Child Bride (34 page)

Currie later surmised that when the
Photoplay
piece came out and Elvis became angry with him, Priscilla used the opportunity to tell Elvis what he had said, possibly because Elvis thought she had played a part in the article but, more likely, “it was her chance to get rid of me,” something Priscilla had been attempting to do since Bad Nauheim, once she discovered Elvis’s preoccupation with virgins and the threat Currie posed, since she had been intimate with him. The Beaulieus, according to Currie, did not have a problem with the
Photoplay
piece about Priscilla. “I kept in touch with them after that,” Currie said. “I think they wanted the publicity at that time. Really, there wasn’t any animosity. It’s a nice little story.… My God, it’s a fairy tale; they made up a lot of things in there.”

The
Photoplay
two-part series, as the first extended publicity about Priscilla Beaulieu, may have helped shape the public’s image of her as a modern-day Cinderella, as opposed to the rather tragic figure she really was. From the outside, Priscilla’s life appeared to be a dream come true. Even Nancy Sinatra, who was a friend of Elvis’s and knew Priscilla slightly around this time, was swept up by the illusion of romanticism that swirled about Elvis and Priscilla. She told biographer Albert Goldman in the late 1970s, when he was researching his acid account of the singer’s life, “Someday somebody should do a love story based on these two people, because it’s an incredible story. It’s like
Snow White
or
Sleeping Beauty.
Elvis asked her father if he could … marry her and … take care of her schooling and take care of her. And [Elvis] put her in a convent, and he saved her, kept her for himself. He didn’t want anyone to touch her, except him.” Nancy Sinatra’s idealized perception of Priscilla as the heroine of a storybook romance fitted perfectly into her childhood role as a fairy-tale princess, the part her mother had created for her and groomed her to play. This fantasy was eagerly embraced by Elvis fans, who saw their hero as the archetypal White Knight. It was then perpetuated by Priscilla herself, struggling to match her life to the myth of a relationship that never existed, except in Elvis’s imagination.

The Priscilla-and-Elvis story, like most legends, contains an element of truth, for if soul mates exist, Elvis and Priscilla had a karmic connection that seemingly predestined them to come
together—perhaps, as Mike Edwards suggested, for Elvis to “save” Priscilla from an unhappy childhood and for her to replace, in Elvis’s mind, the mother and girlfriend he loved and lost.

If Priscilla fit the part of a fairy-tale’s heroine, it was the dark tale of Rapunzel, locked in a tower, lonely and bereft and untouched. She was a virtual prisoner at Graceland, leading a controlled life that, for all its poetry, was emotionally harrowing for her. Elvis was very often away, either making one of his three or so films a year or recording music, leaving Priscilla alone and bored in Memphis, restricted in whom she could befriend and unable to leave the grounds without an escort. “Priscilla couldn’t have made it without Grandma,” Willie Jane noted sympathetically. “She spent the night with her when Elvis was away.” Graceland in certain ways resembled the Clampett mansion in
The Beverly Hillbillies.
The Presleys, like the Clampetts, were dirt-poor southerners who, with Elvis’s meteoric success, found themselves suddenly rich. Vernon was a latter-day Jed; Elvis was a well-intended, oversexed Jethro; and Grandma Presley assumed the role of Granny, whom she favored slightly. Elvis’s grandmother, according to Willie Jane, used to say to Priscilla, “You little girls shouldn’t leave home and come here.”

Priscilla hadn’t many girlfriends, her lifelong pattern, and “didn’t associate with many people,” according to Willie, who spent many an afternoon with Elvis’s young, beautiful, and trapped girlfriend. Priscilla’s one attempt to bring in an outsider—an acquaintance from her ballet class whom she invited to the house for dinner—was disastrous. Grandma Presley happened to mention the incident to Dee, who castigated Priscilla. “I never heard the end of it,” Priscilla recalled. “How could I bring somebody into Graceland? They might steal something. Well, what did I do? I again withdrew, didn’t have any friends over, because I didn’t want anything stolen from the house.”

