Priscilla Presley is airing out all her good and bad laundry in her latest memoir, “Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis Presley.”
In the book, which was obtained by Fox News Digital, Priscilla shared that she had an affair with her karate instructor, Mike Stone, during her marriage to Elvis Presley.
She wrote that “ironically,” she began taking karate lessons to impress her husband after learning about Elvis’ infidelity from reading handwritten letters by other women.
“When I turned the key in the mailbox, however, what poured out wasn’t bills or junk mail. The mailbox was stuffed full of letters from girls. … I finally held written proof of what I’d always feared. I was deeply hurt, but I was also furious. I called Elvis and demanded an explanation. … When that tactic failed, he resorted to saying the girls were all lying.”
“This time, though, turning the tables didn’t work. If Elvis was having affairs that were none of my business, then it was none of his business what I was doing. The close friendship that Mike and I had developed turned into an affair,” she wrote.
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During an interview with Today, Priscilla opened up about those letters and said there were “too many of us” in her marriage.
“They would go and meet Elvis at the house on weekends when he went, and it was another life. Now, he would come home great and wonderful. He was still a good husband, but it was just too many of us,” she said on Monday.
According to Priscilla, the affair enraged Elvis so much he contemplated hiring an assassin to kill Stone.
“Elvis found the thought of me with another man unbearable. In the weeks after my departure, he told the guys that Mike had to die. He even asked Joe [Esposito] to find a hit man,” she wrote, referring to Elvis’ longtime road manager who was also famously known as a member of the “Memphis Mafia,” according to Priscilla.
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“Joe warned me to be careful. When I offered to bring Lisa [Marie Presley] to Vegas for one of Elvis’s shows, Joe advised against it. Seeing me might set Elvis off. Over time, and with a lot of persuasion from his father and the guys, Elvis gradually calmed down and gave up the idea of killing Mike, thank God,” she wrote.
Priscilla met Elvis in 1959 when she was 14 and the star was serving in the Army in Germany. The pair were married from 1967 to 1973. The former couple welcomed one child during their marriage, Lisa Marie.
In her book, Priscilla mentioned that Elvis “forced” himself on her after he learned of the affair. She made it clear that this wasn’t the reason she decided to file for divorce in 1972.
“I didn’t leave because of Mike Stone. And I didn’t leave because Elvis had forced himself on me when he found out about Mike. He had not. Elvis had felt emasculated. He’d needed to prove to himself and to me that he could make love ‘like a real man,’ the way he imagined a karate master doing it.”
“Elvis made love to me forcefully, not forcibly. His usual tenderness and consideration for me were missing. It was emotionally hurtful, and it left me with an unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis. But it was not the reason I left,” she wrote.
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She told the British talk show, “Loose Women,” years ago that she didn’t divorce the King of Rock because she didn’t love him.
“I did not divorce him because I didn’t love him ― he was the love of my life, truly. If anything, I left because I needed to find out what the world was like,” Priscilla said in 2016.
After the divorce, Lisa Marie primarily lived with her mother. “I wanted to keep the family together as much as I could. One way or another, I made sure she saw her daddy,” she wrote in her memoir.
Several years after the divorce, Elvis died at 42 from a heart attack. During an interview with People, Priscilla addressed conspiracy theories that Elvis is still alive. “There’s been so much that’s untruthful out there — things like Elvis is still alive and hidden somewhere. I wish he was still alive,” she told the outlet.
Priscilla’s “Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis Presley” will be available on Sept. 23.
