Of course, after sixty years, Barbara looks a little different, but that’s definitely her, back when she was a twenty-year-old old known as Bobbi Owens who called Elvis Presley’s hotel room on a dare after he performed in Charleston, South Carolina. Incredibly, she actually chatted with the singer for about an hour and a half. Even more incredible?
Elvis then sent a car for her and had her come meet him in Richmond. Since she was planning on heading up to Philadelphia to visit a man she’d been seeing anyway, Barbara actually took him up on the offer. The two spent the day together, and before Elvis was due onstage at the Mosque, they ended up in that soon-to-be-iconic stairwell.
Elvis kept trying to kiss me,” Barbara tells Inside Edition. “I kept turning away, and one time I stuck my tongue out, and he stuck his out and touched mine.
Their tryst ended after that day, but it was captured forever in multiple pictures by photographer Alfred Wertheimer. Occasionally, that’s meant the photo has resurfaced in Barbara’s life in surprising and funny ways. Vanity Fair reports:
Several years ago, Malcolm Gray was watching an Elvis Presley tribute show on Pay Per View when a still photograph appeared: the iconic 1956 shot of the 21-year-old rock ‘n’ roll star playfully romancing a blonde fan backstage. Gray’s eyes widened. “My God, come here!” the electrical engineer shouted to his girlfriend, Barbara, now his wife. “They’ve got you on that big screen. Does Priscilla know who you are?”
“No,” Barbara said, nonchalantly, from the other room. She had seen that photo hundreds of times over the past half-century. “I was before Priscilla, Malcolm.”
So how did Malcolm take the news? What did Barbara think as a young woman when the photo started to, as we’d say now, go viral? Did she ever see Elvis again? And what made Barbara finally come forward to attach her name to this iconic picture? Watch her interview with Inside Edition for the rest of this fun piece of music history.
Credits: Tiphero.com
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