Child Bride (14 page)

Even in the army, Elvis was surrounded by a cadre of male followers, later labeled “the Memphis Mafia,” who worked for him, played with him, and generally emulated him. The singular exception was Cliff Gleaves, a glib, highly intelligent, and original disc jockey and comedian whom Elvis met and became fascinated by early in his career. Cliff lived at Elvis’s house in Memphis pre-Graceland and joined him in Germany at Elvis’s request. Two points distinguished Cliff Gleaves from the others in Elvis Presley’s entourage: He was strictly a friend, not on the payroll; and Elvis copied him. “Cliff was Elvis’s alter ego,” in the opinion of Currie, who became close to Cliff in Wiesbaden. “Cliff was the most charismatic human being I’ve ever met. He was something Elvis always wanted to be and wasn’t. That’s why Elvis wanted Cliff around all the time.” In later years, after Elvis’s death, some of the group would try to trivialize Cliff Gleaves’s influence on Elvis’s life in order to amplify their own, a common practice in Presley circles; Cliff, whose ego was not dependent upon his association with Elvis, did not bother to promote
himself. “He was the closest thing to Elvis,” confirmed Elvis’s stepbrother, Rick Stanley, who witnessed Elvis’s hero worship of Cliff. “Elvis seemed to sit at his feet. Cliff took the floor, he sucked up the air. He was like Robin Williams—everyone just sat while he went on a riff. Elvis sat in awe of him. Here’s a guy that was better than Elvis! Cliff didn’t have to sing to get people’s attention. Anybody with any intuition who’s being honest will tell you that Cliff Gleaves was it. Elvis’d fly him in from anywhere just to have him around. Cliff knew, ‘I’m this guy’s fix.’ ”

“Cliff was a dear friend,” Charlie Hodge agreed. “An interesting character. There are actually some Hollywood stars who used to watch Cliff, and they admired his technique of talking and snapping his fingers, which they began to use in their acting.”

Priscilla barely registered on Cliff and his girlfriend, a fetching young German woman named Gerta Heylmann. Gerta remembered that Priscilla was excited about being in the company of Elvis and that she was exceedingly quiet, “more eyes and ears.”

“She just faded into the scenery more or less,” Cliff confirmed in a conversation in 1978. “Almost unnoticeable. Looking back, if anything stood out—maybe it’s because of what Currie told her to do—my impression would have been, for a girl her age, she held her own.… I can picture that scene in the living room—Priscilla sitting there, just kind of a little grin on her face.”

Priscilla strove to appear older than her fourteen years, an assignment her mother helped her carry out. Ann, who had sneaked out of her parents’ house in her mother’s high heels, loaned her clothes to Priscilla to help create an illusion of sophistication far beyond that of a ninth-grader, and she assisted with her hair and makeup. Gerta, who was a model, recalled Priscilla as “older-thinking” and skillfully made-up. Her look, recalled a classmate, Donna Pollen, consisted of “foxy” skirts that billowed out over multiple petticoats, emphasizing her tiny waist.

P
riscilla Beaulieu was not the only girl Elvis Presley was dating that fall in Germany. Heli Priemel, a fifteen-year-old German beauty nicknamed “Legs,” recalled evenings when she would leave Elvis’s bedroom as Priscilla was arriving. Heli eventually complained, something Priscilla never did. “Priscilla knew the rules,” Currie explained. “She didn’t make a fuss about … there being somebody else. Back then she was just happy to go see him.”

“It wasn’t only Priscilla coming to the house,” confirmed Rex Mansfield, a member of Elvis’s army entourage. “It was a lot of girls.” Priscilla was a starry-eyed teenager in fantasy lust with a rock star; she dared not say or do anything that might give him an excuse to stop seeing her. The stress and insecurity for a ninth-grader in that position would have broken a girl who lacked Priscilla’s iron will. Not only was Elvis romancing Heli in front of her, but he still enjoyed an occasional interlude with his young German secretary Elisabeth, who later married Rex, and he was known to have a steady girlfriend back in Memphis. The rivalry for Elvis Presley’s affection was keen, and Priscilla had already demonstrated that she played to win.

