Child Bride (25 page)

She would later re-create the experience with unconcealed frustration in
Elvis and Me
, complaining of Elvis ignoring her until twelve-thirty in the morning, when he whispered a request that she quietly make her way to his bedroom. Priscilla, who had been star-struck and inexperienced enough at fourteen to go along with Elvis’s routine, was no longer so puppy-eager to play his celebrity games. “I’d waited too long to be discreet,” as she put it. She made a production of exiting the den for Elvis’s upstairs bedroom, “making sure everyone knew he was mine—at least for as long as I was here.”

Freshly powdered and perfumed, she waited for Elvis and dutifully crawled into bed beside him when he finally arrived ten minutes later. It had to be strange for Priscilla to be
expected
to fall into bed with a man she hadn’t seen in two years, someone she thought she might never encounter again, someone she had replaced with other lovers. “This new Elvis,” she later spoke of, “I hardly knew at all.”

In her memoir, Priscilla described her first few minutes alone with Elvis almost gynecologically, confirming, unwittingly, her phobia that Elvis might find out she had been with other men. “As we lay in the dim light,” she wrote, “he soon discovered that I was still as untouched as he’d left me two years before. Relieved and pleased, he told me how much this meant to him.” How, short of a complete physical examination in his bedroom to confirm that her hymen was intact, or bleeding from first-time intercourse (and Priscilla claimed they did not have intercourse that night), could Elvis possibly have discovered she was “untouched”? Priscilla was in a panic, at the time, anxious to convince Elvis that she had “saved” herself for him, and she was desperate, years later, to perpetuate the illusion she was a virgin when in truth she had dallied with a dozen boys or men and had intercourse, by their accounts, with three, not counting Elvis.

The ensuing hour or so in the bedroom with her childhood idol was bizarrely unfulfilling to the “new” Priscilla. Though she may have felt awkward being reunited with a man she considered a comparative stranger, Priscilla was above all a sexual
creature; once in bed with Elvis, she wanted satisfaction. She described their sexual encounter as a battle, with the two of them engaged in heavy foreplay, fully aroused, when Elvis withdrew, leaving Priscilla alternately demanding and begging for intercourse. The mythical version, in Priscilla’s book and movie, was that Elvis told her he was reserving the moment of penetration for “a right time and place,” but this did not make sense in light of her confession to Currie that she and Elvis had already consummated their relationship in Germany. If Elvis did stop short of penetration in his bedroom in California, the more logical explanation was that it was because he
preferred
foreplay to intercourse, a preference he had already revealed to Priscilla.

By either scenario, the evening ended on a note of intense disappointment for Priscilla, made more so by Elvis’s insistence that she leave immediately afterward to spend the remaining few hours of the night at the house of his friend George Barris, who designed custom cars for motion pictures. This was not for propriety’s sake, nor was it for the Beaulieus, who had placed no restrictions on where Priscilla spent the night. Elvis wanted Priscilla out of the house so he could telephone Anita, concerned that she might cause a scandal by revealing that he was entertaining a teenage girl.

“The minute I walked in, the phone rang,” said Anita. “I was so mad, I think he was afraid I was going to do something and get him in serious trouble. But I didn’t.”

If George Barris and his wife, Shirley, were surprised by Elvis’s request to have them act as beards for his affair with a visiting seventeen-year-old, they kept it to themselves. They recalled that Priscilla seemed “overwhelmed” when one of the group dropped her off that night, “moving into a world where she didn’t know what to expect or where she was going to go.”

The first place she went was Las Vegas, the archetype of all that is surreal, as Priscilla’s life from then on would be. The Presley entourage checked into the Sahara Hotel, where Elvis smuggled Priscilla into bars and casinos and taught her to play twenty-one, though she had to count the numbers on her fingers underneath the table. When she couldn’t keep up with the Vegas hours, Elvis gave Priscilla amphetamines and sleeping pills to help her sustain the pace, a practice he had been introduced to during night drills in the army in Germany. As George Barris observed, “She was coming from a simple, quiet environment,
going into this dramatic world, which was a make-believe world for a girl.”

