Child Bride (15 page)

There were questionable aspects to Priscilla’s description of the second rape attempt itself. During her face-off with Currie in May of 1996, she claimed that he had invited her to see a movie with his wife and him a few weeks after he attacked her by the side of the autobahn on the way home from Elvis’s. “I asked my parents. My father said, ‘Fine.’ I went down, and Carol wasn’t in the car. I said, ‘Where is Carol?’ He said, ‘She isn’t feeling well.’ ” According to Priscilla, she and Currie drove off, “and he took me by the river, the Rhine River. And he tried again.” Why, if he tried to rape her once before and she was terrified of him, would Priscilla get in the car alone with Currie, especially on a ruse? She no longer needed him as a conduit to Elvis. Why even accept an invitation to the movies? “He said that Carol wasn’t feeling well, so I went with him. I
trusted
this man!” Priscilla explained.

“No, it didn’t happen, Priscilla,” Currie argued in their head-to-head encounter in 1996. “Boy, you’ve made a lot of things up since I talked to you last. I mean
a lot.”

During that same 1996 conversation, Currie also denied Priscilla’s characterization of the earlier roadside incident as rape:

The timing of the alleged attacks was a weakness in Priscilla’s account. She maintained that Currie did not make a sexual advance until
after
she had met Elvis. Since Currie had been rejected by a girlfriend who became involved with Elvis, it made no sense that he would wait until
after
Priscilla obtained what she needed from him—the introduction to Elvis—before making a romantic move. Priscilla’s motivation for positioning the incidents
after
Currie introduced her to Elvis is clear, for she would not have wanted anyone to know she was in a compromising position with Currie
before
she met her idol, or people might
believe she was desperate enough to have intercourse to make it happen. Mike Edwards, her 1970s beau, offered the most convincing proof, for Priscilla confided to him that she and Currie had an encounter in the hills
before
she met Elvis.

Priscilla’s accounts of the attempted rapes are also inconsistent. In an interview just prior to her 1996 discussion with Currie, she stated that he tried to rape her “two or three” times, but when she met with Currie face-to-face, she said it happened twice. How could she have forgotten an attempted rape?

“I had at least ten girls that I could call any night and go have sex with them,” countered Currie. “I’m not bragging—at least ten. I didn’t need to rape anybody. Bringing up this rape thing, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. We were both young and foolish back then. I was older than her, but we were still young and foolish and this is what happened. And she can live the lie as long as she wants to, but in her mind she knows what the truth is.”

Priscilla also offered different versions of when she told Elvis that Currie tried to rape her—whether it was after the first or the second attempt. The most glaring problem with Priscilla’s account, however, was Elvis’s friendliness toward Currie after she claimed to have told him. “Elvis would have wanted to
kill
him if that had happened,” Joe Esposito insisted. Nor, seemingly, did Elvis ever mention Priscilla’s accusations about Currie to his entourage. “He never told us,” said Joe. Rex Mansfield and Elisabeth Stefaniak agreed, and believed Elvis would have mentioned it to them if Priscilla had accused Currie of rape. Lamar Fike, who took over Currie’s role as Priscilla’s driver, was offered no explanation by Elvis. “He didn’t say anything,” Currie recalled Lamar saying. “He just said, ‘Go pick her up.’ ”

Priscilla further claimed that she told her parents Currie tried to rape her and they were “livid,” but she offered a different version of when she told them each time she related the story. Yet neither Ann Beaulieu nor Priscilla’s stepfather—who was Currie Grant’s superior officer in the air force—said a word to Currie after supposedly learning that he attempted to rape their fourteen-year-old daughter. “She never told her parents
anything
,” Currie disputed hotly. “If she had told her parents anything, Elvis and I would probably both be in prison today.”

According to Priscilla, “After I told Elvis what had happened and how Currie made a play for me, Elvis kicked him out. He was not seen anymore there, he was out of the house.” She and
her parents, she maintained, did not see Currie the rest of the time Elvis was in Germany. “Once he was out, he was out. He was out of my life at that time. When I told Elvis what had happened, I did not see Currie. Currie did not come to the house again.”

This, like much of Priscilla’s “official” biography, is simply untrue. Rex Mansfield; Elvis’s secretary, Elisabeth; and Cliff Gleaves’s girlfriend, Gerta, all remembered Currie joining the nightly gatherings at Elvis’s house regularly during the remaining five months Elvis was in Germany, and Elvis was always pleased to see him. It seems inconceivable that Elvis would continue to invite into his home a man he knew had tried to rape his fourteen-year-old girlfriend more than once.

In addition to the inconsistencies, inaccuracy, and implausibility of Priscilla’s account, one has to consider who had the greater motivation to lie. What would Currie stand to gain by revealing that he lured a fourteen-year-old into sex? Why would Currie hurt his former wife and children and embarrass himself by saying this if it wasn’t true? Priscilla attributed it to a “vendetta” against her or “like he wants to be known.… There’s got to be a motive in there somewhere.” Perhaps, she speculated, Currie wanted notoriety for claiming to take her virginity before Elvis.

