Child Bride (17 page)

Priscilla anguished over Elvis’s complicated love life and the specter of Anita Wood. That she did so alone, unable and unwilling to confide in anyone, is a remarkable feat for a teenage girl. She felt, at times, she later told a magazine, “cheap and unloved.” But for all her apparent fragility, Priscilla had a core of steel. “I don’t know where I get—even now sometimes—the strength,” she confided in 1996. “I certainly couldn’t tell him what he could do and what he couldn’t do. All I knew was that the time I spent with him was totally devoted to him. And that’s all I could do. I couldn’t change his mind; I couldn’t do anything. So if it was meant to be, it was meant to be. I’ve done what I could do. And that’s basically how I worked it out.”

P
riscilla’s claim to have left her future with Elvis in the hands of fate was not altogether true. She had a plan, a romantic strategy she had formulated in her enterprising teenage mind, to snare Elvis Presley. “In Anita’s letters, I’d already spotted trouble,” she recounted. “Doubts that were hitting her. She had heard about me through news or through someone. She definitely knew about me. She knew that there was someone else and ‘Would you talk to me about it?’ And he had told me that there were problems and that he didn’t trust her anymore.”

Priscilla began making mental notes from Anita’s letters and Elvis’s responses, silently assessing and categorizing what he liked and disdained in a woman, what might eliminate her from competition: “All those things that he would say, I internalized: you know, he didn’t
trust
[Anita] anymore, that she was going out on him. So I knew what was important to him.” Priscilla plotted how she would transform herself into Elvis’s ideal woman, just as she had planned the strategy for their original meeting, right down to the Debra Paget hairstyle. It was an audacious plan for a ninth-grader, to contemplate competing with a sophisticated adult woman for the affections of a movie star. “You have to remember,” she revealed years later, “it wasn’t difficult to behave like that. I felt I was already like that. So I
had a head start. I knew that he loved feminine girls. I knew that he loved small girls.… I knew his thoughts. I knew what he liked. I knew what he was attracted to. So what was I going to do?
Become
whatever it was.”

In order to get what she most wanted, Priscilla had created a persona that she would find an increasingly uncomfortable fit. Elisabeth Stefaniak recalled that Priscilla would occasionally sneak a cigarette behind Elvis’s back, even though she knew he did not approve of girls who smoked or drank. And she often felt out of place in Elvis’s crowd, mostly GIs and good ol’ southern boys in their twenties.

Priscilla was also discovering Elvis’s sexual secret during their intimate evenings in his bedroom. It was a revelation that explained much about their unusual relationship and helped unlock the mystery of Elvis Presley’s sexual psychology. Elvis confided in Priscilla that his reputation as an international sex symbol created performance anxiety when he had intercourse with a woman. Elvis Presley the consummate performer was so motivated to
please
, to gratify an audience of any size, that the expectation to deliver sexually was incapacitating to him. “And he mentioned that to me, even in Germany,” Priscilla revealed.

Joe Esposito formed the same impression from his thirty years in close proximity to the star, though Elvis never expressed it to him in so many words. “Elvis knew very little about sex,” Joe said. “He wasn’t raised on it. He wouldn’t talk to people about it ’cause he figured he knew everything. His ego wouldn’t let him talk. Elvis never talked about his sexual affairs with women with us guys. Oh, once in a while [he’d say], ‘She was great last night in bed,’ but he never went into detail.… I don’t think he had that much confidence in himself as far as sex goes.”

From their exchanged confidences in the bedroom at Bad Nauheim, Priscilla concluded that Elvis did not derive much pleasure from intercourse, presumably because of his insecurity over his performance. “He had other preferences,” she later said emphatically, “of making love.… And it’s not abnormal.” Elvis’s preference, according to Priscilla, was extended foreplay as opposed to consummating the sex act by penetration. “And not just with
me.
That was just his preference.”

That would explain Elvis’s fascination with thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. He was drawn to them, both romantically and sexually, because that was their level of sexual development. They were innocents, just arriving at the make-out stage of sexuality,
where Elvis felt most comfortable. They also had little or no sexual experience by which to judge—or criticize—his performance.

Willie Jane Nichols remembered nights at Elvis’s house on Audubon Road in Memphis, his home before Graceland, where the up-and-coming singer, then in his early twenties, regularly invited a small group of fourteen-year-old girls for sleep overs in his bed. “A bunch of girls would come and stay up all night with him,” she declared. “They were close little friends and talked and discussed things. Gladys was okay with that. And her home was well chaperoned—Gladys was there.” Elvis felt comfortable with these adolescent girls. “He was so insecure,” affirmed Willie. “That’s why he needed younger girls. And they all wanted to be with him.”

