Child Bride (27 page)

The guests who were there would forever remember Priscilla, dressed in a deep pink sweater—“the most beautiful girl I had ever seen!” exclaimed Willie Jane, whose breath was taken away by Priscilla Beaulieu. “She had such a quiet, gentle type of beauty.” The Priscilla of Elvis’s imagination—the demure Priscilla from Bad Nauheim, the porcelain figurine who had captivated Currie—was very much in evidence at Graceland and his houseguests were as bedazzled as Elvis. “She was different from any girl we’d ever seen Elvis with,” Willie explained. “She was very tiny, she was very sweet and sensitive, and she had
such
manners! She had a lot of class. Everyone adored her … because she had a sweet way about her.” Elvis, recollected Gladys’s friend, “treated her as if she might break if you dropped her, like a China doll. She was very shy and reserved.”

By the end of the evening Priscilla and Elvis were upstairs in his bedroom and did not emerge for five days, according to Alan Fortas. Once again the Beaulieus had imposed no restrictions on Priscilla’s sleeping arrangements. Their seventeen-year-old daughter spent her second and third days at Graceland in Elvis’s bed, in a coma, overdosed on Placidyl, which he had given her so she could keep up with his nighttime schedule.

The master bedroom bore eerie testimony to the rock star’s
complicated psyche. The ceiling was upholstered in black patent leather, and two televisions were mounted above the bed so that Elvis, a compulsive in all things he loved, could watch them simultaneously. The art reflected his two great loves: his mother and Jesus Christ. From Elvis’s bed, Priscilla could see a framed picture of Gladys Presley and various renderings of Jesus. “The image of that seventeen-year-old child going upstairs into that jet-black bedroom—my God!” remarked Larry Peerce, who directed the miniseries based upon Priscilla’s memoir and who visited the off-limits second floor of Graceland. “My God. And the televisions in the ceiling and the religious icons around the room, Christ pictures. It must have been very bizarre for a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old kid. The whole thing looked like the Marquis de Sade or something.”

The strange schizophrenic nature of their relationship, older lover-Lolita and father-daughter—revealed itself vividly at Christmas, when Elvis gave Priscilla a diamond ring—and a puppy. “He
patted
her all the time,” recalled Barbara Little. “He called her Nungin, which I understood his mom always called him. That was his pet name for her. They called each other that.” Barbara’s first thought, when she met Priscilla in the kitchen at Graceland, “was that she reminded me of Debra Paget.”

Ricky Stanley, who was there all through Christmas, compared Elvis and Priscilla to a high school couple: “They sat and held hands, he kept his arm around her all the time, and he really, really flipped over her.”

Elvis had but one disappointment in Priscilla that Christmas: She had cut off her long hair. He failed to recognize this as a sign of her withdrawal, however. For Priscilla Beaulieu, the Memphis visit was at once intensely romantic and harrowing. Barbara Little remembered Priscilla standing in the kitchen that first night, nervously filing her fingernails, trying to disguise her awkwardness as a teenager in bobby socks and a cardigan sweater mixing with a circle of adults she did not know. Joan Esposito, who met Priscilla that Christmas, was struck by “how young she was” and how “very, very quiet.” She struggled valiantly to adjust to Elvis’s schedule of partying at night and sleeping by day, resorting to the uppers and downers he offered her in a naive but misguided effort to be awake and asleep when he wanted her to be. A picture of Elvis and Priscilla at the Memphian Theatre that December captures the surreal glamour of Priscilla’s Christmas trip; Elvis stands defiantly in front of the
billboard of coming attractions, looking movie star-stunning in a blue velvet blazer and admiral’s cap, his black hair gleaming, a pistol protruding slightly from his pants pocket. Behind him, barely seen in profile, hides a teenage Priscilla, all black hair and legs.

Elvis increasingly saw Priscilla Beaulieu as “the one,” a function of his flair for the melodramatic and the mystical; but he was also drawn to her due to the sexual proclivities he had confided to Priscilla on Goethestrasse. Priscilla Beaulieu, at seventeen, was Elvis’s romantic ideal, a teenager who could be satisfied—or so he believed—with making out. “Think about it,” suggested Patti Parry, who discussed the subject with Elvis, something he would never do with his male friends: “[He was] a nineteen-year-old truck driver who had no sophistication and became [famous as] a superstud—though he was not a stud—and all of a sudden … 
everything.
He was so scared and so shy.” Elvis’s fatal error in judgment was his underestimation of Priscilla Beaulieu’s sexuality.

