Priscilla Presley’s Parents Were Stunned Into Silence When They Saw How Elvis Had Changed Her Look

Priscilla Presley’s parents found her relationship with Elvis concerning. He was significantly older than her and their relationship brought Priscilla across the ocean to Memphis to finish high school. When they saw their daughter after she spent more time with Elvis, they could hardly believe it. He exercised his influence on her to make her look quite different.

Elvis controlled Priscilla Presley’s appearance, which surprised her parents

After two years of living with Elvis at Graceland, Priscilla went to visit her parents when they moved back to the United States. She hadn’t seen them in a while and knew that her appearance might be surprising to them. Elvis preferred her to wear form fitting clothing and heavy makeup, which she hadn’t done while living with her parents.

“I did miss them,” she wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “I was well aware that my appearance—in a tight, form-fitting dress, spiked high heels, heavy makeup, and with my hair dyed jet black and piled high on top of my head in a beehive hairdo — would elicit, as usual, a less than delighted response from them, but I was determined not to change a single part of the total look that Elvis had painstakingly created.”

As she’d imagined, her parents were shocked by the change to her looks.

“I flew to Connecticut and my expectations were correct,” he said. “My parents were again so shocked when they saw me that they could barely speak. Later, my father told me that under all that makeup, my eyes looked like ‘two pissholes in the snow.’”

Priscilla Presley’s parents were worried about her relationship with Elvis

While at this point in her relationship, Priscilla’s parents were more accepting of her relationship with Elvis, they hadn’t always felt that way. Elvis and Priscilla began dating when she was still in high school. While they allowed Priscilla to see Elvis, they wished he would find someone his own age.

“‘Why you?’ [my mother] asked, her voice thick with emotion. ‘Why can’t he find someone his own age? You’re only sixteen. What is this man doing to our family?’ She buried her face in her hands and began crying.”

Priscilla Presley said she sometimes felt like a living doll with Elvis

Priscilla explained that while she didn’t want to change her look out of respect for Elvis, she sometimes felt that she was his doll. Not only did he ask her to wear more makeup and dye her hair, but he wanted control over what she wore. He brought her out many dresses to shape her wardrobe.

“Back at Graceland he had: me model all my new clothes again for Grandma, who patiently sat through a long two hours of changes,” she wrote. “I was Elvis’s doll, his own living doll, to fashion as he pleased.”

This began to feel suffocating by the end of their relationship.