Child Bride (24 page)

So it was and ever would be with Priscilla Beaulieu. She beguiled her way through childhood and adolescence. Even girls were not immune. Katie Neece, another junior who knew her only slightly, still believed years later that Priscilla was “completely unaware of how beautiful she was.” Almost everyone who attended school with Priscilla commented upon her sweet disposition, which had remained unchanged since her second-grade teacher remarked on her “pleasing personality.” Students at H. H. Arnold in general found Priscilla pleasant and nice and did not consider her conceited, despite the attention she received when Elvis left.

Al Corey remembers that as May approached, Priscilla grew increasingly nervous about seeing Elvis. She cornered Al in the school library, frantic with fear that Elvis would be able to tell she’d had sex with Tom Stewart. “She was concerned Elvis would find out.
Desperate.”
Priscilla still registered alarm thirty-five years later, when she recounted Elvis’s warning that she remain “untouched.” Now that she had plans to actually see him, Priscilla felt vulnerable and panicked. “She showed me some letter [he had sent] where he was gonna send her to a doctor when she got there, to make sure she was capable of having children,” Al recounted. “She came up to me in the library
all the time
to talk about it. She’d ask me time and again about going to this doctor, because she was worried Elvis was gonna find out she’d been intimate with Tommy. I finally told her, ‘Just tell him you rode a horse.’ ”

Another confidant of Priscilla’s from that spring, who was not in touch with Al, remembered Priscilla expressing similar fears that she would be checked by Elvis’s doctors. Priscilla was evidently concerned that Elvis, or his doctor, would be able to observe that her vaginal area had stretched from sexual activity.

While Priscilla wrestled with her private demons in Wiesbaden, Elvis was reaching a crisis in his relationship with Anita Wood. Just as Priscilla had once agonized over Anita’s correspondence, Anita had by now stumbled upon the letter from Priscilla in Elvis’s study in Bel Air, referring to her anticipated trip to Hollywood to see him. The “child” Elvis had befriended in Bad Nauheim took on a different and dangerous connotation to Anita Wood. She confronted Elvis with the letter. “It was the beginning of the end,” by Anita’s later description, “because I was furious.
He
was furious. I don’t know if he was mad that I found the letter or that I said something about it.”

Elvis had no desire to end his courtship of Anita simply because Priscilla was coming to see him. Despite his extracurricular activity with starlets and his fixation on Priscilla, he and Anita had a close relationship, which she believed was leading to marriage, and there is reason to assume Elvis felt the same way. Gladys Presley, according to her good friend Willie Jane, had already sanctioned Anita as her son’s future bride. “She loved Anita Wood,” Willie said. “Gladys wanted Elvis to marry Anita, but Colonel Parker didn’t think it was good for his career. Anita and Elvis had more in common; she was a good southern girl.” It is not altogether clear
why
Elvis Presley summoned Priscilla that spring: perhaps he and Anita were having difficulties, as some—though not Anita—have suggested; or perhaps he and Priscilla had discussed such a visit in the abstract, and in a moment of impulse or boredom, he phoned.

Priscilla responded to her imminent reunion with Elvis by having a last fling, this time with a Lancer, a member of the Spartans’ rival male club. Lee Rushing was considered by some to be the handsomest boy in Priscilla’s class, though he would turn out to be but a dalliance. She scored her second prom date of the season as Lee’s consort at the Junior Class Ball, making him Priscilla’s eighth official beau in the last half of the eleventh grade alone, more than some girls date in a lifetime.

Even if she was not intimate with any of her boyfriends in Germany, Priscilla was not leading the cloistered life Elvis envisioned. She knew she was playing with fire. Priscilla had already made a mental note of Elvis’s displeasure with Anita when he suspected she was seeing someone while he was in Germany. “He told me on a couple of occasions that if a nice girl turned out
not
to be so nice, he wanted nothing to do with her,” Alan Fortas, who traveled with Elvis in his post-army days, later wrote. The mere fact that Priscilla
had
these relationships suggests she was either ambivalent about Elvis or did not seriously expect her Elvis fantasy to materialize—or both.

Priscilla had felt twinges of apprehension about Elvis while he was still in Germany: the difference in their ages, her discomfort around his much older friends, the teasing, her frustration over his sexual restraint. Priscilla’s five months in Germany with Elvis were like the romance of the characters in the movie
Roman Holiday
, in which a reporter and a princess have an unexpected encounter. Their interlude together was magical and bittersweet,
for they knew it had to end and they would resume their normal lives. Priscilla the realist had accepted that.

