Child Bride (26 page)

Though Elvis was obsessed with Priscilla in his way and looked forward to her Christmas visit, he too was in conflict. He was still involved with Anita, and she understood the implied contract that existed between Elvis and any woman he was seeing: The woman had to be monogamous, but he could date other women
because he was Elvis Presley;
to assume otherwise would have been unrealistic and naive. “I didn’t expect him not to date anyone but me,” Anita said. “Of course, when he was in Memphis, I expected that.” When Priscilla left L.A. for Germany in June, Anita chose to overlook Elvis’s indiscretion. “We dated a little bit longer after that, but then I think he began to get confused.”

Late in the summer, as Anita was coming down to breakfast at Graceland, she overheard Elvis in the kitchen talking to his father and a few of the guys about Priscilla’s Christmas visit and
how he couldn’t make up his mind between her and Anita. “And I told him I’d heard him,” Anita recalled, “and that he wouldn’t have to make that choice. I’d make that choice for him.” Elvis had crossed an imaginary line with Anita. Inviting Priscilla to Graceland violated Anita’s sense of southern propriety; Memphis, Elvis’s
home
, was her turf. “I was a very prideful young lady. I couldn’t stand the thought of him making a choice between us. I said, ‘It’s just not going to work.’ ”

Ricky Stanley, Vernon Presley’s then six-year-old stepson by his army bride, Dee, was in the kitchen that morning and witnessed the fireworks. “Oh, wow!… Elvis wanted to continue to date Anita. She was a southern girl who was pretty popular there in Memphis, had her own kind of talk show thing; she was a dancer and a singer. And Elvis wanted to date her
and
he wanted to bring Priscilla over for Christmas,
and
he wanted Anita to go along with it. And Anita said, ‘Sorry buddy, forget it.’ And he threw a fit. He started tearing the kitchen apart, throwing dishes—there was language. There was a big hassle with yelling and everything. And … she was not gonna give in, and she hooked it. She just walked out. And that was it … and I thought, ‘Welcome to Graceland!’ ”

“I called my brother and he came out, and I left,” Anita remembered. “It was a very tearful departure. It was a sad situation.” The decision to leave Elvis was “very difficult” for her. “We did have a special relationship for a number of years. It was wonderful. I wouldn’t take anything for it. I wouldn’t change any of it. But I did have to make that decision to leave.… The other girls he had dated, that was fine. That’s what was supposed to happen … but he didn’t want me dating anybody. I thought that was not fair.”

Family friend and Memphian Willie Jane Nichols, who had known Elvis for years and spent considerable time with him and Anita, considered
Elvis
the one who was spurned. “[Anita] got fed up with it. She could have stayed longer.
She
walked out. Lotta people think he dumped her. But she walked out of Graceland. And he said, ‘You’ll be back.’ But she didn’t go back.”

Wes Bryan, a young singer-actor touted by United Artists in the late fifties as the next James Dean, had caught Elvis’s fancy and occasionally dropped by Graceland at his invitation, so Wes had seen Elvis with Anita quite often. Like Willie Jane and several others in the circle, he considered Anita a more suitable match for Elvis than Priscilla, whom Wes found “cocky and
cold.” Anita, to his mind, was “a beautiful girl with a beautiful personality. I was highly impressed. That’s the girl Elvis Presley should have married. She waited for him for seven years. It was unfortunate that he didn’t marry her.”

Elvis’s argument with Anita that August morning in the kitchen at Graceland was a turning point in Priscilla’s life, though she didn’t know it; for by leaving, Anita Wood had unwittingly helped seal Priscilla Beaulieu’s fate. With Anita no longer present in his life, Elvis focused his romantic attention obsessively on Priscilla, his teenage dream girl. He began making plans in earnest for her Christmas visit, entreating Joan Esposito, in November, to begin weaning her new baby so she could fly to Germany the next month to escort Priscilla to Graceland. “I didn’t even have a passport,” Joan would later recollect. “So I had about four weeks’ notice. I started slowing down so that I could go there. I was to fly over, pick her up, turn around, and fly back.”

