Child Bride (50 page)

Priscilla was also tiring of Bis & Beau and was showing up at the boutique less and less often, though she reveled in the publicity. She appeared on the cover of
Parade
, standing in front of the boutique, and she modeled for Bis & Beau brochures, posing seductively in the sexy leather costumes she and Olivia created. Someone in the business, seeing her in the layouts, suggested that she act in commercials, and Priscilla stored the information in the back of her brain, where it firmly remained.

She met the British photographer Terry O’Neill, who would later marry Faye Dunaway, when he came into Bis & Beau one day, and there was an instant attraction. Terry, a sophisticated European, was so embarrassed by Priscilla’s “terrible” taste in
clothes that he chose obscure restaurants when they went to dinner together to avoid being seen with her in public. “To be honest,” he said once, “she was a bit of a fashion disaster at the time. I hated those big hats she was wearing and the ridiculously flared trousers.” He was enchanted, however, by Priscilla’s ultra-feminine sexuality, commenting later on how exquisitely she prepared before making love, describing her romantic master bedroom, which he said featured a four-poster bed, special dimmed lighting, and a mirrored ceiling.

Elvis’s love life was effectively nonexistent by 1975. Linda Thompson had assumed more the role of caretaker than girlfriend, a relationship Shirley Dieu, who was dating the divorced Joe Esposito, characterized as “mother-son,” dominated by baby talk. Joe introduced Elvis to Sheila Ryan, a petite, cherubic blond who was all of nineteen, and in the mid-seventies, she became Linda’s alternate, though both had met Elvis too late to enjoy him as a genuine mate. “I don’t believe that Priscilla’s experience with Elvis was anything close to what mine and Linda’s was,” Sheila stated. “We were more or less keepin’ him alive.” Their duties were more medical than sexual. “We pulled food out of his mouth when he would fall asleep with a hamburger or whatever, because he took a lot of pills to sleep.” Sheila never had an orgasm when she was with Elvis; he made out with her as if they were teenagers. There was, she felt, a sweetness to it. “I was just like a little angel to him. That was all. He liked … pretty lace underwear and that was it.”

Terry O’Neill dropped Priscilla after two months to return to England—one of the few men who ever rejected
her
—and she was not pleased. “That was not a great experience for her,” Olivia understated. Casting about for a replacement, she settled for Robert Kardashian, the Los Angeles lawyer who would later be made infamous as O. J. Simpson’s best friend. To Priscilla, at the time, he was a convenient boyfriend, for his brother Tom had recently married Joan Esposito and the two couples could travel and do things together. “I think she was just going out with him because she had no one to go out with,” expressed Joan Quinn, Robert’s cousin. Elvis continued to call Priscilla, in spite of his girlfriends and her boyfriends, testing the waters about getting back together. For a time, recalled Terry O’Neill, Mike Stone was pressing her to return as well. “Elvis would come here at night,” she said in 1996, sitting in the house on Summit Drive. “I would be with someone—I was in a relationship
—and he would just show up. He didn’t care whether I was with someone or not.… He’d show up at two in the morning, three in the morning … or he’d call me. So he dominated my life even after our breakup, because when you have someone who doesn’t care, and has been the center of attention, and is no longer the center of attention, there’s a loss. And Elvis was used to having his cake and eating it too. And there is no way that he was going to have that. And he still wanted to know that he was cared for, or that he could be cared for.”

Lance Robbins, a friend of Kardashian’s, remembered Robert telling him that Priscilla received long, incoherent phone calls from Elvis while she and Robert were in bed, “and she would put the receiver on the pillow between them and let him listen.” Priscilla viewed the calls and Elvis’s midnight drop-in visits as proof of his undying desire for her. In truth, Elvis Presley “was a dying man,” said Kathy Westmoreland, who sang backup for him and slept beside him during his last months and years. “I knew he was dying,” Sheila agreed, “and I wasn’t in denial over it. You know, you just know things. He didn’t really want to live. He’d done everything, and nothing seemed to work out. People were a disappointment to him time after time. I think mostly Priscilla disappointed him.”

