When Elvis Presley was an awkward young guitar player singing sultry love ballads on local southern stages at the tender age of eighteen, he met a young raven-haired, green-eyed dancer and singer Lucy De Barbin and instantly fell in love. He was enamored by the petit French-American beauty who graced the stage at former Louisiana Governor James Knoe's garden party one August evening in 1953. Lucy, harboring a deep and dark secret would lock eyes with Elvis following their performances that night, only to quickly run away, leaving Elvis deflated yet curious for more.

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A chance meeting only a month later through Lucy's sister Mary, who happened to live down the street from Elvis in Memphis, would seal their fate as mutual confidants and lovers fueling a three decade romance that, as Lucy has claimed with assured confidence, resulted in the birth of their daughter, Desiree, in 1958. Why didn't Elvis marry Lucy and why was Desiree kept under wraps? Surely this is a just another crazy fan claiming paternity to get close to someone famous, right? Perhaps. There is no DNA test to back up this claim, but there is more to this story, so stay with me.

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When Lucy was a young adolescent, her grandmother sold her to the highest bidder, a wealthy and surly alcoholic around the age of thirty. Apparently the practice of child trafficking in the American south was not uncommon, go figure in light (or rather dark) of the Epstein files release. Lucy spent the next few years living with a much older man who would beat and rape her. Her only solace was her children, two who were born before she reached the age of sixteen, and her talent that landed her a spot as a dancer of KNOE's Mr. Music Show, a entertainment variety television show produced in Monroe, Louisiana. Lucy would go on to have a lucrative career in retail and fashion, working with high profile clients such as Coco Chanel, and eventually leave her abusive husband and support herself and her family, which grew to six children by the 1960s.

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What happened to Elvis and Lucy? Elvis and Lucy maintained a long distance relationship from 1953 to 1977 that included long drives, holding hands in the park, and secret rendezvous in hotel rooms. Lucy couldn't be in Elvis' life the way she wanted. He begged and pleaded her to stand beside him, but her past and his skyrocketing career and public image made their situation complex and complicated. Lucy feared her husband's rath and her maternal instinct to protect her children at all costs became paramount.

 

Despite the obstacles, Elvis and Lucy's love was genuine. When Elvis was drafted into the army and sent to Germany, Lucy, pregnant with Desiree, was fleeing from the monster she was forced to marry. From 1958 to 1967, Lucy would maintain a private life away from the limelight of Elvis Presley and marry another man who would provide her and her children with a steady and predictable life. Elvis would go on to meet and marry Priscilla, but he kept searching for Lucy until he tracked her down on the eve of Lisa's birth, when both their lives would again enter a tailspin of heartache and regret.

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Elvis and Lucy is an adapted feature screenplay written by Sarah Angell based on the book "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Dary Matera and Lucy De Barbin (Villard Books, 1987).