Elvis, recalled stepbrother Ricky Stanley, “was like a fifteen-year-old kid with his first crush.… I was real little and he was talking about a beautiful girl he called Cilla. Oh, he just went on and on: ‘She’s so pretty, you’re gonna like her. Just thinking about her I’m so excited that she’s coming. Everybody is gonna like her.’ It was like prom night. Because, see, that’s the way he was. He was like a little kid.” Elvis could barely contain his enthusiasm around his close Memphis friends, one of whom was disc jockey George Klein, a schoolmate. Elvis told Barbara Little, George’s girlfriend and eventual wife, “that he met this little girl, and he said, ‘I think that I love her.’ ” According to Barbara, Elvis told George that Priscilla was “waiting for him” in Germany, saving herself for him.

Elvis and Priscilla were both in love with illusions. Elvis, with an idealized child-woman with the combined qualities of his mother and Debra Paget, a woman who subscribed to his southern mores concerning purity and fidelity. This fictional virgin goddess bore little more than a physical resemblance to Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he barely knew. The fact that Priscilla lived in another country reinforced Elvis’s grand passion, for he could ascribe to her all the qualities he wished her to possess—and in his mind, she did possess them. Priscilla still clung to the image of Elvis Presley that had magnetized her as a child—the darkly erotic, powerful star who had supplanted Mario Lanza in her imagination. Each had romanticized the other out of all proportion
to reality. The difference was that Priscilla had peered at the real Elvis, and she was not certain she liked what she saw.

In September or October of her senior year, Priscilla accepted a date with Jamie Lindberg, a senior whose family had just been transferred to Wiesbaden and who had telephoned her on a bet. By Homecoming, they were going steady. Like Ron Tapp, Jamie was a football player and part of the school’s social clique, not Priscilla’s typical boyfriend; he was, however, exceptionally good-looking and popular, with wavy brown hair and a
GQ
face. Both Priscilla and Jamie fell hard and fell fast, to hear classmates tell it. Mike Kimball, Jamie’s best friend, remembered them as “off in their own thing” from their first date.

Priscilla Beaulieu found herself in the center of a risky triangle that fall—infatuated with Jamie Lindberg but promised to Elvis Presley, who, according to several of her confidants, had already effectively negotiated for her hand with Paul and Ann Beaulieu. “There was a secret there,” as one of them confided.

Jamie was another skeleton in Priscilla’s increasingly crowded closet, an unknown rival to Elvis Presley, who believed his teen dream was counting the days until Christmas, just as he was. Priscilla had in fact been living a lie with Elvis since their earliest dates in Bad Nauheim, and she perpetuated that lie over the next three years with her false assurances to Elvis that she was “untouched.” As the deceit deepened, so did the elaborate cover-up, prompting Priscilla, once she married Elvis, to reinvent her past.

She fostered this illusion in interviews, creating the fiction that when she returned to Germany from her California trip, she was so consumed with Elvis that “this time,” she told the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
in 1974, “I could not bring myself to date anybody.” The truth was one of her closely guarded secrets. Priscilla was actually in love with Jamie Lindberg that autumn, but later on, she was desperate to conceal that fact from the public, for it would have undermined the romanticized image she had so carefully constructed of her perfect love affair with Elvis Presley. Asked recently about her senior year, she confirmed her earlier statement that she did not date anyone. When presented with the fact that she went out with Jamie, Priscilla claimed it was to placate her parents so they would not think she was obsessed with Elvis and would permit her to go to Memphis at Christmas. “My heart and soul [were] not in Germany at that time,” she insisted. “[I] was
consumed
by Elvis. My every
move
was him. My every
thought
was on him. I
lived
and
breathed
him.”

Like Priscilla’s earlier attempts to revise the past by asserting that she dated her previous boyfriends in Wiesbaden “for her parents’ sake,” this was a complete reversal of reality. Jamie—like Tom Stewart, Ron Tapp, Mike Kimball, and Barney Williams—vividly recalled Priscilla’s parents, her mother especially,
obstructing
his senior-year romance with Priscilla. “I could just basically see it. I know her mom had a real strong influence over her, and does to this day. And she’s a very powerful woman. But her mom definitely picked up on the fact that Priscilla and I were really getting close.”

