Elvis Presley Once Called Priscilla Presley While She Was in Bed with Robert Kardashian

Priscilla Presley is recalling how she navigated her relationship with Robert Kardashian amid her divorce from Elvis Presley.

Priscilla, 80, opened up about her relationship with the late attorney in her second book, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. Priscilla dated Kardashian in 1975, two years after she and Elvis divorced. Kardashian died of esophageal cancer in 2003. He was 59. Elvis died of a heart attack in 1977. He was 42.

In the book, Priscilla recalled a night when Elvis called her after a performance at 2 a.m., unaware she was with Kardashian.

“It hadn’t crossed [Elvis’] mind that I might have been asleep. It had certainly never occurred to him that I might be with another man,” Presley wrote. “Despite our divorce, he still couldn’t wrap his head around my being with someone else.”

“He’d have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom,” Presley wrote. “Elvis always carried a loaded gun, sometimes more than one.”

Kardashian never knew the singer called late that night, and Elvis never knew of her relationship with Kardashian, Presley wrote.

“Fortunately, [Kardashian] was a sound sleeper, so I leaped out of bed and grabbed the phone before it woke him,” Presley wrote. “I tiptoed down the hall to the guest bedroom and shut the door to listen to the familiar voice.”

Presley and Kardashian dated for around a year, but explained she didn’t like that his “demanding” job made him keep “long hours.”

“Robert was a sweet man, and I liked him,” she said, adding that, at that point in their lives, they both had different goals. “Robert wanted to get married, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I wasn’t ready to marry again.”

They remained friends. Before Kardashian died in 2003, the former couple had one last conversation while he was in the hospital, which his daughter, Kim Kardashian, organized, Presley revealed. “He was the kindest of men, and I remember him with great affection.”

Kardashian married Kris Jenner in 1978, and they had four children: Kim, 44, Kourtney, 46, Khloé, 41, and Robert Jr., 38. 

Presley and Elvis had one child together, Lisa Marie Presley, who was born in 1968. Lisa Marie died in 2023 from a small bowel obstruction at age 54. Priscilla also has a son, Navarone Garibaldi, 38, whom she shares with Marco Garibaldi Garcia.

Lisa Marie and ex-husband Danny Keough had two children: Riley Keough, 36, and Benjamin Keough, who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020. She also shared twins Finley Aaron Love and Harper Vivienne Anne, 16, with second husband Michael Lockwood.

Priscilla recently opened up about her daughter’s tragic death in an interview with this week’s PEOPLE cover, calling it “the second saddest day of my life, other than losing Elvis.”

Hours before Lisa Marie’s death on Jan. 12, the family was at the hospital all day long.

“Lisa really wasn’t breathing, so she was on the ventilator. For hours we were there waiting, hoping and praying until the doctor came in and said, ‘Priscilla, I’m so sorry, she’s gone,’ ” she recalled for PEOPLE. “We just couldn’t believe it — didn’t want to believe it. It was hard on all of us, it still is.”

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Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis is available on Sept. 23.