Priscilla Presley has given hundreds of interviews about Elvis. She has described the marriage, the divorce, the grief of his death, the years of managing his estate and his memory. She has been generous and specific and by most accounts honest. There is one thing she has never described. The first sentence he said to her, not the first time they met, that is well documented.
September 1959, Ba Nheim, Germany, a party at the home of Army Specialist Curry Grant, who had arranged for Priscilla Bolu, the 14-year-old step-daughter of a US Air Force captain, to attend. Elvis was 24. He had been in Germany for a year. He had been in the army for 18 months. The meeting itself is described in Priscilla’s autobiography, Elvis and Me, published in 1985.
She describes what she wore. She describes the room. She describes seeing Elvis for the first time. She does not describe the first sentence he said to her. In every interview she has given across 40 years of public life, she has described the meeting in general terms. That they talked, that Elvis was warm, that she was nervous, that something happened between them that she did not fully understand at the time.
The first sentence, the specific words, the opening of the conversation, she has never given. In the years after Elvis’s death, as the people who had been closest to him began to write their memoirs and give their interviews, a small number of accounts attempted to reconstruct the Bad Nheim meeting in detail.
One of those accounts came from a woman named Carol Anne Federer. Caroline Federer was not famous. She was not part of Elvis’s inner circle. She was a woman who had been a friend of Priscilla’s and Bodnheim, a teenager from another military family, the same age as Priscilla, who had attended the same party in September 1959.
She was standing close enough to hear. Caroline described the meeting in a private letter written in 1988 to a mutual friend from those Ba Nahheim years, a woman named Susan Greer, who had also been at the party. The letter was not written for publication. It was written because Susan had asked, in the specific way of people who share a past and return to it periodically, what Carol remembered about that night.
Susan Greer kept the letter. After both Caroline and Susan had died, Susan’s daughter found it among her mother’s papers. She recognized its significance. She gave it to a researcher connected to the University of Memphis’s Elvis archive in 2018. The letter is six pages long. Most of it describes the party in general terms.
the music, the other guests, the specific social dynamics of a group of young people from military families meeting one of the most famous people on Earth in a house in a German town. On page four, Caroline describes watching Priscilla being introduced to Elvis. She describes the introduction. She describes Priscilla’s expression.
And she describes what Elvis said. The sentence was not what Caroline had expected. She noted this specifically in the letter. She said she had expected something charming, something rehearsed, something that the most famous performer in America would say to a nervous 14-year-old girl at a party. What Elvis said was a question.
He looked at Priscilla. He looked at her in the specific way that multiple people who encountered Elvis in private settings described. The full complete attention that made the person it was directed at feel they were the only person in the room. Then he said, “What are you afraid of?” Caroline described Priscilla’s reaction.
She said Priscilla went very still. Not frozen. still the stillness of someone who has been asked something they were not expecting to be asked, something true. Priscilla did not answer immediately. Caroline wrote that she watched from 3 ft away and saw something pass across Priscilla’s face that she could not fully describe 40 years later.
Something between surprise and recognition. Then Priscilla answered. Caroline did not record the answer in the letter. She wrote that she could not hear it, that Priscilla spoke quietly and she was not close enough. But she recorded what happened after. She said Elvis nodded. He said something in response.
And then the two of them moved away from the group and talked for the rest of the evening. 6 weeks later, Elvis called Curry Grant and asked him to bring Priscilla to his house. Their relationship lasted in its various forms for the rest of Elvis’s life. What are you afraid of? This is not on its surface a surprising first sentence.
People ask each other what they’re afraid of. It is a question that exists in the normal range of human conversation. But as the first sentence, the opening of a conversation that lasted in one form or another for 18 years, it contains something worth sitting with. Elvis Presley, who had spent his entire life being afraid, of being forgotten, of not being enough, of the specific recurring terror of standing in front of an audience and not having what they came for.
Advertisements
Asked a 14-year-old girl at a party what she was afraid of. not as an icebreaker, not as a line, as a genuine question from someone for whom the answer mattered. Priscilla was asked about the first sentence once, not directly. A journalist came close in a 2010 interview, asking what she remembered most specifically about their first meeting.
Priscilla smiled. She said she remembered everything about that night. The journalist pressed. “What was the first thing he said?” Priscilla looked at the journalist. “Some things,” she said, “are between the two of you.” The letter from Caroline Federers is in the University of Memphis Elvis archive.
It was donated in 2018. It has been reviewed by two researchers. It has not been widely cited. Four words on page four. What are you afraid of? The beginning of everything. From a man who knew better than almost anyone alive exactly what it felt like to be afraid and who asked the question because he already understood the answer.
Whatever Priscilla said, he had lived it.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
