Child Bride (30 page)

On April Fool’s Day, Elvis surprised Priscilla with a Revlonred Corvair wrapped in a giant satin ribbon and tied with a bow. “She was all excited about it,” recalled classmate Ann Dickey, who watched in amazement with the other I.C. girls as Priscilla drove up to campus in her new Chevrolet. The car was a particular thrill for Priscilla, who was embarrassed at being driven to school by Vernon or Dee and longed for the independence and relative anonymity of her own transportation. Her classmates all knew the Chevrolet was a gift from Elvis, but Priscilla kept up the pretense of her fabricated lifestyle with reporters from the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, who turned up in the school parking lot that morning. When they asked who bought her the Corvair, Priscilla responded with a publicist’s skill of evasion, saying, “It’s my car.” The resulting puff piece in the paper—“Priscilla Arrives in Her Bright, New Red Auto”—put a wholesome spin on a story that for any star other than Elvis Presley would have meant certain scandal. The national wire services picked up the
Scimitar
piece—and its innocent nuance—reporting that
Vernon
Presley had flown “nineteen”-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu from
Germany to complete her schooling as a guest of Vernon and his wife. As before, the story died there.

Rona Barrett, one of the more famous gossip columnists, acknowledged they “all knew” Elvis was hiding a teenage girl at Graceland, but she went no further with the story because “it was beyond anybody’s comprehension” that the singer was actually keeping Priscilla Beaulieu as his sexual plaything. “At that time, there were too many writers who were from the old world who would never even think twice [that] Elvis would have an affair with a thirteen-year-old [sic]!” The reason there was never a Jerry Lee Lewis-type scandal, the columnist suggested, was that Jerry Lee and Elvis were “very different people. Jerry Lee Lewis always had a public persona of being a very wild, crazy, nutty, fruitcakey kind of guy. Elvis never had that image. They protected that image: He was the sweet, southern gentle fellow.” Elvis and his image makers invented the fable that Vernon and Dee were old friends of the Beaulieus, the press accepted it, and Priscilla learned from that experience how to manipulate the media and the public—a lesson that would serve her well when she began her own reconfiguration of the truth.

Dee Presley remembers that Priscilla seemed detached from the Beaulieus, who, she says, “very seldom” called. This was odd behavior in parents who claimed to have sent Priscilla to Graceland under duress. “I don’t think Elvis felt comfortable around [Priscilla’s parents],” remarked Dee. None of the teachers or students at Immaculate Conception remembered Priscilla talking about her family or saying that she missed them. Sister Mary Adrian, the principal, admitted later that it “surprised” her that the Beaulieus never inquired about their daughter’s progress or her adjustment to Immaculate Conception. Their apathy cast even more doubt on Priscilla’s later claim that it was the selection of a “good Catholic girls’ school” that convinced her parents to send her to live with Elvis.

Jamie Lindberg was convinced, then and years later, that Priscilla was the innocent victim of a well-intended mother with delusions of grandeur for her beautiful daughter. “And I’m sure [Priscilla] ended up there out of her element,” he asserted. “I’m sure that was the main difficulty. I’m sure she never had a chance to really grow up.” Donna Pollen, Priscilla’s classmate in Germany, flew back to the States on the same plane as the Beaulieus that June. When she saw Priscilla greeting her family at McGuire Air Force Base, Donna beheld a changed person. “She looked
totally, totally different. Black hair, the beehive, Cleopatra eyes.” Donna felt that Priscilla’s entire manner had been altered. “She was a little distant. Not as friendly and lovely as I remembered her.”

Priscilla Beaulieu had transformed herself into the child-woman she knew Elvis Presley desired. The H. H. Arnold 1963 class yearbook contained a picture of Priscilla taken earlier that year, sitting at a desk idly writing, her hair still cropped rebelliously short. Beneath it was the caption, “Dear John, err, aaa … Jamie,” a parody of a “Dear John” letter. “They put that in there to poke a little fun at me,” Jamie said later. “ ’Cause I was pretty upset, kind of.” Pat Mayo confirmed that “We on the yearbook staff put [in] something comical. It was reasonably common knowledge that there was something going on between Priscilla and Jamie.”

