The version of Priscilla Presley who lingers in pop culture—dark eyeliner, teased hair, immaculate gowns—is the primary one we see in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, played by Olivia DeJonge and seen primarily as a witness to the central drama between Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker. The bulk of their relationship took place in the 1960s, a period skimmed over by a montage. 

But Priscilla is about to tell her side of the story—and already did, actually, in the 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, which Sofia Coppola has adapted for her upcoming film, Priscilla. Cowritten with Sandra Harmon, the book recounts the relationship from the moment a 14-year-old Priscilla met Elvis at a party to his death in 1977, four years after their divorce. The book is full of eye-popping personal details, from some of her and Elvis’s nicknames for each other (Sattnin, Little One) to their bedroom exploits involving role-play and Polaroids. It also depicts a version of Elvis very different from the wide-eyed, well-intentioned boy in Luhrmann’s film. Surrounded constantly by his entourage and managed closely by his father and by Colonel Parker, Elvis had precious little control over his own life—but in Priscilla’s telling, he had complete control over her. 

The daughter of an Air Force captain, Priscilla was living with her family in Wiesbaden, Germany, at the same time that Elvis, the biggest rock star in the world, was stationed in Germany as part of his military deployment. The ninth grader was invited to a party at Elvis’s house by one of his friends, who persuaded her parents to let her attend by promising she would be chaperoned. Elvis singled her out from the crowd, and the two spent hours together in his bedroom—chastely, in Priscilla’s telling—before his military service ended a few months later. Elvis returned to life as a celebrity and a relationship with actor Anita Wood; Priscilla returned to high school. “I want you to promise me you’ll stay the way you are,” he told her before he left. “Untouched, as I left you.”

Two years later, when Priscilla was 16, Elvis invited her to visit him for two weeks in Los Angeles, and despite promises to her parents that she would be chaperoned the entire time, they snuck away to Las Vegas. By the time she was 17 she was living at Graceland, staying up all night with Elvis and his entourage and then attending a local Catholic high school the next morning. “Day after day I drove to school, attended classes till noon, then returned to Graceland to slip back into bed and cuddle next to Elvis, who was still sound asleep,” Priscilla writes. She eventually joins Elvis in taking sleeping pills as well as diet pills, relying on them to get through her final exams. “I was leading a double life—a schoolgirl by day, a femme fatale at night.” 

Controlling but loving in the early days, Elvis becomes more mercurial as their relationship evolved, and Priscilla writes about her decision to divorce him as, essentially, becoming her own person for the first time. “He taught me everything: how to dress, how to walk, how to apply makeup and wear my hair, how to behave, how to return love—his way,” she writes early in the book. “Over the years, he became my father, husband, and very nearly God.” 

By the time she was writing the book in 1985 Priscilla seemed aware of how this controlling, deeply power imbalanced relationship was damaging to her. But the story would undeniably be received differently today, given current conversations about consent and grooming minors. Which is one of many reasons to be fascinated by the arrival of Coppola’s Priscilla, which will debut at the Venice Film Festival and arrive in theaters from A24 in October. Coppola, after all, already made a movie about another famous child bride, Marie Antoinette, capturing both the young princess’s naivete and her eventual dominance in the freewheeling French court. Sections of Priscilla’s life at Graceland feel a whole lot like Marie Antoinette, even if the relative recency of her relationship with Elvis will make it a lot harder to spin the story as heightened fantasy. 

On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, Hillary Busis joins David Canfield, Richard Lawson, and Katey Rich to discuss Elvis & Me, the many uncomfortable and downright horrifying scenes within it, and how all of that might make it to the screen. For more on Priscilla and her family’s legacy you absolutely cannot miss our September issue cover story, in which Priscilla’s granddaughter, Riley Keough, weighs in on their recent legal battle on Elvis’s estate and much more of their family history.