Elvis, at heart, was a shy, uneducated southern mama’s boy, to a degree sexually ignorant, despite his fame and reputation for carnal knowledge. Alan Fortas, another member of the early Memphis Mafia, claimed Elvis was embarrassed to be seen naked because he was uncircumcised; others suggested he had an inferiority complex about the size of his penis, which according to his female partners, was on the slight side of normal. “Remember, Elvis’s childhood was sheltered by his mom, and he wasn’t around a lot of guys, so that’s what it was more than anything,” Joe Esposito surmised. “I saw him nude many times. But he wouldn’t openly undress; he was shy about it.”

Elvis was a victim of his sexually omnipotent image, knowing he was human, yet still desirous of fulfilling the fantasies of his female fans. His reaction, when it came to sex, was to “withdraw,” as Priscilla learned that fall and analyzed thirty-five years later. “Because so much was expected from him. I heard that the same phenomenon happened with Marilyn Monroe. She was a sex symbol, a sex
goddess
, and anyone who was with her expected to be blown out the door with ecstasy. And because of that, she didn’t date a lot and she was very insecure in that area. So it’s something that I can honestly see how he … because women talk about it, you know? And I think he used other means of … ways of climaxing.”

In a certain way, it begged the question whether Elvis and Priscilla had intercourse in Germany as Currie claims Priscilla told him, or if Elvis penetrated her prior to their honeymoon—the $64,000 question behind the legend—since intercourse, penetration, was not the sexual turn-on for Elvis.

For Priscilla, however, clearly it was. Priscilla Beaulieu, at fourteen, lacked the insight or understanding of Priscilla Presley at fifty vis-à-vis Elvis Presley’s sexual pressures. She wrote in her autobiography of “begging” Elvis, during his last days in Germany, “to consummate our love.” Elvis portrayed Priscilla to Joe Esposito as the sexual aggressor in Bad Nauheim, claiming she would even “sit on his face” to arouse him. Priscilla’s sexual frustration in Germany would set the tone for her future relationship with Elvis and would lead to its eventual demise.

Priscilla was beginning to perceive that Elvis Presley, the person, was not what she had “imagined if” in her childhood fantasies back in Austin. He was a human being, a sex symbol with painful insecurities, a star of fragile complexity, not the demigod she had envisioned. Their relationship, though sexual and romantic, existed more firmly on another, largely symbolic, plane, for Elvis had truly succeeded Jimmy Wagner as Priscilla’s fantasy father figure, and Elvis responded in kind. Suni, who saw them together at Goethestrasse that winter, “clowning around” with frozen Pepsis, perceived that Elvis treated Priscilla “like a little
sister.”

Unbeknownst to Elvis, Priscilla had already found a surrogate for him in Wiesbaden, a punk rebel who embodied everything Elvis Presley the rock-and-roll renegade had seemed to be but was not. Tom Stewart, a sophomore at H. H. Arnold, resembled the boys Priscilla had been attracted to during her last year at Del Valle—dark, slicked-back hair, black leather jacket—a facsimile, in essence, of Elvis.

Former classmates spoke of Tommy in the hushed, reverential tones reserved for the near-mythic. Nouns and adjectives like “wild,” “bad boy,” “maverick,” “James Dean” spilled out of their mouths. “That’s poetic bullshit. He wasn’t a moody James Dean,” countered Tom Muldoon, who ran around with Tommy in Wiesbaden. “He smoke, he drank, he was a damn good athlete, Golden Glove champion, and not afraid to let people know that he was a sort of a dangerous guy.… He used to get into fights. Stewart was not a big guy, [but] he was a tough guy.”

“He was a guy who was on the fringe,” according to Steve Fox, a classmate. “Sociologically on the fringe. Not in the mainstream … and he certainly had the intimidation factor. People were careful around him.”

In truth, Tom Stewart was an enigma. No one seemed to recall if he had any siblings, what his father did, which girls he dated
other than Priscilla. He was a loner who seemed to disappear after graduating, rumored to have been killed in a knife fight on a beach in New Jersey a year after he left Germany. Like Priscilla’s perceived history, this was myth.

Above all, Tommy Stewart—Elvis’s replacement in Priscilla’s life—was
sexual.
Joe Delahunt, who was a member of the same gang, the Spartans, placed Tommy in the “sexually progressive” category. “He used to frequent a street in Wiesbaden where prostitution was legal,” recalled Tom Muldoon, another Spartan. “Yeah, of course he had sex. Anytime he wanted he went down to Meinzerstrasse and had sex.”

