Priscilla Presley was just 17 when Graceland became home. Every time she walks in, one room takes her back to 2 a.m. — Elvis at the piano, after a late night at the movies.
Priscilla Presley has walked through the front door of Graceland more times than anyone could count. But even now, after all these years, the house still does something to her the moment she steps inside.
She was only 17 when she moved to Memphis for good in March 1963. Elvis was already the most famous singer in the world. Priscilla was still a schoolgirl, enrolled at Immaculate Conception, an all-girls Catholic school in town. Before long, she was living at Graceland full time.
Life in that house did not run on normal time. It ran on Elvis’s time.
Dinner was around 10 at night. And after dinner, most nights, that meant the movies.
“We saw a lot of movies,” Priscilla told the crowd at the Old Bags Luncheon at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, this past February. The theater would call, and they could ask for whatever film they wanted to see. When the movie was over, it was back home to Graceland in the small hours, long after the rest of the city had gone to sleep.
It was 2 in the morning. The house was quiet. The city was quiet. But Graceland was not finished for the night.
That is the part Priscilla still talks about.
In a December 2023 interview with FOX 32 Chicago, she was asked about the holidays first, and she made it clear how much they meant to Elvis at Graceland. “Yes, that was his special time,” she said.
Then she described what happens every time she comes back.
“I walk in the front door and I look over where the piano room is at the end of the living room,” she said. And when she does, she says she can “just hear the music that he played after we’d come home from the theater at 2 in the morning.”
It is the piano. After those late movie nights, Elvis would sit down and play, and that sound is what Priscilla still hears when she looks toward the end of the living room.
It was not a concert. It was not a performance for anyone. It was just a plain night at home, with music drifting out of the next room at an hour when most people were sound asleep.
TODAY’s cameras followed Priscilla as she opened the doors and walked the rooms herself, so you get to see the house through the eyes of the woman who actually lived there. And for an even older look at the house, a 1984 home video puts Priscilla in the role of tour guide, showing Graceland as it looked more than four decades ago.
Priscilla still goes back to Graceland. When she walks in, she looks to the end of the living room first, and she has said it brings those 2 a.m. evenings right back to her.
There is something sweet about the way she tells it. Most of us have a sound like that tucked away somewhere — maybe a parent humming in the kitchen, or a radio playing down the hall when we were kids. Hers just happens to be Elvis at the piano.
So if you ever take the tour yourself, glance over to that end of the room for a second and think of a teenage Priscilla, home late from the movies, listening.
What song do you think Elvis was playing that night? Tell us in the comments.
