ELVIS HAD A SECRET RELATIONSHIP — AND KATHY FINALLY TOLD THE STORY 10 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH
For years, whenever someone quietly asked what Elvis Presley was really like behind closed doors, Kathy Westmoreland gave almost the same answer:
“We were friends.”
It was true.
But it was nowhere near the whole story.
Ten years after Elvis Presley’s death, Kathy finally opened the door to one of the most personal chapters of her life — a chapter she later described as one of the hardest things she had ever written.
Chapter 7 was not simply about friendship.
It was about love, intimacy, jealousy, heartbreak, spiritual searching, and the complicated relationship between a famous married man and a woman who remained emotionally connected to him for seven years.
Kathy remembered the beginning almost like a fairy tale. Elvis was handsome, gentle, caring, generous and deeply affectionate. But there was one unavoidable fact: he was married and had a child.
And surprisingly, Kathy eventually came to believe that she was never meant to become his wife.
Why?
Because, in her view, Elvis simply wasn’t built for the kind of conventional marriage many people imagined for him.
She believed Elvis’s heart belonged not only to the women in his life, but to something much larger — his audience, his music, his world and the endless need to be loved.
One of the most striking ideas in her account is that Elvis seemed to be “in love with love.”
That doesn’t mean Kathy portrayed him as a heartless man. Quite the opposite. She described enormous affection between them, including conversations about spirituality, religion, psychic phenomena and the meaning of life.
But affection did not erase reality.
Eventually, Kathy realized they might actually be better friends than lovers.
And then comes one of the most controversial parts of her story.
Kathy directly challenged the familiar narrative that Priscilla Presley leaving Elvis completely destroyed him and ultimately sent him toward his death.
She was there when Elvis learned that his marriage was over.
She described his grief as real. His stress was real. His emotional reaction was real.
But Kathy did not believe the divorce was the “killer” that some later accounts have portrayed it as.
According to her recollection, Elvis eventually accepted that he and Priscilla were not right for each other and even began looking forward to being a free man.
That does not prove that the divorce had no lasting effect on Elvis.
It simply gives us another firsthand perspective — one that complicates a story often repeated as if there were only one possible explanation.
And Kathy’s portrait of Elvis doesn’t stop there.
She remembered him as loving and generous, but also possessive and jealous.
Her account of Elvis’s reaction when actor Lee Majors was around her is particularly revealing. Kathy recalled Elvis making it clear that he did not want another man getting too close to her.
At one point, according to Kathy, Elvis essentially told her:
“You’ll always belong to me.”
It was a moment that showed a darker side of the relationship — one that Kathy did not completely excuse or romanticize.
Then came one of the most emotional nights of her entire story.
Before dawn, Kathy received a phone call.
It was Elvis.
He needed her.
When she arrived, she encountered an Elvis who was emotionally shattered after learning that Priscilla had moved on.
According to Kathy, Elvis had learned about Priscilla and Mike Stone in an especially painful way — through Lisa Marie.
He knew his marriage was probably ending.
But knowing something intellectually and experiencing it emotionally were two completely different things.
Kathy believed Elvis could understand the situation with his mind, but struggled to accept it with his heart.
And yet, even in that devastating moment, Kathy offered an unusually unsentimental observation:
If it hadn’t been Mike Stone, she believed, it would eventually have been someone else.
In her view, Priscilla had been lonely and needed love too.
That perspective makes the story far more complicated than the simple version of “Elvis was abandoned and never recovered.”
Kathy also remembered Elvis’s relationships with other women, including Linda Thompson and Ginger Alden.
Her description of Ginger is particularly significant.
Kathy believed Elvis was genuinely happy and deeply in love with Ginger. At one point, she recalled, he seriously considered marrying her.
She also remembered something she considered extraordinary: during that period, Elvis appeared to be more monogamous than he had been in previous relationships.
But Kathy believed Ginger struggled with the realities of Elvis’s increasingly difficult life.
And by then, according to Kathy’s recollection, those around Elvis understood how serious his physical condition had become.
That leads to perhaps the most haunting theme of Chapter 7.
The people closest to Elvis knew something was wrong.
The image Kathy leaves behind is not simply the glamorous superstar standing under stage lights.
It is Elvis alone in a dark room, struggling to sleep, surrounded by noise outside but emotionally isolated inside.
It is Elvis searching for spiritual answers.
It is Elvis seriously considering a monastery.
And it is Elvis wrestling with the question of what his life was actually supposed to mean.
His spiritual relationship with Larry Geller became so important that members of his inner circle reportedly worried that Elvis was becoming too deeply involved in religion and metaphysical subjects.
At one point, Kathy recalled, Elvis seriously considered leaving everything behind and entering a monastery.
But eventually he came to another conclusion.
Perhaps his purpose was not to disappear from the world.
Perhaps his voice was the gift he was supposed to use to reach millions of people.
And that may be the most revealing part of Kathy’s story.
She didn’t describe Elvis as simply a romantic hero.
She didn’t describe him as simply a victim.
And she didn’t describe him as simply a superstar.
She remembered a complicated man — generous and possessive, spiritual and impulsive, deeply loving yet incapable of giving one person everything they wanted.
After seven years of emotional highs and painful lows, Kathy believed their relationship had transformed into something difficult to define.
They were no longer simply lovers.
They were something else.
Two people who had known each other too deeply to become strangers.
Two people who had seen each other’s weaknesses.
Two people who had shared secrets almost nobody else could understand.
And perhaps that is why Chapter 7 remains so fascinating.
Because Kathy’s story doesn’t make Elvis smaller.
It makes him more human.
The Elvis behind the stage lights was not always the man fans wanted him to be.
He could be tender.
He could be jealous.
He could be generous.
He could be cruel.
He could search desperately for spiritual meaning while simultaneously struggling with very human desires.
And according to Kathy, the relationship they built over seven years eventually became something neither of them could simply walk away from.
They were free — yet somehow still bound to one another.
And perhaps that is the real shock of Kathy Westmoreland’s story:
The woman who spent years telling people she and Elvis were “just friends” was carrying a much deeper story all along.
Ten years after Elvis died, she finally decided that the truth — complicated, uncomfortable and deeply personal — deserved to be told.
