This is the July 21 issue of the National Enquirer. When I saw it on the stand at the grocery store check-out line, I thought “big deal, this story has been around for years on TV entertainment shows and websites.” Certain Elvis websites, too. But, then I remembered something in my collection of supermarket tabloids with Elvis on the cover. I searched through the storage box and found this.
This is the April 26, 1977 issue of the National Enquirer. Elvis didn’t get the big headline, but they found a nasty-looking photo of him, and used the caption: Elvis’ Bizarre Behavior and Secret Face Lift.
It certainly appears that the Enquirer is having trouble coming up with new ideas. They are now repeating a theme they used 37 years ago, just changing the subject from Elvis to Priscilla. They couldn’t even come up with a clever line of crap for their headline. After classics like “Elvis Fathered My Alien Baby,” shouldn’t we get something equally bizarre like “Botox Poisoning Enables Priscilla to Communicate with Horses.”
Above is what they reported in their story. Do Botox injections actually count as plastic surgery? I thought that involved cutting with a scalpel. Anyway, I read the whole article and it is pretty disgusting, so there will be only one excerpt here. It sure sounds like the usual Enquirer drivel, but I think this has been reported elsewhere. Supposedly, the villain in this story is an unlicensed bogus plastic surgeon from Argentina who told Priscilla he was injecting her with his miracle anti-wrinkle serum.
“The serum turned out to be industrial, low-grade silicon, similar to what’s used to lubricate auto parts!”
The Enquirer states that this guy has been nicknamed Dr. Jiffy Lube. How could a smart woman like Priscilla ever get involved with such a sorry con artist?
This is the rest of the story. Elvis was finally mentioned three-quarters of the way through. While the Enquirer sated there have been no suggestions that Priscilla is addicted to face treatments, they just had to mention Elvis’ problem with prescription drugs.
Along the bottom of the two-page spread, you can see a timeline of Pricilla’s appearance over the years. They certainly didn’t pick the worst pictures of her during the Botox years. You can Google Priscilla Presley Botox, and some really scary photos pop up. I can’t figure out why she would go out in public looking like that, knowing it would attract the paparazzi.
Priscilla looks pretty in some of the Enquirer younger photos, but none that showed her as the absolute knock-out she was in her twenties, thirties and forties.
So, how did the National Enquirer treat Elvis in his cover story article 37 years ago?
They clobbered him big time on the last three bulleted items above, but no mention of them is warranted here. The so-called face lift was simply small eye-tucks. Here is how the Enquirer reported the story.
In a desperate attempt to improve his appearance, the sagging superstar had a face lift at Mid-South Hospital in Memphis on June 18, 1975. Newsmen were told he was in the hospital for treatment of an eye condition…
Presley’s decision to have a face lift surprised even many of his closest friends. One of them… recalled, “Elvis had been secluded for three days, and then told one of his bodyguards to come into the room. He asked, ‘How do I look?’
The bodyguard told him, ‘You look good, your eyes look clear and everything.’ He just wanted to make Elvis feel good, because if he was in a bad mood, he would take his gun and start shooting things.”
So, the bodyguard thought he was being questioned about some other eye condition and never noticed the results of the eye-tucks.
Here is a photo of Elvis supposedly taken shortly after the eye surgery. The comments on the forum where I borrowed it seemed to concur that the difference after the tucks was negligible. What do you think?
Here’s a prediction. Elvis and Priscilla won’t be the last members of the family to get the National Enquirer treatment on a face lift cover story. I just hope it’s an eye-tuck and not Botox.
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