There were glimmerings that Elvis, ever the impossible romantic, saw their relationship as something more. As Priscilla panicked over the loss of her virginity, Elvis was telling his friend George Barris that “this is a different type of girl, not very forward,” and purging the house he was renting in Bel Air of unsavory elements in anticipation of his virgin goddess’s visit. “One night we are sitting there,” Patti Parry recollected, “and he takes all of the girls into a room—all of the groupies—and says, ‘Sit down. I want to tell you something. There is this little girl, Priscilla, that I met in Germany that I have a relationship with, and she’s coming to L.A. So I want to tell you girls, no more parties. It’s going to end now, because I am into her and I want her and I have a relationship with her.’ And I was the only girl who was allowed to stay.”

Patti knew that, coming from Elvis, this was tantamount to a commitment. “Which was very special and she should be proud of that.” Patti saw Elvis often and at his most vulnerable and regarded him as “the sweetest, gentlest, most insecure man you would ever want to meet in your life.” Patti sometimes slept in the same bed with Elvis, though they did not have sex. “Elvis sleepwalked,” as Priscilla would later explain, “and so he had people sleep with him. His mother was fearful for him because he nearly jumped out of a window on a couple of occasions, and so, because of that, she had asked for someone to sleep with him, if
she
did not, just to watch his back. Stories and rumors flew and grew from these kinds of stories.” For all his womanizing, Elvis craved mothering; Patti understood this and happily met that need. “He was like my little baby. He would say, ‘Patti, rub my back. Cut my toenails.’ I was so fortunate, because I became the sister he never had.”

Elvis cleared his latest rental house, on Bellagio Road, of one other significant female before Priscilla’s arrival in May of 1962: Anita. According to Joe Esposito, Elvis made arrangements for Joe’s wife to keep Anita occupied at Graceland while Priscilla was in L.A. This would not be the first or last game of musical chairs Elvis would play with women, using members of his entourage as accessories before the fact. “I was in Saint Louis at the time,” recalled Joan Esposito. “I got a phone call from Joe saying, ‘I want you to go to Memphis and stay with Anita, to keep her busy because we are going to be out here.’ They were
making a movie. He said, ‘Go on back and keep Anita company. Anita’s getting angry, so you go take care of it.’ ”

“I was furious,” Anita confirmed. “We had a really terrible row about it when I found [Priscilla’s] letter. I went home the next day on the airplane. I thought he was lying all the time, anyway. I went straight home to Graceland and I stayed with Grandma [Presley]. I stayed with Grandma a lot when he was away.”

Priscilla, who was unaware of Elvis’s machinations with Anita, later wrote of her own anxieties over the visit, fearful that she might be “hurt,” though Judy Comstock, a new friend from school, “never saw any doubt.” A part of Priscilla was giddy and excited at the thought of seeing Elvis again, for she wrote in a senior’s yearbook that April, “I’ll be leaving about the same time, but I will return, darn it.” Judy perceived Priscilla as a projectile headed straight for its target, Elvis Presley. But whose target was he—Priscilla’s or her parents’? It would be ludicrous to accept the Beaulieus’ self-portrait as over-protective parents opposed to Priscilla’s trip to L.A. to see Elvis. How many parents
—military
parents especially—would allow their just-turned-seventeen-year-old daughter to spend two weeks in another country with a movie star famous for bedding starlets and introducing sex into rock and roll? The myth once again crumbles beside the facts. “Her father thought this thing was wonderful!” proclaimed Ronnie Garland, who observed the Beaulieus’ Elvis frenzy from the apartment below. Judy Comstock remembered Priscilla’s mother as being “in charge” of the family, and Ann supported the trip to Hollywood to see Elvis.

When Tom Stewart dropped out of the picture, Ron Redd became Priscilla’s date to the Senior Ball. He began going out with her shortly after Paul Beaulieu negotiated the arrangements for his daughter’s L.A. trip. He felt the die had already been cast for Priscilla’s future. “I knew shortly after really starting to spend time with her … that it was a done deal,” Ron Redd admitted. “And I told people for years, I said, ‘You watch. When Elvis gets married, he’s going to marry a girl named Priscilla Beaulieu.’ ”

H. H. Arnold closed its doors for the summer in May of 1962; within hours, Paul and Ann Beaulieu put their eleventh-grade daughter on an airplane, alone, to stay with Elvis Presley in Bel Air for two weeks. Tommy Stewart, who graduated in May, took off for the States, never to be heard from again by any of his
classmates until the report surfaced that he had been killed in a knife fight on a beach in New Jersey within months after leaving Wiesbaden. Years later, when Priscilla was forced to amend her fictitious history to include a few “kind-of dates” she had in Germany after Elvis left, Tom Stewart was conspicuously missing from her short list.

