Child Bride (10 page)

Priscilla was caught in a web of untruths and kept entangling herself further, insisting, during the confrontation with Currie, that she “didn’t even know where Elvis
was”
in Germany, she “didn’t even know the area,” though
in her own book
she wrote that she had looked up Bad Nauheim and Wiesbaden on the map to calculate the distance between Elvis’s house and her father’s base. She insisted, to refute Currie, “It wasn’t a big drive for me to meet—I mean, to hope to meet him. I wasn’t
infatuated
with meeting Elvis Presley, you know?”

Priscilla had obviously forgotten—if she ever knew—that her cousin Margaret Ann Iversen had given a brief but telling interview to the New London, Connecticut, newspaper in March of 1960, shortly after the news broke that a young American girl named Priscilla Beaulieu was dating Elvis Presley in Germany.
Margaret Ann recounted for the
New London Day
her cousin Priscilla’s two-week stopover in Connecticut the previous summer and how, as she was leaving for Germany, Priscilla had said to her that she “would like to meet Elvis.”

But there was more. Priscilla’s final defense was that she
couldn’t
have asked Currie for an introduction to Elvis Presley because she “didn’t even know he knew Elvis.” Currie was not certain how Priscilla discovered that he and Elvis were friends; it was common knowledge at the Eagle Club and he assumed she either picked it up there or heard it from one of her friends. Priscilla hotly disputed this, exclaiming, “I didn’t
have
any girlfriends then! I didn’t have any school girlfriends.”

A half-American classmate of Priscilla’s from Wiesbaden, Vera Von Cronthall, the adopted daughter of a German baron, remembered seeing Priscilla around the Eagle Club that late summer and early fall. Vera’s best friend was a stunning German girl of fifteen named Stephie McCann, who lived next door to the Eagle Club and was friendly with Currie Grant. Stephie and Priscilla, Vera recalled, knew each other slightly from the Eagle Club and, later, at school. According to Vera, Priscilla was standing in line behind her and Stephie in the Eagle Club snack bar one day and mentioned to Stephie that she would like to meet Elvis Presley. “She asked to see Elvis. I remember that. My friend Stephie knew Currie, and Priscilla knew that was the way to meet Elvis … she was interested. She knew that Currie knew Elvis, and she was trying to get in there.” Stephie McCann, years later, would not recall the specific conversation, but considered it “very possible that something like that was said because … we all knew each other. We hung around at the Eagle Club.” And Priscilla knew that Stephie was a friend of Currie’s and that Currie knew Elvis. Vera, Stephie maintained, would “certainly not” have any reason to fabricate.

“I remember Stephie complaining about Priscilla,” Vera insisted. “ ‘Oh, she’s always bugging me, I guess I’ll let her know. I’ll get her to meet Elvis and get her off my back.’ Just something like that.”

It is not impossible to imagine that Currie Grant might have dangled an invitation to meet Elvis as a lure to Priscilla, since she had not responded to his attempts to talk to her alone. His story, however, stands up to scrutiny; Priscilla’s does not. Priscilla and Currie clearly met and got acquainted in the foyer of the Eagle Club with no mention of Elvis Presley, just as Currie
maintained. His boss, Peggy Dotson, confirmed this, and Priscilla eventually admitted it. He eyed her over the next few weeks while she ignored him—another element of Currie’s account that Priscilla affirmed—and there is every reason to believe that Priscilla then approached
Currie
in the snack bar of the Eagle Club, hoping for an introduction to Elvis. She desperately wanted to meet Elvis Presley, despite her later protestations, and Vera Von Cronthall provided the missing link by confirming that Priscilla knew that Currie was a friend of Elvis’s.

Why
was Priscilla so desperate to establish such a seemingly trivial point—who asked whom to meet Elvis? And why would she deny that she was an Elvis fan who was determined to meet him? Those were the real questions. The explanation would not become clear until later in the unfolding Priscilla-Currie-Elvis triangle.

It involved more secrets harbored by the girl who was reared on hidden truths.

C
urrie Grant was toying with Priscilla Beaulieu, not certain whether he would bring her to meet Elvis Presley. Her approach in the snack bar was the opening he had been hoping for. “In my mind I said, Now I’ve got her,” he recalled, like a spider assessing a fly. “I thought, She wants something. She wants me to do a favor for her—but now I’ve got her. ’Cause she’s coming to
me
.”

