10 Famous Women You Totally Forgot Elvis Dated
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It’s no secret that Elvis Presley was extremely handsome and that girls and women of all ages fell head over heels for him as soon as he became a famous musician. Heck, the “Can’t Help Falling in Love” artist still makes his fans swoon decades after his death in 1977.
From his music to his movies to the way he scandalously swayed those hips, Elvis was captivating audiences (but mainly women). It’s really no surprise that over the course of the singer’s unfortunately short career, Elvis dated a lot of women, including some extremely famous faces. One might even call him the George Clooney of the 1950s and 1960s.
Decades after Elvis was discovered dead in his bathroom at Graceland at just 42-years-old, but many still dub him a “ladies man,” and today, may have called him out for his troubling fondness of underage women.
But we’re taking a look back at his love life. The King’s romances were a huge part of his life and identity, and he dated more famous women than you may have known, so away we go.
A version of this story originally appeared in August 2017.
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Priscilla Presley
How could anyone forget that Priscilla Presley, née Beaulieu, was once married to the “Jailhouse Rock” singer?
At just 21, Priscilla tied the knot with Elvis, who was 32 at the time. Their wedding took place on May 1, 1967, and they divorced in 1973. They also had one daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.
Before they made things official by saying “I do,” they dated for about eight years. When they first met, while Elvis was in the Army, Priscilla was only 14.
In December 2014, Priscilla, now 72, opened up to the Daily Mirror about her former husband and said, “I just thought how he was the real deal. Elvis wasn’t putting on any pretence; he never did. What you saw with him is what you got. Not everyone knows that. People know his music, but they don’t necessarily know the real Elvis. I want the world to know he was a lovely, loyal man.”
Rita Moreno
Back in 1961, Rita Moreno and Elvis Presley dated, but it was right after Moreno found out Marlon Brando cheated on her. So she was looking to get back at Brando.
“I’m going with Marlon Brando,” Moreno said on Late Night With Seth Meyers via UsMagazine, stressing it wasn’t a full-fledged relationship. “Well, going with because it was, like, eight years on and off. So, one time, I find a lady’s underwear in his house and I go home brokenhearted, hurt, angry [and] just destroyed.”
Then she talked about how Presley’s manager called her up, trying to set up a date with the two. They only went on one date though, and Brando was furious.
“Marlon found out and went crazy because, of course, despite the underwear in his house, he was entitled, I was not,” she continued. “He asked me to come over and he was in a rage. … We’d been going out, at that point, for six years together and he said, ‘How dare you?’ and he’s carrying on like he’s completely innocent. The best part is he’s so angry, he started to throw chairs. It was wonderful.”
Cybill Shepherd
Did you know the Cybill star and Elvis dated?
During a May 2016 appearance on Sway in the Morning, Cybill Shepherd talked going on a date with the singer and what the sex was like. Shepherd said she received a phone call from someone saying Elvis wanted to go out with her, and she told the person to have Elvis call him herself. He did, and they went out on a date, which then turned into a relationship.
“He’s a really wonderful, sexy, incredible guy,” Shepherd said. The Moonlighting actress also told Sway, “I had to teach him how to [go down on me].”
They dated in the early ’70s, but the relationship didn’t last, and it seems Elvis’ drug use was an issue for her. As Shepherd told Larry King in 2000, “But that — even though I didn’t know then at the time, it could never have worked with Elvis and I, because I saw the drug use in Las Vegas.”
Linda Thompson
Linda Thompson, Brody Jenner’s mom and Caitlyn Jenner’s former spouse, began dating Elvis in 1972 when she was 22.
While chatting with Entertainment Tonight in August 2016, Thompson said, “I was still a virgin when I met him.” She added, “I think that is what added to the allure of me for him. Because he was a very territorial man. And a very jealous man. It really made him feel wonderful that I was a virgin.” Yes, Thompson lost her virginity to Elvis.
Thompson also said that Elvis wasn’t one to stay faithful. “Elvis was not monogamous,” she noted. “As we say in the South, bless his heart. He just wasn’t monogamous. He had a tremendous capacity to love, and he loved women and women loved him… I was happy to share him with his legions of fans and even understood sharing him occasionally to infidelity, but it didn’t make it any easier.”
They dated for over four years and broke up in 1976, eight months before he died.
Ann-Margret
The Viva Las Vegas co-stars were known for their affair while Elvis was engaged to Priscilla. According to a so-called friend of the singer, “Ann-Margret was really the love of his life,” The Daily Beast reports.
In Ann-Margret’s 1994 memoir Ann-Margret: My Story, she talks about her relationship with Elvis. “It was a very strong relationship, very intense,” she wrote. “We both felt a current, an electricity that went straight through us,” she writes in her memoir (via The New York Times). “It would become a force we couldn’t control.”
As for their sex life and the fact that the singer/actor once bought her a round pink bed for her Beverly Hills apartment, as reported by The New York Times, Ann-Margret, now 76, has remained mum by choosing not to discuss how intimate the two had been.
After Elvis decided to stay with Priscilla, he and Ann-Margret ended their relationship in 1964, despite that “his wish was that we could stay together” and that they even talked about getting married.
Apparently, Elvis thought Ann-Margret had talked to British tabloids about their relationship and their marriage conversations, which led him to break it off with her. The Bye Bye Birdie actress implies in her book that their relationship was destined to end due to his “commitments,” which seems to suggest his relationship with Priscilla.
Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood and Elvis dated, but the attraction between the two allegedly didn’t last.
