On August 15th, 1977, Anne Margaret opened a new residency show at the Las Vegas Hilton. She had done this many times before. Las Vegas was her second home. She had been performing there for over a decade, selling out showrooms the way few performers could. Before every single opening night for 10 years, without fail, a flower arrangement had arrived backstage.

Not roses, not liies, a guitar. An enormous arrangement of flowers shaped like a guitar sent from Elvis Presley, who never once forgot and never once failed to send it. On August 15th, 1977, no flowers came, no telegram, no phone call, nothing. For the first time in a decade, the backstage was quiet in the way it had never been quiet before.

Anne Margaret noticed immediately. She did both shows that night. The professional in her never faltered. But she told people later that she worried through every song was wrong. She knew it the way you know things when someone has been a part of your life long enough that their absence has a sound.

The next morning, August 16th, a phone call confirmed what the missing flowers had already told her. Elvis Presley was dead. When Joe Espazito, Elvis’s road manager, told her it was going to be a mad house at Graceand and that perhaps she should stay away. Anne Margaret said two words. She said, “I’m coming.

” This is a story about two people who recognized each other on a sound stage in Hollywood in the summer of 1963 and never fully let go. Not through marriages, not through years, not through everything that came between them. It is a story about what happens when two forces of nature collide at exactly the wrong moment.

And it is a story about a guitar made of flowers that arrived every year for 10 years. and the night it didn’t come and what that silence meant. The MGM sound stage where they met for the first time was almost empty except for a piano, a few crew members in the background watching from a respectful distance.

Director George Sydney, who had specifically recruited Anne Margaret for this film after working with her on Bye-Bye Birdie, Watching Carefully, and a studio photographer positioned to document what the film company executives believed would be a historic pairing. Anne Margaret would later write in her memoir that she had been surprisingly calm about meeting Elvis.

After all, she wrote, “This was Elvis, a man who had captured the heart of almost every woman in America.” She paused before writing what came next. Little did I know, he would soon capture mine. What happened when they actually got to work was something that people in that room would describe for the rest of their lives.

On July 9th and 10th, they each recorded their individual songs at Radio Recorder Studios. Then on July 11th, they went into the studio together to record three duets, The Lady Loves Me, You’re the Boss, and Today, Tomorrow, and Forever. >> [snorts] >> three songs. Two performers who had been told separately that the other one moved like them, sang like them, felt music the way they felt it.

What happened in that studio was by every account electric, not professional, not courteous, electric. Anne Margaret described it this way. We experienced music in the same visceral way. music ignited a fiery, pentup passion inside Elvis and inside me. It was an odd, embarrassing, funny, inspiring, and wonderful sensation.

We looked at each other move and saw virtual mirror images. When Elvis thrust his pelvis, mine slammed forward, too. When his shoulder dropped, I was down there with him. When he whirled, I was already on my heel. One of the Memphis Mafia, the group of friends and aids who traveled everywhere with Elvis, took him aside after those first sessions and offered the clearest possible explanation for why everything felt different.

He said, “She’s the female you.” Elvis had no answer for that. He had never had a co-star who was the female him. He had never met anyone in a professional setting who understood from the inside what it meant to be built around music, to have it run through you as a physical force rather than just a craft.

Until now. 4 days later, the cast and crew traveled to Las Vegas to begin location filming. They checked into the Sahara Hotel. Elvis and his entourage occupied the 28th floor. [snorts] the Memphis Mafia spreading out across rooms on either side of Elvis’s presidential suite at the top.

A few floors down, Anne Margaret had her own room. It did not take long. Within days, Anne Margaret was spending nights in the presidential suite. They stayed inside for entire weekends, not the usual scene around Elvis, which involved a rotating cast of people, hangers on, games, noise, a controlled chaos that was part of how he managed never being alone.

This was different. They went out together, just the two of them, without the entourage. They rode motorcycles through the desert at night. They talked for hours. They were, according to Lamar Fe, a man who had been around Elvis through everything and was not given to sentimentality, genuinely in love.

Elvis’s affair with Anne Margaret was not just an affair. He was really in love with her. It got hot and heavy. Marty Lacer, one of Elvis’s closest friends since childhood, was clearer. Neither one of them was married, and they really cared a lot about each other. The Memphis mafia had seen Elvis with women before. This was different.

This was two people who had found each other at a frequency no one else could hear. They didn’t need the group around them. They didn’t perform for each other. They just were. two kids from towns nobody had ever heard of who somehow became the two most electrically physical performers of their generation sitting in a hotel room in Las Vegas talking about music and motorcycles and what it felt like to be inside a spotlight when you’d never asked to be built for one Margaret called him by nicknames he’d given her Thumper Bunny Rusty after her character in the film Scooby She used these names when she called Graceand so the people who answered the phone would know it was her. She had her own code. She had her own key to his home in California. He commissioned a round pink bed for her apartment in

Beverly Hills, pink being her signature color. He sent lavish guitar-shaped floral arrangements to her performances every time without fail. Beginning in 1967 when she first opened in Las Vegas, the flowers came guitarshaped from Elvis, a private signal that had been running between them quietly for years.

