Elvis and Priscilla Presley Walked Out of Their Divorce Hearing Holding Hands

What the paperwork records

On 9 October 1973 Elvis and Priscilla Presley left a Santa Monica courthouse after their divorce was finalised, and a Los Angeles Times photographer named George R. Fry photographed them walking out together, hands joined, both smiling. The negative is held by the UCLA Library, which has released it under a Creative Commons licence. It is the single most misread celebrity photograph of the 1970s: it does not show a reconciliation, and it does not show a performance. It shows the end of a settlement both sides had agreed to.

The marriage lasted six years and five months. The relationship that preceded it began in circumstances that would be reported very differently today, and this article states those circumstances plainly rather than around them.

Verified timeline

1. September 1959

   Priscilla Beaulieu, then 14 and the stepdaughter of a US Air Force officer stationed in West Germany, meets Elvis Presley, then 24 and serving in the US Army at Friedberg. She has described the meeting in her own memoir and in interviews.

2. March 1960

   Presley's army service ends and he returns to the United States. The two remain in contact.

3. 1963

   Priscilla Beaulieu moves to Memphis, completes her schooling there, and lives at or near Graceland with the agreement of her parents and Presley's father.

4. 1 May 1967

   They marry at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The ceremony lasts about eight minutes.

5. 1 February 1968

   Their daughter Lisa Marie Presley is born in Memphis.

6. December 1968

   Presley's television special — later known as the '68 Comeback Special — is broadcast, and he returns to live performance the following year.

7. February 1972

   The couple separate. Priscilla Presley moves out of the Los Angeles home.

8. 18 August 1972

   A petition for divorce is filed. The proceedings are settled rather than contested.

9. 9 October 1973

   The divorce is finalised at the Santa Monica courthouse. They leave together, photographed hand in hand.

10. 16 August 1977

    Elvis Presley dies at Graceland, aged 42.

11. 7 June 1982

    Graceland opens to the public. Priscilla Presley had led the decision to open the house rather than sell it.

12. 27 March 2006

    Graceland is designated a National Historic Landmark.

13. 12 January 2023

    Lisa Marie Presley dies in California, aged 54.

What the sources support

• PUBLIC RECORD: the marriage took place on 1 May 1967 in Las Vegas and was dissolved on 9 October 1973 in Santa Monica.
• PUBLIC RECORD: the divorce was settled by agreement. Both parties appeared and the proceedings were not contested in open court.
• CONFIRMED: Priscilla Presley has described the German meeting, the move to Memphis and the marriage in her own published account and in numerous interviews given under her own name.
• PUBLIC RECORD: Graceland opened to visitors on 7 June 1982 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
• CONFIRMED: Priscilla Presley served as chair and president of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the company created to manage the estate.

The photograph, and why it looks the way it does

Divorce photographs of the period are almost always adversarial: separate exits, a hand raised against a lens, a lawyer between the parties and the camera. This one is not. Both of them had agreed to the terms in advance, both had an interest in a quiet exit, and both were entirely aware that a Los Angeles Times photographer was waiting. It is a picture of two people ending a marriage without a public fight — which in 1973, for a subject of that fame, was the unusual part.

The revised settlement that produced it was substantially larger than the one originally proposed, and was reported at the time in the region of $2 million in cash plus property interests and support. That figure comes from contemporaneous reporting of the filings rather than from a document Forgotten Frame has inspected, and is recorded here as REPORTED.

In their own words

“We had a divorce, but we never really parted. We were still very much in each other's lives.”

Elvis Presley never gave a detailed public account of the divorce. He continued to perform until weeks before his death in 1977, and the two remained in contact over their daughter throughout. No statement from either of them attributes the end of the marriage to a single cause, and Forgotten Frame does not supply one.

Where the record stops

Everything about why the marriage ended is REPORTED at best. The commonly cited explanations — the touring schedule, the entourage at Graceland, relationships on both sides — appear in memoirs and in interviews given decades later by people who were not parties to the settlement. Nothing in the court record states a cause; California had adopted no-fault divorce in 1970, so nothing in the record was required to.

What followed

Elvis Presley died at Graceland on 16 August 1977. The estate that passed to his daughter was heavily encumbered, and the decision not to sell the house but to open it was the one that preserved it. Graceland admitted its first paying visitors in June 1982 and has since received millions of them; the National Park Service lists it as a National Historic Landmark.

Priscilla Presley built a second career as an actress, most visibly in the Naked Gun films, and remained the public face of the estate for decades. Lisa Marie Presley died in January 2023 at 54. The house is still open, and the photograph from outside the courthouse still runs, usually with a caption that gets it wrong.