Elvis Presley's Affair With Ann-Margret Was Much Stranger Than You Thought

For fourteen years, on every opening night of her career, red roses arrived in the shape of a guitar. No note was needed. She knew who they were from. They came to Vegas, to the road, to every theatre she played — from a man who was married to somebody else, for one year of romance and thirteen years of whatever came after it. On 16 August 1977, Ann-Margret opened at the Las Vegas Hilton. The flowers didn't come. It was the only opening night in fourteen years that they didn't. She still had two shows to play that night. Her husband told her dancers and her backstage crew to watch her through both of them. They met in July 1963 on the set of Viva Las Vegas. He was twenty-eight and nine years into a run of forgettable pictures. She was twenty-two, Swedish-born, and had just come out of Bye Bye Birdie as the biggest new star in America. What the crew noticed wasn't romantic. It was rhythmic — two people moving identically without looking at each other, over and over, in a film that isn't otherwise very good. She wrote later that they experienced music the same way, physically, and called the sensation odd, embarrassing, funny and wonderful all at once.