Child Bride (29 page)

So beloved was Elvis Presley in Memphis, Tennessee, and so powerful and far-reaching his star power in 1963, that even the nuns at Immaculate Conception High School looked the other way.

Other privileges were granted as well. Priscilla, according to her guidance counselor in Germany, transferred that March without enough credits to graduate from H. H. Arnold due to three F’s her senior year, yet Sister Mary Adrian permitted her to qualify for graduation from Immaculate Conception taking only three classes and attending half days. “We thought she got special treatment,” recalled classmate Sherry Adler. “She only had to come for a half day. For the rest of us it was eight-thirty to three.”

Priscilla also missed morning mass at eight, customarily arriving, during her first few weeks, around eight-thirty, just as mass ended and first period began. She would arrive in a Cadillac driven by Vernon Presley, whom the other girls mistakenly assumed was her chauffeur. Sister Rose Marie, her religion instructor,
regarded Priscilla as a “nonpracticing Catholic” who knew little about the religion. This seemed odd, considering Paul Beaulieu’s supposed insistence on a Catholic school as a condition of the move—another “manufactured truth,” according to a close friend of Priscilla’s in Germany. The selection of Immaculate Conception turned on the fact that it was a
girls’
school, not that it was Catholic. Priscilla’s parents, like Elvis, wanted to keep her away from boys.

Priscilla arrived for her first day at I.C. dressed in a pink linen suit, looking “like a showgirl,” according to one of her teachers. “She had on makeup enough for three people,” stated Sister Rose Marie, who was considered the sophisticate of the faculty. “Very heavily made-up eyes and dark lipstick. This took away from her beauty, I thought. I don’t know whether she was trying to be Elizabeth Taylor or what. That’s one thing we frowned upon. We didn’t object to makeup, but such a heavy display of it we felt did not enhance a young girl’s looks.” Sister Rose Marie or one of the other nuns would have said something to Priscilla about it, “if she had not been Elvis Presley’s girlfriend.” The principal did insist that Priscilla wear the school uniform, compelling her to replace the tight sweaters and skirts she had taken to wearing in Wiesbaden with a schoolgirl plaid skirt, a light blue I.C.-monogrammed vest, and a white blouse, a bizarre contrast to her theatrical makeup and teased black hair. “Priscilla didn’t look like we did in a uniform anyway,” remembered a classmate. “We looked like children, and Priscilla looked sophisticated.”

Nonetheless, she tried to fit in despite the unnatural circumstances of her enrollment and her Vegas glamour. Theresa Giannini, a senior and the president of the Student Council, was asked to take Priscilla to class and show her around during her first few days. Theresa remembered her as “real nice, and quiet. She seemed pretty normal to me. She was very cooperative, didn’t put on airs or anything.”

By Priscilla’s second day at Immaculate Conception, word had reached the Memphis papers that Elvis Presley’s “houseguest” was enrolled at the school, and reporters and photographers from the
Press-Scimitar
and
Commercial Appeal
descended upon the genteel campus en masse. Sister Mary Adrian allowed Priscilla to decide whether to talk to them or not, and Priscilla decided to meet the press. The result was an astonishingly polite account of Elvis’s illegal domestic arrangement, with the Memphis papers
repeating Priscilla’s story that Vernon and Dee Presley were “friends of the family, and it was lucky it worked out so I could come and visit them and finish my last semester.” With that and a photograph of Priscilla in her school uniform, the story, extraordinarily, faded out of sight in the press, though according to Anita Wood, “there was something of a scandal in Memphis. There was much talk there. Much talk. People in our hometown would never, ever [understand why] the parents of a girl that age would let her come across the ocean, to another town, and live there. It was unbelievable. It was unheard of back then.”

By Priscilla’s own accounts, she stayed with Vernon and Dee less than a week before moving into Grandma Presley’s room in Graceland until Elvis returned and she could share his bed. “Everyone has always wondered how that happened,” remarked Joe Esposito’s then-wife, Joan. “Maybe her parents trusted Dee and Mr. Presley.”

According to Dee, Priscilla left her house and moved in with Elvis with the Beaulieus’ knowledge and consent: “I made sure. I said, ‘Vernon, make sure that the Beaulieus know.’ I know that I did inform them and get their permission. It was with their permission that she left my house and moved into Graceland. They knew she was there.”

