Child Bride (13 page)

The call to return came not from Elvis but from Currie. Elvis had not mentioned Priscilla to Currie since his request that first night to “bring her back.” Whether she would see her idol a second time turned on Currie’s caprice. Currie generally visited Elvis several times a week; two nights later, as he prepared to drive to Bad Nauheim, he invited Priscilla to come along. “I did it as a favor to E. P.; I didn’t realize he was going to like her that much.”

Priscilla’s reaction was a mixture of adolescent giddiness and utter bewilderment. “I thought, ‘It can’t be. I’m only fourteen,’ you know. ‘He wants to see me?’ ”

“She said, ‘I have to ask my mother,’ ” recalled Currie. Ann Beaulieu did not hesitate. “Ann got on the phone and said, ‘It’s okay, Currie. What time would you like me to have her ready?’ ” Currie, who knew Elvis was taking Priscilla to his bedroom, was
stunned by Ann Beaulieu’s nonchalance, despite having taken advantage of her daughter himself. “I thought, Lady, it’s like giving your daughter to the wolves. I don’t leave my fourteen-year-old daughter with some guy I don’t know. She’s doing it because he’s famous. I would never do that to my kid. Never.” Priscilla’s teen behavior and the sheer thrill of her fantasy took over once she was in Currie’s car. She was skittish, insecure, asking a million questions. Currie, whose wife had stayed home, continued in his role as romantic coach. “I kept reminding her to keep a shy, quiet profile with Elvis. I told her, ‘He flipped over your looks, but to keep him interested, you’re going to have to keep playing the game of being everything he wants in a girl.’ ”

When Priscilla and Currie arrived, the regulars were milling about the house, listening to Elvis play the piano and sing. He stopped when he saw them and said hello. Once he began to sing again, Currie recalled, “he couldn’t take his eyes off Priscilla.” Geraldine Hopper, Priscilla’s gym teacher in Wiesbaden, understood Elvis’s infatuation. “Isn’t he supposed to have admired virginity and purity? Innocence has a great appeal to a lot of men, especially in his business. I think she happened to come along in his life at a time when she must have been so different from the showgirls and the entertainers and the put-on sophisticates that he dealt with in his career, that I can see that appeal. And Priscilla projected that.” Elvis’s secret nickname for Priscilla, in fact, was “Pab,” taken from her initials, but short for “Pablum”—baby food. Her angelic demeanor was Priscilla’s secret weapon with men. Carol Grant saw this as a pose. “My mother recalls her being a prissy, assertive, you-think-she’s-innocent-but-she’s-not kind of girl,” stated the Grants’ daughter Karon. “And my mom is pretty perceptive.”

Their second evening, Elvis and Priscilla again retreated to his bedroom, where they lingered for several hours. It was their private time together, setting a ritual for the visits to come. “We would listen to a radio show at night as we’d be talking,” remembered Priscilla. It was the same program each time, often playing what Priscilla considered “sad” music, some of it country-western. Elvis poured his soul out to Priscilla, confiding in her intimacies the fourteen-year-old considered beyond her: his anxieties about his career, whether his fans would accept him when he returned from the army, his laments over the diminishing quality of the movies he was making, his unrealized ambition
to play parts worthy of his role models, James Dean and Marlon Brando. “Sharing a lot of emotions, in a lot of areas. I was really a sounding board. He’d release a lot of his feelings to me.” For Priscilla, finder of stray animals and keeper of secrets, the relationship felt familiar, if not natural. “I guess he
trusted
me. He trusted me a lot. And he was very close to me. The great thing about having Elvis at that time, before he came back from the army, was that he was
so
unaffected. I mean, he was still raw; he was still innocent. And I feel really fortunate that I got to see that part of him and be a part of that time in his life, or be a part of
him
at that time in his life.” The true tragedy was that Priscilla had neither the experience nor the maturity to help him; all she could do, really, was listen.

Elvis scrutinized Priscilla’s features with the meticulousness of a plastic surgeon—searching for validation that she possessed, for him, the perfect face. When he met the Beaulieus a few weeks later, Priscilla said, “his big thing was that I didn’t look like anybody in my family. That was his big question: ‘Why don’t you? You don’t look like your mother or your father. You look
different.’
” Elvis had stumbled onto the secret, and his suspicions left Priscilla conflicted, torn between her vow of silence with her mother and her growing intimacy with Elvis. For a short time she kept the truth about her identity from Elvis, but “the more I went to visit with him, the more we became closer and closer.”