Her two closest companions, outside the Memphis Mafia wives—Marty’s wife, Patsy; Richard Davis’s wife, Peggy; Gene Smith’s wife, Jo; and Joe’s wife, Joan—were Memphians Carolyn Jones and Jean Boyd. Jean was the cousin of Pat Boyd, who worked in the office at Graceland and later married Elvis’s school friend Red West, the unappointed ringleader of the entourage. Priscilla and her girlfriends played cards, a favorite pastime of Priscilla’s, or went horseback riding, her childhood passion. “She didn’t go out a lot,” said Willie. “She liked to eat Mexican
food. She’d go down to Pancho’s a lot.” Priscilla was possibly closest to Patsy Presley, Elvis’s double cousin, who was another Graceland employee. Becky Yancey worked in the office with Patsy and remembered Priscilla scampering in nearly every day, wearing little black Capri pants and Capezios, reading Elvis’s fan mail or finding and weeding out her own letters to him from Germany. Or she passed the time with the Stanleys, mostly Ricky, who had a huge crush on her that he would carry to adulthood. With Patsy or Ricky, Priscilla went bowling, to the movies, or to Leonard’s Drive-in, a local hangout. She was desperate for something to
do.

When Elvis was around, Priscilla had to vie for his attention against the stiff competition of his male disciples, who included his cousins Gene and Billy Smith; Lamar Fike; former classmates Red and Sonny West, who were cousins; Richard Davis; Charlie Hodge; and Marty Lacker, all of whom did his bidding and received a salary. Joe Esposito was ever about, and others would come and go as it suited Elvis’s mood. The atmosphere within the retinue was one of extreme competition, with everyone jockeying for Elvis’s approval, for the position of Most Favored, but more meaningfully for his
time
, the rarest commodity in Elvis’s harried life. “There was always the one-upmanship,” Priscilla recalled. “Who was going to sit next to him? Who was going to be next in line? Who was going to be invited to the movies? Where were they going to be sitting? Everybody in the theater had their positions, and
no
one dared touch that position if it was close to [Elvis]. There was a definite pecking order. So thank God I didn’t have to worry about that, because I sat next to him! But what went on behind that seat, I didn’t even want to know.” Priscilla and the members of Elvis’s male entourage eyed one another with mutual wariness; everyone was a threat in Elvis’s rarefied world. Willie Jane thought that “The guys wanted to break Elvis and Priscilla up, because Priscilla didn’t want him to do some of the things they wanted him to do.
They
wanted him for themselves, let’s face it.”

Priscilla was never quite sure where she stood, despite her father’s arrangement with Elvis. She told Barbara Walters, years later, that Elvis “was reluctant in mentioning marriage.” Naturally this added to Priscilla’s uncertainty over her standing with Elvis, and the situation was exacerbated by his chronic womanizing. Nancy Sinatra, who had proclaimed Elvis and Priscilla the ultimate romantic couple, told Albert Goldman later that she
herself was “dry-humping” him during the filming of
Speedway
in 1967.

The seeds of a deeper discontent were being sown in Priscilla’s early Memphis years. Joan Esposito remembered that Elvis “did not want Priscilla in the public light or spotlight at all. He did not want her acting or modeling. He squelched anything of that nature, anything public that she wanted to do. And she was always trying to improve herself and keep up.” Priscilla had modeled on a very minor level while she was taking classes at the Patricia Stevens charm school. The context was almost comical for the girlfriend of Elvis Presley: Priscilla modeled fashions from a local Memphis boutique during lunch hour at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in a strip mall close to Graceland. That she would do this demonstrated her unquenchable interest in fashion and glamour and show business of a sort. Though she spoke of her desire to give Elvis children, Priscilla confided to Becky Yancey that year that she did not want to get pregnant “because it would ruin her figure.”

Priscilla was drawn to the performing arts. She might have enrolled in Jo Haynes’s class to compete with Ann-Margret, but she soon found that dancing was an outlet for her unused energy and drive. Dance freed her, gave her a means of expression, provided an arena where she was able to be herself. Jo Haynes observed that Priscilla seemed truly happy when she was dancing.

She went dance-crazy in Memphis, transferring from Jo Haynes’s school to one run by Maylee Kaplan. Then, when she heard that Willie Jane had a military friend who taught ballroom dancing as a hobby, Priscilla scheduled private lessons at his home each Tuesday afternoon at two o’clock. She was accompanied to her lessons by Patsy Lacker, who sat and watched. “She danced the cha-cha, the waltz, the tango, the fox trot, the jitterbug, a little rock and roll, even folk dancing and the polka,” recalled Willie’s instructor friend, Jack Kenner. “Anything you could do to music. She was quick to catch on. She responded beautifully to a leader, a leader who knew dancing would make her look like a professional, because she was good at following.”

