Child Bride (22 page)

Priscilla, ever the competitor, fretted about Elvis’s costars, poring over
Stars and Stripes
for any shred of Hollywood gossip, her imagination running rampant, fueled by rumors of on-set romances. A part of her was still driven to realize her childhood goal, but Currie, who answered her volley of questions about Elvis that spring, did not see her as in love with him. “She was star-struck. She didn’t know what love was yet. It was just the name value and all the friends she had, all the oohs and ahs! ‘You’re dating Elvis Presley!’ She was a schoolgirl, and it got to her, just like a proud peacock with her chest out: ‘Yeah, I got Elvis!’ ”

Priscilla, ironically, was conducting her love life in the same manner as Elvis. “She had a life of her own
way
past anything … kind of in addition to her life with Elvis,” as Al Corey put it. “Kind of like he did with her.” Elvis had no clue. “He saw her as this young, innocent girl,” posited Joe Esposito, “that he wanted to raise the way
he
wanted her to be. I could see that he knew she was innocent, and he had this thing about virgins and young girls. That’s the reason he liked to date them, ’cause he didn’t like the thought of other men having slept with them.” When Currie presented his snapshots of Priscilla to Elvis that
spring—holding daisies in a field behind her apartment, smiling and fresh-faced—it perpetuated his romantic illusion of the little girl he had left behind who was saving herself for his touch only. And that was just how Priscilla wanted it—and later falsely presented it in books and interviews.

In truth, she could have taught Elvis a trick or two about romantic manipulation and duplicity. Currie had given her proofs of the photos he took of her for Elvis, and Priscilla gave them to Ron Tapp, the football hero she was going steady with in Germany. Her good friend Ronnie Garland, a perceptive teenager, saw the Elvis relationship as a sort of fantasy to Priscilla: “You could look at her and see that this was like a fairyland. I’m sure she didn’t relate this to life, to normal life—being a freshman in high school when she met him. It was like a princess story come true. She went back to her own boyfriend and her own group, everything. This has to have been very bizarre.” Ron, who dated Priscilla exclusively all through his senior year, regarded their relationship as serious on both their parts.

The obstacle, in the opinion of Priscilla’s closest friends, was her parents. “Apparently she was not welcome to allow her life to go on that way,” Ronnie said, “[as] normal.” Ron Tapp concurred, recalling that Paul Beaulieu was ultra-strict, even imposing a ten-thirty curfew on Ron’s graduation night, causing them to miss the graduation party. “He wanted her back … right after graduation. We talked about that, but he won.” Ron later found it difficult to believe that Captain Beaulieu had permitted Priscilla to stay at Elvis’s house until two and three in the morning unchaperoned the year before. Debbie Ross, Priscilla’s other close friend and neighbor, also found it incongruous: “As I grew older, I thought, Gee, that was really sort of strange that he was strict with her among teenagers and she was seeing a man who was ten years older than we were.” Debbie—like Ronnie, Al, Suni, and others—recalled Priscilla’s father “being strict and gruff about everything.” Debbie concluded, as had the others, that the Beaulieus had a different policy where Elvis was concerned. “There were two sets of rules. Definitely. I recall discussing things like that with [Priscilla] and wondering, Well, how does that happen?” It happened, one could only conclude, because Paul and Ann Beaulieu were seduced by the glamour and glory of Elvis. Priscilla’s teenage boyfriends didn’t stand a chance.

The proof of Priscilla’s feelings for Ron Tapp were in the pictures she gave him. The breezy photos Currie took of her for
Elvis, romping in jeans and a sweater, showing off her Christmas watch, were innocent and youthful, as Elvis saw her. At the same time, however, Priscilla was giving Ron snapshots of herself posing in baby-doll pajamas, gazing into the camera with raw seductiveness. In one photo she is lying on her stomach on the Beaulieus’ living room floor with her left leg bent at the knee suggestively, her baby-doll top pulled up above her waist to reveal her panties, a seductive look on her face. In another photograph she is standing in her baby dolls, looking straight at the camera with aggressive sexuality. Ron had no recollection of where the photos came from. “I don’t know if I asked for a picture or what. She gave them to me. My memory is that her parents took them. I don’t think I ever asked.” It struck him as curious, though, that Priscilla’s parents, who were so strict where he was concerned, would take cheesecake photos of their daughter in shorty pajamas—if they were the ones who shot the pictures. “I didn’t really understand it, but they were nice pictures!” The fact that Priscilla, at fifteen, would present her high school boyfriend with provocative photos of herself in revealing lingerie, spoke volumes about her sexuality and the nature of their relationship, though Ron was too much of a gentleman to provide details.

