Disconcerting Stories From Elvis Presley’s Personal Life

One of the first documented times Elvis hit on a young girl was in 1956. Jackie Rowland was 14 to Elvis’s 21, and Jackie’s parents discovered the pair in a side room backstage at one of his shows. When Elvis requested to take Jackie to a bar, her mother told him, “My little girl is under-age and she is coming home with me.”

Another woman, Frances Forbes, says that she used to hang around Elvis’s house when she was 13 years old. Elvis didn’t notice her then, but as soon as she turned 14, he became interested. Forbes says “[14] was a magical age with Elvis. It really was.” Elvis invited Forbes, along with two other 14-year-old girls, to pajama parties in his house, during which he taught the girls to apply makeup and tickled and kissed them. Elvis requested more young girls, and his manager delivered. One night, the singer removed a group of girls’ clothing, kissed and fondled them, and then fell asleep with them in his arms. Another night, Elvis requested that the girls engage in mud wrestling while wearing white underwear.

“He was fascinated with the idea of real young teenage girls. It scared the hell out of all of us,” said Lamar Fike, a former member of Elvis’s entourage. Two years after his and Priscilla’s divorce, when he was 39, he began seeing Reeca Smith, a 14-year-old friend of his stepbrother.

Cybill Shepherd had a brief affair with Elvis, and she said that the sex was mediocre. In Elvis: A Southern Life, Williamson writes of Shepherd’s recounted experience, “He was a great kisser and very sweet, but not the stud she had expected. She ascribed the difficulty to the drugs he was taking. “It was hard for him to be a natural man,’ she said. In her 2000 memoir, Shepherd wrote that she taught Elvis some new sexual techniques, but that in the end, she couldn’t handle his drug use.

Additionally, Rebel Without A Cause star Natalie Wood reportedly stormed out of Presley’s bedroom 20 minutes after he wooed her, asking his entourage, “What’s the matter with your boss? He’s all hands and no action. I thought he was supposed to be king of the sack, but he doesn’t want to do it with me.” Wood also reportedly told her sister, “He can sing, but he can’t do much else.”

Pageant girl Ginger Alden entered into a relationship with Elvis Presley when she was 20 and he was 41, but she reportedly met him much earlier in her life. When she was five years old, her father worked in Army public relations, and she claims it was through him that she first met Elvis.

She and her sister Terry, a fellow Tennessee beauty queen, both met with Presley as potential partners, and it was Ginger who impressed him the most. Terry lost Elvis’s affections after she easily beat him in an arm wrestling contest. He had hoped to start a new life with Ginger, but they had a tumultuous relationship, and Elvis was abusive – he once fired shots over her car as she drove away after a fight. Elvis also asked an aide to let the air out of Ginger’s tires so she couldn’t leave, and he threatened to lock her inside the gates of Graceland.

Elvis and Priscilla often role-played in the bedroom. According to Priscilla and others close to the couple, Elvis also liked to watch Priscilla with other women: “At times, Elvis introduced another girl into the sex scene in his bedroom. In this play, Elvis had Priscilla and the girl pretend to make love while he watched, filmed, and sometimes joined in.”

Elvis gave Priscilla amphetamines, to which he was addicted, to keep her awake during their late-night sex sessions. The pair used a Polaroid camera to photograph their escapades. Elvis kept the images in a silver suitcase, which was delivered to Priscilla after his death.

When Priscilla announced to Elvis that she was no longer in love with him and had a new beau, karate champ Mike Stone, Elvis became extremely jealous. Priscilla wrote, “He grabbed me and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he’d ever made love to me before.”

He told her, “This is how a real man makes love to his woman.”

Three of Elvis’s disgruntled security guards wrote a tell-all book titled Elvis: What Happened? after they were fired. In it, they claimed that Elvis seduced a 17-year-old girl who overdosed in his Palm Springs home. She suffered permanent brain damage but refused to sue out of loyalty to the singer. In another story, Elvis threw a pool cue at a girl who interrupted his game, causing serious damage to her chest.

Elvis also allegedly hosted parties that often involved sex between attendees and dancers. He installed two-way mirrors in his bathrooms to watch couples have sex and to see women undress.

Elvis placed a lot of value on virginity. His preference for young women was widely known, but he wasn’t quite the sex fiend that many assumed. When he first met Priscilla, she was 14 years old and still a virgin. Although fellow military officers saw him take her up to his room where they stayed until the early hours of the morning, he apparently did not consummate the relationship that night. In fact, it took him quite a while, with a lot of insistence from Priscilla, to have sex with her.

Joel Williamson, author of Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, wrote, “He made love to her in every way short of penetration. It was as if Priscilla’s virginity was another thing that Elvis strangely and sorely needed to maintain.

Elvis’s marriage to Priscilla was fraught from the beginning. Those close to him claim that he never wanted to get married, but was pressured into it by his manager and Priscilla’s parents.

With regard to the conception of their daughter, Lisa Marie, former entourage member Lamar Fike has said Elvis “didn’t pull out in time.” According to an Elvis biographer, both Priscilla and Elvis loved their daughter, but their marriage fell apart completely after she was born – Elvis flatly refused to sleep with Priscilla after she became pregnant, and many speculate that it was because her pregnancy became a physical representation that she was no longer a virgin.

Elvis led a very complicated love life, which isn’t all that surprising considering how many young women were enamored with him. He publicly dated his first serious girlfriend, Anita Wood, for several years.

Although they had a serious relationship, it wasn’t strong enough to survive his introduction to Priscilla Beaulieu while he was stationed in Germany. Wood overhead Elvis telling his father he was torn between her and Priscilla, and she decided to end the relationship.

During his and Priscilla’s marriage, Elvis was dating five women. One was Viva Las Vegas costar Ann-Margret Olsson; when Priscilla found out about the relationship, she reportedly “picked up a flower vase and threw it across the room.” Priscilla, in her own words, began to style her hair like Ann-Margret in an attempt to emulate her and win back Elvis’s affections.

Although Elvis was famous for both his music and his highly sexualized persona, his actual performance in the bedroom was reportedly somewhat divergent from his public image. According to some sources, he was the “King of Foreplay,” often wooing women into his bed without fully engaging in sexual intercourse.

Elvis’s relationship with his mother, Gladys Presley, may have set him up for an emotionally stunted adulthood. It began the moment he was born when his twin, Jesse, was stillborn. After the tragic loss of one son, Gladys developed a strong bond with her only child. They even had a secret language that continued into adulthood. It included terms like “iddytream,” which meant ice cream, and “butch,” which meant “milk.”

Gladys Presley passed away from hepatitis at only 46 years old; Elvis, 23, was so upset he tried to jump into her grave.