Yet Currie has never offered or sold his story to tabloids, magazines, or newspapers in the thirty-seven years since he met Priscilla Beaulieu. When he recounted their history for this book, he was sixty-four years old, one of his sons had just died, and he was in need of a catharsis. He did not seek me out, nor did he ask for money. “I’m not trying to make up things against Priscilla,” he explained. “I could care less. I had my fifteen minutes of fame years ago. I don’t need any more. I don’t want any more. But don’t sit there and look in my face and tell me I’m lying and that never happened. Not when I know frigging well it did, and I was right there. I may not be Priscilla Presley, and I may not be a celebrity, but it’s my life too, and my history too, and I want it to be the truth. If I really wanted to brag that I got her first, I’d have been telling people from the time it happened until now.”

Priscilla, by contrast, had much to lose and much to protect. Her version of events was the foundation of the Elvis-and-Priscilla legend. As she put it after her heated encounter with Currie in 1996: “My life is on the line here. I mean all my
credibility, everything.
Everything!
My life—my
image
that I worked so hard to create.”

She was in a panic as the debate with Currie—over who asked whom to meet Elvis and whether they dallied in the hills—began to escalate. “May God strike me dead if I’m not telling the truth!” Priscilla exclaimed repeatedly. After an hour, she fled, agitated, and collided with another car on the fifteen-minute drive home.
^*

Priscilla had been telling the myth for so many years and was so deep in denial that perhaps she had come to believe it herself. Dostoyevsky mentioned this phenomenon, saying, “There are secrets you’ll even hide from yourself.” Psychologists identify it as repressed memory. John Bradshaw, an expert on family secrets, believes that the harboring of secrets “sets up the auto-hypnotic ego defenses like repression, denial—how we set up ways
not
to remember.” Bradshaw claims that denial “is largely unconscious. It’s not the same as lying. Denial protects the person’s options to keep the status quo.”

Certainly that is what Priscilla wished to do; to preserve the Elvis-and-Priscilla story, to perpetuate the myth.

When Priscilla began writing her memoir in 1983, Mike Edwards urged her to be honest about her affair with Currie, to practice the Scientology principle of confronting one’s past in order to release it. Priscilla chose instead to follow the path of denial, to continue the myth. “And I didn’t push her,” recalled Mike, “ ’cause I guess, at that time, it was too late in our relationship.”

The Currie affair was a trauma in Priscilla’s life. Whether or not Priscilla had consensual sex with him, he committed statutory rape—as did Elvis—since she was only fourteen. As the adult in the situation, he was the responsible party, a fact that he acknowledges today: “She was only a young girl, inexperienced.
Here I was in my twenties. It’s true, I shouldn’t have been doing those things.”

The reality was that Priscilla and Currie used
each other;
a truth that Currie had accepted. Priscilla was still in denial. “I just felt sad for her,” recalled Mike, speaking of his attempts to push Priscilla to confront the past. “She could have freed herself; she could have broken those chains. If she’d be honest, it sets you
free.
She wanted to do that book and set herself free, but she didn’t do it.”

In a way, Priscilla knew no other form of behavior. She had been indoctrinated by her mother in the art of deception and denial, often motivated by fear.

D
uring Priscilla Beaulieu’s five-month interlude with Elvis Presley in Germany, one thing was certain: She was a fourteen-year-old girl who was in far over her head.

Her “friendship” with Elvis, as her parents later characterized it to the media, was not the innocent fantasy they described; it was sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and Ann and Paul Beaulieu were too taken with Elvis’s celebrity and their daughter’s adolescent infatuation with a man of such importance to notice or intervene. When Lamar Fike pulled up to the Beaulieus’ to fetch Priscilla in the early evening and then to drop her off at one or two in the morning, her parents did not communicate. He just picked her up and brought her home.

Priscilla had a succession of drivers from October on: Lamar, who joked with her and called her Ballou; Joe Esposito; Elvis’s father, Vernon, sometimes with his new blond girlfriend, Dee Stanley, the estranged wife of an army sergeant; Priscilla’s parents; and, on the rare occasion, Elvis himself. Joe, who got to know the Beaulieus slightly, also recalled that Ann “really liked Elvis a
lot.”

Those in Elvis’s inner circle, who saw Priscilla’s parents rarely, regarded them as a nice ordinary couple. Paul Beaulieu,
to them, was a figure in the background in a military uniform; Ann was friendly, though slightly reserved.

There were suggestions, when one peered more closely, of a darker, gothic side to Priscilla’s home life. Sunhild Ernst, a sixteen-year-old Wiesbaden girl, baby-sat for the younger Beaulieu children a few times that fall. She stopped after an incident with Paul Beaulieu. “When he drove me home,” she said years later, “he was drunk and hit on me, or tried anyway.” Suni, as she was called, lived quite near the Beaulieus and was Currie and Carol’s regular baby-sitter. She agreed to help out the Beaulieus when Carol called her one day saying that Paul and Ann could not find a sitter. “But after he tried to hit on me, that was it. I told her, ‘Forget it. I don’t need this.’ ”

Priscilla’s stepfather, by Suni’s observation, “was a drunk.” On the last night she baby-sat for their children, Paul propositioned her as soon as they left the Beaulieu house. “There was no physical [contact], because I would have gotten out of the car. I just said, ‘Look, I’m not interested.’ And then I kind of said, ‘Forget it. No, uh-uh.’ At the time, I wasn’t allowed to go out or date or anything like that. And then to have some old captain coming on to you—that’s kind of scary. I was glad to get out of the car.” Suni stayed away from the Beaulieus after that.