She and Currie had developed a comfortable routine on the hour’s drive back and forth. When Carol did not come along,
Currie would question Priscilla for a few minutes about that night’s bedroom activities with Elvis, “and after a while it would be boring, and then I’d let it drop and we would talk about other things or she’d take a little nap. She would tell me when I’d ask, whatever I’d ask: ‘Oh, we did this and we did that. He put his hand between my legs. He played with my breasts. He took my clothes off and we just lay there, and his thing was sticking up like this.…’ She would go into detail on what would happen, because she was still unsure of herself up there, especially with Heli up there and that competition going on.”

During one of their early drives home, Currie found himself sexually excited by Priscilla’s description of her foreplay with Elvis, and pulled the car off the autobahn for a quick tryst. “She was very cold,” as he described it. “I was pushing her hair around, just to kiss her on the mouth. She was kissing, but not very enthusiastically. I tried to put my hand on her breast, and she kind of wriggled out of the way and turned to the side a little bit, and I stopped.” Currie immediately recognized the “old syndrome,” as he called it. “Now she’s been with Elvis, up in the bedroom there, she didn’t need me. And that’s why she’s acting this way.”

Priscilla’s version of this encounter is that Currie pulled her onto a dirt road and tried to rape her. “And I was terrified. I did everything in my power to keep him off me. He gave up because I made such a fuss. There was a house there, so if I had to crawl there, I could get there. There were lights there, I was going for that. I kicked doors open and blew horns. When the horn was going off, the lights came on at the house, and it scared him.” Priscilla told no one, she says now, “because I thought I wouldn’t see Elvis anymore. I thought Currie would never do it again.”

Something had occurred, prior to this evening, that not only suggested a motive for Priscilla to allege that Currie tried to rape her, but that could also explain why they offered different versions of their entire relationship.

During one of the private talks in his bedroom, Elvis had recently revealed to Priscilla that he considered virginity sacred and that he would never date seriously or consider marrying a girl who had been with another man. “That was early on,” she confirmed. “It was important to him that he was the first.
Very
important to him.”

That conversation, by Priscilla’s own account, was portentous.
In reality, it must have been harrowing. Elvis naturally assumed, since she was barely fourteen, that Priscilla was a virgin, and she affirmed this while they were talking and making out in his bedroom. According to Currie, however, Priscilla had had intercourse with
him
a few weeks earlier in the hills above Wiesbaden. Elvis’s old-fashioned southern insistence on a virgin bride was the quintessential Catch-22 for Priscilla Beaulieu. She had made the ultimate sacrifice—her virginity—in order to actualize her dream of meeting Elvis, only to discover that in doing so, she had effectively disqualified herself from ever becoming his wife.
If Elvis ever found out
 …

It was at this moment that Currie Grant began to pose a threat to Priscilla Beaulieu, for he knew she was not a virgin. If he revealed their liaison, it would jeopardize her growing romance with Elvis.

Thus was born another secret in Priscilla’s adolescent life. To ensure her chance for a lasting relationship with Elvis Presley, she would have to conceal the fact that she and Currie Grant had had intercourse before he took her to meet her idol. That is a secret Priscilla Presley guards to this day, for the key element in the Elvis-and-Priscilla myth—the single, powerful image with which she is most closely associated—is her assertion that she was a virgin bride on her wedding night with Elvis, seven years after they met.

Mike Edwards, in whom she confided that she and Currie had a sexual “altercation” in the hills
before
he took her to meet Elvis, suspected Priscilla was denying she and Currie were intimate for the same reason: to preserve her image as a virgin. “You know how, when you talk to someone … you hear stories, you kind of listen?
I
thought they did have intercourse, but I never pushed it. And I thought
other
things, that we talked about. I
always
thought they did. And I felt that she did not
want
that because she wanted to be a virgin for Elvis. I always sensed that.”

This would explain why Priscilla was so desperate, years later, to conceal the otherwise harmless fact that she had been a huge Elvis Presley fan and that it was her fantasy to meet him. In admitting that, she would have felt exposed to speculation about about how she made her dream come true. People might believe she was willing to do almost anything to make that fantasy happen. If, however, she
denied
that she was an Elvis fan—as she has done—who would believe Currie’s account that she
asked him to introduce her to Elvis and then slept with him to gain access?

“I think she is saying that, maybe, because she wants to appear like a different young lady,” Karon Grant reasoned. “As far as I remember, and I’m going back many, many years, I was told many times, over and over again, that
she
walked up to my
dad
and said, ‘I hear you know Elvis.’ I don’t see any other reason why there would be a dispute or another story of how it happened. It’s kind of sad that she would be this way.”

