Child Bride (62 page)

As he sat in his car and watched Priscilla go into her house, Mike Edwards realized he was living the premonition he’d had six years before, when
he
watched Mike Stone stand on the driveway with a script, talking to Priscilla through the gate. Priscilla, he knew, would coldly excommunicate him. That, he had observed, was her pattern when someone no longer served a purpose in her life. She simply discarded that person. Mike had seen her do it with everyone from acting teachers to friends. “It was like you no longer existed. You were gone. Suddenly—
wham!
—the big gate came down. And they were on the outside of the gate. They no longer exist. And the same thing happened to me.”

Joan Quinn, Priscilla’s society role model during her long relationship with Mike Edwards, had witnessed, and to some extent experienced herself, the metaphor of the closing of the gate. “[Priscilla] started distancing herself from all of us,” she said, “and becoming more and more private. She was too good to sit at the beauty shop with us anymore. She had already done the gym, worked off of Michael. She learned a lot from Michael, learned a lot from us. Why would she want to be friends with someone like me, who told her what restaurants to go to, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, what we were doing and what movies to see?” Priscilla—Eve Carrington—the seemingly
meek, submissive, demure child-woman, had quietly observed, absorbed, and eventually surpassed those she had once held up as ideals and sought to emulate, or in a way, to
become.
It was, to a degree, the same thing she had done with Elvis Presley. Her admirers considered this proof that Priscilla was the consummate survivor; her critics perceived it as raw opportunism.

B
By April, Priscilla and Marco Garibaldi were in Rio de Janeiro, being photographed by tabloid reporters locked in a kiss in their bathing suits on the beach. They had flown to Brazil together, during Priscilla’s hiatus from
Dallas
, so she could meet Marco’s parents, appearing very much like a couple headed toward a serious commitment. Brazilian newspapers reported that Marco had been introducing Priscilla Presley as his fiancée.

Kathy Monderine, who had introduced them, said they “just seemed to belong together” despite the difference in their ages—Priscilla was thirty-nine; Marco was twenty-eight. Marco was dubbed, in both legitimate magazines and tabloids, the “mystery man” in Priscilla Presley’s life—a title he seemed rather to enjoy. It was also appropriate. Marco’s past, even his occupation, were clouded in confusion. The Monderines had described him to Priscilla as a screenwriter and director. He called himself a producer, though he had never produced or published anything. Jerry Schilling remembered Marco telling him that he had met Priscilla while he was interviewing her, possibly for a documentary. Marco said later that he wrote a screenplay called
Warlords
, which was “almost but not quite made” and that he had once directed MTV music videos. Mike Edwards had heard, through
Brett Strong, that Marco was “selling posters in the back of his car” when he met Priscilla.

Marco told fanciful tales of a cloak-and-dagger past, of being recruited, as a teenager in Brazil, for an intelligence organization, where he learned to fly a helicopter and acquired arcane knowledge of “voice imprinting” and digital voice analysis—his “spy stuff,” as Bob Wall would refer to it, laughing good-naturedly. Whether it was true or not was almost impossible to prove, but it was fitting that Priscilla would find herself in love with a man who had as many secrets as she. Marco told her about an early marriage to an American named Carolyn.

Sometime before summer, Marco moved into Priscilla’s hilltop house on Summit Drive, behind the fabled gate. He opened an office in west Los Angeles, which he called Destiny Productions. Marco was a great believer in destiny. When he was a boy of eleven or so, in Brazil, he was stopped by a derelict as he was on his way to go swimming. “A star will shine on you in a place far, far away,” she said to him cryptically, “and you will be protected.” He often wondered, once he had begun his love affair with Priscilla Presley and entered the rarefied world she inhabited, if that was what the old woman meant.

The September after Marco moved in with Priscilla,
Elvis and Me
, her feverishly anticipated autobiography, was released, coinciding with the celebration of what would have been Elvis Presley’s fiftieth year. The book Priscilla had anguished over for three years, that she had told Mike Edwards would be her great unveiling—the truth, finally, about her life, her past—instead set in stone all the myths she had been hiding behind for years: that Currie had approached her, out of the blue, to meet Elvis Presley; that she was never an Elvis fan; her strict parents; Elvis’s enraged response to her near-rape by Currie; waiting by the phone in Germany for Elvis to call; that Elvis was her one and only love; that the Beaulieus disapproved of Elvis; that she tearfully pleaded to move to Memphis; that she was a virgin bride.

