Before She Died, Ann Margret Breaks Silence On The Real Story Of Her Elvis Affair – HT

 

She was 22 years old, a Swedish immigrant’s daughter from a tiny village near the Arctic Circle, and she’d  just been cast opposite the most famous man on the planet. The year was 1963, and the MGM soundstage in Hollywood was about to become the setting of a love story    that would haunt two people for the rest of their lives.

Ann-Margret walked onto that set expecting  to meet a movie star. Instead, she met the only man who ever matched her energy, her restlessness,  and her hunger for something real in a town built entirely on illusion. What happened  between them over the next 12 months would shatter an engagement, nearly destroy a future marriage, and create a secret bond so powerful that Ann-Margret guarded it for over 60 years, even when  every talk show host in America begged her to spill the details.

Even when the tabloids offered fortunes for the full story. Even after Elvis was gone and there was nobody left to protect. She kept her silence. Until she  didn’t. And what she revealed changes everything you think you know about the King’s love life. To understand why this affair mattered so much, you have to understand who Ann-Margret was before Elvis entered the picture.

She wasn’t just another Hollywood starlet. Born Ann-Margret Olson in Stockholm, Sweden in 1941, she grew up in a tiny village of lumberjacks and farmers so far north it nearly touched the Arctic Circle. Her family emigrated to Illinois when she was 5 years old, and she took her first dance lessons shortly after arriving in America.

The talent was obvious from the start. She could mimic any dance step on the first try. Her mother, who worked as a funeral parlor receptionist to support the family after her husband was injured on the job, sewed every single costume by hand. By her teenage years, Ann-Margret was winning talent competitions across the Midwest and catching the attention of people who mattered.

George Burns discovered her performing at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. Variety magazine declared that Burns had found a gold mine. A record deal with RCA Victor followed, then a film contract,  and by 1963, she had already starred in Bye Bye Birdie opposite Dick Van Dyke, and earned a reputation as one of the most electric performers in Hollywood.

 The press had already given her a nickname that would follow her everywhere. They called her the female Elvis Presley. So, when MGM paired her with the actual Elvis Presley for a film called Viva Las Vegas, the anticipation was enormous. Two forces of nature on one soundstage. The question was not whether there would be chemistry on screen.

 The question was whether anyone could contain what happened off screen. Elvis was curious about her before they even met. He had heard about this Swedish redhead who could sing and dance with the same raw energy he brought to every performance. He pointed out to friends that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But nothing prepared him for what  happened when they actually stood face to face on that MGM lot.

Ann-Margret described it years later in her memoir. She said they both felt a current, an electricity that went straight through them. It would become a force they couldn’t control. Elvis told friends afterward that he detected a kindred soul in her from the very first glance, a smile, a look, something neither of them could name but both of them recognized.

   They were both desperately shy around new people. Both of them hid enormous passion behind quiet, almost awkward first impressions. And both of them came alive the moment music started playing. Ann-Margret wrote that whenever they began singing together, they couldn’t help but notice how eerily similar their performance styles were.

 The same instincts, the same fire, the same inability to hold anything back. It didn’t take long for the professional connection to become something much more personal.    And this is where the story gets complicated, because there was someone else in the picture. Someone waiting at Graceland who had no idea her entire world was about to be rocked.

Priscilla Beaulieu was just 18 years old. She’d recently graduated from high school and was living at Graceland in a relationship that Elvis’s inner circle kept carefully hidden from the public. She was young, beautiful, and completely devoted to a man she’d been involved with since she was 14 years old in Germany.

And she was terrified of exactly the kind of woman Ann-Margret represented. Priscilla later wrote that she cursed herself for not being able to tell Elvis what she feared when she learned his new leading lady would be the fastest rising starlet in Hollywood. Every time she tried to visit the set in Los Angeles, Elvis delayed her.

 He told her there were problems with the director, that the timing wasn’t right. That she should stay in Memphis. The real reason was far simpler. Elvis was falling in love with someone else. Inside his hotel suite, away from the cameras and the Memphis Mafia entourage that followed him everywhere, Elvis and Ann-Margret spent entire weekends alone together. His buddies were stunned.

 This wasn’t the Elvis they knew. He never ditched the guys for a woman. He never went out as a couple without the whole crew tagging along. Ann-Margret changed something fundamental in him. The Memphis Mafia actually liked her. She was straightforward, warm, funny, and confident in a way that was magnetic rather than threatening.

