Before there was Priscilla, there was Anita Wood. She was a beauty queen and TV performer from Tennessee, and in 1957 Elvis Presley told the world she was his “No. 1 Girl.” He gave her a nickname — “Little” — and he meant it seriously enough to put a promise in writing while stationed overseas: “I guarantee that when I marry, it will be to Miss Little Presley Wood.” He never did. And the reason was already sitting in a living room in Germany.
Anita wasn’t a fan who got lucky. She had won the 1954 Youth Talent Contest at the Mid-South Fair and been a runner-up for Miss Tennessee. She was a working performer with her own career, appearing on television and recording for real labels. Paramount Pictures even signed her as an actress — a contract most young women in America would have killed for. She gave it up for Elvis.
Then came 1958. Elvis was drafted, and while he was serving in Germany, he lost his mother, Gladys. He phoned Anita himself with the news, calling her by her nickname and asking her to come. She was in New York working at the time. She dropped everything and went to Memphis to be with him. This was not a casual romance — it was the relationship that carried Elvis through the worst loss of his life.
Elvis Presley, Anita Wood & Priscilla: The Untold Love Triangle
His letters from Germany are some of the most emotional writing he ever did. One four-page handwritten letter to Anita, sent about six weeks after he arrived, later sold at auction with an estimate around $75,000. In it, he doesn’t sound like the biggest star on earth. He sounds like a lonely young soldier missing his girl. He wrote to her about waiting for him: “Only God knows when the time will be right.” He asked her to trust him, believe him, and wait — and promised that their future would be filled with happiness.
But something had changed on his end. Anita had already noticed his letters in the press mentioning a German girl, and Elvis was writing back to reassure her. She says she was all set to fly out and visit him in 1959 — and that Colonel Parker made sure it never happened. Meanwhile, in Bad Nauheim, a 14-year-old named Priscilla Beaulieu was becoming the person to whom Elvis poured out his heart.
Anita Wood & Elvis Presley telephone conversation (1960)
Elvis came home in 1960, and he and Anita carried on for two more years. There’s even a surviving recording of a phone call where she refuses to let him charm his way out of ignoring her, telling him flatly: “Because you don’t think of me. Because you don’t miss me.” By the summer of 1962, Anita had realized the commitment was never coming, and she walked away.
She had once discussed baby names with him — a girl would get a name close to Lisa, a boy would be Elvis Presley Jr. Instead, in 1965, she married NFL player Johnny Brewer, and they remained married for 46 years until he died in 2011. She lived until 2023. The girl who gave up a Paramount contract for the King ended up with the one thing he never gave her: someone who stayed.