She had, by Mike Edwards’s characterization, created an artificial reality. This was something Priscilla had talked about when they were together. He said, “Priscilla once told me, ‘Michael, you gotta learn PR.’ And I said, ‘Well, how do
you
know it?’ And she said, ‘Because I learned from the best.’ And that was Elvis and Colonel Parker. Colonel Parker was a wiz with PR—how to fabricate something great. And he taught that to
Elvis, and Priscilla learned it from Elvis. You
create
stuff. You create an
un-
reality, which works better for you.”

Priscilla had become locked into her pattern of denial back in Germany, posing as a virgin for Elvis, who demanded that the woman he married be chaste. Concealing her serious boyfriends in Wiesbaden, leading Elvis to believe she had been faithful to him. This image of Priscilla as the demure innocent was perpetuated by Elvis and ingrained in the public perception of Elvis and Priscilla. Priscilla had unwittingly become a mythic symbol, like Jackie Kennedy. How could she reveal to millions of Elvis fans, faithful to the myth, that she had never really loved Elvis in the way they believed, that she was not his mama’s virginal reincarnation, that in fact she hadn’t wanted to move to Memphis at all, that she was in love with someone else? “She was trying to keep this image up that Elvis had created for her,” said Mike, “and then she had to keep up the image for Lisa. And then she felt … that she had to carry on that image.” The lie had become too big.

Sandra Harmon, who wrote the book for Priscilla, later acknowledged that her only source was Priscilla. She did not attempt to verify anything she was told.
Elvis and Me
was strictly
Priscilla’s
account of her life. Priscilla was now committed, irrevocably, to the Priscilla Myth. “And then,” as Mike pointed out, “you’ve got to continually—I don’t want to say lie, but you’ve got to continually hold on to that story, which may not be the whole truth. And I think that makes you very—You just live a life of dishonesty.” That was the reason Priscilla challenged Currie Grant’s story with a vehemence that bordered on mania, for Currie’s truth, about their intercourse and her eagerness to meet Elvis, was like a loose thread on a handwoven sweater: one tug, and her intricate fabric of lies would unravel.

Mike’s wish that Priscilla would emancipate herself, in her memoir—from the secrets, the suppression, the myths—went unrealized. “That’s what she wanted to do,” he lamented. “She wanted to be set free. She wanted to do that book and set herself free—and she didn’t do it.” Telling the truth about her life, he believed, was the only way Priscilla could escape what she considered the tyranny of being forever linked to Elvis. “You want to get out from the shadow, get out! Become something
else.
I don’t have anger; I have just
empathy
and
pain
for that. I think you get so entrenched in something that, like a drug addict, you can’t let it go and take that step. The book,
Elvis and Me
, was supposed to be the step to get out from the shadow.”

Elvis and Me
did make Priscilla an even greater fortune than she had already accumulated, for it was a phenomenon in the publishing industry, on best-seller lists for months and months. What it did reveal about Priscilla—as did the subsequent miniseries based on the book, also called
Elvis and Me
—was her thinly disguised hostility toward Elvis Presley, her deep resentment at having sublimated herself to
his
superstardom,
his
ego, for so many years of her life. Her memoir was proof of a lasting regret on Priscilla’s part for the child-woman she once was, the little girl who suppressed her own identity, assumed a false persona, to become the child bride her parents wanted her to be. Larry Geller, Elvis’s close friend in spiritual matters, called the book, and the miniseries,
Me and Me
, and saw them as a testament to Priscilla’s ego, proof of her desire to be the one in the spotlight, as an opportunity to “vent her anger” toward Elvis. “I thought the movie was an abomination. That was not Elvis, in any way, shape, or form.” Shirley Dieu, who was offended by Priscilla’s behavior the last time Elvis and Priscilla saw each other, when she mocked him behind his back about his snowmobile suit, was outraged by the miniseries. In the last scene, the actor playing Elvis appeared at Priscilla’s door in an over-the-top Las Vegas stage–style “zoot suit,” as Shirley described it, begging Priscilla to take him back. “And in the movie, she said, ‘Oh, Elvis, you don’t have to wear that suit. People will like you for who you are!’ and I thought, ‘You lying little bitch. He wasn’t even wearing that, he was wearing a snowmobile outfit, and you were laughing your butt off at him, and [in the miniseries] you are sitting there acting like a prima donna.’ ”