She could joke around with the guys and give it right back. She rode motorcycles. She was both impossibly glamorous and completely down-to-earth. Lamar Fike, one of Elvis’s closest confidants, said it plainly. Elvis’s affair with Ann-Margret was not just an affair. He was really in love with her. It got hot and heavy.

Marty Lacker, another insider, confirmed it. Neither one of them was married, and they really cared a lot about each other. And Priscilla was back at Graceland completely in the dark. Meanwhile, on set, things were getting tense for entirely different reasons. Director George Sidney adored Ann-Margret.

 He had already directed her in Bye Bye Birdie and knew exactly how to showcase her talents. He gave her close-ups. He gave her musical numbers. He treated the film like a showcase for both stars equally. Elvis hated it. He wanted all the close-ups for himself. He did not want Ann-Margret to have any solo numbers. The tension got bad enough that Sidney had to put his foot down.

The famous final scene of Viva Las Vegas was filmed in split screen specifically because Elvis refused to share the spotlight in the movie’s climax. The irony is almost too perfect. The man who could not stop sharing his private life with her would not share a single camera angle on screen. But the professional jealousy never poisoned what was happening between them behind closed doors.

If anything, it made the contrast more dramatic. On camera, two egos battling for dominance. Off camera, two people who could not get enough of each other. Then the tabloids got involved, and everything exploded.  A story hit the national papers claiming that Elvis and Ann-Margret were engaged. The news spread like wildfire across every entertainment outlet in the country.

   And back at Graceland, Priscilla Beaulieu read every word. She was devastated. Heartbroken,  confused, and furious in a way she’d never experienced before. When Elvis found out about the story,    he confronted Ann-Margret. She told him the newspapers had exaggerated, that she’d been misquoted, that things had been blown out of proportion.

 But the damage was already done. Priscilla confronted Elvis directly. According to her memoir, she became so enraged that she threw a vase against the wall. Elvis physically pinned her down and delivered an ultimatum. He said he didn’t know the situation was going to get out of hand. He told her he wanted a woman who understood that things like this might just happen.

Then he asked her point-blank whether she was going to be that woman or not. Think about that moment for a second. Elvis wasn’t apologizing. He wasn’t begging for forgiveness. He was asking Priscilla to accept the reality of who he was and what came with loving him. And Priscilla, against every instinct telling her to walk away, chose to stay.

But the pressure was mounting from every direction. Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s legendary and controlling manager, got involved. Priscilla’s parents were furious and made their displeasure known. The Memphis Mafia men, who had been enjoying Ann-Margret’s company, suddenly found themselves caught in the middle of a crisis that threatened to derail Elvis’s carefully managed public image.

The Colonel made it clear. The affair had to end. Elvis had made a promise to Priscilla and her family, and he needed to honor it. The walls were closing in. And this is where the story turns into something genuinely tragic. According to multiple people in Elvis’s inner circle, he would have chosen Ann-Margret.

Several Memphis Mafia members were convinced of it. Lamar Fike believed Elvis would have married her in a heartbeat. But there was one condition Elvis could never let go of. He believed in what Fite called the old Southern idea that a wife stays home and cooks dinner and has it on the table when the husband gets home.

Ann-Margret to give up her career entirely, to walk away from everything she had built since she was a little girl mimicking dance steps in Illinois. Ann-Margret refused. She had worked her entire life to get where she was and she was not going to let anybody stand in her way, not even the man she loved more than anyone she had ever met.

So the impossible choice was made for them, not by hatred, not by betrayal, but by two people who wanted fundamentally different lives and could not stop wanting each other. Ann-Margret described it with heartbreaking simplicity. She said both of them knew that no matter how much they loved each other, no matter how strong their bond, they were not going to last.

 They tried not to think about it. Sometimes that was impossible. They talked about marriage. They were so alike, so compatible. But Elvis had commitments, promises to keep and he vowed to keep his word. And then one day, after months of a love affair that burned hotter than anything either of them had experienced, Elvis simply stopped calling.

No dramatic goodbye, no final confrontation, just silence. On May 1st, 1967,    Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in Las Vegas. Exactly one week later, Ann-Margret married actor Roger Smith in the same city. Two weddings,  seven days apart, in the same town where they had filmed the movie that brought them together.

You’d think that would be the end of the story. Two people moving on, building separate  lives, letting go of what couldn’t be. But that’s not what happened. Not even close. For the remaining 10 years of Elvis’s life, something extraordinary continued between  them. A connection that defied every rule of how ex-lovers are supposed to behave.