Priscilla Beaulieu and Currie Grant had mutually compatible goals. Currie was Priscilla’s ticket to Elvis, and Priscilla was Currie’s passport to bliss. Currie studied his prey, making small talk and asking Priscilla a few “critical” questions, including her age. “When she said fourteen, I almost fell off my chair!” he remembered.

“I look older, don’t I?” he recalled Priscilla responding, nonchalantly. Her tender age, however, did not deter either of them.

Currie began stringing Priscilla along, saying he
might
be able to take her to Elvis’s house, making arrangements to meet her at the club several more times to talk about it. “If I said, ‘Meet me at five o’clock,’ she would be there at fifteen to five waiting for me.” This went on, Currie estimated, for roughly a week.

Currie was playing a cat-and-mouse game with Priscilla. A few months earlier, he had brought a young girl with whom he
was having an affair to Elvis’s house. When they got to Bad Nauheim, Elvis took a fancy to Currie’s date and took her to his bedroom. By the time she left, she had lost all interest in Currie. “Once she had been with him, you can forget about doing anything,” he recalled. “She sat on the far side of the seat, almost glued to the right door.” The experience burned into Currie’s skin like a branding iron. If he hoped to get anywhere with Priscilla, he figured, it would have to occur before she met Elvis,
if
he took her to the house. When Priscilla informed him late in the week that she had already told her mother about the proposed visit, Currie was annoyed, but he softened when he saw the “sad look” in Priscilla’s eyes.

Currie called Ann Beaulieu shortly thereafter. Priscilla’s mother was delighted and suggested that Currie and his wife, Carol, stop by for coffee and dessert. Carol Grant, a petite dark-haired British beauty who sang occasionally at the Eagle Club, had heard from her husband about Priscilla Beaulieu and her obsession to meet Elvis, and she accompanied Currie to the Beaulieus’.

Contrary to legend, neither Ann nor Paul Beaulieu exhibited the slightest hesitation about sending their not-quite-ninth-grade daughter to meet Elvis Presley, according to both Carol and Currie Grant. “The father didn’t say much,” recalled Currie of that evening. “The mother wanted it real bad—because Priscilla wanted it real bad.”

This, reduced to its essence, was the single element of the Elvis-and-Priscilla myth that mystified even Elvis’s legion of fans:
Why
would the parents of a fourteen-year-old girl allow their daughter to meet a twenty-four-year-old sex symbol at his home? Priscilla later created the fiction, perpetuated in nearly all Elvis folklore, that her father and mother were extremely strict and opposed the meeting with Elvis—perhaps partly because she was embarrassed (what kind of parents
would
consent?) and partly because her parents’ enthusiasm about the meeting and their consent were not consistent with the proper image she would present once her association with Elvis made her famous.

In reality, Ann Beaulieu was an accessory before the fact in her daughter’s girlish quest to meet Elvis Presley. The reasons for this were psychologically complex. Priscilla was the center of Ann’s universe, her love child, her remembrance of Jimmy. Ann permitted Priscilla to do things she would not have considered for her other children. Her daughter’s infatuation with Elvis,
moreover, must have struck an emotional chord in Ann. How could she not be reminded of herself at just past fourteen—sneaking out of the house to date a handsome, dark-haired older man in uniform? Ann would not deprive her daughter of the joy her own parents had denied her. “She had a lot of compassion for me,” Priscilla said of her mother’s attitude toward Elvis.

“She understood.”

Ann was also star-struck, for she had been drawn to Elvis Presley since the family’s Del Valle days. During the Grants’ get-acquainted conversation with the Beaulieus, “it was not a question of
if
Ann would let Priscilla go,” recalled Currie, “it was rather a question of when I would take her.”

Currie left the house without setting a date for the big night. He wished to perpetuate his amorous game with Priscilla Beaulieu awhile longer, capitalizing on his connection to the King. Priscilla had become for him the consummate challenge. He was a driven man who had to get past her look-but-don’t-touch demureness. Currie Grant wanted, desperately, to
conquer
Priscilla Beaulieu.

During their next conversation at the club, he set the trap: “I told her we’d have to be alone.” Priscilla at first demurred, Currie recalled. She told him her parents knew he was married. “Well, somehow we’ve got to be alone,” he insisted. “I can’t stand it.” Priscilla then came up with a plan, according to Currie: Currie could ask her parents’ permission to take her to a movie with him and Carol; then he could tell his wife he had to work late, pick Priscilla up alone, and tell her mother and father they would collect Carol on their way to the theater. “That was her idea, not mine,” Currie said. “I thought, Man, that was pretty provocative. And if I get caught they will put me
under
the prison!”

