Priscilla Presley has revealed that Elvis once asked if she wanted an abortion while she was pregnant with their only child, Lisa Marie, in a new memoir packed with stark confessions.
The 80-year-old former Dallas actress recounts the story in Softly, As I Leave You, on sale Tuesday, and obtained by Page Six.
Presley recalls how she first met Elvis when she was 14 and he was 24 and stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army. They wed in 1967 and quickly discovered she was pregnant.
“Our wedding had meant I could finally come out in the open,” Priscilla writes. “I was so excited. But when I got pregnant on my wedding night, those dreams fell apart. Neither Elvis nor I was ready for a child.”
The young couple, she says, spent weeks in silence, wracked with anxiety. “At my lowest point, I even wondered how I’d feel if I had an accident and miscarried,” she confesses. Then Elvis confronted the issue directly. “He looked at me one day and asked if I wanted to have an abortion. He told me he’d support whatever I wanted. His words were a wake-up call.”
Priscilla broke down in tears. “The enormity of it hit me head-on, and I began to cry. I told him, ‘No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!’”
When Lisa Marie arrived in February 1968, “we fell hopelessly in love with her,” Priscilla writes. But she also says her daughter “inherited Elvis’s vulnerability to opioid addiction and was addicted by the time she left the hospital.”
Priscilla traces Lisa’s struggles through decades of substance abuse. By 2014, she claims, Lisa was taking “up to 80 pills a day” and living in “a tornado of drug-fueled emotions with no relief in sight.” Priscilla temporarily took custody of Lisa’s twins before returning them a year later.
The death of Lisa’s son Benjamin to suicide in 2020 marked “the beginning of the end,” Priscilla writes. By January 2023, Lisa appeared unsteady at the Golden Globes and left early. “I didn’t know it was the last hug,” Priscilla recalls.
Two days later, Lisa suffered cardiac arrest caused by a bowel obstruction linked to bariatric surgery. “I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was gone,” Priscilla writes.
She ends her memoir with a final goodbye: “My little wild child, I love you forever.”