No one close to Elvis questioned his arrangement with Priscilla, or the propriety of a girl of seventeen living with an adult star, for they were all on his payroll, and who would question the boss? As Geraldine Kyle, Dee’s best friend and a visitor to the Presley house, put it, “That was the way Elvis wanted it, and what Elvis wanted, Elvis got. You didn’t question Elvis. That was it. Dee never had first or second thoughts about it; I am sure that she would have been looked on as a troublemaker and that was the last thing she wanted.”

The assumption was that Elvis planned to marry Priscilla at some point. Joan Esposito’s attitude was typical. “I assumed he did,” she said later. “I don’t know whether she said it or I picked it up.”

Everyone assumed that Priscilla believed she and Elvis would marry. “It was obvious,” said Willie Jane Nichols. “That’s why she came.”

Remarkably, no special precautions were taken by Elvis or his family or staff to shield the fact that he was sheltering a teenage schoolgirl-lover under his roof, but certain “house rules” were laid down for Priscilla: she could invite only a few friends to
Graceland, and she would have to stay close to home and not call attention to herself. Priscilla, so adept at keeping secrets, complied dutifully as she began to play the role for which her entire life had been an almost eerie preparation. Just as she had maintained the illusion since childhood that Paul Beaulieu was her real father, so she repeated convincingly the public relations invention that the Beaulieus were “friends” of the Presleys. She told this story to the Memphis newspapers and to show business reporter May Mann that spring, to throw them off the criminal cohabitation that was really happening at Graceland. The line between reality and fiction had become so blurred in Priscilla’s young life that it was small wonder she would later confuse the truth with her own fabrications during her confrontation with Currie Grant. She had passed from one household of illusion directly into another; living this way was all she knew.

Priscilla spent her first several weeks at Graceland utterly alone, waiting for Elvis. Mornings, she went through the motions at Immaculate Conception, plainly miserable, apprehensive of making friends, physically, socially, and emotionally isolated. “She went to school, and she went home,” as former student Theresa Giannini put it. “She would leave [school] at lunchtime. She didn’t eat lunch or socialize with us.” Priscilla was as silent as a sphinx at I.C., continuing the ruse—even with her classmates—that she was not Elvis Presley’s live-in girlfriend. “In fact,” said another senior, “she told people that she lived with ‘a family in Whitehaven,’ ” the neighborhood in Memphis where Graceland was located. Priscilla’s discretion impressed the principal, Sister Mary Adrian, who “really admired her for the way she just did not capitalize on Elvis’s popularity. And her loyalty to him. I
really
admired that.” Priscilla did have an identifying symbol that marked her as “Elvis’s girl,” however, remembered a classmate; she wore his
Blue Hawaii
star sapphire ring, “so we all knew exactly who she was.” The ring, according to Willie Jane Nichols, was a trophy for Priscilla, visible proof that Elvis was hers. “She put tape inside and wrapped it and wrapped it and [wore] it on her little finger.”

Surprisingly, the other girls at I.C. didn’t gawk at Priscilla; in fact, remarked Sherry Riggins, another senior, “no big to-do was made of her.” It was beyond the realm of her conservative Catholic classmates even to contemplate the lifestyle Priscilla was leading; in their innocence, insisted Sherry, they assumed Priscilla and Elvis were innocent, too. Having sex, to the girls
at Immaculate Conception High School in 1963, was not even a consideration. Priscilla’s primary distinction, according to Sherry, was her hair and makeup. “Hardly any of us wore makeup to any extent, and she was like ready for the stage.” Priscilla had conformed to Elvis’s wishes by letting her hair grow and she wore it in an enormous black beehive.

When she got home from school those first days, recalled Dee, Priscilla spent much of her time “locked up in her room,” a stranger in a strange land, living under a set of rules she had not yet decoded, uncertain whom to trust. Her years as a silent observer stood her in great stead, for Priscilla watched, listened, and learned. “I think the first phase she went through was awe,” said Ricky Stanley, Dee’s middle son, who observed Priscilla. “She was trying to get the big picture here: Who were the players? I’m not saying she is calculating, but she is not stupid. She’s a smart girl. And when she found out how things worked, then she felt comfortable.” The days of comfort would not arrive for several years, however. Priscilla’s best friend during those first months was her toy poodle, Honey, her Christmas gift from Elvis.