Priscilla’s and Currie’s motives became clear the first night they were alone. “After we got in the hills, I tried to kiss her, tried to talk about things,” he recalled. “All she wanted to do was talk about Elvis. Finally I just reached over and kissed her. She didn’t really resist, but she didn’t really want to do it. It was like kissing a table. I wasn’t used to people being that way, stiff, and I let it go.” Priscilla persisted in her questions about Elvis. “The girl would not give up. There was nothing I could do but talk to her about Elvis.” Currie persisted in trying to kiss Priscilla “until she finally got used to it. After about half an hour there was nothing to it. We would talk in between.”

As the evening progressed, he counseled her as to how to behave if he did decide to take her to meet Elvis. “I’d seen him meet about fifteen girls up to that point, and I saw him get turned off on three or four of those girls. If you started talking too much, asking too many questions, it bothered him. I advised her not to talk too much, to be very quiet and demure: ‘Don’t tell him how much you like his records, his movies. Just be quiet and let him ask the questions. You answer the questions. You’ll get along with him a lot better.’ ”

That first evening ended on a note of frustration for both. “I was a little disappointed,” declared Currie. “She probably saw this, because at the end I wouldn’t even touch her. I knew she was too stiff and embarrassed and shy, and I didn’t want to make a fool out of either one of us, so I just let it go—but she was ready to go out the next time.”

Currie did not mention Priscilla to Elvis during those first days and weeks, when he was setting the stage for his own seduction. He
was
aware that the rock-and-roll star was attracted to younger women. Earlier that year Elvis had become involved with a sixteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot look-alike from Frankfurt named Margit Bürgin, and he began dating a young German girl named Heli Priemel in August. Margit Bürgin had aborted Elvis’s child a few months before, unknown to Elvis—an experience that nearly traumatized Bürgin, who was a virgin when they met. Although Elvis was interested in younger women, Currie was not certain he would like Priscilla, “because she wasn’t passionate, and I wasn’t sure that E. P. would go for someone like that.” He also had misgivings because of her age; sixteen was one thing, fourteen was quite another. And he still had designs on Priscilla himself.

In her desperate mission to meet Elvis Presley, Priscilla had fallen deeper into Currie Grant’s web, a dangerous spot for any fourteen-year-old girl. By his own admission, Currie was taking advantage of his connection to Elvis, using himself as bait for Priscilla to fulfill her fantasy of meeting the rock star. “Oh, absolutely,” Currie confessed. “I don’t deny that at all. All the guys around Elvis would say the same thing. They get the leftovers that Elvis can’t get to or doesn’t want. I’ve done it many times myself. I’m not bragging. I’m just telling you what the facts are.” He felt guilty “fooling” the Beaulieus, Currie later admitted. “I felt really bad, but I wanted Priscilla—to be with her—more.”

Currie and Priscilla parked in the hills a second time, using the same movie subterfuge, sometime that late summer or early fall. These rendezvous were their secret, and secrecy was a concept with which Priscilla was intimate. In Currie’s words, “I told her several times, ‘Whatever we say or do, it always stays between you and me.’ And she agreed.”

Priscilla, according to Currie, would have done anything to meet Elvis Presley. By their fourth encounter in the hills, she had given herself sexually to Currie. “It actually started getting better on the third,” he remembered, “but she did everything humanly possible to please me on that fourth time.” It was then that Currie Grant made his decision to bring Priscilla Beaulieu to meet Elvis Presley: “I felt sorry for her, because she had tried so hard to please me, had done everything that we needed to do.” By the end of their lovemaking, Currie told Priscilla he would take her to Elvis’s house—“and she became a little aggressive herself.”

As they were driving back to the Beaulieus’, Currie became aroused again and pulled the car to a dark spot near the Wiesbaden Museum. “We just got into it, and this German police car with a big ‘Polizei’ on the side—a green Volkswagen, I’ll never forget it—caught us a block from her house. It scared the living hell out of me! The windows were all steamed up, her blouse was loosened, and her skirt was up. I was getting ready to do it again, and we got caught before we got into the act itself. I thought they’d put me in prison. She was a minor, I was in the air force, her father was in the air force. But the German policeman was such a nice guy.… If it had been the American police I might have been dead. The cop said, ‘You’d better be careful, and take her on home when you get ready.’ ”