At 94, Barbara Eden Reveals What Elvis Told Her About the Girl in Germany

Caption: Elvis Presley in a 1968 promotional portrait. Credit: RCA, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Before Elvis Presley married Priscilla, he turned to a co-star for advice on whether a Hollywood marriage could survive. Barbara Eden, now 94, is still telling the story, and this weekend she told it again as fans marked the anniversary of Presley’s death.

The Question on the Set of ‘Flaming Star’

Eden filmed the 1960 Western “Flaming Star” with Presley early in both their careers. She has described him as a serious actor and an unusually courteous one, recalling that he would get her a chair when she arrived on set. Then came the exchange she keeps returning to. According to Eden, Presley asked her directly how a marriage could hold up under fame: “How do you have a marriage in Hollywood? How do you do this with all the stuff going on?”

The Girl He Mentioned in Germany

Presley told her he had met “this girl in Germany,” Eden recalled, adding that he was “not too sure, she’s awfully young.” He offered no name. The young woman was Priscilla Beaulieu, whom Presley had met in West Germany in 1959, when she was 14; by the time “Flaming Star” filmed the following year, she was 15. The couple married in 1967, and their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was born in 1968. Eden has said she only understood later who he had been describing.

What She Told Him

Eden’s answer was less about romance than routine. “For us, it’s our job,” she remembered telling him. “This is how we make money. That’s it.” She has also said she made little money from “Flaming Star,” and has recalled that audiences were disappointed Presley did not sing in it, a reaction that led to a musical number being added.

Why the Story Still Lands

Eden became a household name a few years later as the star of “I Dream of Jeannie,” and at 94, days from her 95th birthday, she is still working and still asked about Presley. The anecdote resurfaces because it captures a version of him the public rarely saw: not the performer, but a young man asking a colleague whether fame and marriage could survive each other. Presley and Priscilla divorced in 1973, and Presley died on August 16, 1977. Eden has kept telling the story, she has said, because of how ordinary the question felt in the moment.

References: Parade | Fox News