Child Bride (35 page)

Priscilla’s real life as the girlfriend of Elvis Presley was far and away from what she must have pictured when she was
twelve, listening to “Hound Dog” while curled up on the bed in her pajamas with Pam. The celebrity whom Priscilla had taken up with was now a movie star, not a rocker. By the mid-sixties, five years into the relationship, Priscilla still had not seen Elvis perform live; he had given his last concert in the spring of 1961, while she was in Germany. The Elvis who mugged his way through bad but entertaining B pictures was not the electrifying, slightly menacing rock rebel of Priscilla’s earlier years, and this may have been a subtle factor in their growing estrangement.

Elvis the movie star had settled into a routine of three or so pictures a year, which brought Priscilla back to Los Angeles once Ann-Margret had receded into the background. She was, to Joe Esposito’s watching eyes, still enamored of Hollywood and moviemaking, in contrast to Elvis’s deepening disillusionment. In a span of nine months in 1964, he shot
Girl Happy, Tickle Me
, and
Roustabout
, fluff films that Elvis, who had aspired to follow in the tradition of Dean and Brando, found increasingly embarrassing and stultifying to his singing and acting ability. He was hindered, ironically, by success, for the formula films were so profitable that Colonel Parker, Elvis’s money-minded manager, kept him contractually enslaved to the genre. “Elvis could have changed that probably,” Priscilla proclaimed to Barbara Walters years later, “if he had had more of a confront”—a Scientology term meaning “to confront”—“with Colonel Parker.” Elvis, to his occasional detriment, left the negotiating to the Colonel and concentrated on the creative. Priscilla, for all her postmortem bravado, would not have presumed to make a business suggestion to Elvis; she knew her place. Elvis, by the later observations of those who were around him, seemed not to give much thought to Priscilla’s intelligence. “I don’t think he thought she was a rocket scientist,” Joe ruminated, “but I don’t think he thought she was stupid, either.” Her intellect simply was not an issue.

Even then Priscilla’s interests seemed to drift in the direction of film; she read movie magazines, recalled Barbara Little, took a drama class in Memphis, and projected the frustrated air of someone weary of remaining in the shadows. Elvis’s stepmother, Dee, whose later clashes with Priscilla occasionally colored her accuracy, considered Priscilla envious of Elvis and a simmering pot waiting to boil over. This observation made good sense. Priscilla was accustomed to a degree of adoration and interest that she would never attain in the presence of Elvis Presley. “She went … to Universal once, on a tour,” remembered George
Klein. “From what I understand, one of the producers on the lot saw her and offered her a screen test, not knowing who she was.” The screen test, or any career in show business, would never happen as long as she was Elvis’s girlfriend or wife, a limitation Priscilla accepted, reluctantly.

Her life was carefully circumscribed to fit Elvis’s needs. She avoided his movie sets, tolerated his ever-present circle of aides, and adjusted to life inside a glass cage, where fans congregated outside the gates of whichever house Elvis was occupying. “I know she didn’t care for the fans,” commented Sandi Miller, one of the girls who spent weekends at Elvis’s later houses in Palm Springs. “You can’t blame her. She couldn’t go outside her house without having thirty to forty kids outside her gate, and guys who worked for Elvis would bring their girlfriends to the house. I might get a little tired of that.” Priscilla bore this with varying degrees of patience, alternating between a detached friendliness, occasional warmth, and thinly veiled scorn. “She went out and told the fans to ‘all go home and leave us alone’ on several occasions,” said Sandi. “She went to the point of calling the police. I know that at the Hillcrest house, she called the police and had barriers put up.… Elvis basically reversed that. He called the police and told them, ‘They are allowed to stay; they are welcome!’ ” Priscilla was treading on sacred ground when it came to Elvis Presley’s fans. Elvis and his fans loved each other unconditionally, and Elvis embraced them, both literally and figuratively, stopping by the gate no matter how tired he might be to sign autographs, take pictures, swap stories. He was a warm and open-hearted man who truly loved people, and he understood that his fans were the reason for his success. Priscilla, who was aloof by nature, kept them at arm’s length; she also recognized herself as their rival, for she occupied the position Elvis’s female fans only dreamed of: She was the King’s girlfriend.

Being banished to Memphis while Elvis was shooting in L.A. or recording in Nashville was tantamount to solitary confinement to Priscilla. “Because I didn’t have anything to do!” she told a documentarian. “He didn’t want me to work. I remember shopping every single day! There must have been about three or four stores that I would faithfully return to each day. And I got to where I knew the stock more than I’m sure the people that worked there did. And one day I said, ‘This is ridiculous!
No
one
can shop this much!’ … It was just something to do, to kill time.”