The fact that sweet Priscilla Beaulieu would gravitate to Tom Stewart demonstrated the law that opposites attract. It was indicative, too, of the dark, dangerous side of Priscilla. “I’ll tell you what,” offered Al Corey, whose family arrived in Germany shortly after Elvis left. “She and Tommy Stewart would leave after school, and God knows where they went. She would wait for Tommy after soccer practice, and he wouldn’t even get cleaned up. He’d go with
her
to get cleaned up.” The relationship, according to several classmates, had begun even before Elvis returned to the States—possibly before she met Elvis.

Tommy was virtually Priscilla’s only nexus to school. Academic subjects held no interest for Priscilla. She got the answers to German exams from Dave Grant, the studious sophomore who sat next to her. She also drew a classmate, George Bennett, into service. “He did her homework,” recalled his roommate, Bob Thomas. “He was awestruck.” George’s assessment of Priscilla’s intellectual acumen was not high. “How can I say this kindly?” posed Bob. “She didn’t even know how to open a book.”

“The common thought about her was, frankly, that she wasn’t very bright,” Steve Fox explained, and Priscilla’s grades bore this out. Jacqueline Momberg, dean of girls, described them as “below average. Whether that was her innate ability or lack of interest I have no idea.” However, Steve, a sophomore whose father was a diplomat, sensed that people underestimated Priscilla, “and that’s probably been a gift to her.”

How could Priscilla Beaulieu be expected to focus on ninth-grade English when she was living a fairy tale? She spent Christmas with Elvis Presley at his private party, where he gave her a platinum watch inlaid with diamonds. She would later contend that a classmate betrayed her and leaked to the school that she was seeing Elvis, but Priscilla openly exhibited her watch that
December—to the school secretary, to Stephie McCann, to Linda Williams. “She was really happy to show it off,” recalled Barbara Sobelman, a bare acquaintance.

Currie Grant, sometimes with Carol, continued to appear at Elvis’s parties, including Christmas. The Grants, in fact, spent New Year’s Eve at the Von Steuben Hotel in Frankfurt with Cliff Gleaves and Gerta—and Paul and Ann Beaulieu. Currie had not been blacklisted by Elvis the previous October, as Priscilla claimed, nor had Priscilla or her parents ostracized him.

The Beaulieus, recalled Gerta, were cordial to Currie at dinner and the evening was pleasant, with one exception. “Priscilla’s father,” related Gerta, “put his hand on my knee or something—I don’t know what they call it anymore—but it was very upsetting to Cliff.” Captain Beaulieu, she recalled, was “tipsy.” “She told Cliff,” recalled Currie, “and he said, ‘That old son-of-a-bitch! Girlie, are you sure you didn’t cause that by sticking your leg up between his?’ Of course he jumped on her and they had one hell of a fight. She started crying, ‘I had nothing to do with it! He stuck his hand under the table and was trying to feel me up!’ ” Gerta fled to the ladies room, with Cliff behind her, and was so distraught she lost her engagement ring. When she returned to the table, Paul Beaulieu “apologized,” she recalled, “because Cliff said something to him. He was very upset about this.”

Currie was also on the scene for Elvis’s birthday party, held on their mutual birthday, January 8. He took the first photograph of Elvis and Priscilla that evening, a now famous shot of Elvis feeding Priscilla birthday cake. Priscilla was spending three and four nights a week with Elvis by then, but was still consumed by fear. When Elvis returned from a weeklong bacchanalia in Paris with a few soldier buddies at the end of January, Priscilla approached Currie at the Eagle Club “like a jealous fourteen-year-old, asking, ‘What did you do? Did Elvis date a lot of girls? Did he like any of them?’ ”

Priscilla’s reverie drew to a close at the end of February, as Elvis’s tenure in the army ended and he prepared to return to the States and resume his interrupted career. She had been sprinkled with Elvis fairy-dust for just a little over five months, five months that would intrigue the world.

The public at large got its first inkling of Priscilla Beaulieu at 9:00
A.M.
German time on Monday, March 1, 1960, from an unexpected source—Elvis himself. The occasion was a farewell
press conference the day before his departure, attended by seventy newsmen who had congregated in Friedberg to hear the singer-soldier wax eloquent on army life. They received an unexpected bonus when Elvis, clearly besotted, revealed that he had been seeing a young American girl named Priscilla Beaulieu, the daughter of an air force captain. Priscilla came by her later gilding of the truth naturally, for Elvis altered the facts that morning. Priscilla, he volunteered, was
sixteen
, and their meetings took place, he said, in her father’s home.