Child Bride (40 page)

For a brief, shining moment in their often turbulent history, Elvis and Priscilla actually lived the fantasy marriage they projected to an adoring world. Elvis reveled in being a father, and so missed Priscilla and Lisa when he started
Live a Little, Love a Little
in mid-March that he sent for them after three days. With President Kennedy’s death five years earlier, Elvis and Priscilla seemed to replace, in the public consciousness, Jack and Jackie as the fairy-tale couple of the sixties. Like Jacqueline Kennedy, Priscilla was beautiful, glamorous, mysterious, and aloof. Both women wore dark hair in a bouffant style, and had romantic French surnames that began with
B
—Beaulieu and Bouvier. They were often photographed on horseback, spoke in airy, exaggeratedly feminine voices, and were interested in fashion and the decorative arts. And both women, of course, had married legends as famous for their philandering as their brilliance.

Priscilla’s Camelot was no less flawed than Jackie’s. The specter of sex which had so long haunted her relationship with Elvis now threatened to destroy it completely with the gradual unveiling of the star’s second sexual secret. Elvis, contrary to the claims of his biographers, continued to have sex with Priscilla during her pregnancy
as
he preferred it—through foreplay, video-enhanced masturbation, role-playing, and, less often, intercourse. “He didn’t do anything differently,” Priscilla recollected. “I mean, it was still the same. We’d play games, and we just had a different kind of relationship that was not bad at
all.
And that continued.” With the birth of Lisa, however, Priscilla began to notice that Elvis exhibited no sexual interest in her whatsoever. In her diary for April 5, 1968, she noted with despair, “It’s been two months and he still hasn’t touched me.” Elvis and Priscilla’s sex life came to a dead halt that spring.

Priscilla, whose self-image, for her own Freudian reasons, was almost pathologically intertwined with her physical and sexual desirability, was tormented by the now famous sexual pathology that led to Elvis’s withdrawal from her: “He told me he was … He told me that it was
difficult
because you are a
mother.
These aren’t
his
words, but me trying to put it all together for my
own
self. It turned the relationship into something else. It changed the dynamics. Not that I wasn’t sexy to him, not that he didn’t desire it—because, believe me, that wasn’t the case at all—but as far as actual intercourse, it changed the dynamics.”

Elvis, she said, never explained to her why he was uncomfortable having sex with a woman who had given birth. The friends of Elvis later offered theories based on their conversations with him. Alan Fortas claimed Elvis was repulsed by childbirth. Joyce Bova, who would become one of Elvis’s girlfriends later in his marriage to Priscilla, said Elvis told her that having a child was God’s way of telling a woman that she was not a little girl anymore, that it was time to be respected; she shouldn’t “be trying to be sexy and attracting men.” God, he believed, did not intend sex with a woman who was a mother to be exciting; a woman who had a child, Elvis told Joyce, was “not attractive in that way.” Priscilla perceived Elvis’s attitude, once she was older, as a variation on the madonna-whore syndrome. It did not, Gladys’s great friend Willie Jane maintained, derive from anything Elvis’s mother had instilled in him, nor had there been anything more than the deep southern tie of filial affection between Elvis and his mama. “He did not have a strange relationship with his mother,” emphasized Priscilla, who viewed with rightful and righteous contempt as “off-the-wall and sensationalism” any suggestion to the contrary. Elvis’s idiosyncrasy was, to be redundant, uniquely Elvis, and was likely idiopathic in origin, a by-product of his rural southern mores and individualistic religious beliefs.

The fourteen-year-old Priscilla had been Elvis Presley’s sexual-romantic paragon. If only she could have remained frozen in time … As she grew up and into more adult sex, however, Elvis’s preference for making out and playing games—a result of his anxiety about satisfying superhuman expectations—left her frustrated. Once Priscilla had a baby, the ultimate sexual taboo for Elvis, he no longer desired her at all in a physical way. It was a Catch-22. Though she later said otherwise, Priscilla wrote in her memoir that Elvis told her about his phobia before they were married, which cast the situation in a somewhat different light. If Priscilla married Elvis and had his child,
knowing
of his aversion to intercourse with a mother, she had either underestimated her own sex drive or was unwilling, once she had achieved her goal of marriage, to compromise her sexuality in order to sustain the relationship with Elvis. “I was certainly not prepared,”
Priscilla reflected, “emotionally or physically. Because, you know, having a child is an incredible experience that you have
with
the father. And you nurture and you love and you bond with your child. I mean, there can’t be anything more stimulating, and so … from a woman’s point of view, not to have that same feeling shared, you know, is somewhat a mystery for me too.”