Robert Lovenheim, who produced
Elvis and Me
, admitted, later, that even he had questions about the credibility of Priscilla’s account. “There are two sides to the story,” he said. “And I don’t know which is right and which is wrong. I mean, we went with the book. How close it is to reality, I don’t know. One story is Priscilla’s story, which is [that] she fell in love, Elvis was in love with her, her parents were very much against it, but slowly they conceded to her wishes and let her move into Graceland. The other version is that the parents were starstruck; they loved the idea that their daughter was going out with Elvis Presley, and they made no attempt to really restrict it in any way.” Lovenheim included the scene where Priscilla claimed Currie had tried to rape her. “After the film was made, or when it was in postproduction, somebody who worked for me on the
crew met Currie.” Currie mentioned, to Lovenheim’s crew member, that it was
Priscilla
who pursued him, and that she had consensual sex with him so she could meet Elvis. “It made a lot of sense, I’ll tell ya,” Lovenheim admitted. “That’s what rock and roll is about.” By then the film had wrapped, and Currie’s version of events “didn’t suit the story we were telling,” said Lovenheim, who was contracted to dramatize Priscilla’s book—
her
life as
she
told it. “There is the Priscilla myth,” as he put it, “and then there is the truth.”

Lovenheim and his director, Larry Peerce, could see for themselves the protective armor Priscilla wore to shield herself. They knew how “covered” she was. They originally planned to open and close the miniseries with on-camera interviews with the real Priscilla and the real Lisa. Peerce asked Priscilla and Lisa questions, off-camera, about their lives and about Elvis, and they responded improvisationally. Priscilla was so rigid that her comments were unusable. “If you look at her in this interview, she is so stiff,” commented Lovenheim. “And she’s so incapable of even
thinking
of what [really] went on. All she can do is recite the party line.… We tried for hours with her. We could not get her to crack.” Peerce, the director, had the same observation. “It was quite interesting,” he recalled. “You’d ask Lisa, and she’d just answer—
boom.
But you ask Priscilla, she’d count one, two, three. Then she’d answer. You could see her selectively editing.” Calculating her responses, perhaps, to make certain she stayed within the myth she had created. Both Robert Lovenheim and Larry Peerce had great affection for Lisa, whom they considered a “terrific kid,” enveloped by the continuing Elvis world, “and our feeling was, ‘God, please break away and become your own person,’ ” said Lovenheim. “Which unfortunately didn’t happen.”

Priscilla’s personal life, with Marco, reached a new level of happiness as her memoir came out. She discovered she was pregnant, and made plans to marry Marco, his brother Antonio told a newspaper, and which Priscilla would later repeat to columnist Marilyn Beck and to
People.
The
Dallas
producers wrote her pregnancy into the story line, so that Jenna Wade would give birth just as Priscilla did. Much was made, in the media, of Priscilla’s pregnancy, for she turned forty that year, making older motherhood suddenly chic. She was named one of
Harper’s Bazaar’s
Ten Most Beautiful Women of 1985. Priscilla, so long lampooned for the “Elvira” hair and makeup she had worn when
she was with Elvis, was now being extolled for her “natural look.” She seemed to change her hair color and cut with the seasons—a “Madonna with class,” one celebrity photographer called her. All of this was possibly a backlash to having been frozen in the Cleopatra image during her twenties, but it was also a reflection of Priscilla’s quest for variety, for new experiences, new adventures.

Sometime near the end of 1985, as she was solidifying her commitment to Marco, making plans for the birth of their child, his mysterious past surfaced in the form of a warning call, to him, from a tabloid. A reporter for the
Star
had uncovered information about a second ex-wife named Joann Nilsen, who had divorced him on the grounds of fraud. The reporter also told Marco that they had learned his name was originally Garcia, not Garibaldi. Marco denied both accusations, saying he had never heard the names Joann Nilsen or Marco Garcia, and he directed a lawyer to write to the
Star
threatening legal action if they published the information. Marco’s lawyer stated it was “gross misinformation” to suggest that Marco had had a previous marriage dissolved on the basis of fraud.