When director Sofia Coppola picked up the book Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N’ Roll, she was expecting a “juicy read” about the couple’s highly publicized relationship. Instead, Coppola found herself “very impressed and touched” by Priscilla’s story and calls it “an unexpected” discovery.
In the 1985 memoir, Priscilla Beulieu Presley and co-author Sandra Harmon detail Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis when she was just 14, their subsequent marriage, affairs, divorce, and the bond she shared with the legend.
The book became a New York Times bestseller, and it served as inspiration for Coppola’s 2023 motion picture Priscilla.
More: Sofia Coppola talks ‘Priscilla’ with Elvis Mitchell
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
I really love [Elvis and Me] because I wasn't expecting it to be so moving and beautiful. I was expecting sort of a fun, juicy read about [Prisicilla Presley’s] story.
It was written in the ‘80s, looking back at her growing up, and I had no idea that she had been in high school when she lived in Graceland. Just imagine going to Catholic school during the day and living in Graceland with Elvis in the ‘60s, and just everything that she went through that we knew so little about.
It was really a discovery. [Priscilla] talks about it in such vivid detail about everything she went through. And to finally find her own way and strength, to go out on her own, must have been so hard, especially in that era, in the ‘70s, being married to a powerful man and without any income of her own. It was very unusual then to do that, so I was really impressed and touched by her story.
There's so many details that really struck me, that she saw as symbolizing what he was going through, or just that said so much that she must have intuitively known which moments to include.
There was one scene where, I think it was an early script and we had to trim it, but Lisa Marie [Presley] was a toddler, and she's playing with spinach at the dinner table and making a mess and squeezing it through her fingers, and Elvis asked the nanny to bring her to the kitchen. Lisa always describes him as a loving father who adored her, but the reality of the mess of kids didn't fit into his world, which was so curated. It just said so much about going there and getting in the muck in a way. It said a lot to me about how reality affected him at that stage.
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‘Elvis and Me’ book cover. Courtesy of Penguin Random House