On New Year’s Eve, Priscilla’s last night in Memphis, Elvis arranged for a private party at the Manhattan Club, since she was under age. While they were at the club, Priscilla recalled, Elvis suddenly declared that “he wanted me to stay. He didn’t want me to go back to Germany.” Priscilla’s reaction to this declaration was telling: She drank four double screwdrivers, became ill, and was driven back to Graceland by George Klein and Barbara Little. When Elvis, who seldom drank alcohol, came home slightly drunk in the early hours of the morning, Priscilla was passed out on his bed wearing only her bra and panties. He undressed her and then himself, arousing them both. Priscilla’s parting memory of Elvis, that Christmas, was one of sexual dissatisfaction. “My passion had gotten to him,” she later wrote, “and under the influence of alcohol, he weakened. Then, before I knew what happened, he withdrew.… I have to admit that, at that moment, I didn’t care if it was special and I didn’t care what he’d vowed. I didn’t care, in fact, what
he
wanted at all. I only knew I wanted him.”

Priscilla’s feelings for Elvis were a complicated cocktail of star lust, fantasy love, and filial affection for a father figure. As one of her friends had described it, she felt
a
love for Elvis more so than actually being
in
love with him, and sexual incompatibility was but one of her concerns. She still regarded him possessively,
however, demanding, Alan Fortas would later write, that “Anita Wood be cut out of his life forever.”

On New Year’s morning, as Priscilla prepared to fly home, Elvis, acting on his impulse from the night before, telephoned Paul Beaulieu in Wiesbaden to negotiate for a few extra days of Priscilla’s time. Captain Beaulieu, in his self-appointed role as agent, took a tough stance, telling Elvis their “deal” extended only through January first. “He said it was out of the question that I stay any longer than I was supposed to,” Priscilla said. “My father was quite firm.” Elvis, by now possessed by Priscilla and accustomed to getting his way, began brainstorming, coming up with different ruses, suggesting, Priscilla explained, that “I could get sick, maybe—something would happen where I would have to stay. ’Cause he didn’t want me to go.”

It was then, according to Priscilla, that the fantastic idea was born to Elvis that Priscilla live at Graceland with him on a permanent basis. Priscilla’s own account of her reaction to this proposal was extremely revealing: “I was dumbfounded,” she said later, indicating that Jamie Lindberg and Priscilla’s other intimates in Germany were correct in describing her as confused vis-à-vis Elvis that Christmas.

Another phone conversation ensued between Elvis and Captain Beaulieu, with Elvis proposing his outrageous scheme, according to a recent admission by Priscilla, who omitted this incident from her own book. Astoundingly, Paul Beaulieu—who, minutes earlier, had refused to extend Priscilla’s visit by even two days—
did not say no
to Elvis Presley’s proposition that his seventeen-year-old daughter move to Memphis to live with the movie star. “My father didn’t want to make any commitments at that time,” Priscilla said of this extraordinary conversation. “He just said, ‘She needs to come home, and we’ll talk about it after she gets home.’ That we would talk about it at the right time.”

Priscilla and
her
feelings, once again, seemed to be no more than an afterthought to the three people who controlled her destiny: Elvis Presley and Paul and Ann Beaulieu.

P
riscilla Beaulieu flew back to Germany in January 1963 much as she had the previous June: in a state of utter panic and bewilderment, a puppet in the hands of her overly ambitious parents. She told a close friend “she was afraid that they were going to make her go back and stay all the time.”

This was the contrapuntal opposite of the Priscilla-and-Elvis legend, where Priscilla described herself as obsessively driven to move into Graceland that January. The myth was that Priscilla confided first in her mother and gradually revealed Elvis’s invitation to her father—supposedly starving herself, withdrawing, cutting class, failing in school, and threatening to run away in order to coerce her parents into allowing her to rejoin Elvis. Yet the dean of girls at H. H. Arnold, Jackie Momberg, had no record of absences for Priscilla during that spring semester, and her classmates did not recall her missing anything. She was always with Jamie, by their recollection, and for the first time in her high school life Priscilla was actually participating in school activities—because Jamie did. “She was never rebellious,” insisted her friend from that year, Judy Comstock. “I don’t remember it.” Another confidant reported that “There was never any ‘convincing.’ That isn’t true. That is part of the manufactured [story].”

