Child Bride (28 page)

Ronnie Garland and Barney Williams’s sister, Liz, were two of the few friends Priscilla Beaulieu entrusted with the information that she was leaving that March. Liza’s mother gave a small going-away party for Priscilla. “She told everyone she was going back [to the States] to finish high school with friends of her parents,” said Ronnie. “That’s what we were told. There was a great deal of speculation.” Ronnie thought Priscilla seemed distressed. “I’m sure she said something. I remember one day she wanted to come to my house to listen to records, and I said sure. She said, ‘I need to get out of here, but I can’t get past my daddy unless we go out the window.’ And she said, ‘Let’s just tell him we are going to take a walk.’ She put a scar on, and we walked out. She said she was going away to finish high school with friends of her parents. She was just not real overjoyed, you know?” Paul Beaulieu, by contrast, appeared thrilled, to Ronnie. “He—let’s put it this way—was a very strange man.”

Priscilla Beaulieu was spirited out of her parents’ home in Wiesbaden in March. There was a sense of urgency to the departure. “It was kind of like she was
gone
,” remembered Jane Breighner. “It wasn’t like ‘She’s going.’ It was kind of like: ‘She’s gone.’ ” Priscilla did not even inform her classmates that she would not be completing a group project. “She disappeared one weekend,” said a close friend. “I remember what she was doing, and suddenly she was gone. And she was aware that could happen. No one heard from Priscilla. She was just bundled up, and she didn’t come back.” Judy Comstock, who considered Priscilla a good friend, felt betrayed. “That really hurt me. It hurt me that she didn’t say good-bye.”

The timing of the move, in addition to its suddenness, was curious. Spring break was a few weeks away, a logical time to transfer in midsemester. School would be out for the summer in less than two months. Why, after Elvis and Priscilla had been apart for four years, the sudden pressure to transfer Priscilla to another high school with less than six weeks left in her senior year? What was the urgency? Priscilla seemed not to know, years later, how that weekend was selected.

There are those who contend that Priscilla Beaulieu’s parents sold her into marriage, or at the least the
promise
of marriage, to Elvis Presley, the most popular rock-and-roll singer in the world. “I really believe that there was money involved in having Priscilla sent to Tennessee,” Al Corey posited. “I mean I never saw anybody go to the bank, but I suspect that.”

Mike Stone, Priscilla’s lover following her divorce from Elvis, was among those who wondered. “There are a lot of things that are a mystery to
me
still.” In the entire five years they were together, Priscilla never told him how or why it was arranged that she should go to Memphis. She was, still and ever, the secret-keeper. “But I think … she wasn’t aware of some of the things that may have taken place. And if she was, she probably did not want to talk about it.” She and her parents, Mike observed, had “kind of a strange relationship.” Mike believed Priscilla was “a pawn in some kind of game she didn’t understand” where Elvis was concerned.

“I was surprised when she was permitted to go to Graceland,” commented Priscilla’s principal of the previous two years, John Reddington, who had met with Captain Beaulieu about Priscilla, “and this is only my reaction. Seems to me to be a crass, shallow reaction in allowing the daughter to cue herself into fame and riches at a tender age.”

There was another oddity concerning Priscilla’s departure date. Paul Beaulieu had already received notice from the air force that he and his family would be transferred to California in June, only nine weeks away. Priscilla could have completed her last six weeks of high school in Wiesbaden and then flown to the States with her family. Were the Beaulieus concerned that Priscilla might reject Elvis for Jamie? Were they concerned that Elvis’s attention might wander if he didn’t get what he wanted right away? Why would Paul Beaulieu have agreed to withdraw Priscilla from high school and obtain special military leave to fly her to the United States in mid-March when he would have been taking her there anyway in June? “We always wondered about that, too,” conceded classmate Donna Pollen. “It seemed very odd.” Elvis’s circumstances that March made the timing even more suspicious, for he was in Los Angeles filming a movie,
Fun in Acapulco
, and would not return to Graceland until June—
after
Priscilla would have graduated with her class from H. H. Arnold.