Elvis and Priscilla were discovering a common and extremely potent emotional and psychological bond. He talked about the devastating loss of his mother, who had died at age forty-five the summer before, and Priscilla could relate to his grief and longing for a missing parent. As Elvis probed deeper, finally asking her whether the Beaulieus were really her parents, Priscilla revealed the truth about Paul Beaulieu, showing Elvis the photograph of her real father. “It was one of those evenings we shared. We did a lot of talking at that time. We were sharing losses.” Priscilla felt burdened with guilt afterward, so powerful was her apprehension at disclosing the family secret. “I told my mother that I had told Elvis because he asked me. Not knowing if that was the right thing to do. Because then it was a betrayal against her, you know. She was actually okay with it.” It was Priscilla who was left carrying the emotional baggage.

The revelation stirred something within Elvis. He was by nature a tender, compassionate man; Priscilla’s secret and the loss
of her real father fostered in him a strong, almost primal desire to shield her. In a complicated way, Priscilla transferred her emotional dependence to Elvis, who assumed the mantle of Jimmy Wagner, Priscilla’s fantasy father figure, guardian angel, and protector. “He had a lot of empathy for me,” she said, when she told him about her traumatic discovery of the trunk and the stress of keeping her real father a secret. “He really did. And he protected me. Elvis was like that in a sense; if he saw you had a loss, he totally related to it.” Mike Edwards romanticized Elvis as Priscilla’s knight in shining armor, sent to rescue her, to fulfill the fantasies she had created to escape from a family—a father—to which she instinctively knew she did not belong. “And he came along,” Mike said, referring to Elvis, “and it was perfect. It was meant to be.”

Priscilla’s lost father and Elvis’s grief over his mother’s death created an unbreakable bond between them. “He was drawn to me,” Priscilla recalled. “I can’t say it’s
from
that, because our relationship had already started. But I felt more comfortable with him and had more trust in him, you know, and I felt that he was a trustworthy person that I could depend on.”

In exchange, Priscilla filled an enormous void for Elvis, listening to him for hours as he reminisced about Gladys, talking with him in the private language he and his mother had invented. Priscilla’s physical resemblance to Debra Paget reinforced their intimacy. It was an intricate, complicated psychosexual relationship, almost beyond fathoming to anyone but Priscilla and Elvis.

“I don’t think he
saw
his mother,” as Joe Esposito analyzed, “but he looked at Priscilla in that way because she had that look. I feel that had a lot to do with it. I feel he wanted her to be like his mother, to take really good care of him. No matter what he wanted, his mother would do that. Anything Elvis wanted, he got. And he wanted Priscilla to be the same way. As long as you take care of me, I’ll take care of you.”

Their evenings together always ended on the same bittersweet note, listening to “Good Night, My Love” on the radio. “That was a song that would always end off on the radio station at twelve o’clock at night in Germany,” remembered Priscilla. “And his rule was, when that song would come on, it was twelve and I had to leave in a half hour or so.”

Elvis and Priscilla were still intertwined as they walked down the stairs from the bedroom at 12:45 on their second night together,
recalled Currie. “Bring her back, Currie,” Elvis again entreated.

Currie was less apprehensive, considering the mild reaction from Priscilla’s parents when he brought her home the first night two hours past her curfew. This time, with Carol at home, he could indulge his impulse for voyeurism and competition by pressing Priscilla for sexual details: “I was dying to know what had happened upstairs, but I wasn’t going to ask her in front of my wife.” Priscilla, being Priscilla, balked, saying she and Elvis “just talked a lot.” Currie, being Currie, knew there was more. Though Priscilla would later claim she told Currie nothing, “I
made
her tell me what went on, exactly,” Currie asserted. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, Priscilla. I’m the guy who brought you up here, honey. Don’t play coy with me. After what you and I have been through in the last three or four weeks? What did he do?’ I made her tell me everything. I said, ‘He’s a friend of mine. You’re a friend of mine. What’s the big deal?’ ”

Priscilla was in a dilemma. Though her natural instinct was to reveal nothing, she was dependent upon Currie to see Elvis. Not only was Currie her transportation, he controlled her access; she visited Bad Nauheim at his discretion, for Elvis had not requested she return on a particular night, nor had he called Priscilla formally for a date. “He never called
me
,” declared Currie. “He never even knew if I was going to come back. That’s all fallacy.” For Priscilla, Currie Grant occupied the unusual triad of sexual mentor, father confessor, and keys to the kingdom of Elvis.