Priscilla, anticipating seeing Elvis at Christmas, was again tormented by his stern warning that he would somehow know if she had been unfaithful. Al Corey had graduated and moved away, but she confided her fears in another classmate, expressing her concern about being examined by Elvis’s doctors for evidence of sexual activity. Jamie would not say, later, whether he and Priscilla had intercourse that year, calling it “a privacy-type thing,” but a classmate, Pat Mayo, claimed to have tutored Jamie that spring in exchange for information about Priscilla, “and as high school chums would talk,” said Pat, “to the best of my knowledge, she was not chaste when she married Elvis.” Jamie told Pat that he and Priscilla had intimate relations. “If you can believe one good buddy to another, sitting around talking as boys talk … I think he was being truthful.” Priscilla, Jamie would say of their sexual relationship years after the fact, “was much more sophisticated than I was, I’ll tell you that. I went, ‘Wow!’ ” Jamie also admitted that “when her parents would go out, that’s where I would go.”

Mike Sinclair, who double-dated with Priscilla and Jamie that year, confirmed this. “I know that Priscilla generally wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends over. And I know that there were times when Priscilla’s parents were gone that Jamie came over.… He climbed up the window.”

Priscilla confided in Jamie her anxieties about Elvis, her grave doubts, her discomfort around his older crowd, her feeling “that it was not her place in time right then. And I think that she was a little afraid of the whole relationship,” Jamie said. “And she was comfortable in the one we had, because it was the right relationship for a girl that age.… We did fun things, and she had a blast. We were just two people—you know how it is—we
just sort of clicked. We never had a fight or an argument or anything. Had a lot of laughs and some really good times.”

According to her confidants, Priscilla was being steered by her parents toward the relationship with Elvis. Throughout the fall she got phone calls from the star, who was excited about her Christmas visit. These calls caused the seventeen-year-old Priscilla great confusion and anxiety. “I’m sure the Elvis thing was kind of a pressure cooker,” as Jamie put it. “And I was just a kid, just having fun. And I think at the time, that was her maturity level, too. And probably … Priscilla would have been better off in the whole relationship with Elvis if her mom had let her do her little high school thing and let her grow up and press on.”

Ronnie Garland recalled Paul Beaulieu promoting Elvis to Priscilla “excitedly” and the family receiving more gifts from the singer.

Jamie perceived Priscilla as “bewildered by the entire
complexity
of the situation.” Her behavior in school corroborated Jamie’s account. Priscilla failed English and German that fall and did not show up for meetings on class projects.

Priscilla Presley’s reconstructed account of her senior-year relationship with Jamie as “marking time” until she saw Elvis at Christmas was “definitely not the case,” according to Jamie. Those who were closest to Priscilla that fall believed that she was in love with Jamie Lindberg, not Elvis Presley. Certainly Jamie considered them in love. “We’d talk for hours. It was never boring; we were never looking for the next sentence.”

“It was more than a casual affair that they were having,” as his senior class tutor Pat Mayo defined it.

When Priscilla left for Memphis in December, “she told me she was just going for Christmas,” Jamie recalled, “and I said, ‘God! You really are?’ and she said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do you really want to go?’ and she said, ‘I’m just going for Christmas. I’m coming back.’ ” Jamie was upset that Priscilla was seeing Elvis, and Priscilla appeared to feel the same way. Jamie was under the impression Priscilla wanted out of the Elvis relationship, that she would have preferred to stay with him in Germany. “That song ‘Return to Sender’ came out when I was seeing her.… Listening to the words … I think during that time she was trying to say [to Elvis], ‘Hold off.’ And I don’t think she was not returning [his]
letters
—I think she was not returning [his]
sentiment.
I always thought that was what the song was about. It
might have been an egotistical outlook, but it seemed [valid] at the time.”

Elvis’s plan to have Joan Esposito go to Germany fell through and Priscilla flew alone from Frankfurt to New York in late December and was met at La Guardia by Vernon and Dee Presley, who drove her to Memphis. “[Elvis] asked me would I do him a favor,” recalled Dee. “When he told me who was coming over … for Christmas, I guess I was a little bit surprised. I really liked Anita.” Dee Presley found Priscilla wide-eyed at her “first time coming to Graceland, wondering what it was going to be like.”

Elvis had arranged for a gathering of friends to be at the house when Priscilla arrived, “and he carried her around and introduced her to each and every person there, one by one,” remembered Willie Jane Nichols, who was one of the guests, “saying, ‘This is Priscilla.’ Elvis was very attentive to her and took care of her like she was a little girl.” The dynamics of the Elvis-and-Priscilla relationship crystallized in that moment, with Priscilla responding, in Ricky Stanley’s observation, “like a scared kid: just big-eyed and excited and reluctant, timid.”