The truth, according to Jamie and the few others who knew Priscilla well, was that Priscilla’s parents were concerned that she was getting too close to Jamie and they were pressuring Priscilla to move to Graceland to sustain the romance with Elvis Presley. “I’m sure—positive—in retrospect that was the case,” Jamie affirmed. “She kind of got caught up in a very enthusiastic mom who had great plans for her, and that’s how she ended up there.” Priscilla told Jamie that she did not want to go to Memphis and feared she might be making the worst mistake of her life. “We were real serious,” he asserted, “and she’s saying, ‘I can’t believe it. I’m going to maybe be giving up all this for a
buffoon.’
 ”

Another friend, who knew the situation between Priscilla and Jamie, described her as anxious that winter, concerned that she would be unhappy and unfulfilled at Graceland: “She didn’t want to be forced into it. I knew that. She knew she would be stuck someplace where she wouldn’t get to do anything.”

But Priscilla Beaulieu was in too deep; her relationship with Elvis was like a runaway train, and she was powerless to stop its momentum. “My impression has always been that she was like a little high school girl, and I don’t think she wanted to step out of that environment at all,” recounted Jamie. “But I think her mom more or less said, ‘You are going.’ ” Jamie’s recollection was seconded by a confidant of Priscilla’s from that year and the year before. “The real reason for her coming back to Memphis [has] never been published. The reason that has been given is not the true reason. And Jamie does have something to do with … the true reason. She did not
go
back; she was
sent
back. There was a very great danger that she was not going to marry Elvis. And Jamie had a lot to do with that.… And her parents thought it best to get her out of Wiesbaden. In fact, she did not want to go.” According to Priscilla’s friend, Ann Beaulieu was orchestrating the impending move to Memphis. “Priscilla did not leave on her own. She was forced. [She and Jamie] were growing too close, and her mother was afraid she was going to throw Elvis over for Jamie.… That is the truth. I am absolutely certain.” The legend of ever-faithful Priscilla, living for the moment she could join Elvis at Graceland, was just that: a legend, the romantic invention of a young woman desperate to disguise her real history, or as her friend described it, the “manufactured past of a celebrity.” Priscilla and her parents were experts in maintaining a fiction; they had been doing it since
Priscilla was three, concealing her real identity. But it’s also likely that Priscilla was highly flattered by Elvis’s affections and unable to say no to his invitation. After all, he was one of the most desirable men in the world, and she was a high school senior, dazzled by that sort of fame and fortune. More important, it was part of the plan she had had since childhood.

Sometime in mid-March a special “arrangement” was made between the Beaulieus and Elvis Presley. The exact terms may never be known, but they included Priscilla completing the remaining few weeks of her senior year at a Catholic girls’ school and ostensibly moving in with Elvis’s father, Vernon, and his wife, Dee, who lived in a smaller house on the Graceland compound with Dee’s three young sons by her first husband. According to Priscilla’s most recent account, “the deciding factor, I think, was the fact that I would stay with Vernon and Dee. And that it was a Catholic school, and that it was a girls’ school. Elvis had found the school. He enrolled me in the school. I would be staying with Dee and Vernon. And they had their three children there. And, you know, he would like—he lived close to them. And that he did plan on marrying me. And he didn’t give them a time. He just said, ‘I want her here.’ ”

The Beaulieus had, in effect, made an arranged marriage for their teenage daughter. Priscilla, recalled her friend Judy, was “certain” she would marry Elvis sometime after she moved to Memphis, and the singer told his stepmother, Dee, at the time that he had “promised Priscilla’s father” he would marry her. Al Corey, who had shared confidences with Priscilla for two years, did not feel she was in love with Elvis Presley. “She got sold,” he said.

Few people in Wiesbaden knew that Priscilla was even thinking of leaving that winter. She attended school in Germany throughout January, February, and early March and was seen everywhere with Jamie Lindberg. As the situation with Elvis became clear to Jamie in the middle of March, he invited Priscilla on a “last date” to a beer festival, telling her he would practice his German so he could make an announcement at the festival “to the whole state of Germany” that she was leaving. “And she laughed. She says, ‘All right, we’ll go.’ I said, ‘Great.’ A few hours later she calls back. She was crying a little bit, and she says, ‘My mom won’t let me go.’ She was really out of sorts. So that was it.” That was the last time Jamie Lindberg talked to Priscilla in Germany.