Priscilla lived the
Pretty Woman
script in Vegas. Elvis sent her on a shopping spree to the most expensive boutiques on the Strip—but Priscilla bought Julia Roberts’s hooker character’s “before” dresses—sexy, flashy clothes from Suzy Creamcheese, a trendy designer who embodied the glamorous excess of the sixties. Elvis preferred to see women in tight, sexy clothing, and Priscilla, eager to please, followed his lead. Her Pygmalion-type transformation that May included a session with Armand, the Sahara Hotel hairdresser, who piled Priscilla’s long hair on top of her head, teasing and spraying and twisting it around until it resembled two birds’ nests atop each other. Then he rimmed her blue eyes with black liner and false eyelashes, creating the Cleopatra look that later became a caricature. Eventually Elvis was blamed for pressuring Priscilla into this extreme, supposedly to match his own dyed-black hair and mascaraed eyes. Elvis had taken to blackening his hair after seeing and admiring Tony Curtis’s look in an early picture, and he sometimes used mascara, according to Joe, to emulate Rudolph Valentino and to emphasize the blue in his eyes.

Kohl-darkened eyes and back-combed hair were also hallmarks of the 1960s. Elvis Presley did not invent the style; he merely followed and perhaps exaggerated it. The Barrises, in fact, recalled that Priscilla was the one who went overboard in her childlike attempts to appear older and more glamorous. Elvis, according to the Barrises, preferred to see her with a more natural look. “He walks in the door, and she’s coming down [the stairs],” Shirley Barris related, “this elegant, beautiful young child, but all of a sudden she looks sophisticated. And he walks in and looks at her and he doesn’t say hello … or anything. He looks at her and says, ‘Go back upstairs and get rid of that hairdo.’ You could see her anxiousness. And not that she was waiting to hear a compliment. I’m sure in her heart it was all to please him … and you see the expression on this angelic face. It was as if her whole world stopped and ended and she was so overwhelmed by it all. And little tears started coming. And she starts running up the stairs, and of course I run after her. And then she let her hair down. And when he saw that, he said,
‘This
is how I love you.’ Then you see the glow in her face come back.” Priscilla was overcompensating by using too much mascara and teasing her hair in a relentless bid to impress Elvis.
How else could an eleventh-grader compete with Tuesday Weld and Natalie Wood?

Her two weeks in Los Angeles and Las Vegas were an emotional roller coaster for Priscilla, a seventeen-year-old thrust into an adult Disneyland, on a mission to captivate the star she had fantasized about since childhood, yet finding herself increasingly ambivalent about him and his lifestyle. She told her friend Judy, when she returned to Germany, about “taking off” in his limousine and driving around the field to amuse herself when she became “bored” with watching Elvis play football.

Priscilla was rediscovering, as she spent more time with him, that Elvis Presley and the
image
of Elvis Presley were two discrete entities; Elvis was not the smoldering, oversexed bad boy of rock who had attracted her as a fan; it was she, ironically, who was pleading with him to make love to her. Priscilla was magnetically drawn to dangerous, overtly sexual men; Elvis, to her growing disappointment, was a sensitive artist with complex notions about virginity and intercourse. Her confusion between fantasy and reality with respect to Elvis became obvious in a passage from her autobiography about her trip to L.A. In it, she wrote of being disillusioned by Elvis’s criticism of her hair, until he put on one of his records, sat beside her, and sang along with his own recorded voice. “In that moment, I fell in love all over again,” Priscilla wrote. The passage is profoundly self-revelatory. It was “Elvis Presley,” not Elvis Presley, with whom Priscilla Beaulieu was in love.

Elvis, who had established the rules of their courtship and found Priscilla a willing participant, considered the visit, and Priscilla, a romantic triumph. Before she left, he gave her the jade, gold, and onyx ring he had worn in
Blue Hawaii
, telling her he wanted his “little girl” to visit him at Graceland for Christmas. Elvis Presley was falling deeper and deeper under the spell of Priscilla Beaulieu. The tragedy, for them both, was that the girl he was falling in love with was not really Priscilla but the submissive persona Currie had created for her in Germany to impress Elvis.

Sooner or later, however, the real Priscilla would emerge.

P
riscilla Presley, in her mythical retelling of her life, described herself as possessed to rejoin Elvis at Christmastime, but by intimates’ accounts, she was a frightened and confused teenager swimming in deep and treacherous waters when she returned to Germany in June of 1962.

Her own account of Elvis’s Los Angeles farewell echoed the apprehension her close friends in Wiesbaden described. “I want you back the way you are now,” Elvis whispered to her. “And remember I’ll always know.”

