Introduction:
There are some secrets that survive a relationship. Others survive a lifetime.
Nearly five decades after Elvis Presley’s death, Priscilla Presley is opening a deeply personal chapter of her past — one involving a late-night phone call, another man sleeping just rooms away, and a truth Elvis would never discover.
In her memoir Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, Priscilla looks back on the complicated years that followed the end of one of the most famous marriages in American pop culture. Among the memories she revisits is her brief relationship with attorney Robert Kardashian, years before his family became internationally known.
Priscilla and Elvis had divorced in 1973, but emotional boundaries were far less clear. According to her recollection, Elvis still struggled with the idea that she could truly move on with someone else.
Then came one unforgettable night.
It was around two in the morning when the telephone rang after one of Elvis’s performances. Robert Kardashian was nearby, asleep and completely unaware of who was calling. Priscilla rushed to answer before the ringing could wake him, quietly moving into another room to speak with the man who had once been her husband — and who still remained an enormous presence in her life.
Elvis had no idea Robert was there.
Robert, in turn, never learned that Elvis had called.
Priscilla later reflected that Elvis’s reaction could have been intense had he discovered the truth. Behind that startling memory, however, lies something more complicated than celebrity drama: the story of a woman attempting to build a new life while still carrying the emotional weight of an extraordinary past.
Her relationship with Kardashian lasted about a year. She remembers him as gentle and kind, but their lives were moving in different directions. Kardashian wanted marriage; Priscilla, having already experienced a relationship lived under extraordinary public attention, knew she was not ready to make that commitment again.
They eventually separated but remained friends. Years later, shortly before Kardashian’s death in 2003, the two spoke one final time — a conversation Priscilla remembers with warmth and gratitude.
Today, those memories carry an even deeper sense of loss. Priscilla has endured the deaths of Elvis and, decades later, their daughter Lisa Marie Presley in 2023. Speaking about Lisa Marie’s final hours, she has described the devastating experience of waiting with family members at the hospital, hoping for an outcome that never came.
What emerges from Priscilla’s story is not simply a revelation about Elvis Presley or Robert Kardashian. It is a portrait of love after love has ende