“She got lucky,” declared Vera Von Cronthall, who recalled Priscilla asking around the Eagle Club that summer about meeting Elvis. “She probably would never have met Elvis if Currie hadn’t taken a real liking to her.”

Priscilla began writing to friends back in Austin, that November, that she had met Elvis Presley at a private party in Wiesbaden after he entertained at the officers’ club. By Thanksgiving she had revealed that they were dating, with the fanciful explanation that Elvis had noticed her at the party and approached
her.
“It was so unreal to us,” recalled Christine Laws, who had graduated from junior high with Priscilla only five months earlier. Priscilla told a teacher, Güdrun Von Heister, that Elvis was a “distant relative”—anything, apparently, to create a smoke screen, to divert attention away from Currie and the truth.

Currie was unaware of Priscilla’s deception and her motivation for it. After the incident along the side of the autobahn, he continued to drive her back and forth to Bad Nauheim for nearly a month and, by his account, persisted in coaxing sexual information from her on those nights that Carol stayed home. Priscilla was trapped. Currie was still her entrée to Elvis.

According to Currie, Priscilla’s legendary tale of Elvis withholding penetration until their honeymoon was another falsehood. “He didn’t have intercourse with her the first night or two,” Currie said. “He didn’t get into the deeper stuff until the third or fourth time. Eventually he had intercourse with her. Not only once. She told me that. It was either the third or fourth time, I don’t know which one.”

Mike Stone, the karate champion with whom Priscilla had an affair at the end of her marriage to Elvis, always questioned whether she and Elvis had delayed intercourse until their honeymoon, and occasionally he asked her about it. She kept the secret, even from her lover. “Would you tell?” he asked. “I think a lot of things like that are best left unsaid, especially if
you are involved with somebody, like we were at the time. There’s some things you just don’t want to bring up.”

Elvis apparently told Joe Esposito he was “doing everything else”
but
intercourse with Priscilla in Germany. Priscilla did not express a concern about becoming pregnant, at least during her conversations with Currie; nor was Elvis bothered. “E. P. was like me,” Currie noted. “He pulled out before anything. Because he and I talked about it.” The withdrawal method of birth control may have been Elvis’s interpretation of stopping short of penetration with Priscilla, for he told Joe that fall that what he and Priscilla were doing “was okay as long as you didn’t finish the sex act. That was his thinking. In other words, ‘I’m not doing anything wrong.’ ”

By five or six weeks into her relationship with Elvis, Currie noticed that Priscilla became more confident of her standing and balked at responding to Currie’s routine sexual interrogation. One weekend when he called to arrange the hour he would be at her house, “she says, ‘Oh, Currie, Elvis is sending Lamar down to pick me up.’ ” Currie felt he was doing Elvis a favor by taking Priscilla with him and wondered why Lamar would drive to the Beaulieus’ and back. “I knew something was going on, because she’d clammed up on me a little bit on the last couple of nights.” Currie did not perceive himself as a threat to Priscilla because he was not aware of Elvis’s virginity fetish, nor did he plan to reveal he’d had sex with her, since she was a minor and it was against the law; he considered the episode in the hills “their secret.”

Currie did suspect that Priscilla had asked Elvis to arrange for another driver because he was asking too many intimate questions, “because they had gotten really close now and she feels more secure around Elvis and doesn’t need me anymore.”

Priscilla claims today that Currie tried to rape her a
second
time, that she told Elvis about both attacks, and that he “went crazy” and banished Currie from his house and their lives. “I was afraid of him,” she explained. “I had to tell Elvis. It was a very, very, very big decision to make, because I didn’t know at that time, in the beginning, if Elvis would ever see me again. I didn’t know … if he would say, ‘This just isn’t going to work.’ I had to take that chance. Elvis was furious. He couldn’t believe it. And that’s why Currie never came to the house again.”

Priscilla’s rape scenario is fraught with improbabilities. The day she told Currie that Lamar Fike was going to drive her to Bad Nauheim, Currie spent the evening at Elvis’s house
with
Elvis and Priscilla.
If Elvis was irate and had replaced Currie as Priscilla’s driver because she told him Currie tried to rape her, why would Elvis allow Currie into the house to socialize with them that night?