Elvis told Sheila and Kathy, separately, that he was going to die at the age of forty-two. “He knew he was gonna die,” said Sheila. He also told Nancy Rooks, one of the maids at Graceland, that he would die at forty-two because his mama was that age when she died. “We talked a lot about life after death,” said Nancy. “He said him and God was friends and if he died he would come back, because the strong come back and the weak don’t.” After one of his last concerts, remembered Kathy, he grew concerned that he would die without leaving an enduring legacy. “One of my last conversations with him, he was saying, ‘What is this all about? How are people going to remember me? They aren’t going to remember me.’ He said, ‘I’ve never done anything lasting. I’ve never done a classic film. What could I do before I go?’ ” He told Kathy he was going to write his autobiography, which he planned to call
Through My Eyes
, so that he could leave behind something he considered meaningful. It seems bizarre, years later, that Elvis Presley worried about whether he would be remembered.

Sheila had left Elvis by 1976, for she had fallen in love with James Caan, whom she would marry, and she could no longer
bear to watch the man whom most women worshiped as a romantic god die in front of her, incontinent from prescription drugs, sleeping in a diaper. “It wasn’t a dream,” said Sheila. “It was a nightmare.” Elvis’s lifestyle had become disturbingly similar to that of Howard Hughes, whom Elvis admired and wanted to meet. Strangely, Hughes had a high regard for Elvis Presley. The parallels between the two men were almost eerie. They were both Capricorns, only children, nicknamed Sonny, coddled by overprotective mothers who died early. Both were innately shy. Each became rich, and was a genius in his chosen field. Elvis accumulated a cadre of aides known as the Memphis Mafia; Hughes employed aides called the Mormon Mafia. Both Elvis and Howard Hughes were considered great lovers and ladies’ men, yet they used intermediaries to procure beautiful women, then seldom touched them. Each instructed his aides not to talk to the women whom they sequestered. Elvis and Hughes both married abruptly, after a bizarre crisis in their lives, then rarely had sex with their wives. They both preferred to live in hotel suites behind blackout curtains, eating a certain food for months on end, watching the same movie over and over. Both men lived in and had a strong attachment to Las Vegas; both of them admired Richard Nixon and sent him secret communiqués; both believed they would die young because their mothers had. Hughes and Elvis deliberately shrouded their private lives in mystery. They were obsessed with cleanliness in those around them, yet they neglected their own personal hygiene. Both men wanted to create a foundation to fund charities, but their plans were thwarted, in part by their own inattention. Each man, greatly admired in youth, became a caricature of his former self in his final years; Elvis growing hugely bloated, Hughes becoming anorexic-thin. They spent their last years in near seclusion, addicted to prescription medication, surrounded by sycophants who watched them self-destruct. Each man, finally, left an estate mired in controversy that would make more money for him dead than alive. Howard Hughes died in April of 1976, just before the meeting with Elvis Presley could be arranged.

That same month, Priscilla sold her interest in Bis & Beau to travel the world, a dream of hers since her first years with Elvis, when, instead, she found herself entwined with a man in a lifestyle more insular than her years as a schoolgirl in Germany. She saw “something missing” from her life as a boutique owner, she told
TV Guide
several years later. “Her head just wasn’t there,”
Olivia said. “After having gone through the major divorce, there was a lot of media attention on her, and people were starting to recognize her … [and] she decided to pursue other things. I think she thought maybe this wasn’t her niche and that there were a lot of possibilities out there for her.” In truth, she wanted to model and act, her twin fascinations since Immaculate Conception.

Priscilla began the year 1977 in a blaze of ambition. She had ended her six-month romance of convenience with Robert Kardashian, whom those who knew her considered too weak for Priscilla. Since her childhood, listening to Mario Lanza’s powerful voice on the stereo, Priscilla had been magnetized to forceful men—her soul’s calling, perhaps, to the father she never knew about but whose loss she seemed to intuit. “I … would become the dominant one, and that almost keeps
me
in place,” she tried to explain. “I know this is very old-fashioned thinking, but to have a relationship, you have to have a balance. I’ve dated submissive, nonaggressive men, and I found it very boring. And I realized then that I could never date a guy who was noncommittal, someone who sat back and [said], ‘Whatever you want to do, hon.’ I need much more of a challenge than that. I need someone to keep me on my toes. I need someone [to] look good for. I would never let myself go. Someone who … I don’t know. That’s just the type of person I am. It’s a challenge for me.… I’ll never become less than I am. So a challenge is good.”

