Elvis Presley Asked His Co-Star for Advice Before Marrying Priscilla

By the time Elvis Presley met Priscilla Beaulieu in West Germany in 1959, he was already an international music and movie star. After returning to the United States in March 1960, however, Elvis found himself wrestling with a very personal question: Could he build a lasting relationship while managing the demands of a high-profile career? Seeking perspective, he turned to Barbara Eden, his co-star in the 1960 Western Flaming Star. “He said, ‘I want to know how you and your husband survive this business. I’m a little worried about bringing her to the United States,’” Eden recalled in a 2023 interview with Fox News.

Eden was married at the time to fellow actor Michael Ansara, and Elvis wanted to understand how a marriage could withstand two demanding careers. The I Dream of Jeannie star offered the most practical advice she could. “I told him, ‘… As long as the two of you are a team, it will work out,’” she said, although Elvis remained uneasy. Eden also later admitted she had not realized how young Priscilla was. Priscilla was 15 and Elvis was 25 when they met. “I had no idea how young she was! He didn’t tell me! Oh boy. And such a pretty, pretty girl,” Eden said during Elvis Week in 2022, according to the Express.

Elvis ultimately continued his relationship with Priscilla. In 1963, she moved to the United States, where she lived with Elvis’ parents while completing school. The couple married in May 1967. Decades later, during Elvis Week at Graceland in August 2022, Eden finally met Priscilla and shared the story of Elvis’ early concerns. “I just met her recently, and I told her the story about Elvis. She is a lovely woman and I like her a lot,” Eden told Fox News. Her advice may have been well-intentioned, but Elvis’ worries were not entirely unfounded.

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Elvis Presley’s fears about the pressures surrounding his relationship with Priscilla eventually proved justified. More than half of Hollywood celebrity marriages end in divorce—a rate more than twice that of the general population—and the Presleys ultimately became part of that statistic. Their divorce was finalized on October 9, 1973. Still, the marriage ended without open hostility. A widely seen photograph of the couple leaving the courthouse arm-in-arm and smiling reflects the amicable terms of their split.

The two continued to care deeply about each other, but life alongside Elvis Presley came with extraordinary pressures. Priscilla had been a teenager when she crossed the Atlantic to join him, leaving her family and entering a world shaped almost entirely by Elvis’ fame. “He already had his inner circle, and of course, they embraced me, but I never realized that that was it,” she said on the U.K. program Loose Women in 2016.

Elvis’ enormous celebrity also made ordinary life nearly impossible. To avoid being photographed, he rarely visited public places or ate at restaurants, leaving Priscilla largely cut off from the outside world. “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,” she explained. His extramarital affairs added another strain and ultimately helped end the marriage. “He would come home great and wonderful and was still a good husband, but it was just too many of us,” Priscilla said on Today in 2025. In the end, Elvis’ career and lifestyle created the very obstacles he had feared. Eden’s own marriage to Michael Ansara also ended in divorce the year after the Presleys separated, and she is now in an age-gap relationship herself.