Priscilla coaxed Elvis into dancing with her at the house. “I never had seen Elvis do ballroom dancing before, but he did with Priscilla,” Willie remembers. Jack Kenner and Priscilla put on a demonstration for one of his children’s classes at the Millington Naval Airbase one rainy night in 1965, “and the word got around
who she was and some of the kids kind of whispered, ‘That’s Priscilla Beaulieu!’ and … they wanted her signatures. She excited them, ’cause they knew she was Elvis’s girlfriend.” That year, the year Priscilla turned twenty, she and Jack Kenner discussed the possibility of opening a dance studio. “We were gonna teach here in Memphis,” Jack said.

Those plans, like so many others of Priscilla’s, never materialized, because Elvis’s life was an unrelenting barrage of show business commitments, and he wanted a girlfriend who would be there for him at a moment’s notice. Dee Presley thought Priscilla had aspirations to perform—and possibly a touch of envy of the idol who now effectively held her captive.

With the frustration Priscilla was experiencing, one might wonder why she chose to stay with Elvis Presley, for she was, after all, a willing participant in his domestic arrangement. The answer to that riddle was the same as the underlying problem: Elvis. For all his control issues, his sexual double standard, and his occasional egomania, when Elvis focused his attention on someone, he was
magic:
hysterically funny, with a sharp, incisive wit and flashes of brilliance. He was the most charismatic human being that Patti Parry, Rick Stanley, and countless others had ever met. His endearing traits, in many instances, were the mirror images of the characteristics that made him so difficult to bear at times. His need to control, for example, manifested itself positively in his tenderly protective and nurturing side; the exaggerated self-gratification brought on by his stardom and power was equaled, and possibly surpassed, by his legendary generosity; his double standard reflected the southern tendency to place a woman on a pedestal as a creature to be revered, almost worshiped; his egocentricity, when reversed, gave Elvis an almost supernatural ability to empathize. Elvis Presley was a man of many paradoxes—alternately megalomaniacal and humble, oversexed yet strangely prudish.

Loneliness hung about Elvis like a shroud. “For some reason,” Priscilla was later to say, “the Presley family … always [had] that quality of loneliness.… His grandmother was that way, his father was that way, and he would have times of loneliness, of just
feeling lonely
, and there was nothing anyone could do.” These times made women want to take care of him, to mother him, and it was powerfully compelling. Cybill Shepherd, who dated Elvis at the end of his marriage to Priscilla, felt that the song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” “said a lot about Elvis,”
whom Cybill found “fragile.” Priscilla was no exception; she cut Elvis’s meat for him, even in restaurants, for he had never learned proper table manners and was embarrassed by his ignorance; she spoke baby talk to him. Elvis projected a vulnerability that was irresistible in one so brilliant, so famous, and so beautiful; this same tenderness registered when he sang a ballad. Elvis did not merely sing the words; he
lived
his songs as if each one had been written from personal experience, and he communicated that intimacy to his fans. His tremulous, emotional voice could move a person to tears; it seemed to touch one’s very soul. To listen to Elvis Presley sing was to experience the divine.

With that genius came privileges and concessions that ordinary humans would never have been granted. Priscilla stayed with Elvis for all those reasons and more—out of faithfulness to her childhood dream, to honor her parents’ arrangement, and because she and Elvis loved each other in a mystical way that even Priscilla found difficult either to describe or to fully understand.

I
n a way, Priscilla’s heartbreaking beauty had been as much a curse as a blessing to her. It had transformed her, from birth, into the object of her mother’s frustrated ambition; when she was only three, it had drawn Paul Beaulieu, who wanted her for himself, leading to the family secret that would tarnish her childhood and forever blur her identity; it had isolated her, in school, as a creature too rarefied to be friends with normal girls; and at fourteen, her exquisite face had attracted superstar Elvis Presley and initiated a fantasy with dark, sometimes dangerous undertones.

Through it all, Priscilla Beaulieu demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt, a consequence, in part, of her military upbringing. Beneath her porcelain facade, she was a survivor. “You’d think she was made of iron,” pronounced Willie Jane Nichols, the Tennessee sage who watched Priscilla go through adolescence competing with fame, Ann-Margret, drugs, Elvis’s cohorts, rock and roll, and movies. Patti Parry, who observed Priscilla on the West Coast, regarded her as supremely self-possessed: “She always carried herself. She dealt with it and dealt with it well. I think inside she was a mess … but she also knew that she had Elvis Presley.”