Without a boyfriend for the first time perhaps since she was six, Priscilla focused on the career she had suppressed during the Elvis years. The suggestion that she do commercials resurfaced in her psyche, and Priscilla set about to achieve that goal. Pursuing a career in show business, she would say, was the second biggest decision of her life. “I had to go to work for my own sense of self-esteem. I had to shake the image of just being Elvis Presley’s wife and get people to accept me as me, a person with my own talent.” Priscilla, the military brat who thrived on change and new experiences, was determined not to get stuck in a time warp. She was also eager to reinstate her childhood and adolescent standing, too long dormant, as the queen of her domain. Norman Brokaw, the powerful William Morris agent, approached her about getting into acting, and Priscilla, whose wings had been clipped by Elvis, sought, at long last, to fly. She enrolled in an acting workshop that focused on commercials, taught by Holly Hire. “I brought her in for a couple of commercials,
and they thought that she was really lovely, but I don’t think that she could cut it or something,” said Hire. Maybelline, one of the companies that considered Priscilla for an endorsement, passed when they discovered that the smoky eyes she was so famous for from her wedding portrait with Elvis had actually been enhanced by several pairs of false eyelashes. Nina Blanchard, the modeling agent, rejected her as “too short.”

Elvis continued his physical decline, which worsened when his relationship with Linda Thompson ended late in 1976. His entourage would say Elvis dismissed Linda, who was having an affair with a musician named David Briggs; Linda’s account was that she moved out voluntarily, tired of Elvis’s “vampire” life. Quite probably it was a combination. “I think that Linda was growing tired of it all,” said Shirley Dieu, who was living with Joe Esposito. “If you were with Elvis, you had to stay in a locked room with foil on the windows. It had to be hard for anybody. I think she got fed up, and she heard that David was worth a million dollars and she latched right on to him. Everybody felt that Elvis knew it but didn’t want to be embarrassed by it, and he got rid of her to make it look like he was getting rid of her before she left.”

George Klein, ever the faithful procurer of women, found Elvis a replacement before Linda’s bags were even packed. On November 19, George ferried to Graceland a trio of southern sisters, the Aldens, two of whom were beauty queens. George’s intent was that Elvis would take to Terry, the reigning Miss Tennessee, but his eyes were riveted to her younger sister, nineteen-year-old Ginger, who had merely gone along to keep Terry and Rosemary Alden company. “His first words to me were, ‘Ginger, you’re burning a hole through me,’ ” she recalled. In a scene reminiscent of his first, electric meeting with Priscilla, Elvis had an immediate, almost out-of-body experience upon seeing Ginger Alden. “Elvis seemed to single me out that evening,” as she put it, in understatement. Some would see Elvis’s fascination with Ginger as an attempt to reproduce Priscilla, for like Priscilla in her prime Elvis years, Ginger had long, dark hair, a sweetly beautiful face, and darkly made-up eyes. Elvis told Ginger she resembled his mother, and in truth she did, particularly around the eyes, which, like those of Elvis’s mother, were brown, deep-set, expressive, and soulful. “When I see Ginger, I feel like I’m falling into my mother’s eyes,” Elvis told Larry Geller.

Elvis became instantly obsessed with Ginger. Though the two
had barely become acquainted, he telephoned her parents the next weekend, recalled Ginger, and invited her to join him on his tour. By December, less than three weeks later, while Elvis was appearing in Vegas, he was picturing them married. “Elvis told me when he closed his eyes he kept having visions of me in a white gown.” He called Jo Alden, Ginger’s mother, during the Vegas engagement and said, “Mrs. Alden, I’m in love with your daughter and I want to marry her,” according to Ginger. “I was speechless and shocked, as I know she was.” On January 26, back at Graceland, he proposed to an incredulous Ginger. The setting, as it had been with Priscilla, was a bathroom. “I noticed a lot of commotion at Graceland,” Ginger recalled. “People coming in and out and phone calls being made often. He called me into his bathroom, where I sat in a chair as he knelt down in front of me. He said many beautiful things to me and then presented a gorgeous diamond ring, asking me to marry him. I was so surprised as I said yes.” Jo Alden, an outgoing sort whose critics labeled her a social climber, admitted that “it took [Ginger] a while to get used to him. But he’d say, ‘I need you for inspiration to go with me on my trips.’ ” Elvis showered the bewildered Ginger with gifts. “He gave her three or four rings at a time,” said Jo Alden. “She told him one time, ‘Elvis, I would be just as happy for a box of candy or flowers.’ ” Elvis responded, “Well, you’re going to have to get used to it.” Ginger recalled that “Elvis said he would love to have a son and he wanted me to be the mother. We had started a list of names.” The entire courtship had an air of almost tragic desperation.