Her sex life with Elvis still consisted largely of foreplay or videotaped sex games between herself and another girl. It was not Priscilla’s ideal. “At first I took this personally, but even the relationships he had
after
me … were not consummated. Long-term relationships. Like the relationship with Ginger … there really wasn’t sex involved.” Hollywood reporter Rona Barrett, who was a close friend of Juliet Prowse while Juliet was dating Elvis, recalled Juliet telling her “that the minute that relationship had its first, second, third night, it was over.” Elvis, according to Juliet and others, had intercourse with them only a few times. “Like he could do it once, but not again,” said Rona. Currie Grant, who was as much of a playboy as Elvis during their years in Germany, felt that Elvis loved the thrill of the chase, the need for conquest, but once he had a woman where he wanted her, he grew bored and wanted to move on to the next one.

Priscilla by now had become more confident of her standing in Elvis’s life, even instituting changes here and there at Graceland. She never had to look at a checkbook, much less balance one, and had an unlimited clothes budget. She started designing some of her own outfits and presenting her ideas to a Memphis dressmaker to sew. To a different young woman, a life of leisure with Elvis Presley might have been a fabulous fantasy, but for Priscilla, who craved variety and action and a full-throttle sexual relationship, it was a form of exile. Elvis had not changed fundamentally since she first met him, nor did he pretend to be anything other than what he was. He was seeing other women while they were still in Germany, and it was there that he revealed his sexual preferences and insecurities; Priscilla had experienced his nocturnal lifestyle, seen his male circle of friends. “She knew all of that, she accepted that,” a later girlfriend of Elvis’s remarked. “He was just going on with his life.”

It was
Priscilla
who was the poseur; she had assumed a false persona in Wiesbaden to get close to Elvis, beginning with the first visit to Goethestrasse, when Currie coached her on how to behave. Mike Edwards later described her as “this little enigma, who projected being demure.” A lot of people hide who they are, and I think she created that aura when she first met him way back in Germany when she first went to [his] house.”

In the process of pretending to be something she wasn’t, the
real
Priscilla was disappearing. Yet she was driven, still, to
achieve her ultimate goal, the one she had set for herself as a child, the life her parents had determined for her: to marry Elvis Presley. The deeper problem was Priscilla’s ambivalence toward Elvis, and by sustaining this act, she only brought herself greater unhappiness.

The Beaulieus visited the Bel Air house during the filming of
Girl Happy
, Priscilla was later to write, and they questioned Elvis about marriage while Priscilla pretended to occupy a separate bedroom for their benefit. The movie magazines had basically accepted her role as Elvis’s “hidden lover” without creating a scandal. A sense of complacency had set in, leaving Priscilla, and her parents, increasingly edgy. Elvis, Priscilla admitted, balked at the subject of marriage, but she felt she had no choice but to continue her campaign in full force.

In her way, she loved Elvis, whether or not she was
in
love with him. He had become a father figure to her. She would tell a later beau how Elvis used to call himself Daddy when they were alone. “Elvis had this hard time dealing with ‘Mother’ and ‘the little girl’ that I was to him. I didn’t know it then but … I finally realized in later years that he was a father to me. He was my mentor.”

In the spring of 1964, Elvis met someone who would have a profound influence on his life. Larry Geller entered Elvis’s world as his personal barber. Jay Sebring, who was later killed along with Sharon Tate in the Manson murders, had arranged the introduction. In the post-Elvis literature, Larry occasionally would be hyperbolized as a wild-eyed, bearded swami who cast a spell over Elvis, but in fact he was a clean-shaven, soft-spoken, easygoing man who, though raised Jewish, had embraced New Age spirituality. Larry, like Elvis, was attracted to the metaphysical and pondered the deeper philosophical questions the Memphis Mafia did not begin to fathom and thus ridiculed.