All of Wiesbaden was gossiping about Priscilla’s mysterious departure, with Americans and Germans alike eyeing the Beaulieus disapprovingly for sending their seventeen-year-old daughter to live with a twenty-eight-year-old movie star/rock star—sex symbol. “People talked,” as Donna Pollen put it. “It wasn’t something that was done at the time.” Priscilla herself was not seen as the transgressor; Paul and Ann Beaulieu were held to
blame. As adults they understood the consequences, and as her parents, they should have protected her. The Rosses, the Beaulieus’ former across-the-hall neighbors and parents of Priscilla’s good friend Debbie, were aghast. “All I recall,” said Debbie, “is my mother’s comment: ‘Well, we can figure out what that’s all about.… My friend Laurie wrote me about it.… ‘This is the latest scandal. This is the gossip. Can you believe this is happening?’ ”

“I know there was lots of gossip,” confirmed Donna Wells, who had accompanied Priscilla to Elvis’s house in Bad Nauheim four years earlier. “Talk about Priscilla and her dad. Everybody was shocked that she did this because of her age and the way it was presented—that she was living with [Elvis], that he was sending her to school, that she was being chaperoned.”

The disapproval extended to Ann Beaulieu’s family back in Connecticut. “We all thought it was terrible,” recalled Ann’s cousin Margaret, who was surprised that Ann sanctioned the arrangement. “I have my opinion. I think it might be more Paul. He liked to be something important.”

Priscilla Presley, years later, at fifty-one, had a difficult time answering whether she would have allowed her own daughter, at seventeen, to move in with a rock star eleven years older. “I don’t
know
,” she responded carefully, measuring her words. “I can’t say no. You know, my daughter has gone through things, too, that as a parent I have to kind of get into her head and see where she is. If she was truly in love with someone and wanted to be with him and that was the priority—and even though I
knew
she was going to make a mistake? You know, do I let her make her own mistakes and let her see? Or do I fight it and have her hate me?” Priscilla Presley let the question dangle.

Even if Priscilla
had
been desperate to move in with Elvis, how could her parents have approved the romantic folly of a seventeen-year-old girl? One of Priscilla’s closer friends in Wiesbaden, who knew of her apprehension, considered her “in fantasy” with Elvis, not in love: “We are talking about a seventeen-year-old girl dating the guy that every woman in the world wanted. I wouldn’t say she wasn’t excited. She talked about Elvis plenty, but I never heard her say she was in love with him … but I’ll tell you, if you ask whether a seventeen-year-old girl is enamored with the guy because he was a superstar … I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s true!’ ”

Elvis, to Priscilla, may have also represented an escape, a sanctuary, from a home life that was rumored to be unhappy, which would explain her eagerness, at fourteen, to spend countless nights in the bed of a twenty-five-year-old man. Priscilla Presley revealed this in so many words to Barbara Walters in 1985, when she was asked if she was “mad” about Elvis. “I was,” she answered, then immediately added, “but our relationship was very different. It was a very protective relationship from the very beginning. I don’t know what it was about him, but he kind of took me under his arm and nourished me in many ways.”
If
there was abuse in the Beaulieu house and Elvis sensed it, he might have invited her to live at Graceland to protect her; and Priscilla may have seen it as a safer haven, for ultimately she did consent to go. There was a connection there; a soul contact between Elvis and Priscilla that bordered on the mystical and involved their own complicated spiritual-psychic connections to their dead parents.

And what of Elvis? He was, it seemed, in love—but with what? Or whom? He was in love with ghosts—the ghost of Debra Paget, the ghost of his dead twin, the ghost of his late mother—and they all coexisted, at least in his mind, in the person of Priscilla Ann Beaulieu. His promise of marriage must have appeared, to him, a long way off in an uncertain future, since Priscilla was but seventeen and would not begin to pressure him about it for several years—another benefit of her tender age. And Elvis, by everyone’s account, was not the marrying kind. Colonel Tom Parker had convinced him that marriage could damage his career and put a crimp in his dating pattern, neither of which Elvis Presley was keen to sacrifice for any woman, including Priscilla Beaulieu.

“Destiny is a funny thing,” Jamie Lindberg remarked, thirty-four years after his aborted love affair with Priscilla Beaulieu. “You really are not in control. You’re along for the ride, so you might as well enjoy it.”

P
Priscilla’s life was unfolding just as her childhood friend Carol Ann had prophesied, when she said that Priscilla’s mother would one day push her into an “event” that would bring Priscilla fame and fortune. Even Carol Ann, however, had not imagined an event of such epic proportions as Priscilla was drawn into in March of 1963—leaving her family, at seventeen, to move to another country to live with Elvis Presley.

