Breaking Down the Differences Between “Priscilla” and the Presleys’ Real Life

In the movie, Priscilla lives with her parents in Germany, where her dad, Paul Beaulieu, was based in the Air Force. They let Priscilla first go to Elvis’s house because a fellow member of the Air Force vouches for Elvis and escorts Priscilla there. He asks Priscilla to go to the party after spotting her sitting alone at a restaurant. In real life, Elvis’s friend Currie Grant met Priscilla at a supper club and invited her to the party. He had to use his own Air Force connections to convince Priscilla’s parents to let him go.

After it became clear that Elvis wanted to date Priscilla, her parents put up a fight, and Priscilla remembers them raising complaints about her age – she was 14 when they met – the same way they do in the film. Like in the movie, Elvis – who was 24 – and his father Vernon came over to impress his parents.

When Elvis’s military service ended, she escorted him to the airport to see him off and was even photographed that day (pictured). Like in the movie, they were mobbed by fans, and Elvis’s team told the press Priscilla was just a friend of his. And once Elvis returned to America, he spent long periods of time ignoring her, causing her to be deeply depressed.

When Elvis finally invited Priscilla to come visit, her parents were against her making the trip, but were ultimately convinced, partly because Priscilla was so miserable. As part of the deal, she couldn’t actually stay with Elvis and had to write letters home every day – though the pair worked around that. The movie did change Priscilla’s first trip to America with Elvis however; as Priscilla writes, first she visited him in Los Angeles. She didn’t see Graceland until her second trip. In the movie, she goes to Graceland first.

Priscilla attended Catholic school in Memphis, allowing her to graduate high school – though she had to use Elvis’s fame to do so. In the movie, she cheats off a girl during one of her finals, promising that if the girl helps, she can hang out with Elvis. That scene is lifted right out of Priscilla’s book.

In the movie, when Priscilla comes to visit (and then live with) Elvis, he is using drugs, and he gives some of them to her. After she takes a sleeping pill, she sleeps for multiple days.

The sleeping pill incident is described the same way in the book (though it happens a little later in her and Elvis’s relationship). And in both the book and movie, Elvis gives Priscilla pills to help her stay awake when she’s attending high school (but staying up every night with him). Priscilla writes in her book that Elvis would only wake up in the late afternoon, so she would often get back in bed with him after a day at school.

In “Priscilla,” it’s Elvis’s idea for Priscilla to die her hair black and wear dark makeup, and when he takes her shopping, he has strong ideas about what she should and shouldn’t wear. And Priscilla writes about all of that in her book. Elvis thought black hair went best with blue eyes, so he wanted him and Priscilla to both have it, and he would get mad if she wasn’t wearing enough makeup. The few times she ignored his fashion rules by, for example, wearing a patterned dress, he would be furious.

“At that time I just liked that he was paying attention to me,” Priscilla told the Guardian in 2015. “He was very opinionated on what he wanted: ‘I don’t like you in that color. Brown isn’t good for you. Green looks horrible, it’s a dull color with no spark to it.’ I was a young kid, 16 years old, so I thought: ‘Oh, OK!’ It wasn’t until I got a little older that I started developing things that I liked.”

In the movie, Elvis and Priscilla don’t have sex until they’re married, and that’s also what Priscilla says happened in her memoir. They would sleep together almost every night, but they never moved toward penetrative sex. Even though she often wanted to do it, he would tell her not to and that he preferred her “innocent.”

In 2014’s “Elvis Presley: A Southern Life,” biographer Joel Williamson claims that they were intimate in every sex act but penetrative sex before their wedding.

In “Priscilla,” Priscilla is often stuck at home (first in Germany, and then in Memphis) while Elvis is out and about with other women, some of them famous. In the movie, Priscilla is especially jealous of Elvis’s costar Ann-Margret. Ann-Margret admitted in her own memoir, 1994’s “Ann-Margret: My Story,” that she and Elvis did date for about a year while Priscilla was back at Graceland. Nancy Sinatra also confessed in a 2004 interview with Hot Press that she and Elvis “fell absolutely in love” while Priscilla was pregnant with Lisa Marie, but they didn’t “do anything about it.”

However, in “Elvis and Me,” Priscilla admits she was also once unfaithful to Elvis with her dance instructor and had an emotional affair with her karate instructor. “Priscilla” shows Priscilla practicing karate, but otherwise omits both these men.

Priscilla and Elvis’s marriage, in “Priscilla,” is rarely “good.” While she is pregnant, he tries to leave her before changing his mind, and she is often alone with Lisa Marie. Priscilla describes the same scenes in her memoir and says Elvis didn’t want to have sex with her after she gave birth.

In the years after their wedding, Elvis spent more and more time away from Priscilla and Lisa Marie. When Elvis began his Vegas residency, Lisa Marie was only there sporadically, and she saw lots of evidence that he had other women around, like letters to their house in Palm Springs from women who’d been there.

In her memoir, she describes one night when, angry because she had revealed her own affair to him, he has Priscilla come to his suite and, in her words, “forcefully made love to me.” In “Priscilla,” in that moment Elvis is violent, but does not rape her. In years since, when asked about this incident, Priscilla has not commented and directed people to the book.

In both the memoir and “Priscilla,” she told him she was going to leave him in 1972. They finalized their split in 1973.

Priscilla is clear in her memoir – and in many, many interviews since – that despite their divorce, she still loved Elvis and continues to do so, making Coppola’s decision to use “I Will Always Love You” at the end of the film particularly apt. Both the movie and memoir also end with the divorce (though the beginning of Priscilla’s book addresses the moments after she learned Elvis had died).