Elvis and Priscilla’s intimacy began withering on the vine; she stopped going to Palm Springs on weekends, annoyed by the cast of female and male regulars, and uninterested, still, in joining Elvis in his spiritual pursuits, which continued despite Larry’s expulsion from the entourage; the Circle G, which had been a fleeting source of joy, was sold as an extravagance. Priscilla spoke wistfully to a magazine, years later, of the nights when Elvis would go into Lisa’s bedroom (he called her Yeesa) and read her nursery rhymes. Her happiest moments, she said—though they were few—were “when he dropped that wall, when he became the person he might have been without all the pressures.”

The chasm between Elvis and Priscilla, exacerbated by his attitude toward sex with someone who had given birth, became a gulf. Priscilla’s frustration revealed itself in snide, embittered comments. She told Memphis secretary Becky Yancey that it was more fun to be the girlfriend than the wife, and she mentioned to Willie Jane, more ominously, that she wanted no more children. Nancy Rooks, one of the Graceland maids, used to hear Elvis talk about how he wanted twenty children because he was an only child; Nancy asked Priscilla, after Lisa was born, if she was going to have another baby. “And she said, ‘No more with him.’ I told her, ‘But he wants twenty kids.’ She said, ‘Not with me. I’m not having any more with him.’ ” It was impossible to know whether Priscilla’s attitude was caused by Elvis’s physical rejection of her, by her admitted concern about her figure, or by incompatibility with her mate. Presumably it was all three.

With Elvis on a separate path, Priscilla spent more time with the entourage wives and became especially close to Joan Esposito. She saw herself as—and probably was—the originator of fashion trends, the leader, the “female Elvis” of the distaff set. “All the girls would wear their hair like I did, dress like I did. They emulated [me]; basically what I came back with from California they tried to be and do.” There was, not surprisingly, a certain resentment among the guys’ wives toward Priscilla, who
was gorgeous and glamorous and who was married to the king of their kingdom. Priscilla’s critics referred to Joan Esposito, who was an open, friendly, accommodating sort, as Priscilla’s coolie, a yes-person who did the boss’s wife’s bidding. “Some of them didn’t like Priscilla,” Joe Esposito said after the fact. “Patsy Lacker. And recently I found out Jo Smith didn’t care for her, which I found really surprising. Billy Smith’s wife really put her down in one of the books.” The Memphis Mafia wives and girlfriends regarded Priscilla as a queen bee. “We all knew that she got special treatment,” Joe said matter-of-factly, “because of who she was. She got resented for that.”

By the end of April 1968, not even a year after her “fairy-tale” wedding to Elvis, Priscilla’s diary telegraphed the eventual demise of the marriage; she was questioning her own sexuality, she wrote, and her physical and emotional needs were not being met. Priscilla began, quite literally, to transform herself. She started with little dance steps, enrolling in a modern jazz class, one of Elvis’s approved activities for her. Then she enrolled in an acting class. Patricia Crowley took dance lessons with Priscilla that year and remembered her as extremely conscientious, “working all day long on her lessons. I think she really wanted a career.” Patricia, an actress herself, got the impression that Priscilla’s chosen career would be acting, though she was still shy about speaking in public. Her drama coach remembered Priscilla hanging on the sidelines, insecure. “Once in a while she’d get over there on the stage, but generally she was a looker. [Performing] was good for her.”

Elvis was absorbed in his own private drama, an effort to revitalize his image as a rocker, which had suffered during his years of making predominantly disappointing B films. His five-year contract with MGM was ending, and he hoped to make a comeback in a television special for NBC, a prospect that both excited and terrified him, for he hadn’t performed in concert in years. It was to this end that he was dedicating his considerable energies, nervous and creative, during the greater part of 1968, as his bride immersed herself in dance and drama.

