Priscilla Presley has spent more than six decades in the public eye, and a new photo retrospective captures the arc of that life in a single thread: Elvis Presley, Lisa Marie Presley, Graceland and the appearances that kept drawing attention back to the family. The images range from her teenage goodbye to Elvis in Frankfurt to later moments at concerts, premieres and ceremonies tied to the Presley name.
One of the earliest photographs in the set goes back to March 2, 1960, when Priscilla Beaulieu was 16 and was led away by a military policeman at Frankfurt Airport as she tried to say goodbye to Elvis Presley, who was traveling to America after his military service. Years later, after their marriage in 1967, the images shift to public life in a very different register: Elvis and Priscilla after their wedding in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967, Elvis being fed a mouthful of wedding cake at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, and the couple photographed with their daughter, Lisa Marie, on Feb. 13, 1968.
The retrospective shows how closely Priscilla’s own public identity remained tied to Elvis and to Graceland. On Jan. 16, 1971, she and Elvis stood as he was introduced at a luncheon in Memphis. Decades later, she and Lisa Marie arrived for a debut party at Elvis Presley’s Memphis in the Lansky Bros. building in July 1997, and Priscilla was back in Memphis in 2002 looking over the newly unveiled cover of Elvis’s album of his 31 number one hit records at the 25th anniversary concert at the Pyramid.
That public role did not fade. In 2005, Priscilla and Lisa Marie attended the American Society of Young Musicians’ benefit concert and awards show in Los Angeles, where Lisa Marie was honored as favorite new female rock vocalist. In 2006, Priscilla listened as Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton addressed Elvis fans on the front lawn of Graceland, after the home had already been designated a National Historic Landmark. She also appeared with U.S. President George W. Bush at The Rendezvous in Memphis that June, then later waved at the premiere of Valkyrie in Los Angeles in 2008 and posed with the Memphis Pom Squad during halftime at FedExForum.
The tension running through the images is simple: Priscilla Presley has been both a private witness to Elvis’s life and a public guardian of the legacy that followed his death. In 2009, on what would have been Elvis Presley’s 74th birthday, she introduced Max and Bandit, rescue horses adopted by Graceland, and said Graceland is “a living, breathing home,” adding that she wanted “to keep it the way Elvis left it,” including the barn and horses that were part of life for Elvis. She later re-christened the refurbished river cruise liner American Queen in 2012 as its godmother and visited the Elvis at the 02 exhibition in London in 2014.
The photos make the answer plain. Lisa Marie Presley is one part of the story, but the larger story is Priscilla Presley herself — 81 years old, still linked to the places, people and moments that turned a marriage into a permanent public legacy.
