If you tried to script a rock n roll soap opera, you would probably start with Tom Jones, Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley. Two ultra-macho singers, one iconic wife, and enough Vegas glitter to blind a small country.
For decades fans have whispered about a secret love triangle. The truth is messier and, in many ways, more interesting. The deepest bond here was not romantic at all – it was the intense, almost brotherly friendship between Tom and Elvis, with Priscilla woven through their lives in far subtler ways.
How Tom Jones and Elvis actually bonded
Tom Jones met Elvis in 1965 while filming at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. Elvis, already the King, crossed the soundstage singing Tom’s hit ‘With These Hands’ to the stunned Welsh newcomer, and the two quickly struck up a friendship that outlasted most showbiz alliances of the era.
By April 1968, that friendship had shifted to the crucible of Las Vegas. Elvis defied Colonel Parker’s usual caution about being seen at rival shows and insisted on a ringside table at Tom’s Flamingo Hotel gig. After the show he hugged Tom backstage, told him ‘You lit a fire in me tonight’, then called his manager the next day to demand a proper stage comeback, while Tom’s wife Linda and Priscilla sat in a corner swapping baby photos of Joanne Woodward and Lisa Marie Presley.
Elvis insider Jerry Schilling later said the King rarely socialised with other entertainers, but Tom was the glaring exception he truly called a friend. He recalled late nights where the two men traded each other’s songs, jammed on ‘One Night’ and even vacationed together in Hawaii, describing Tom as the one artist Elvis truly called a friend. Tom himself has talked about those Vegas suite sessions as marathon gospel jams, with Elvis asking when he would finally cut a gospel album – a challenge that stuck with him until he made his stripped back record ‘Praise and Blame‘ decades later.
In a later interview Tom pushed that intimacy into almost absurd territory. He described stepping out of a Vegas shower to find Elvis at his bathroom mirror in unlined North Beach leather trousers, struggling to pull them up, leaving Tom naked and Elvis half dressed. He said that moment captured how close they had become, joked that Priscilla was amazed Elvis would share a bathroom with another man, and used the same Fox News chat to insist that while he still sees her often and calls her a ‘very dear friend’, there is nothing romantic between them.
Priscilla’s place in their inner circle
To understand why fans are obsessed with this trio, you have to start with Priscilla’s bond with Elvis. She met him as a teenager in Germany, married him in 1967 and then watched his Vegas comeback tear their private life apart. In a recent public Q&A she spoke about finding letters from other women, feeling gutted by his affairs yet still calling him the love of her life, and admitting she never really wanted to remarry, in part because of how Elvis himself might have reacted.
That tension makes her friendship with Tom uniquely loaded. She was there in 1968 when Elvis walked into Tom’s Flamingo show, sharing new baby photos with Linda while the two men plotted a comeback. She saw first hand that Elvis viewed Tom not as competition but as the only other male star allowed fully inside the bubble. Her later closeness to Tom is rooted in that shared history, not in some late life coup where Elvis’s widow runs off with his best mate.
From Vegas nights to decades of rumours
Tom did not exactly help himself when it came to his public image. He stayed married to his childhood sweetheart Linda for nearly six decades, yet has openly bragged that at his peak he slept with up to 250 groupies a year, with high profile affairs that included Supremes singer Mary Wilson and former Miss World Marjorie Wallace, while Linda tolerated it and occasionally exploded over the headlines, as he admitted in a candid interview about his womanising heyday. For fans fed on tabloid morality tales, the idea of Elvis’s widow ending up with a man like that was catnip.
When Linda died of cancer in 2016, paparazzi snapped Tom and Priscilla arriving together at Hollywood restaurant Craig’s in the same Rolls Royce. British tabloids instantly cast it as a late life romance, and one widely repeated piece had Tom half joking that he did not know how Elvis would feel about those dinners and that the King probably would not be too sure about it, as later recycled in a speculative story claiming that Tom and Priscilla had finally confirmed a romance. For Elvis loyalists, it looked like the ultimate betrayal fantasy: the King’s closest male friend riding into the sunset with his former queen.
Yet whenever the story has been forced out of the gossip pages and into more serious outlets, the people involved shut the romance angle down. In 2017 Tom told Hello! magazine that ‘Priscilla is a friend of mine’ and that it was simply not true they were dating or in a relationship, stressing that they were ‘just friends, but good friends’ whose connection dated back to the glory days when he and Elvis were both tearing up Vegas.
His representatives have been even more blunt. After those Craig’s photos, a spokesperson told People and other outlets that Tom and Priscilla had known each other for many years, were simply part of a wider Los Angeles social circle who sometimes met up for dinner, and that there was no more to the story than that; Tom, speaking separately, called her a lovely lady and said they simply enjoyed their nights out together.
Priscilla has echoed him point for point. On Good Morning Britain she said the pictures of them together showed nothing new, explaining that ‘always friendship, always friends’ defined their bond, calling Tom a great guy and saying part of why they saw more of each other after 2016 was that she was supporting a widower whose wife, the love of his life, had just died.
Even modern fakery has piled on. In 2025, AI generated images suddenly appeared online showing what looked like a Tom and Priscilla wedding. She reposted the fake wedding shots herself with ‘fake news’ graphics splashed across the images and joked on Instagram that she had woken up to find out she had married Tom Jones in her sleep, before making it clear to fans that she was very much still single.
Timeline: Tom, Elvis and Priscilla in key moments
If you strip away the fantasies, their story looks less like a love triangle and more like three lives repeatedly colliding around the same stages, hotels and griefs. This quick timeline puts the main beats in order.
| Year | Event | Relationship note |
|---|---|---|
| 1965 | Tom and Elvis meet at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. | Elvis seeks out the young Welsh singer, opening the door to a rare star-to-star friendship. |
| 1967 – 1968 | Elvis and Priscilla marry; Elvis watches Tom at the Flamingo in Vegas. | Backstage, Linda and Priscilla swap baby photos while Elvis tells Tom he has lit a fire under him. |
| Late 1960s – early 1970s | Elvis’s Vegas residency and tours overlap with Tom’s own shows. | The men share suites, sing gospel into the night and vacation together; Priscilla moves in the same inner circle. |
| 1973 | Elvis and Priscilla’s divorce is finalised. | They remain bound by Lisa Marie and by Priscilla’s role as guardian of his legacy. |
| 1977 | Elvis dies at 42. | Tom loses a close friend; his connection to Priscilla becomes one of shared mourning rather than shared parties. |
| 2016 | Linda, Tom’s wife of nearly 60 years, dies. | Old friends including Priscilla come back into sharper focus as he navigates life as a widower. |
| 2017 onwards | Joint dinners and public sightings of Tom and Priscilla spark recurring romance rumours. | Both repeatedly insist they are longtime friends, not lovers, even as tabloids and now AI keep trying to marry them off. |
So was there ever a love triangle?
Look closely at the evidence and the most intense relationship in this story is between Tom and Elvis, not between either of them and Priscilla. Two alpha male singers bonded over gospel music, stagecraft and the peculiar loneliness of being worshipped, to the point where sharing a bathroom in Vegas felt less intimate than the secrets they shared about fear, faith and fame.
Priscilla, for her part, remains the woman Elvis never quite let go of and the friend Tom never crossed a line with, despite a personal history that includes more bed partners than most small towns. Ironically, both men seem to have slept with half of Vegas, yet there is no solid evidence that Tom ever turned his old friend’s ex into anything more than a confidante. In an era built on scandal, that may be the one rock n roll taboo everyone involved quietly agreed not to break.
