Child Bride (6 page)

Priscilla later insisted that she was certain she was going to lose, but her parents proceeded with confidence. Ann went shopping for a strapless evening gown for Priscilla to wear to the dance; her father, she recalled, “kept reminding me to practice an acceptance speech.” Shortly before the coronation, a classmate warned the Rutherfords that Priscilla was going to win because her grandparents—Ann’s parents—had sent a forty-dollar check to her campaign.

When the big night arrived, it was Priscilla Beaulieu who was crowned queen of the Popham Halloween Carnival. Pam Rutherford sat below her, as runner-up princess. “That was a funny deal, too,” recalled Pam, who never spoke of it to Priscilla until years later, when Priscilla wrote about the contest in her autobiography.
Priscilla claimed it was
she
who heard a rumor that
Pam’s
grandparents “had put in a hundred-dollar bill for their vote. My parents were disappointed; there was no way that they could afford to match that much money and even if they could, they objected on principle.”

“It’s so silly now, because we’re fifty years old and who cares!” Pam remarked after
Elvis and Me
came out. “She relates the same story, only in reverse. And I thought, ‘Jeez! How could she get that so mixed up?’ And I just assumed the way she told it is the way it was for her, and I’m not writing the book, so it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me.” Priscilla would later attribute the mix-up to “misinformation” from another girl, but there would always be lingering doubts.

The consensus, years after the fact, was that if there were any machinations to ensure the outcome of the contest, Ann Beaulieu was the more likely source. “This would have been very typical of Priscilla’s mother,” remarked Christine Laws, with an ironic laugh. “Honey, it was very important. What was important was looks, appearance.… Many mothers live vicariously through their daughters. And she did.”

In 1956, the year of her greatest glory at school, Priscilla’s sense of destiny returned, more powerful than before. “I would get this
feeling
,” she later tried to explain. “Someone would ask me, ‘What are you going to do in life?’ You know, ‘What are you going to be?’ And I just remember that I had this incredible feeling that whatever it was going to be, it was chosen for
me.
And it was going to create a very big effect.”

Just as Priscilla Beaulieu was being elected carnival queen, Elvis Presley was labeled the King of Rock and Roll. It was the end of 1956 and the beginning of his phenomenal trajectory to fame. By October he had earned five gold records in a single year, with two more to come; released his second album,
Elvis;
starred in a major feature film, the civil war drama
Love Me Tender;
and signed a ten-picture movie contract. He appeared in concert all over Texas that fall, fanning the flames of Priscilla’s growing infatuation.

She and Pam went on a double-date to see her idol in
Love Me Tender
at the Base theater. Priscilla’s date was her current beau, seventh-grader Larry Powell. Pam and Priscilla, he remembered, were hysterical over seeing Elvis on the screen. “She was definitely screaming,” Larry recalled of Priscilla. “Standing up and hollering. You know those black-and-white reels of Elvis at
some of his early concerts, with girls screaming and crying? She was just like you see in those old movies.”

Both girls scrutinized Debra Paget, Elvis’s costar. Pam idolized Paget, her “favorite movie star,” while Priscilla was simply sizing up the competition. Earl Wilson quoted Elvis in
Photoplay
that January of 1957 describing Paget as “the most beautiful girl in the world,” and fan magazines were reporting his unrequited love for her.

There was truth to the rumors, though the real story has never been told until now. The account repeated in most Presley biographies states that Elvis developed an intense infatuation with Debra Paget, who, at twenty-two, rejected the shy nineteen-year-old singer as unsophisticated. According to Debra Paget, however, she and Elvis Presley fell in love.

She “was a very young twenty-two,” as she put it, and extremely shy, and “found Elvis to be a very sweet, unassuming, fun, and kind person.” Their conversations, on and off the set, revolved around God. Debra’s parents—particularly her mother, who dominated her life and her career—refused to allow Debra to date Elvis, because, she recalled, “there were stories going around about him,” a side effect of his reputation as a rock-and-roll rebel. Willie Jane Nichols, Elvis’s mother’s best friend from Tennessee, would hear about Debra from Gladys Presley during the
Love Me Tender
shoot. “She talked to Elvis daily,” recalled Nichols. “Gladys would say, ‘I wish you could hear him talk about Debra Paget!’ He was just overwhelmed with her.”