Unlike Priscilla’s two previous trips to visit Elvis, this time she had an escort. The family’s official explanation was that Paul Beaulieu wanted to talk to Elvis in person before releasing Priscilla to him; but one had to wonder whether her father wasn’t taking Priscilla there to be sure his deal with Elvis Presley was sealed with at least a handshake.

Elvis was not at Graceland to welcome Priscilla and Paul because he was filming
Fun in Acapulco
in Los Angeles. So the mountain went to Mohammed or, in this case, Paul Beaulieu and Priscilla flew to Los Angeles to see Elvis.

If Paul Beaulieu was striving to be important, he had arrived in the right place. Elvis, correctly assessing his teenage girlfriend’s father, shrewdly provided the military man with a personal grand tour of Hollywood, conducted by its reigning star,
as they finalized the terms of their “arrangement” for custody of Priscilla.

After a few days of sight-seeing, Paul Beaulieu flew to Graceland with his daughter to deliver her to Vernon and Dee Presley’s comparatively modest two-story Colonial on Dolan Street, at the end of the pasture from Elvis’s
Gone With the Wind
—inspired estate. “My father went with me to check out the house where I was staying and to talk to Vernon,” Priscilla explained after the fact. Two days later Paul Beaulieu flew back to Germany, leaving his daughter alone to face her destiny.

Priscilla Beaulieu’s first days at Graceland were not the fairy tale that Elvis Presley’s female fans later imagined. Cinderella had arrived to an empty castle with no Prince Charming, feeling very lost and very alone. “It was awkward and a bit intimidating,” Priscilla later admitted, reinforcing Jamie’s parting memory of her as anxious and confused about Elvis. “Because these were
his
grounds, his place,” Priscilla said. “And I really didn’t know anyone. I hadn’t seen Vernon in a while. I had seen Elvis, but I hadn’t seen Vernon or Dee.” The fact that Elvis was not there to help her settle in revealed an ambivalence on his part that added to Priscilla’s torment.

If, as Priscilla Presley maintained, the “deciding factor” in her parents’ decision to permit her move to Graceland was the selection of a good Catholic girls’ school, it seemed strange that Paul Beaulieu did not take the time to register her or to inspect Immaculate Conception High School while he was in Memphis. Priscilla claimed her father “saw” the school, but it must have been from a distance, for the nuns on the faculty did not meet either of Priscilla Beaulieu’s parents during her tenure at Immaculate Conception. Sister Mary Adrian, the principal, had first heard of Priscilla Beaulieu through a letter from a Memphis attorney earlier that March, “saying that this girl would be coming to our school from Germany, and she was a senior.” Sister Mary Adrian did not know of the Presley connection until the day Priscilla was registered, when Vernon Presley arrived in her office with Priscilla around six-thirty or seven o’clock at night. “I was expecting an attorney and a German girl,” recalled Sister Mary Adrian, “and I wondered what Vernon Presley would want. He said that the attorney couldn’t come, so he was bringing Priscilla. And then it clicked—‘Ah, the girl in Germany!’—and I realized who she was, because I’d read in the paper that Elvis was dating a girl in Germany.”

Sister Adrian admitted she “really didn’t question the arrangement” when Vernon Presley told her Priscilla would be living with him and his wife, even though she knew Priscilla was Elvis’s girlfriend. “Well, back then, I probably … thought she was living with his mother. They told me that, and I trusted them. I’d do that until I’d found something out for sure.”

One of the other teachers, Sister Rose Marie Barrasso, Priscilla’s English, homeroom, and Problems of Democracy instructor, acknowledged that she and the rest of the faculty knew that Priscilla was living at Graceland, not with Vernon and Dee: “We were told that she was living at the Presley mansion as a houseguest, and that Elvis and she were going together and that he had brought her over from Germany.… A great deal was made of the fact that Elvis’s grandmother was more or less there and everything was on the up-and-up. It was all put up in a pretty package. And in those days, Catholic schools were very strict and did not stand for anything out of line.” She felt Sister Mary Adrian and the rest of the administration “probably knew what was going on, but they kept it quiet. [Priscilla] only had a few months there at school. I think they just wanted things to go smoothly. That always kind of amazed me—you know, a nun, the principal of the school—and she didn’t make any comment on the fact that here was this young girl, unchaperoned, living in a man’s house! Course his grandmother was there, which supposedly made everything all right.”