Linda Thompson

She doesn't have to try hard to remember the first date. It was July 6, 1972, says Linda Thompson, the beginning of a five-year romance that jumbled love with the dark side of celebrity.

Elvis Presley had just separated from Priscilla Presley over her affair with her karate instructor. Thompson had just been named Miss Tennessee Universe. A member of Elvis' entourage invited Thompson to meet Elvis during a private after-midnight movie screening at the Memphian Theatre. Thompson wouldn't remember the name of the movie by the next day, but she remembers Elvis faking a yawn and stretching as he put his arm around her:

"'Hello, honey, where have you been all of my life?'" he asked.

The line wasn't original, but it worked, says Thompson, who had grown up on Elvis' music and was instantly smitten.

"There are just a few times in your life when you meet someone that you think is a kindred spirit," she said in a recent telephone interview from her home in California. "We both grew up in Memphis with the same religious fervor, the same cuisine, the same socioeconomic group, the same humidity. Unless you've grown up in that vicinity you don't really understand what being a Southerner is all about," says Thompson, who would become an actress, songwriter and, eventually, wife to Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, then Hollywood mega-music producer David Foster.

In 1972, Thompson was "young, naive, inexperienced" and unprepared at first for the powerful effect Presley had on everyone around him. She was 22. He was 37. Elvis advanced his cause by telling her, "Honey, you know I'm not married anymore."

"Maybe you should have married a Memphis girl, a Southern girl," she said.

"He looked at me and said, 'You know, you're right.'"

Thompson says she and Elvis quickly came to an understanding. She was a virgin. Elvis wanted her to live with him. "When he started hitting on me, I let him know I wasn't that kind of girl." They would live and sleep together, Thompson says, but Elvis waited months until she was ready for the relationship to grow more intimate.

Meanwhile, she was getting to know "a paradoxical man." He was a "gentleman" toward her as a woman. He was also "very volatile, very moody ... and he had a family history of addictive behavior."

Drugs were a way of life for him when they met. "I think most people with drug addictions are in denial. I think he tried to justify it in his own mind that 'the doctor wouldn't have given me this if it was going to do harm.'"

Elvis told her he began using drugs while in the Army, taking Dexedrine to stay awake on duty. When she met him, she became a sentry, keeping a doctor's telephone number handy just in case. There were several times during their five years together when he "literally probably would have died" if she hadn't called that number.

"It was at a time when the world wasn't prepared for it," she says. "I wasn't prepared for it. This was before Betty Ford, Tucson and all those wonderful rehab facilities."

Thompson, mother of two sons by Jenner, says she was always a "very nurturing person" and wished Elvis could live without being mobbed in public.

"There were times when I held him in my arms. He was being the baby. I said, 'There are times when I think I could just take you and move away somewhere. We could have lots of little critters and take (Elvis' daughter) Lisa Marie and live a simple life.'"

"He looked up at me and said, 'Now, why the hell would I want to do that?'"

Elvis said it "with a twinkle in his eye and mischief," she says.

Besides, Thompson says she rarely even talked about Elvis for the last 20 years because her estranged husband, music producer David Foster, "was very jealous of Elvis.

Thompson says she decided to end her relationship with Elvis when she realized she couldn't save him from drugs and his chaotic lifestyle. "I thought, 'I'm a young girl, full of energy and vitality. I can't spend my life trying to keep this man alive who is so hellbent on destruction.'"

Elvis was also notoriously involved with other women. The most enduring was with actress Ann-Margret: "He said he would have married her until she went to the press and said she was going to quit her career and marry Elvis," Thompson says.

Thompson and Elvis remained friends until he died, six months after she left him. She also has been friendly with Priscilla Presley.

Thompson says she occasionally defended her to Elvis. "His ego was very, very hurt, but in many ways you can't blame Priscilla. She was like the token wife. She was tucked away at home while he had a plethora of girlfriends. I remember taking up her cause a little bit (in conversations with Elvis)."

Thompson says it was Lisa Marie, 9 at the time, who called when her father died. "When I look into Lisa Marie's eyes I sometimes have to look away. She looks so much like Elvis." Thompson also defends Lisa's doomed marriage to Michael Jackson. "Lisa Marie is 100 percent authentic. She loved him. She met him when she was just a kid. He had just done 'Thriller.' She probably had quite a bit of a crush on him. Her motives were pure. I can't speak for his."

After her breakup with Elvis, Thompson became an actress, a regular on the TV show "Hee Haw" and a songwriter who turned her poetry into hits recorded by Kenny Rogers, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Josh Groban and others. With Foster, she won an Emmy last year for the lyrics and music to "Aren't They All Our Children" for a TV benefit for Ronald McDonald House Charities.

Thompson, who also appeared as a guest star on TV shows from "Starsky & Hutch" to "Fantasy Island" to "Love Boat," now is a special correspondent for the syndicated TV show "Extra."

Despite her own celebrity and two husbands since her involvement with The King of Rock and Roll, Thompson says, "I never stopped loving him.

'To this day, there's a part of my heart that has Elvis written all over it'.

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