According to a March 2010 Daily Mail article, the Rebel Without a Cause actress went out on a date with Elvis in 1956 after he invited her to the set of his movie Love Me Tender.
At the time, he was 21 and she was 18. However, she was reportedly disappointed with his lack of physical intimacy. She once allegedly stormed out of his bedroom during a party and reportedly declared, “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.”
Per The Daily Beast, this didn’t stop the West Side Story actress from going out on further dates with the King, and she allegedly once said, “It was like having the date that I never had in high school. I thought it was really wild!”
Peggy Lipton
Yes, Rashida Jones’ mom had a thing with Elvis. They had a brief 1971 relationship, which Peggy Lipton discusses in her 2005 autobiography, Breathing Out (via The Daily Beast). Lipton said something similar to what Wood reportedly also said: the two didn’t have much of a sex life. “He kissed like a god, but that was about it,” Lipton writes. “He didn’t feel like a man next to me — more like a boy who’d never matured.”
Lipton even writes that due to his drug use, Elvis was “virtually impotent,” at least during their relationship.
Connie Stevens
Similar to how other women wound up on dates with the Speedway actor, Connie Stevens once received a phone call from Elvis. After seeing her on Hawaiian Eye, he just had to meet her, according to The Daily Beast.
In a 2010 book by Alanna Nash about Elvis’ love life, titled Baby, Let’s Play House, Stevens says about their romance, “I knew this was a fellow who could break your heart.” She adds, “He was just so beautiful.”
Apparently, they dated, but not seriously, for about two years. In the book, Stevens says Elvis is “one of the loves of my life,” but their romance didn’t last.
As reported by The Daily Beast, Stevens didn’t want to be just another number to the huge star. “I knew it was never to be,” she says.
Gael Greene
For those unaware, Gael Greene is a famed and respected American restaurant critic.
As told in her 2006 memoir (via New York Magazine), Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess, Greene discusses the time she had sex with Elvis. She first met him in 1956, when she was 21.
After writing Elvis’ manager, Colonel Parker, for an interview with the singer, Greene was invited to Elvis’ press conference, she explains in her book. Eventually, she ended up at the Blue Hawaii actor’s hotel room with a bunch of other people.
According to Greene, when Elvis showed up at the room, he grabbed her hand and took her to the bedroom. “Silently, he took my hand — yes, still gloved — and led me to a bedroom,” she writes. “I was thinking, Oh my God… this is Elvis… I am going to do it with Elvis. I am not going to be coy. I will not make him talk me into it. He didn’t ask. I didn’t answer. He closed the door, dropped his pants, and lay on the bed — very pale, soft, young —watching me take off my clothes and, yes, at last, my little white gloves.”
Greene, now 83, says she doesn’t remember any details about the sex but that “it was certainly good enough.” Apparently, after the sex was over, he said to her, “I need to sleep now.” Oh, she says Elvis also asked her to call room service and order him a fried-egg sandwich. To that, she writes, “The fried-egg sandwich — that part I remember. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”
Tuesday Weld
Tuesday Weld and Elvis had a brief romance while filming Wild in the Country in 1961, but the actress had a reputation for being a “free spirit” and would not put up with any of the singer’s shenanigans.
“Elvis and Tuesday hit it off immediately, but their affair lasted only a short while before it mellowed into a friendship,” Elvis’ road manager Joe Esposito wrote in his 1994 book, Good Rockin’ Tonight, DoYouRemember.com. “Tuesday was a free spirit; she would never have put up with Elvis, who liked to control his women. ‘You stay here, I’m going out tonight’ or ‘Do this for me, I want it done right now’ typified his attitude. Tuesday would never fall in with that program.”
Elvis realized Weld “had a mind of her own” because “Tuesday had the nerve to talk back,” according to biographer Alanna Nash in her book, Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him, per DoYouRemember.com. Elvis quickly backed off the once-hot affair, making it a short-lived relationship in his dating history.
Cassandra Peterson
Cassandra Peterson, also known as Elvira “Mistress of the Dark,” had a date with Elvis back in the late 1960s.
“He invited me to a party at his suite, along with lots of other people, and he really kind of took to me, I think because I was 17, and probably all the other showgirls there were in their 30s,” she told Fox News about their one time date in Las Vegas, when she worked as a show girl. “The fact that I was meeting him was beyond belief. We did hang out one whole evening, a whole night, the next morning, and mostly talked, believe it or not.” But she did admit, there “was some kissing going on.”
She also added that during their brief time together, he gave her life-changing advice.
“I was a showgirl in Las Vegas and Elvis told me to get the heck out of Las Vegas and pursue a singing career and, because he was Elvis, I decided to do that,” she said to Closer Weekly. “At the time I was the youngest showgirl in Las Vegas; I was 17. If it wasn’t for Elvis, I would now be the oldest [showgirl] in Las Vegas, I’m positive.”
Anne Helm
Did you know that Elvis denied dating his former co-star, Anne Helm, because he was engaged to Priscilla Preslet? Well, turns out there was definitely an affair happening, and Helm spilled all the details.
“We did have a romance; it was quite wonderful. Elvis was away from the madding crowd. It was like a shipboard romance. In those days, we were very promiscuous, and of course, I knew he was having a lot of affairs, but we really adored one another,” she said via Do You Remember. “We were very young… Everyone knew about Priscilla, although he didn’t talk a lot about Priscilla to me, but it was rumoured they were going to be married.”
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