“I smiled and nodded,” Priscilla later wrote. “I couldn’t conceive of wanting anyone but him.”

Priscilla was actually panic-stricken, according to Al Corey, terrified of the looming threat that Elvis might learn that she’d led an active sex life during the two years they were apart. Her entire relationship with Elvis Presley was based upon a lie—that she was a virgin when they met—and the lie gradually acquired another dimension as she continued to maintain that she was “saving” herself for him. There was nothing wrong with Priscilla going steady with Tom Stewart, Ron Tapp, and Barney Williams, or dating the other boys; she was a teenage girl with a powerful sex drive who had spent five months with Elvis Presley and thought she would never see him again. The problem
arose when Elvis
did
resurface and Priscilla found herself tangled in a tissue of lies all predicated upon the myth that she was a virgin who desired only Elvis.

After she flew back to Wiesbaden from Los Angeles in June, the Beaulieus took a family holiday in Spain. When they returned in July, Priscilla’s school chum Donna Pollen recalled, “their apartment had been done over. It was all done in teakwood furniture, which was, even then, quite expensive. And we were all wondering how—with all the children and everything and her father’s salary—they were able to afford this.” Donna and a few of the other girls gradually gleaned from their visits that Priscilla was seeing Elvis Presley again and he was sending the Beaulieus gifts and buying presents for Priscilla. “When she came back she had a new suede coat. It seemed like she was getting more and more and more neat new things … so then all this began to fall into place about Elvis.”

Priscilla’s childhood game of Imagine If was unfolding before her eyes, but the fantasy was spinning out of control and the real Priscilla was getting lost. She had played a role to get Elvis Presley, and now—to her surprise as much as anyone else’s—it was coming true. She described herself later as “dumb-founded” by Elvis’s invitation to fly to Graceland for Christmas. “Priscilla didn’t know what to do about Elvis,” confirmed Al Corey, to whom she confided her misgivings that summer. “She was confused. Her parents were telling her what to do. She felt that she was in
way
over her head with [Elvis].” Priscilla Beaulieu’s childhood imaginings of a fairy-tale romance with Elvis Presley did not match the reality of a complicated relationship with a conflicted man, but events and circumstances were moving so quickly, fueled by Elvis and her parents, that Priscilla had become an almost incidental member of the cast.

She was uncertain about spending Christmas at Graceland, filled with trepidation about Elvis yet still addicted to the fantasy, propelled along by her own and, more powerfully, her parents’ overriding ambition. “She wasn’t thrilled,” confessed a close friend from that period. “She’d make comments about it.”

Priscilla’s mixed emotions were apparent that summer. On July 20, barely a month after she left Elvis’s arms, she attended a tea dance at the Von Steuben Hotel for the arriving members of the Air Force Academy class of 1964. Jane Breighner, a classmate and new friend, was at the same party that Friday night and immediately spotted Priscilla. “I just remember her standing and
talking to probably the best-looking guy in the whole room,” Jane said.

Priscilla had come back from the West Coast that June with a dramatic new look, courtesy of Armand at the Sahara. Though she later claimed her parents made her remove every trace of her Vegas makeup, Priscilla’s schoolmates recalled a “radical” change in her appearance from ingenue to sophisticate. Her school picture that fall bears them out, showing Priscilla with heavy eye makeup and a beehive hairstyle. She told her pal Judy that she “loved the way she got her hair fixed over there.” It was thus all the more surprising when Priscilla turned up at school one day that fall with her trademark long hair—her crowning glory—shorn to ear-length. “She had like one ringlet down the middle of her back,” recalled Jane Breighner.
“One
day it was just
gone.
It was like the front of her hair was the same but the back was gone! She cut it off.” Dee Dee Saunders, a sophomore friend, called it a “shocking development.”

Elvis emphatically preferred long hair and told Priscilla so. If she was desperate to please him, why would Priscilla cut the long hair Elvis adored just before her Christmas trip to Graceland? It made no sense, considering she had meticulously studied Elvis’s every desire so that she could become his female ideal—unless Priscilla really was having doubts. By her own admission, she was humiliated by Elvis’s criticism of her hairstyle and makeup; what better way to declare her independence from him than to lop her hair off? It was a subtle act of defiance—or at the least a test of Elvis’s devotion.