She confided in Al Corey that she was concerned about Elvis’s warning that he would know if she’d been with someone else, although the fear was more imaginary than real, since her only contact with the star was an occasional phone call and she had no idea whether or when she would see him again. In fact, to a bookmaker, the odds for survival of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship would have been slim. They lived on different continents, rarely talked, and were seriously involved with other people—not taking into consideration that one was a high school sophomore and the other a twenty-six-year-old rock legend in the making.

Priscilla was a mixed-up fifteen-year-old, a sex kitten masquerading as an innocent for a movie star with a virginity fetish. Her confusion and rebellion played itself out at school, where she was suspended twice, once for wearing a bare-midriff blouse, and another time by the gym teacher, Geraldine Hopper, with whom she had running “contests of will” over her refusal to take a shower, because, explained Miss Hopper, she “wouldn’t have time for primping in front of the mirror.”

“The P.E. teacher and Priscilla were always fighting,” recalled
the principal, “because Priscilla had this mass of gorgeous hair and didn’t want to take showers.” Priscilla’s obsession with her appearance had, if anything, worsened since she met Elvis and started high school. “Even in class,” recalled Güdrun Von Heister, who taught her remedial French that summer, “I would have to say to put her lipstick away. She … had her mirror out and her lipstick, and she’s combing her hair and fixing her eyebrows and all that.” Sex and vanity were Priscilla’s two driving forces, the vestige of a childhood where her self-worth was connected to her physical beauty.

Ann Beaulieu, not surprisingly, supported and defended Priscilla in her battles with the school administration, dispatching Paul to take up Priscilla’s cause with the principal, John Reddington. Reddington, who arrived the year after the Elvis frisson but knew of it, took measure of the situation. Captain Beaulieu, he recalled, was indignant “because he thought there were things at the high school that weren’t being done properly; justice wasn’t being done to Priscilla.… My perception of the encounter was that, for whatever reason, he had kind of come in to take us apart.” Reddington concluded, after the fact, that Ann Beaulieu had pressed her husband into service, blindly accepting her daughter’s explanation of her suspensions, “and little by little I unfolded to him some of the behaviors Priscilla had been engaging in, and I thought he gradually came to the conclusion that if there was correction to be done, then maybe he had to do it with his daughter.” Nothing changed at home after Paul Beaulieu’s conference with the principal. That was Ann’s domain, and Priscilla could do no wrong where her mother was concerned.

John Reddington observed Priscilla Beaulieu over that year and the next with a certain unease. The principal interpreted her seductive outfits and her fixation on makeup and beauty as symptoms of a deeper problem. “My impression was that Priscilla … drew
attention
to herself by her physical appearance.… I perceived her as lonely, and I think maybe the term ‘superficial’ would come to mind … and I hoped for her that maybe with the celebrity life, she’s gotten some therapy and gotten on better terms with herself. That’s the way I felt about her as a high school kid.” John Reddington sensed that Priscilla was suffering from an identity crisis, a perceptive observation considering her confusion at discovering, accidentally, her true father, a secret about which Reddington knew nothing.

Ronnie Garland, who probably knew Priscilla during her years
in Wiesbaden better than anyone except Tom Stewart, “actually felt sorry for her. I think she was quite a bit screwed up. Too pretty for her own good.”

Priscilla and Ron Tapp went steady the duration of her sophomore year, attended the senior prom together, and talked over his plans to enroll at Ole Miss after graduation. He was never aware that Priscilla even heard from Elvis. “I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t ask her. If I had, I don’t know if she would have answered me or not. I just really didn’t want to talk about it.” At fifteen, Priscilla was successfully juggling the star of the football team and Elvis Presley, each believing his romance with her was exclusive.

Ron set aside an entire page in his senior yearbook marked “Reserved for Priscilla,” and she filled it with high school endearments. Elvis was nowhere mentioned, nor did it appear to have been written by a girl who was carrying a torch for someone else:

This is not the letter of a girl who was madly in love with Ron Tapp, but neither is it a portrait of a girl pining by the phone as she waited for Elvis Presley to call.

