Priscilla Reveals The Real Reason She Divorced Elvis

Priscilla Presley opened up to Loose Women about her breakup with the King himself, Elvis.

The couple met when she was just 14 years old to Elvis' 24. They moved in together when she was 17 and married when she was 21, but there were plenty of growing pains along the way. "It was difficult, especially moving into Graceland. He already had his inner circle and of course, they embraced me, but I never realized that that was it," Priscilla said. "He didn't go out, he didn't like eating in restaurants because people would take pictures of him...we truly lived in a bubble. We would go roller skating. He would rent the park where we would ride rode roller coasters and go-karts."

Being sheltered from others her age took a toll on her. "I didn't have my teenage years as a normal girl, obviously, so I had to adapt...I just kind of followed what he did. You lived his life, you honestly didn't have your own life," she explained. "You saw the movies he wanted to see. You listened to the music he listened to, you'd go to places that he would go...the times that he was touring is when I had a dance class I would go to to break out a little bit, and started realizing then, gosh, relationships are a little bit different."

She added, "I was with his friends and I was with the wives of his friends. They were pretty much chosen for me. I got along with them very well...it was lonely in that I didn't have any information on what was going on with my age group."

When she turned 27, she decided to move on.

Priscilla revealed that she had to leave Elvis in order to find herself. "It was a journey. I never had therapy," she noted. "I didn't sign a check until I was 29 years old. Everything was there for me...As a woman, I didn't know who I was." She pointed out that Elvis even advised her on her makeup, hair, and clothes. "I realized, 'I don't know who I am,'" she said. "My considerations were his considerations. My fears were his fears. My likes were his likes."

"I did not divorce him because I didn't love him. He was the love of my life, truly," she said. "If anything I left because—and I still loved him—I needed to find out what the world was like."

In a 1985 interview with Barbara Walters, Priscilla said Elvis was attracted to her "inexperience." She also told Walters that she felt pressured to stay with the King and stay up late and take sleeping pills out of fear that if she didn't want to do it, someone else would take her place. She was scared of losing him and admitted she was terrified that he'd been having an affair with his frequent co-star Ann Margret, though he denied it at the time. "I was under a spell of what I thought was love," she said, admitting that she didn't visit him during his trips to Hollywood for movie roles.

Priscilla also revealed in her Walters sitdown that Elvis didn't want to be intimate with her after the birth of their daughter, Lisa Marie. "Elvis had a hard time dealing with 'mother' and the little girl I was to him...he was a father to me," she said. "He was my mentor. To show any kind of vulnerability or insecurity to me was not 'macho' to him. Our communication was horrible." The lack of a physical relationship was a problem. "I didn't want to go along with the program anymore," she told Walters. "I couldn't be a life support."

She eventually moved on with her karate teacher, Mike Stern. Elvis allegedly wanted Stern dead, but Priscilla said she believes it was just his temper talking and that he didn't actually do anything about it.

When her Loose Women hosts asked if Elvis was "devastated" when she left, she replied, "It was a shock."

Even so, their divorce was incredibly amicable. "When we were in the courtroom, we were holding hands before the judge...The judge said after, 'I thought I was performing a marriage, not a divorce.'" The couple even left the courtroom hand in hand.