Presley moulded Priscilla: new book breaks silence

Press, 5 September 1985, Page 8

Presley moulded Priscilla: new book breaks silence

New York NZPA-AP Priscilla Presley has broken a long silence on her 14 years with Elvis Presley, saying “he moulded me into his woman” after they met. Miss Presley was a 14-year-old ninth-grader when she met Presley, already a teenage heart-throb, in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1959. She was an Air Force brat, and he was a 24-year-old Army recruit. Something in his southern upbringing had taught him that the right girl was to be saved for marriage, Miss Presley writes in “People”

magazine. “I was that girl.” “At the same time, he was moulding me into his woman. I wore the clothes, hairstyle and make-up of his careful choosing,” said Miss Presley, who plays Jenna Wade on television’s “Dallas.” Presley, who died in August, 1977, was already taking the amphetamine dexedrine, Miss Presley writes in excerpts from her soon-to-be-published memoirs, “Elvis and Me.” Presley, who was accustomed to living the life of an entertainer and who despised rising at dawn, be-

gan taking the pills to get him through the dreary hours of Army life, she writes. “He told me he’d begun taking sleeping pills shortly before before he’d been drafted. He dreaded insomnia.”