Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley made Viva Las Vegas together in 1964 and created in the process one of the most electrically charged on-screen partnerships in the history of Hollywood musicals — two performers of such complete and such completely matched physical and musical energy that the cameras could barely contain what happened when they occupied the same frame, and the audience that watched the finished film understood immediately that what they were seeing was not entirely a performance.

The relationship that existed between them during and after that production has been one of entertainment’s most carefully and most lovingly maintained mysteries — Ann-Margret speaking about Elvis across the decades with a warmth and a specificity that went consistently and unmistakably beyond the standard co-star affection, and Elvis, by every account of the people closest to him, carrying something for Ann-Margret that was equally specific and equally lasting. She was one of the people he sent flowers to regularly throughout his life — a gesture so consistent and so personal that the florists involved have been cited in virtually every serious account of their relationship as the most concrete evidence of the ongoing significance of the bond between them. When Elvis died on August 16, 1977, Ann-Margret lost something that she has spent the decades since describing only in the most carefully chosen words — protecting a private grief that the public appetite for Elvis stories would have consumed without giving back anything commensurate with what it took. What fans are only now finding out is that Elvis left Ann-Margret something in those final years — a gift so personal and so specifically chosen for her that the people who knew about it understood immediately that it was not a gesture but a statement, not a courtesy but a confession, kept hidden by a woman who received it in the spirit it was intended and who protected it for twenty years out of the same love and the same loyalty that had defined everything between them since the day they met on that Las Vegas set.