Debra Paget was Elvis Presley’s ideal in a woman. Like him, she had a close, intense relationship with her mother, a heavyset, formidable woman who physically resembled Elvis’s own mother, Gladys, a fact that didn’t escape either Elvis’s or Debra’s attention. Debra’s mother noticed that her daughter bore a certain facial resemblance to Gladys Presley, a fact that could only further endear her to Elvis. These similarities may have marked the beginning of Elvis’s obsession with physical resemblances between people close to him—an understandable preoccupation in a surviving twin, as he was.

Debra Paget was a stunning ingenue with a heart-shaped face, clear blue eyes, and cupid’s-bow lips. Elvis the aesthete admired beauty in any woman. But Debra Paget offered more than a pretty face and a matching mother complex. She was also religious. And more importantly, she was a virgin. Her mother would not allow her to leave the house unchaperoned, so she
had never been on a formal date. To Elvis, this combination was perfection. “He always said he’d marry a virgin,” recalled Debra, “and maybe that’s why he said he’d marry me. Because his mama always told him to marry a virgin.”

Contrary to previously published accounts, Debra did not consider Elvis Presley an undesirable hayseed. “Had my parents not objected,” she related, “I would have gone ahead. I thought a great deal of him.” Because of her natural timidity and because her mother was so opposed to Elvis, Debra kept her feelings to herself, even from Elvis. “I was
very
shy then; I hardly talked.”

Elvis continued to carry a torch for Debra. After
Love Me Tender
wrapped and before he went into the army, sometime in late 1956 or early 1957, he called Debra from El Paso, where he had stopped while driving home to Memphis from Los Angeles, and asked her to marry him. Debra told him it wasn’t possible. “I know it’s your mother and father,” she remembered Elvis saying. “And if it takes twenty years, I’ll get them to like me.”

“I knew it was hopeless,” Debra recalled. “My parents would never relent. It was an impossible situation. I’m not sure I ever told him how I felt, but he could feel it.”

Elvis could not get Debra Paget out of his system. Willie Jane Nichols and her husband, Carl, accompanied Vernon and Gladys Presley to Hollywood in 1957 to watch Elvis shoot his second movie,
Loving You.
His sight-seeing tours always included one stop in Beverly Hills. “Elvis carried us around and took us past Debra Paget’s house,” confirmed Nichols. “I think Debra saw us and remembers that.”

Debra Paget’s version of the tale is both romantic and sad. She and Elvis continued to have feelings for each other but were kept apart by circumstances (her mother). “I did
The Ten Commandments
,” she recalled. “We had to see each other in passing on the Paramount lot, and we looked longingly at each other.” Just before Debra’s mother died, she confessed her regrets to her daughter. “She said she wouldn’t have stopped me if she’d known I felt so strongly.” By then it was too late; both Debra and Elvis had married other people. The actress kept the truth to herself, even after Elvis died. “There was no need to tell others,” she explained. “I don’t like to talk about Elvis; I’ve always felt it was private.”

Priscilla Beaulieu did not know the intimacies of Elvis Presley’s relationship with Debra Paget when she saw
Love Me Tender.
She only knew that Elvis was smitten with the actress,
and if Elvis fancied her, Priscilla wanted to see more of her. She was learning how to actualize her fantasies, an endeavor that required homework and careful study. While she did not put that kind of effort into her schoolwork, if she had a goal, Priscilla could move mountains.

Priscilla was not the only female in the Beaulieu household who had a crush on Elvis Presley. As soon as
Love Me Tender
hit the marquee at the Majestic in downtown Austin, Ann Beaulieu was on the phone with Dora Keen, president of the Bergstrom Officers’ Wives’ Club, saying, “Let’s go see Elvis!” They went to a matinee with two other air force wives.

“It was her idea!” recalled Dora Keen. “When we went to see it, she was crazy about Elvis. Ann was a big Elvis fan. She was following his career, you know, starting in movies. Ann was impressed with him. She could see something in him. We were all acting so stupid about the young man! And I know she was very fond of Elvis.”

Who knows whether Priscilla was aware that her mother harbored a crush on her teenage idol? It was impossible to tell, since years later—for reasons that would soon become clear—Priscilla and all the Beaulieus would reconstruct history, claiming that Ann disapproved of Elvis Presley before Priscilla started seeing him.