When Priscilla Beaulieu’s plane landed at Los Angeles International Airport, Elvis Presley had just finished filming
Blue Hawaii.
He was still in bed when her plane landed in the early afternoon; Joe Esposito, whom Priscilla knew and liked from Germany, was assigned to pick her up. “Elvis didn’t do those things,” he explained. “I think maybe he thought it was more dramatic or something. Elvis had to do everything in dramatics: ‘She’d walk in the room and there I am standing waiting for her.’ ”

Joe and Priscilla fell back into their comfortable friendship, with Joe playing the familiar role of driver-to-the-ingenue. “We hit it off pretty good.… I think she trusted me.” Joe played tour guide en route to Elvis’s rented house on Bellagio Road, driving Priscilla past MGM, where Elvis had an office, and through the streets of Bel Air. Priscilla, who was “very nervous” when Joe met her at the airport gate, suddenly came alive. “She was excited,” he recalled. “It was a big adventure for her. She would ask questions: ‘What do you guys do all day?’ ‘Is it fun to make movies?’ And I told her it’s not as much fun as people think it is—you sit around the set all day. But she was anxious to experience some of that stuff.”

When Priscilla and Joe arrived, Elvis was downstairs watching television and playing pool with Patti Parry and a gaggle of his male friends, who were “pissed,” declared Patti, “because they couldn’t have their girlfriends over.” Patti, who witnessed the fabled reunion of Priscilla and Elvis after two years apart, did not see eyes locked in shared passion or Priscilla frozen in a movie moment of pure ecstasy when Elvis looked up. “I saw
fear.
I think she was scared to death when she walked in and there were eight guys and Elvis.”

The first thing Elvis focused on was Priscilla’s appearance. Her spiral-curl ponytail, worn with a white blouse and skirt, while appropriate for a schoolgirl in Germany, seemed out of place amid Elvis’s Hollywood set. Before they had a chance to get reacquainted, Elvis sent Priscilla upstairs with Patti for a quick makeover. Others would point to this as Svengaliism on
Elvis’s part, but Patti took it as an act of consideration: “He wanted her to feel comfortable.” It was likely both. Elvis had a physical standard with respect to his ideal of feminine beauty: He loved long hair, dark hair, and smoldering eyes, and it was his desire that Priscilla emulate that ideal. The moment had elements of trauma, however, for Priscilla, whose identity since early childhood had been centered on her physical appeal, and her anxiety must have been compounded by her understandable insecurity as a seventeen-year-old attempting to compete with starlets. She found Elvis Presley’s scrutiny of her clothes and makeup unbearable. “He might find flaws,” as she put it later.

Patti took Priscilla upstairs to the bathroom, undid her girlish ponytail, and started to tease, pluck, and pencil. “Make it higher,” Priscilla beseeched, desperate to undo whatever damage had been done by her high school hairdo and to appear more actressy in Elvis’s almighty gaze. Patti recalled her as “nervous as hell.”

The evening did not unfold as Priscilla’s dream date. Elvis, she wrote in her memoir, continued to play pool and joke with his other guests, occasionally pecking her on the cheek as if she were a favorite child. She claimed there were groupies around that night, despite Patti’s vivid recollection of Elvis temporarily banishing them. Priscilla noted his new, darker hair color disapprovingly and felt he had metamorphosed from the “gentle, sensitive and insecure boy” she had known in Germany into someone “mischievous and self-confident to the point of cockiness” and “quick to anger.” Apparently Priscilla did not take kindly to sitting invisibly on the sidelines, gazing adoringly at a man whose full attention was not directed at her.

The foreshadowing of sexual incompatibility between Elvis and Priscilla in Germany became clear during their reunion in L.A. Priscilla had been barely fourteen when she and Elvis retreated to his bedroom in Bad Nauheim for their late-night sexual games of extended foreplay and, according to what she told Currie, occasional intercourse. Priscilla had physically, emotionally, and sexually matured in the two-plus years since then. She had also acquired a considerable amount of experience: a short-term sexual relationship with Peter Von Wechmar, a long-standing and active sex life with Tom Stewart, an eight-month relationship with Ron Tapp that was sexual enough for Priscilla to give him pictures of herself in provocative lingerie, a three-month exclusive relationship with a nineteen-year-old hell-raiser who considered
her sexually advanced, and frequent dates with at least seven or eight popular high school juniors and seniors. The Priscilla who waited impatiently for Elvis to break away from his buddies and take her to his bedroom on Bellagio Road was a different girl from the young fan he had encountered in his living room on Goethestrasse.