On the film set, the chemistry was impossible to manage. Director George Sydney, who clearly arrived on this production with a preference for his lady lead, was giving Anne Margaret favorable camera angles and multiple retakes of her musical numbers. The Memphis Mafia, specifically Red West, Lamar Fe, Joe Espazito, and Sunny West, complained bitterly that Sydney was trying to cut Elvis out of his own picture.

Elvis, for his part, never blamed Anne Margaret, not once. The jealousy, whatever there was of it, was aimed entirely at the director. Offset in private, he was falling. On November 22nd, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot, Elvis and Anne Margaret sat together in front of a television set and watched the broadcasts hand in hand.

The filming of Viva Las Vegas had ended in September, but they were still together, still finding reasons to be in the same room. The world was changing outside the window, and inside they sat. Two people who understood without saying it, that nothing about what they had was simple or permanent, watching a country grieve.

There was a girl at Graceand. Her name was Priscilla Bolu and she was 18 years old in 1963. Elvis had met her in Germany during his army service. She had been 14 then, the daughter of an Air Force officer, and Elvis had been immediately and completely taken with her. Over the years since, through enormous pressure from her family and enormous resistance from Colonel Parker, Elvis arranged for Priscilla to move to Memphis and live at Graceand while she finished high school.

It was a situation that defied easy description. Elvis’s girlfriend technically living in his home, not yet his wife. her parents having been convinced that the arrangement was proper because Glattis’s mother, Mini May, was also in residence. Priscilla was aware of Anne Margaret. She was not remotely at ease about it.

She would later describe the period of the Viva Las Vegas filming as one of the most difficult of her life. watching the newspaper coverage, seeing the photographs, reading the headlines from Elvis’s own hometown paper, the Memphis Press Scimitar, which ran stories with titles like, “It looks like romance for Elvis and Anne Margaret.

She and Elvis fought as they had never fought before. On several occasions, Elvis backed into a corner, threatened to send her back to Germany. Priscilla called her parents. Her father, a United States Air Force captain, was furious. Colonel Parker was called in. The colonel applied pressure. The pressure was about more than personal loyalty.

It was about Elvis’s public image, about the promise that had been made to a military officer’s family, about the careful management of a star whose appeal depended on a certain kind of trustworthiness. Colonel Parker told Elvis to end it with Anne Margaret. And then something happened that made the decision feel like it had been made for him.

Anne Margaret traveled to England for the British premiere of Viva Las Vegas, released there as Love in Las Vegas. The British press, who had been following the romance breathlessly, asked her directly about Elvis, and Margaret was by nature a straight talking person. She did not deny the relationship.

She didn’t say they were getting married, but she didn’t say they weren’t. And the British tabloids, given an inch, took several miles. The headlines that followed suggested an engagement, possibly an imminent wedding. Elvis read the headlines from Graceand and came to a conclusion. She had sold the story.

She had tipped off the press. She had handed what was private between them and handed it to the newspapers. Anne Margaret called him immediately. She explained she had been misqued, that things had been blown out of proportion, that she had never said what the papers claimed she said.

Elvis didn’t know what to believe. He was already under pressure from every direction. Priscilla was at Graceand. Parker was at his ear. Her parents were angry. His management was angry. And now this. He chose what the people around him had been pressuring him to choose. He stepped back. The relationship ended, not cleanly, not easily, and not, it seems, without considerable grief on both sides.

Marty Lacer, one of Elvis’s best men at his wedding to Priscilla in 1967, said something that has stayed with everyone who heard it. If Elvis had ended up with Thumper, this whole story might have wound up differently. They did not disappear from each other’s lives. This is the part of the story that matters most, and it is the part that gets lost when people reduce what happened between them to a film set romance.

What lasted between Elvis Presley and Anne Margaret was not an affair. It was something harder to name. A recognition, a bond between two people who understood each other in a way that had nothing to do with convenience or proximity and everything to do with what they were made of. When Anne Margaret opened her first Las Vegas residency in June of 1967, one week after she married actor Roger Smith, two weeks after Elvis had married Priscilla, a guitar-shaped flower arrangement arrived backstage.

from Elvis. He sent one to every opening night for the next 10 years without exception, without announcement. The flowers just came. A private signal, a quiet message, a promise kept in the only form available to two people who had chosen other lives and still couldn’t quite stop caring. On July 31st, 1969, the night of Elvis’s comeback concert at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, the night he stepped back onto a stage after 9 years away and proved to every doubter exactly who he still was. Anne Margaret was in the audience. She watched him reclaim everything that had been slowly taken from him, and she watched it the way someone watches when they know from the inside what it cost. They attended each other’s shows whenever they were in the same city. They called, they sent messages, they maintained over 15 years, a friendship that several of the people

closest to Elvis described as unlike any other relationship in his life. Outside of Elvis Presley’s family, wrote Alan Hansen, who spent decades researching Elvis’s personal history, Anne Margaret was the most important woman in the entertainer’s life. There was one conversation sometime in the years after the split when Anne Margaret told Elvis plainly what she felt.