More secrets, lies, and cover-ups in the house of hidden truths.

T
he apparent existence of “two” Priscillas became more evident as Priscilla Beaulieu entered junior high in 1957. She was still outwardly demure, with the same catlike inscrutability—a facade her boyfriend Mike Edwards would later refer to as “the mask,” because it so adeptly hid what was really going on. But just below the surface lurked the “naughty” Priscilla.

“She’d ask me to go to the movies with her,” recalled Taylor Keen, “and then ditch me at the drive-in to meet the high school boys.” It was Rooney all over again.

Priscilla and Pam, but especially Priscilla, attracted older boys. “Some of the freshman and sophomore boys thought she was the cutest little trick that ever walked and talked,” recalled Christine Laws. Soldiers on the base—grown men—ogled Priscilla at twelve and a half. “We used to ride the bus,” remembered Pam, “go to the root beer stand and to the PX. The soldiers all looked at her.” The magnet was Priscilla’s dainty doll-like features. “It was more her face than anything else,” agreed Cal White, who dated Priscilla in Austin. “She had the prettiest features I have ever seen in my life.” Even the boys’ mothers marveled at Priscilla. “Her eyes were outstanding,” Charlie Clements’s mother, Mary, remembers. “[The irises] had a dark ring around them.” Though she didn’t “put on airs,” as her friend Evangeline put
it, Priscilla was obsessed with her appearance. A seventh-grade teacher recalled Priscilla opening her mirrored compact in class more often than her textbook. She and Pam handled the attention of their older admirers with aplomb. “They acted like they were twenty,” Taylor Keen remembered. “They were so much more sophisticated.”

For the first time in Priscilla’s childhood, the Beaulieus remained in the same city for three consecutive years, giving their daughter’s life a semblance of permanence. Yet Priscilla herself was not stable. She was still intensely competitive with her best friend, had become quite aggressive around boys, and was developing a finely honed ability to get what she wanted by manipulating others. As one close Texas friend put it: “You like her, you can enjoy her company, but you can’t feel one hundred percent sure of Priscilla. That’s just part of knowing her. And you just have to accept it.”

“She was kinda like a little honeypot,” said Mary Clements, who lived across the street, describing Priscilla at thirteen, the birthday she celebrated on her last day of seventh grade. “She liked older boys and she’d sit in the yard and watch while they played football on our front lawn.” Hoping to attract them, and succeeding. Overall, though, Priscilla was a popular girl in the popular crowd, a cheerleader who was great at the new dance craze, the twist, and friendly to all.

Until that summer, when everything changed.

It began like any other summer evening at the Beaulieus. Priscilla was baby-sitting for Don and Michelle, then six and three, while Paul and Ann attended a party. Bored, she wandered into her parents’ bedroom while her little brother and sister were asleep and began snooping through the closet, “mulling through things.” Her eyes fell on an old trunk buried in the back. Priscilla found herself drawn to it, strangely compelled to see what was inside. “And as I’m opening it,” she recalled, “I had this
unbelievable feeling.”
Inside, folded neatly on top, was an American flag, the type presented to widows of servicemen. Priscilla’s heart raced. “And I kept thinking, I shouldn’t be doing this. It was too private. But as I was exploring, I kept wanting to go on. But then something was saying, Don’t go any further! And I kept going further and further.”

Under the flag she found a cache of carefully preserved, yellowing love letters addressed to Rooney, her mother’s nickname as a girl, from someone named Jimmy; beside them were her
mother’s passionate replies. Mesmerized, Priscilla reached inside the trunk for more. On the bottom was a sea of pictures—photographs she had never seen before of herself as a baby. Along with photos of herself alone and with her mother, she found a photograph of Ann beside a dark, handsome stranger as baby Priscilla lay in her arms. On the back, in her mother’s hand-writing, were the words, “Mommy, Daddy, Priscilla.” A chill ran down Priscilla’s spine as she studied the picture more closely. The face of the stranger in the photo was her own. She had stumbled onto her personal Pandora’s box. “And I kept finding more pictures and finding more pictures, and finding certificates,” she recalled, several decades later. A birth certificate. Baptismal records. “Finding my
life
, you know, in front of me! That was
different
from what I knew.”