Despite all of his affairs and her other relationships, Priscilla Presley reveals the

 He WAS the King. No dispute. Springsteen fans can revere The Boss, but in the history of rock music, Elvis still reigns supreme.

The beautiful boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, may have become a bloated, drug-addled shadow of former glory and yet, to those of us who hero-worshipped him, his crown shines as brightly as ever – that is, as long as you clear your mind of unpleasant facts.

Elvis’s infidelities, his dissolute life at Graceland with his notorious entourage, his utterly appalling irresponsible attitude to raising his daughter. All of it is very well-documented – but the sound of That’s All Right can drown out carping truths.

Newly-weds: Elvis and Priscilla boarding their private jet following their wedding in Las Vegas

A strange, obsessive adoration still turns Priscilla Presley into his No 1 super-fan. The young wife who did the unthinkable and left him (after 13 years together) in February 1972 will never kick her Elvis habit. After more than five decades, Priscilla is still declaring her love. ‘I never regretted my ­decision to leave Elvis,’ she writes. ‘But I never ceased to mourn it.’

Undying love is the theme that runs insistently throughout her new memoir: ‘He was the most beautiful, talented, loving human being I have ever known.’

Presley has already told the story of her courtship by Elvis when she was a rather shockingly young 14 (he was ten years older) and the marriage at 22 which left thousands of women fuming with jealousy.

This memoir picks up where her 1985 book, Elvis And Me, left off and seems to be more frank. It’s as if the passing of years has made her feel more free – and in any case, we live in the era of ‘tell all’.

What’s more, Priscilla Presley is very much her own woman – one who with determination, confidence and the Presley ego, forged a ­successful career in acting and in business and saved Graceland. Whether or not she feels, in any dark night of the soul, that she made a success of her ­relationships with men and of ­motherhood is another matter.

M ost women will find her honesty about being a Sixties woman in the States astonishing: ‘The expectations for girls . . .was to find and secure a good husband. I worked hard to meet those expectations. There were rules for almost everything girls did back then. I should never phone a boy, for that would be forward.

Lovers: Priscilla with Robert Kardashian, 1976

‘A woman’s purpose was to meet her man’s needs before considering her own. I was to listen to my ­husband without expecting him to listen to me. I should never question his instructions or behaviour. I felt it was my job to keep him happy, not the other way around.’ And so on.

Needless to say, Southern-boy Elvis just loved all that. He expected to tell her what to do, what to wear, what to cook, and needed her to lay out his pyjamas every night. He got what he demanded: a docile wife who would always greet him with full hairdo and make-up in place, listen to him ‘talk endlessly’ and never question what he did – or who with.

True Love?: Priscilla never warmed to Michael Jackson, only meeting him twice during his marriage to her daughter Lisa Marie 

She had to tolerate the guys in his entourage bringing pretty girls into Graceland to meet the man who was ‘king of all he surveyed’. No wonder she says: ‘The struggle wore me down and I began to feel like the proverbial bird in a gilded cage.’ Priscilla reveals that even after their divorce she and Elvis still prattled in their old, intimate baby-talk. He would telephone her at all hours, even if she was in bed with other men.

And although she was entitled to act as she pleased, Priscilla was careful not to annoy him.

Once, she was in bed with Robert Kardashian when the phone rang and she ‘just knew who it was’. Surely only a woman still enthralled by her ex would creep out of bed at 2am, chat as long as he wanted, then creep back to her slumbering lover? ‘He never knew Elvis had called. And Elvis never knew about Robert.’

If Elvis had, he ‘would have gone ballistic’ and he ‘always ­carried a loaded gun’.

The issue was that, ‘despite our divorce, he still couldn’t wrap his head around my being with somebody else.’

Michael Jackson’s quick courtship of her daughter Lisa Marie met with her disapproval. Lisa Marie divorced the man who was probably the only one to truly love her, Danny Keough, and married Jackson three weeks later. ‘I was appalled,’ Presley says. ‘I didn’t believe he loved her.’

She describes going to a dinner party at Lisa Marie’s house, hoping to get to know Jackson. But the superstar Jackson ‘stayed as far away from me as possible,’ playing outside with the children. That’s a rather chilling detail.

He later showed up at a tribute to Elvis in Memphis, where they didn’t speak. Those were the only two times she saw her son-in-law. Cue another disaster.

Priscilla’s story is shot through with the kind of loss that would floor most people.

You can’t help wondering at the forces that led to so much bad luck within one family – but the words ‘privilege’ and ‘drugs’ do spring easily to mind.

She tells of the relentless addiction struggles of her son Navarone Garcia (with Brazilian screenwriter and computer ­programmer, Marco Garibaldi Garcia), recounts the terrible suicide of her grandson Benjamin Keough and, of course, the premature death of her daughter, Lisa Marie, Elvis’s only child.

The saga would be relentless were it not told with an almost detachment, perhaps due to having a professional writer as intermediary. 

Or perhaps a life spent in the public eye has taught her iron self-control.

Priscilla Presley is 80 now, and arguably more beautiful than she was as an over-made-up teenager courting Elvis.

The complex story of her relationship with tragic Lisa Marie – ‘my wild child’ – is as riveting and heartbreaking as ever.

To understand the other side I recommend the daughter’s own story, From Here To The Great Unknown, written with Priscilla’s granddaughter, the talented actress Riley Keough.

For the Presley family story never ceases to enthral.

This latest instalment begins and ends with sincerely expressed, almost obsessive love for Elvis – the ghost who will surely haunt his ex-wife as long as she remains in the Heartbreak Hotel of her life.