beachfront set of their film Follow That Dream. Though he was also reportedly seeing Southern belle Joanna Moore at the time, the voluptuous Helm was more down to earth, at times joining in the King’s poker games. “I really fell for Elvis, I mean, who wouldn’t?” Helm admitted in Let’s Play House. “We did have a romance, and it was quite wonderful.” The Toronto-born actress recalls writing poetry about her new leading man during the day, while at night, they would drive around in his Cadillac and listen to music before winding up in bed. “He really liked sex,” Helm said of their time filming together. Though the pair continued seeing each other, one night, Presley offended the young actress, who then closed the piano he was sitting at on his hands. Helm says she apologized for injuring the King and purchased a big rubber thumb as a gag gift the next day. But her effort was moot and their tryst was over. “I never heard from him again,” she says of her walk down Lonely Street.

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While on the set of television detective series Hawaiian Eye, 23-year-old Connie Stevens she was told she had a phone call from none other than Elvis Presley. Though the young star didn’t believe it, the King had reportedly seen her on the show and allegedly invited her to a party. He vowed to come to her house and pick her up personally. Stevens admitted, “I knew this was a fellow who could break your heart,” according to Let’s Play House, but she found him irresistible. “He was just so beautiful.” The pair dated on-and-off for two years at the height of his fame in the early 1960s when Kid Galahad was released and the paranoid icon felt trapped by his fame. While Stevens calls Elvis “one of the loves of my life,” she could not handle being one of many notches on Presley’s bedpost and a member of the entourage he brought with him everywhere. “I knew it was never to be,” she says.

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Though she was only 5 years old when she first met her future fiancé Elvis, Ginger Alden quickly caught the King’s eye. Her father had been Presley’s induction officer when he joined the Army in 1958 and three years later, Alden and her family were invited to join the King at an amusement park, where she rode with Presley on a roller coaster. Alden was reintroduced to Elvis at 20 and the smitten singer took her on tour with him to Las Vegas in December 1976 and proposed soon thereafter. Though he allegedly had plans to make things final in Graceland and would introduce her at public events, a marriage never came to fruition. On August 16, after a sleepless night of racquetball, stress about his upcoming tour, and a Christmas wedding discussion, Alden found her 42-year-old fiancé’s lifeless body on the floor of Graceland’s master bathroom. Though the King’s fans will forever remember Alden as the woman who let their idol die, the then-21-year-old went on to become a model and actress.

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Beauty queen Linda Thompson is believed to be the last woman Elvis ever slept with. Six months after Priscilla left Presley, the two began dating. Though the 22-year-old Memphis-born Miss Tennessee was a virgin when they began seeing each other, they reportedly had “marathon love-making sessions in Vegas hotel rooms,” according to The Observer. Thompson moved to Graceland in August 1972, where she stayed on Presley’s arm for four and a half years until the relationship turned sexless and cold. “There was a lot of heartache,” she later admitted. “And he exhibited a lot of self-destructive behavior, which was very difficult for me, you know, watching someone I loved so much destroy himself.” In 1976, Thompson decided she could no longer bear witness to the destruction and left. “The last time I saw him alive,” she told Larry King “he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I want you to know something, honey, before you leave. No matter what you ever hear, no matter what everybody ever tells you, I just want you to know that I love you.’”

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The Women Who Loved Elvis

In honor of the King’s 75th birthday, an exclusive excerpt from Alanna Nash’s new biography about his famous sleepover parties. From Cybill Shepherd to Natalie Wood, VIEW OUR GALLERY of Elvis’ legendary loves.