“And then she changed her tune and started telling me what happened upstairs. I kind of coerced her into it the first time. She was afraid she might not ever see him again. In the beginning. And then she started telling me, little by little. She knew that I wasn’t going to tell anybody. From then on, she had no qualms about telling me.”

On the second visit, according to Currie, Elvis had Priscilla’s blouse and bra off and she was lying half naked on his bed. “Not totally undressed—he knew how young she was. He was gentle with her the first couple of nights. But by that time, she was a willing participant. His hands were going everywhere. He started to get under her dress.”

Priscilla was loath to tell Currie her bedroom secrets with Elvis, yet she was in need of a sounding board herself. As a fourteen-year-old girl engaged in adult sexual activities with a superstar, she was desperately insecure and in need of counsel.
To whom else could she confess such intimacies? She and Currie shared, as would be their history, a strange, symbiotic love-hate relationship.

When Currie returned Priscilla home at the end of that second visit, it was again close to 2:00
A.M.
Paul and Ann Beaulieu greeted them with smiles, “I’m thinking, I can’t believe these parents,” observed Currie. “I used to say that to Carol.”

In the coming weeks Priscilla must have felt as though she were in Wonderland. Like a small child collecting souvenirs of a favorite holiday, she stored the memories of her fairy-tale love affair with Elvis in a treasure box. “She had a piece of windshield glass in there,” recalled a summer friend of Priscilla’s named Robbie Jones. “He’d had an accident, and that was the glass from the windshield of the car.”

Extraordinarily, Priscilla told almost no one about her dates with Elvis Presley. Her tendency to draw an imaginary line between herself and others, that aura of mystery she possessed even as a child, “got worse after I met Elvis,” she said. “Where most girls would probably exploit it and would probably be giddy, I protected it passionately. And why, I do not know. I don’t know why I was so protective of it—not that Elvis was so secretive.” But of course Priscilla had been reared in a house of secrets amid a family that never talked about vital issues; she’d been trained by her mother to withhold the truth, to keep what was
real
a secret, sacred and untouchable.

“You really didn’t become friends with Priscilla,” Robbie Jones, who met her a summer later, declared. “She was very guarded, even then.… I did go to her house a couple of times and have a lot of respect for her in that she never brought up Elvis and never talked about him. And when she was asked a question, she would specifically answer that question and drop it.”

In their way, Priscilla and Elvis were insulating each other. He embraced the little girl who had lost her real father and was confused by concealing it; she was honoring his trust in her by preserving his privacy, “which in retrospect,” Robbie noted, “was a very mature and hard way to be at that age.”

“I think that I was protecting him,” Priscilla said. “Because I would never betray him. He confided a
lot
to me, that I would
never
share with a girlfriend that I might never see again.”

Her relationship with Elvis was also kept under wraps because it was outside the bounds of conventional morality, especially in
the military world the Beaulieus inhabited. It was an “unwritten rule,” according to Priscilla’s classmate Mary Ann Barks, that high school girls did not date GIs. “Any girl who dated a GI was considered trash.”

“It was not considered proper to do that,” agreed school chum Debbie Ross. “And particularly if you were an officer’s daughter. That kind of mixing at the time was not approved, particularly since we were fourteen years old. That would have been a real problem.” Debbie, whose family lived across the hall from the Beaulieus the next year, had to deal with her parents’ concern about Priscilla’s possible influence on their daughter. “I remember my mother didn’t particularly like Priscilla. I think she was concerned about someone my age dating or seeing a man ten years older than we were. I think she thought there must be something more to it, or there must be something about it that I didn’t need to be a part of.”

Ann Beaulieu had no such compunction. As Priscilla’s visits to Elvis’s house became more frequent—two, three, sometimes four times a week—“her only question was, ‘What time would you like us to have her ready?’ ” recalled Currie. He was still in control, to some extent, for it was he who decided how often he would go to Bad Nauheim and whether or not he would take Priscilla. “The first four to six weeks I was taking her up there, it was always my call.”