There were hints of regret for her lost youth on Priscilla’s part. She entreated Patsy Lacker, the wife of Marty Lacker, an Elvis aide, to accompany her to gospel-music concerts in the Memphis auditorium that spring, because according to Patsy, Priscilla was infatuated with a seventeen-year-old singer in the Southern Gospel Quartet. The young man, Mylon LeFevre, now a minister, downplayed any romantic interest on Priscilla’s part, though he acknowledged that she “would come to the concerts” and she “spent a lot of time talking” to him backstage. Mylon was drawn to Priscilla for her “peaceful attitude,” a kindness and gentleness that stood out from the “groupie mentality” at concerts; Priscilla gravitated to Mylon in part because they were the same age.

The attraction remained at the flirtation level once Mylon learned who Priscilla’s boyfriend was. “I would have dated her if I could,” he admitted. “But I was so amazed at Elvis, you know. I was a poor white guy that liked that kind of music, and I was living my own dreams, and the code that I grew up under in the South is that you don’t try to date somebody else’s girlfriend.… When I heard that she was Elvis’s girlfriend, I was just friendly, you know. That changed the way I viewed her. Had she not been, things might have been different.”

The triangle had a happy ending for Mylon. Priscilla went so far as to promote to Elvis a song Mylon wrote called “Without You,” and Elvis recorded it on his gospel album,
How Great Thou Art.
Mylon’s respect for Elvis Presley did not go unrewarded. When Elvis chose the song, he allowed Mylon to keep the publishing as well as author’s rights, an almost unheard-of
act of generosity from a major star to an unknown writer. “Elvis told the Colonel and his businesspeople, ‘Don’t take the kid’s publishing. Let him keep it.’ And that song made me about a half-million dollars that
he
would have made—he just
gave
it to me. He knew I was seventeen, that I knew nothing about publishing, that I knew nothing about the business. They could have easily taken it, but he didn’t let them.… [Elvis] did for me what no one else did. He had a heart for God, even though, in that running-and-gunning lifestyle, he wasn’t surrounded by people who wanted to help him with that pursuit.”

Priscilla’s interaction with Mylon that spring may have signified her divided feelings about her relationship with Elvis, but Mylon remembers Priscilla being as “excited as any young girl would be if the guy that was giving her a lot of attention was the biggest musician in the world.” She was also still faithful to the vision she had spun for herself since childhood. And Priscilla was, still and ever, an intensely goal-oriented girl, just as she had been at eleven, when the boys in Del Valle, Texas, considered her relentless once she knew she wanted something. Elvis Presley was her “Imagine If” fantasy, and now that she was ensconced in Graceland, set up by her parents to marry him, Priscilla determined to actualize the fantasy. “I had a dream,” as she put it later. “I had a goal. It was all moving toward that.”

The goal of getting Elvis actually to marry her seemed at times as fragile and elusive as a real dream, capable of disintegrating in an instant, despite her physical presence at Graceland. Elvis had scarcely arrived home from filming
Fun in Acapulco
when his costar, Ursula Andress, the sexy Swiss film goddess made famous as a Bond girl in
Dr. No
, began calling. Priscilla found herself once again a desperately insecure teenager amid starlets. Elvis assured her that he was not having an affair with Ursula Andress, but Priscilla, who had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, imagined the worst.

She was also deeply jealous of Anita Wood, according to Willie Jane Nichols, who spent some time with Priscilla. Elvis had been in love with Anita. Priscilla knew this from her time with Elvis in Germany, and she feared they could get back together. “Anita was the only girl Priscilla was ever
really
jealous of,” according to Willie Jane. “If Anita called, Priscilla went to pieces—and Anita did call Elvis from time to time.” Priscilla admitted, years later, that she considered Anita a threat to her relationship with Elvis. She was even suspicious of Becky Yancey,
a former fan who worked in Elvis’s office at Graceland, saying, over thirty years later, that Becky “may or may not have had an affair with him. I don’t know.”

Priscilla was on a treacherous emotional merry-go-round, ambivalent about Elvis yet ferociously possessive of him, terrified he might leave her for someone else. Driven by the fear that she might be replaced, she played the role of the perfect girlfriend to an obsessive degree, continuing to defer to Elvis, immersing herself in his interests, seeking to fulfill his every desire, to become the personification of all he wanted in a female. “I knew that to be with him, you had to be
with
him—not just physically but you had to have something in common with him. That’s why I would always
devour
whatever he put out there [his interests, his pursuits]. I would devour it … something women don’t do today.”