Elvis, and Larry,
lived
for philosophy, spirituality, unanswerable questions on the meaning of life. Elvis’s interest was nascent, while Larry had done an extensive amount of reading and shared that knowledge, and his books, with Elvis, who consumed them, as he did all things he loved, with the appetite of a longshoreman. Larry became, in the Elvis vernacular, “Lawrence of Israel,” assuming the role of spiritual adviser and becoming a trusted confidant. He did not arrive, as has been written, a full-blown guru to Elvis, according to Jerry Schilling, who had met Elvis as a youngster when he participated in Memphis Mafia
football games. After Jerry graduated from college and was about to start teaching history, Elvis asked him to go on the road with him. He joined the entourage as Elvis was boarding his bus to drive to L.A. to start filming
Tickle Me.
“God, we had these major hours of conversation!” Jerry recalled of that first bus trip with Elvis. Unlike the other guys—“we were all these macho, ex-football players”—Jerry felt that Larry Geller “brought another dimension to Elvis” that Jerry, who was more open to philosophical debate, considered fascinating. Elvis was having a difficult time coping with his enormous fame, and yearned to understand why he, a simple truck driver from the South, had been chosen for such adulation. He looked to Larry and Larry’s library—which included books about everything from Buddhism to Christianity to numerology—to help guide him on his spiritual journey.

Elvis entered a period of intense seeking and discovery, most of which made the Colonel, the entourage, and Priscilla—all of whom were vying for control of Elvis—exceedingly nervous. Priscilla was wary of Larry Geller from the outset. She was jealous, like the rest of the household, of the time Elvis spent with him, but she was also uncertain enough to feign an interest in Elvis’s passion.

As an experiment, Elvis, who was strongly opposed to recreational drugs, decided, in the mid-sixties, to try LSD under Larry’s guidance to find out whether there was indeed another level of consciousness, and he persuaded Priscilla and Jerry Schilling to join them on an LSD trip at Graceland. “Elvis was very serious about it,” recalled Jerry. “He said, ‘We are going to experiment with this, but do it the right way.’ Sonny West was … the designated driver. I was a health fanatic, Mr. Milk, and not into drugs, but still, being young and the baby of the group, anything Elvis wanted me to do within reason, I felt very safe. I was surprised Priscilla was going to do it. I don’t think she was curious. For some reason she took it; it was one of those uncharacteristic things. We were in the upstairs part of Graceland, a conference room, which I think now is Lisa’s room, and we sat down at a long table.” The group, recalled Jerry, was “cautious. I don’t know what the normal amount was, but I think Elvis didn’t take all of his. The first thing I remember is noticing that something was changing. Elvis was sitting on a chair, and I just saw his legs get smaller and smaller until he became this
little fat boy, and I started laughing. He got caught up in the laughing, so we had this laughing thing going on.”

Priscilla’s response to dropping acid was illuminating. She freaked out, according to Larry Geller, and ran from mirror to mirror screaming that she was ugly, sobbing at Elvis’s feet that he “didn’t really love her,” her two greatest insecurities in her conscious state. “I had left the room and was on the floor inside a walk-in closet in the master bedroom,” recalled Jerry, “and Priscilla came into the room. She didn’t see me. She was looking in the mirror and brushing up against the walls, just like a cat.” When the effects of the LSD wore off, Priscilla found herself in the same closet, purring. That was the first and last LSD trip for Elvis and Priscilla. “I think that it was … pretty scary for all of us that we even attempted it,” said Jerry. For Priscilla, drugs were never a serious option; she was too intent on maintaining control.

Priscilla, who longed for greater intimacy with Elvis, soon had another reason to resent Larry’s entrance into their lives, although Larry was not responsible for this development. Elvis told Larry that when he first became famous, he was with so many women he was placed in the hospital for exhaustion, teaching him that he was not a sex machine and that sex for its own sake, without love, was meaningless. As part of his spiritual cleansing in the sixties, Elvis determined to abstain from sex altogether for a time to demonstrate that he had control over the weaknesses of the flesh, like Christ and other great religious teachers. “You understand this southern mentality,” explained Larry. “You understand fundamentalism, and [with] people who grow up in that soil, sex is probably one of the most important subjects.… Elvis felt that sex could either uplift you or destroy you. Simple as that. It’s a power that is so important that if you misuse it, you are going to pay the consequences. And he did not want to, for his own self-image, feel that he was a promiscuous person, and most importantly, he didn’t want to misuse what ‘Elvis’ was. He respected the Elvis persona.” He also confided in Larry the same sexual insecurity he had confessed to Priscilla in Bad Nauheim: his powerful need to please, which came from being a performer, and his fear that he might not meet a woman’s sexual expectations during intercourse, another reason he withdrew from sex. “Elvis—the image of Elvis—was godlike,” said Larry. “It was powerful, it was Superman; therefore he had to be the great lover. Therefore he didn’t want anyone talking; he didn’t want any
secrets leaked. Therefore he was very [careful] about who he fooled around with, because he didn’t want someone to say, ‘Well, this is not the world’s greatest lover.’ And I think that he felt a certain inadequacy about his own prowess.”