His wish, she later said, was that we could stay together. She understood why they couldn’t. She understood the forces that had made it impossible. She also understood that understanding something doesn’t make it stop hurting. We come back to Las Vegas. We come back to the Hilton.

We come back to a backstage that was quiet in the wrong way. It was August 15th, 1977. Anne Margaret was opening a new show, her first Vegas residency in 10 years. The flowers had always come. For a decade, every single opening night, the guitar-shaped arrangement had been there when she arrived. It was the one constant she could count on.

In a life full of variables, the industry, the road, the years, Elvis’s flowers were the thing that didn’t change. She arrived, she looked, she waited. Nothing came. No flowers, no telegram, no phone call, nothing. She described what she felt that night with a precision that only someone who has genuinely lost something can manage.

No flowers, no telegram, no message. It was strange. She did both shows. She didn’t tell anyone what she was feeling. She was a professional and she went out there and she performed. But in the back of her mind, through every song, something was wrong. She knew it. She made phone calls the next morning.

On August 16th, 1977, Shirley Du, the girlfriend of Joe Espazito, called with the news. Elvis was dead. He had been found unresponsive in his bathroom at Graceand earlier that day. He was 42 years old. [snorts] Anne Margaret’s husband, Roger, came to find her. Her dancers and backstage crew were quietly directed away.

Anne, Margaret, and Roger were left alone with the news. When Joe Espazito called shortly after to explain the situation, to warn her about the chaos that was already descending on Memphis, to tell her that of course she was invited, but that she should understand what she was walking into.

Anne Margaret said what she had said 14 years earlier in a different context. She said, “I’m coming.” She arrived at Graceand on August 17th, 1977. There were thousands of fans outside the gates, more than anyone had anticipated, more than Memphis had ever seen, gathered in one place, a river of grief flowing down the street in the summer heat.

Anne Margaret came in quietly, the way she had always moved through Elvis’s world, not announcing herself, not performing grief for the cameras, just present. Vernon Presley met her at the door. Vernon was a man who had lost his wife, lost his mother, and now lost his son. He was, by all accounts, a man undone.

But when Anne Margaret came through that door, he gathered himself enough to say the thing he needed her to hear. She described it in her memoir, My Story, with the care of someone preserving something sacred. She wrote, “There was so much to say, to recount, but instead we cried.

” And then Vernon quietly said, “He was so proud of you.” She attended the funeral without making a scene. She gave Priscilla and Lisa Marie the space they needed. She was there for Elvis, not for the occasion, not for the cameras, not for any of the reasons people sometimes show up at funerals of famous people. She was there because she had told someone 14 years ago that she was coming and because some things you simply show up for.

3 months later, Vernon Presley and Colonel Parker asked Anne Margaret to host a 2-hour NBC television tribute called Memories of Elvis. She described it as one of the most difficult, wrenching jobs she had ever undertaken. She never stopped sending her own kind of flowers.

She never stopped speaking of him when she spoke at all as the man he actually was rather than the cartoon the world had made of him. Generous, she said, loving, funny, talented, gifted. She wanted to show people the man she knew, she said, because there had been so much, for some reason, negative surrounding his name, and he didn’t deserve that.

She still visits Graceand. She still speaks of him the way you speak of someone who was irreplaceable. Not with performance, not with drama, but with a quiet, permanent grief that has simply become part of how you move through the world. There is a kind of connection that doesn’t fit into any of the categories we have.

Not marriage, not friendship, not a film set romance that burned bright and disappeared. something older and stranger and more durable than any of those things. Two people who looked at each other once and recognized something. Not attraction exactly or not only that, but a deeper thing, a sameness, a shared frequency, a knowledge arrived at simultaneously that the other person understood what it was like to be you.

Elvis Presley and Anne Margaret had that. They had it on a Hollywood sound stage in July of 1963 in a recording booth and on a hotel floor in Las Vegas, on motorcycle rides through the Nevada desert at night. They had it for 15 years through marriages and shows and phone calls and guitar-shaped flowers. They had it on August 15th, 1977 when the flowers didn’t come and Anne Margaret did two shows anyway and knew without being told that something was permanently over.

She said he was her soulmate. She said they were connected mind, body, and soul. She said she would never fully recover from losing him. And she said all of this carefully after years of saying almost nothing because she wanted people to understand who he was and not just what had happened to him. Marty Lacker was Elvis’s best man.

He knew Elvis better than almost anyone alive. And late in his life, looking back across everything, all the decisions, all the women, all the ways things had gone the way they went, Marty Lacer said the thing that no one who loves Elvis can fully hear without feeling the weight of it. If Elvis had ended up with Thumper, this whole story might have wound up differently.

We’ll never know. That’s the nature of the road not taken. But the flowers kept coming for 10 years, and on the one night they didn’t, she knew before anyone told her. That is what it means to have known someone, really known them, in the place where the music lives. Thank you for watching Elvis Untold.

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