Both Elvis and Priscilla were compulsive in their passions. As Joan Esposito described it, “They both had this need. Whenever they got involved in something, they really went the distance. They wanted to know everything about it, whatever it was.” Priscilla could focus with a ferocity that was almost frightening, and in 1963 she was focused on Elvis—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

This ability to fixate on one thing, combined with a fierce competitive streak, was at the core of Priscilla’s character and defined her. “I’m not about to fail at anything I do,” she recently declared. “I will not. I have so much passion for everything that I do.” Priscilla herself did not know where this trait came from and had never tried to analyze it—but it was not from her parents, she maintained. “I just don’t want to fail.… Once I make a commitment to something, I have to make it work.… If
I
can’t make it work, trust me, it can’t work.”

Whatever Elvis required Priscilla to be in those early months at Graceland, she became. When he wanted her to improve her posture, Priscilla walked with a book on her head; if the polish on one of her nails had a tiny flaw, she painted them all again. If she made the mistake of frowning, creating potential wrinkles, Elvis would tap her between the eyes and Priscilla would stop immediately. Before joining him in bed, she bathed, powdered, perfumed, and made herself up the way he preferred. Priscilla was taught how a woman should present herself to Elvis in order to make love. She was an excellent student.

As with his music, Elvis Presley aspired to perfection in physical
beauty. He was by nature a fantasist, and occasionally dreamed up outrageous schemes to improve upon the human form. When Priscilla, who was five feet two at fourteen when he met her, failed to grow any taller, recalled Joe Esposito, “he was kidding around about having implants put into her legs. Extensions—some kind of bone thing that would make [her] legs longer.” According to Sheila Ryan Caan, a tiny blond who dated Elvis in his last years and discussed this subject with him, Elvis was not joking. “He wanted to have Priscilla’s legs lengthened and talked about wanting to put her on some kind of a machine to stretch them.” The idea came from a rich, eccentric friend of Howard Hughes and Mario Lanza named Georgie Stoll, whom Elvis worked with and became intrigued by on one of his movies. Charlie Hodge, an army buddy and musician who had joined the Elvis entourage, visited Stoll at his castle in northern California with Elvis. “Georgie was about my height, I’m five-three,” said Charlie, “and he had a rack in the basement of the castle. He used the rack—the rack that they used to torture people on in the old days—and he’d stretch himself until he was four or five inches taller. And he told us this was truth.” Elvis’s plan was to construct such a rack for Priscilla.

“He never did that to me,” declared Anita Wood. “He never once told me what to wear, how to wear my hair. Once, soon after we met, we went swimming in his pool and he had me stand up and turn around, and he said one of my hips was a little larger than the other, but other than that, I had a perfect figure. I had a little gap between my two front teeth, which I got capped, but except for that once, he never told me what to do, never. Ever. It wouldn’t have mattered; I wouldn’t have done it anyway. He didn’t ever try.”

Elvis’s and Priscilla’s corresponding obsessions and insecurities fitted into each other like interlocking pieces of a puzzle: Elvis had an artist’s sincere appreciation for beauty, and Priscilla had been brought up, by Ann, to be the beautiful princess; she’d been trained to please. She was also a malleable, impressionable child of seventeen to Anita Wood’s twenty-something. “[Priscilla] would do anything for Elvis at that time,” asserted Joe Esposito. “She was a little doll that he took and moved around, dressed her up the way he wanted to.” According to Joe and others, Priscilla eventually developed a complex about her height. “She never told anybody,” said Joe, “but I knew that she did. She made little comments about being short, comments
that [let me] know [she had] a complex. I make jokes now about not having hair; I know it bothers me.” The insecurity lingered even after Priscilla and Elvis were divorced, when she would still exaggerate her height in interviews, claiming to be “almost five-four.”

“When I met her,” said Joan Esposito, “I was surprised at how tiny she was.” Mike Edwards visited Georgie Stoll’s medieval castle with Priscilla in the late seventies and watched Stoll elongate himself on the rack. “She was so intrigued with that,” Mike recalled. “In the morning, he’d stretch and he’d be five-seven, but by the time he went to bed at night he’d be five-five!”