The two hundred dollars Paul Beaulieu had given her quickly dwindled, leaving Priscilla in the awkward and humiliating circumstance of having to ask Elvis’s father, who controlled the finances, for money to live on. Though Priscilla, by everyone’s account, was extremely conservative about spending, Vernon Presley, in Joan Esposito’s description, “was tight.
I
would not want to have to ask him [for money]. ‘What did you do?’ [he would demand.] ‘I had three milk shakes.’ ” Neither Paul Beaulieu nor Elvis had provided an allowance for Priscilla. Captain Beaulieu likely assumed that money would not be an issue, since Elvis Presley was a millionaire, and “Elvis didn’t think about those things,” Joe Esposito explained. “Elvis never thought about money. I’m sure that Priscilla had a hard time being young, like ‘I need money, what do I do?’ So she had to go to Vernon. He didn’t make it easy for you to ask him for money; he made it seem like you were taking his last dollar.… Elvis wasn’t thinking that she should have a credit card in her wallet, she should have an allowance every week.”

“His father could be brutal,” Priscilla admitted later. “But he was good to me.” Vernon’s second wife, Dee, on the other hand, vexed Priscilla considerably: “If I wore … an extravagant dress, I was criticized on how much I had spent for that dress—you
know, was I going to be like another girlfriend, who was extravagant?”

Priscilla was feeling constricted her first days at Graceland. Joe Esposito did not recall that anyone actually forbade her to bring friends to the house, as long as the “timing” was right, but he admitted that “she was a prisoner as far as leaving and [the family] not knowing where she was. That wasn’t good. We didn’t have cell phones in those days.” Anyway, the reality was that Priscilla had no friends in Memphis, and she was not permitted to leave the grounds of Graceland without one of the entourage. There was a rationale behind this. Elvis, who had played the celebrity game for seven years, was wary of opportunists seeking access to him by pretending to befriend Priscilla. He wanted to protect her
and
to keep her under surveillance whenever she left the house. The resulting lifestyle, for Priscilla, was akin to being the daughter of a Saudi sheikh, pampered and sequestered, living behind a metaphorical veil. “My friends were chosen for me,” she recalled. “They … were the wives of the husbands in Elvis’s group. Never could I bring in an outsider. I didn’t bring anyone in. It was made very clear to me that I [was not to] encourage outsiders to come in, when I first got there.”

Her sharpest critic, according to Priscilla, was not Elvis but Dee, Vernon’s second wife. “I was so young,” Priscilla later reflected, “so naive. I had a picnic out in the front of Graceland. There was a big oak tree, a beautiful oak tree, and I took my dog up there. I had a
picnic.
An innocent picnic. I was criticized [for] trying to make a spectacle of myself and show people on the streets that I was there at Graceland, [for] calling attention to myself. I couldn’t believe this! I was having a picnic with my dog, never, ever thinking that I wanted to be seen from the street!” The incident left emotional scars on Priscilla, who had been reared to be dutiful—to
please
—and who was doing everything in her power to blend into her strange new world. “I was
picked apart.
So what did I do? I chose a tree way in the back part of Graceland, and I stayed there. Because I didn’t want people to criticize [me]…. So I came down to their level. And I have some anger for that, because I fell into that
trap
, not being prepared. Those were the kinds of things that I was approached on, and Dee would do that to me, you know: ‘You shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t do that.’ ” Priscilla felt increasingly persecuted, and her reaction was to become invisible. “I was so criticized
for every little thing that I did that I withdrew, thinking that everything I did was wrong.”

Dee Presley characterized Elvis’s household as cautious, determined to contain a potentially explosive situation. “Vernon lived in fear [because] there was a child living in Graceland,” she declared. “She could surely get pregnant, or the news would pick it up, and it looked like Jerry Lee Lewis. Actually, [Priscilla] was hidden inside Graceland for a lot of years.”

Ignorance and romanticism later painted over the reality, creating the fable that the teenage Priscilla Beaulieu was living at Graceland in a grand love affair with Elvis Presley, when the more bittersweet truth was that she was a confused child driven by her parents’ ambition and her own fading fantasy.

Elvis returned home from the set of
Fun in Acapulco
a few weeks after Priscilla arrived at Graceland, and the fairy-tale patina of her seemingly charmed life reemerged, albeit briefly. “I remember he took her shopping in Memphis, and he bought her hundred-dollar blouses—ten of them,” said Joan Esposito. “This was like, ‘Gosh!’ Her eyes got
this
big.” Priscilla had entered a different world that spring, the world of the nouveaux riches. Elvis, in contrast to Dee, never criticized Priscilla’s spending. “
Never
,” she emphasized. “He wanted me to look great.”