For four years, Linda Thompson was one of the closest people to Elvis Presley. She lived at Graceland, shared his bed, watched him write music history, and witnessed his slow, heartbreaking decline. She also became the person who checked on him in the middle of the night to make sure he was still breathing.
Now, decades later, she’s opening up about what actually made her leave — and what happened in the final days of his life.
“I Am Going to Marry Elvis Presley”
Linda Thompson was born on May 23, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee — the same city where Elvis had already been winning talent shows at Humes High School. She grew up loving his music. But her connection to him started long before they ever met.
“When I was six years old, sitting at the breakfast table, I told my parents, ‘I am going to marry Elvis Presley,'” Thompson recalled.
She entered beauty pageants as a teenager and racked up an extraordinary list of titles: Miss Shelby County, Miss Mid-South Fair, Miss Liberty Bowl, Miss Okra, Memphis State’s Golf Queen, and eventually Miss Tennessee. She placed third in Miss USA.
Meeting the King
In 1972, Elvis and Priscilla Presley divorced. Not long after, Elvis met Linda at a private screening.
“Well, hello honey!” he said.
“I thought he was still married so I had no designs at all,” Linda recalled. “I was just happy to meet my idol.”
After the film started, Elvis came down and sat next to her.
“He started pulling the old yawn, put the hand around the seat,” Linda remembered. “He said, ‘I’ve been separated since the end of the year. We’re getting a divorce. She’s met somebody else and she’s moved on.’ I said, ‘Oh, well I’m sorry to hear that but you should have married a southern girl.’ And he never forgot that.”
They started dating shortly afterward, and Linda moved into Graceland.
“Kindred Spirits”
In her 2016 book A Little Thing Called Life, Thompson described their relationship as something far more complex than a typical romance.
“Ours was a complete relationship — when the need arose, we got to be everything to each other,” she wrote. “He was almost sixteen years older than I and so it was natural for me to sometimes be the little girl, with him playing the daddy. More often than not, though, I was the mommy, and he was the baby. Sometimes we were lovers, sometimes we were brother and sister. Sometimes we were best friends. We were all things to each other at one time or another. And Elvis was always, always everything to me.”
Watching Him Self-Destruct
During the last couple of years of their relationship, Linda watched Elvis’s health decline. He was suffering and took sleeping medication, sometimes mixed with other substances. She would sit and watch him until he fell asleep — then wake up multiple times each night to check that he was still breathing.
“It was exhausting, I have to admit,” Linda said. “I was a young girl but it was still exhausting when you’re not sleeping. And also just emotionally exhausting because this is a person that I loved more than my own life and watching him slowly self-destruct and not being able to do anything about it…”
In early 1975, Elvis was hospitalized. Linda had found him in bed, struggling to catch his breath. He was experiencing liver problems — not from alcohol, but from prescription medication.
The Decision to Leave
Elvis bought Linda a house near Graceland. But by October 1975, she simply couldn’t do it anymore. After Elvis was treated at the hospital once again, she left him to focus on her career in Los Angeles.
“I had this haunting feeling, I just thought, I don’t know if anybody’s going to take care of him the way I did,” Linda explained. “I felt very attuned to his habits and his needs. When you’re with someone for that many years and that closely living with them, I felt very attuned to his habits and his needs and I thought, nobody else is going to know that.”
The Final Phone Call
They stayed in touch. And just days before Elvis died on August 16, 1977, Linda made what would be their last call to Graceland. Elvis’s best friend and guitarist Charlie Hodge answered.
“Charlie was a little impatient with me,” Linda recalled. “He said, ‘He’s fine honey. He’s asleep.’ I said, ‘Just humour me and please go up there and just check on his breathing.'”
Charlie checked and confirmed Elvis was breathing. Then Linda said her final words to the King through his best friend.
“I said, ‘Okay, just tell him that I called and I love him and I was just checking on him,'” she continued. “He said, ‘I’ll let him know. That’ll make him happy.'”
On August 16, 1977, Linda was in her Los Angeles apartment when she got the call. Elvis had been found unconscious on his bathroom floor and was rushed to the hospital, where he passed away at 42. She was the first person a then nine-year-old Lisa Marie Presley called that night.
The Judgment She Still Faces
Whenever photos of Linda Thompson and Elvis Presley resurface, the same comments appear. Many people say she wasn’t as beautiful as Priscilla and that Elvis should have stayed with his first wife.
But that assessment ignores the reality of what Linda gave him: love, stability, and care during a period when he was falling apart. She was a significant part of his life, and their relationship was meaningful in its own right. Comparing the two women serves no one.
A Life Beyond Elvis
Linda went on to build an extraordinary career of her own. She acted in films and television, then became a successful songwriter. In 1993, she was nominated for both a Grammy and an Academy Award for her work on The Bodyguard. She married Bruce Jenner in 1981, and they welcomed sons Brody and Brandon before divorcing in 1986. She later married music producer David Foster, a marriage that ended in 2005.
Through it all, she never stopped honoring Elvis. On the 43rd anniversary of his passing, she wrote a tribute that captured everything he meant to her:
“He was the king of cool as well as the king of rock ‘n’ roll. He had an enormous heart, an unbridled generosity, an innovative talent, a loving, affectionate nature, and a profound sensitivity. He was an original. He was complex in his simplicity, and he was very human.”
A Rare Recording
In recent years, a rare recording from 1973 surfaced online, giving fans a glimpse of Elvis and Linda harmonizing on a song called “Your Life Has Just Begun.” The audio isn’t perfect, but their voices are unmistakable — and the recording offers a deeply personal window into Presley’s final years.
A Love That Still Matters
Linda Thompson left Elvis because she couldn’t save him. But she never stopped loving him. And in sharing her story, she’s done something the tabloids never could: she’s given the world a portrait of Elvis Presley as a human being — complicated, fragile, generous, and deeply loved. ❤️