Priscilla and Elvis flew to Hawaii in May for an unofficial second honeymoon—with an entourage—to disastrous results. Joe and Joan Esposito, who occupied a neighboring cabaña at the Ilikai Hotel with a common wall between the bedrooms, found themselves accidental eavesdroppers to a pathetic exchange between Elvis and Priscilla. “We were going to bed,”
recalled Joe, “and she was trying to have sex with him that night, and he didn’t want to. Joanie and I both heard it; we were headboard to headboard in these little bungalows. I’ll never forget that. Priscilla was screaming, ‘You don’t love me anymore since the baby!’ and ‘We never make love anymore!’ and ‘You never take your pajamas off anymore with me. We’re always in the dark!’ ”

The trip was significant for another reason. Elvis, who had become interested in karate while he was in the army, took Priscilla and the rest of the group to watch an international tournament orchestrated by Ed Parker, a giant in the karate world who had become a personal friend of Elvis’s. There, less than twelve months after their marriage, Priscilla spotted the future lover for whom she would eventually leave Elvis Presley. Mike Stone, a twenty-four-year-old half-Hawaiian onetime army enlistee, was karate’s undisputed bad boy, a world champion for whom competition was a blood sport. The very sort of dark and dangerous rebel Priscilla had been attracted to ever since she was in elementary school. There was some question later about who was fawning over Mike that day, Elvis or Priscilla. Priscilla’s version: “Everyone kept pointing this Mike Stone out. Elvis would point him out and, you know, I kept thinking, ‘Jeez!
Okay!
He is good!’ ” Ed Parker and Mike later claimed that Priscilla went on and on about Mike to Elvis, who admired Mike as a great fighter but found him “cocky.” Mike would later say that Priscilla told him, when the two of them were together several years later, that she decided, the day of the 1968 tournament, that she was going to have him one day—a characteristic Priscilla maneuver, similar to the way she had pursued and attained Elvis. Priscilla confirmed that Mike Stone caught her eye, though they did not meet that day, and she admitted there was an attraction. “A
little
bit, a
little
bit. I remember, just a
little
, because he was like a
cat.
But not in a sexual way, or not in a way that I was looking. There
was
a little something,
noticing
that he
was
a little different. I had no plans of having any kind of a relationship or any kind of a lover at that time, because we were still … so I guess, in my memory, it kind of stayed there.” With Priscilla, that was tantamount to a tattoo.

Priscilla sublimated herself in dance, intensifying her schedule in L.A. that spring to include three demanding classes in addition to her continuing scene work, using a pseudonym, C. P. Persimmons, to disguise her identity—more secrets. Steve Peck, an exacting,
tough-guy former New York stage dancer who owned the studio on Robertson and taught all the classes, dance and acting, coaxed Priscilla onto the stage. “She wasn’t good [as an actress],” he observed, “but she worked very hard. She really got into it.” Priscilla was excellent at dance, into which she threw herself body and soul, filling the voids in her life. Steve pegged Priscilla as a woman with needs, like many of the wives and ex-wives in his Beverly Hills dance classes. His advice to all of them was the same: “Stop talking about it and sweat. Forget about it or get out.” He said later of Priscilla, “Something starts over with a need. With Priscilla, I think it was a building of desire. The life wasn’t what she wanted. Elvis had evidently thought he had her, but she needed something.” Dance began to open Priscilla, so long hidden inside the artificial persona she had created for Elvis; in Peck’s creative environment, she unfolded like a flower. “I think this was the start of her emoting herself,” he assessed. “She would enjoy it and she would laugh and have fun. No one bothered her. A lot of people there didn’t even know who she was.”

Rumors began circulating through Elvis’s entourage that Priscilla was having an affair with Steve Peck. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Joe. “I just kept thinking about this little girl I knew would never do this.” The prim, “good-girl” side of Priscilla’s split personality had deceived even Joe, who had known her since she was fourteen, for Priscilla admitted in her memoir, which came out in 1985, that she had a sexual liaison with someone from her dance class, identified pseudonymously as “Mark.” She later denied that it was her instructor, Steve Peck, saying only that her lover was a dancer. Steve Peck also disavowed the affair, though he acknowledged Priscilla was needy. “She had no romance with me. I was very, very close to her. A close creative—She used to come there, and I knew—I knew there was a problem … because it was obvious. If you really are in love, you don’t go dedicate yourself to something, or if you do, you take him with you. We never [saw Elvis]. She introduced me to him twice.”