Every single time Ann-Margret opened a new show in Las Vegas, a guitar-shaped floral arrangement would arrive backstage. No card was necessary. She always knew who sent it. Elvis never missed a single opening night.    She never forgot that gesture. Year after year, the flowers arrived like clockwork.

A silent message from a man who couldn’t be with her, but refused to let her think he’d  forgotten. Then came December 1972, five [snorts] years after both of them had married other people. Elvis visited Ann-Margret during a gathering in her suite at the Las Vegas Hilton.  They talked. They laughed.

 It probably felt like no time had passed at all. Later that night her phone rang. Elvis told her how great it had been seeing her earlier that evening. Then his voice changed. He said he was  lonely. He asked if he could see her. It was the question Ann-Margret had been dreading and hoping for all afternoon. She told him he knew she couldn’t do that.

Elvis paused and said he knew, but he wanted her to know that he still felt the same. He still felt the same. After nearly a decade, after marriages and careers and children and everything life had thrown between them, the feeling hadn’t changed. Ann-Margret stayed faithful to her husband Roger Smith. She’d made her choice and she honored it completely.

Their marriage lasted 50 years until Smith’s death in 2017. But she never pretended that Elvis didn’t occupy a permanent room in her heart. When Elvis died on August 16th, 1977, at the age of 42, Ann-Margret was crushed. People close to her told her not to attend the funeral. They said it would create a media circus.

 They said Priscilla would not want her there. They said it would dredge up old scandals. Ann-Margret went anyway.    Something remarkable happened at that funeral. Priscilla Presley, the woman who had thrown a vase against a wall over this very relationship 15 years earlier, saw Ann-Margret’s grief and recognized it as real.

In her own memoir, Priscilla wrote that Ann-Margret expressed her sympathy so sincerely that Priscilla felt a genuine bond with her. Two women who had both loved the same extraordinary, impossible man standing together in shared loss. After the funeral, Ann-Margret visited Elvis’s father Vernon. She mourned privately and then she began the silence that would define the  next six decades of her public life.

That silence would come to shape how she remembered him. Every interviewer who sat across from her tried. Larry King practically begged her on national television in 2001 saying it was a new year, it was okay. She could finally  tell the full story. Ann-Margret smiled, deflected, charmed her way out of the question, and told King she had already said everything she was going to say in her book.

Her 1994 memoir, titled simply Ann-Margret: My Story, addressed the Elvis relationship with surgical precision. She confirmed the depth of their connection. She acknowledged it was real, serious and powerful. She described the electricity and the sense of being soulmates, but she drew a hard line at the intimate details.

 She wrote about motorcycle rides and adventures and musical connection. She never gave the tabloids what they wanted. When asked in that Charlie Rose interview about what Elvis meant to her, she said their relationship was very strong and very serious and very real. They were together for one year and she did not want to betray his trust even in death.

Even in death. That line tells you everything about who Ann-Margret is and what Elvis meant to her. Decades after the man was gone, she still considered herself bound by a promise neither of them ever spoke out loud. You do not betray the people you love, not for money, not for fame, not for a good story on television.

She wrote in her memoir that she would never recover from Elvis’s death. She called him a part of her. She said it was rare to have such a friend, rare to have such a soulmate, and she meant every word. What makes this story so enduring is not the scandal or the tabloid drama or the love triangle that kept America entertained in the 1960s.

It is the quiet dignity of two people who loved each other at the wrong time, made impossible choices, and then spent the rest of their lives honoring what they had shared without ever exploiting it. Elvis sent flowers. Ann-Margret kept her silence. And somewhere between those two gestures lives one of the most genuine love stories old Hollywood ever produced.

Ann-Margret is now 84 years old. She still makes rare public appearances. A biopic about her life is reportedly in development with Lindsay Lohan attached to play her. And she is still not telling the full story. Some things, she seems to believe, belong only to the people who lived them. Elvis once told his friend Larry Geller something that puts the entire affair in perspective.

He said that back in 1964, he was falling in love with Ann-Margret and it was serious and he had to choose between her and Priscilla. He said what was really strange was that they looked so much alike, like they were sisters. But he chose Priscilla and the reason he gave was simple. He did not think it would work with Ann-Margret.

Priscilla wanted to be a mother and raise children. He chose the life he thought he was supposed to live over the love he actually felt. And he spent the rest of his life sending flowers to the woman who got away. If this story hit you the way it hit me, subscribe to this channel. We cover the untold stories behind the biggest names in music history and the next one is already in the works.