Ron’s father was transferred to Rapid City, South Dakota, in June. Ron left his football jacket with Priscilla, just as Elvis had left his army jacket, claiming her as his. Ron wrote his first letter to her while he was still on the plane, leaving Germany. When the Tapps landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, Ron struck up a conversation with one of the sons in another military family, “a tall, good-looking guy. And he said he was going to Wiesbaden. He asked me who some of the girls were that he ought to know, so I gave him a bunch of names, but I didn’t give him Priscilla’s.”

The young man was Barney Williams, who remembered the
episode slightly differently. “My family was standing in line to get our baggage checked in, and this young man came up to me, and he dated Priscilla at the time. He was a big football hero at Wiesbaden High School. His name was Ron; I can’t remember his last name. And he had a letter. And while we were getting our bags checked in, he heard Wiesbaden mentioned. He said, ‘You’re going to Wiesbaden?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ Strange he came up to me. He said, ‘Give this letter to Priscilla Beaulieu when you get there.’ ” Barney said that by an odd coincidence he ran into Priscilla at the American Arms Hotel a day or so after he arrived in Wiesbaden. “She was seeing some friend of hers off, and I heard them talking in the lobby and they said, ‘Priscilla.’ Really a small world, isn’t it? And I said, ‘I got a letter for you. It’s from Ron.’ And I gave it to her.” (To borrow a phrase from
Life
, “Farewell to Ron, Hello to Barney.”) “We struck it off then and there,” Barney said. “I started going with her as soon as I got there.”

Priscilla was instantly infatuated. She raced home, pounded on her friend Ronnie’s door and gushed, “You’re not going to believe what just came to town!” She told Ronnie there was a new family, the Williamses, with three children: Barney, Billy, and Liz. “The guys are fantastic-looking! The girl is gorgeous. The older [boy is] mine, and I’ll get you a date with the [younger] one!” “Which she did,” related Ronnie. “She set up a blind date for me with Billy.” Barney and Priscilla were an immediate item, and Ronnie eventually married Billy. Liz Williams became Priscilla and Ronnie’s friend, but she died several years later in a car accident.

Priscilla had not let forty-eight hours pass before replacing Ron Tapp with a steady boyfriend. Elvis Presley was not even a distant third.

After she married Elvis, Priscilla’s characterization of this period was almost comical in its distortion and manipulation of the facts. In her autobiography and in media interviews, she created the illusion that she never dated anyone in Germany after Elvis left, that she was waiting for him exclusively. When
Elvis and Me
was published in 1984, Ron Tapp “rushed out to buy Priscilla’s book,” recalled his wife, Starr, “because we were sure Ron was mentioned in it. We were mystified that he wasn’t, since Ron and Priscilla went together for a year.” They thought of writing her, Starr related, “and asking, ‘What happened to Ron?’ ” Recently, when a few of her beaux from Germany surfaced,
forcing her to acknowledge that she had gone out with them, Priscilla downplayed the relationships, referring to them as “a kind of dating to kill time before I left. I knew I was leaving.”

This was absurd. Her relationships with Tom Stewart, Ron Tapp, and Barney Williams were serious, sexual, two-sided romances, and Priscilla was not “killing time” because she “knew she was leaving.” She had no idea in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades that she would move to Memphis to live with Elvis Presley. By her own admission, she wondered whether he would ever call her again.

Barney Williams, Ron Tapp’s successor, fit all of Priscilla’s requirements in a boyfriend: he was dark, he was gorgeous, and he was wild. He had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, he was nineteen, and he worked at the Air Force exchange. Like Tom Stewart, and to a lesser extent Ron Tapp, Barney was persona non grata at the Beaulieu home. “I had to lie about my age,” he recalled, “because she said her father wouldn’t allow her to date someone who was nineteen years old.… I didn’t have the money, and I wasn’t a singer like Elvis.” Barney remembered having dinner with the Beaulieus one night when Captain Beaulieu mentioned Elvis. “I remember him saying how much Elvis was worth. I can’t remember exactly what he said, ‘That young man’s worth a lot of money,’ blah, blah, blah, blah.” Barney confirmed that Priscilla’s father tried to prevent her from seeing anyone other than Elvis. Priscilla sneaked out to see Barney and invited him to her house on nights when she was baby-sitting. On one such evening, when Ronnie also stopped by, Priscilla thought she heard her father coming up the stairs and went into a paroxysm of terror. “She was laughing and talking with Barney,” recalled Ronnie, “and she thought she heard the bottom stairwell door, and she absolutely panicked. We all hid in the closet. I don’t know if Barney remembers that, but she was really afraid of [her father].”