Child Bride (41 page)

“I was told it was Steve,” countered Joe Esposito. The instructor was without question Priscilla’s type: tall, dark, and Sicilian. Priscilla herself compared Steve admiringly to Anthony Quinn and was nervous, years later, about what he might have revealed about the “personal” side of their relationship. Patti Parry was certain the affair was with Steve. “I
saw
Priscilla with
Steve Peck in the market. He was a very attractive guy. I would never tell Elvis.” Someone did, apparently a member of the entourage. “We knew about it,” said Charlie Hodge, who also believed Priscilla’s lover was Steve Peck. “In fact, we were talking about it in a group with Elvis, and one of the guys said, ‘We could get a detective to follow her.’ ” Elvis, according to Charlie and the rest of the Mafia, forbade them to use a private investigator to tail Priscilla and would not allow anyone to say a disparaging or unkind word about her in his presence. “Elvis said, ‘Anybody does that, they’re fired. There’s a whole big world out there that little girl doesn’t know anything about, and if she gets hurt a little bit, it’ll make a better wife out of her.’ ”

Charlie, like Joe Esposito, “didn’t think Priscilla would ever do anything like that,” so successfully had she suppressed her true nature around Elvis and his friends. The affair was reminiscent of the Priscilla of old, back in Germany, when she maintained a double life with a series of boyfriends while Elvis was thousands of miles away in the United States, believing her to be faithful. She had seemingly remained true to Elvis throughout her four years sequestered at Graceland (except for lusting in her heart after Mylon LeFevre), perhaps because she was a virtual prisoner, and also because she and Elvis were not yet married. Priscilla was still clinging to the fallacy that she had never been with another man, and she was more than likely apprehensive about being caught in an affair, thereby jeopardizing her chances of ever marrying Elvis. Now that she had accomplished her goal, she could take that risk and fulfill her desires—which had never been wholly satisfied by Elvis—just as she had in Wiesbaden.

Priscilla wasted little time in doing so. During the first nine months of her marriage to Elvis she was pregnant; within weeks after having Lisa, she had taken a lover. She attributed the affair with the pseudonymous “Mark,” years later, to “the intensity of the dance,” saying the “drive” and her emotional state “peaked at that time. It helped me, certainly, get through—I hate putting myself in that lower level of existence, but it helped me get through and it helped me get my attention away from
me.
You know, it was exciting, it was something different. Not that I’m promoting it, nor am I using that as an excuse. I don’t think it’s right, but to survive I guess I needed … to be able to do what I needed to do as a woman. I needed to get
away
from Elvis. I needed to get away from his life and his lifestyle.”

The mutual hypocrisy of Elvis and Priscilla’s marriage became
clear at the taping of his NBC special in June. Elvis, recalled his director, did not want Priscilla around during rehearsals, ostensibly because “there were too many other guys around,” but actually because he was having an affair with Susan Henning, a pretty blond dancer in the special who openly stayed with Elvis on the set throughout preproduction. When Priscilla arrived for the taping, the first time she had seen Elvis perform live, she brought Steve Peck, along with several of the other dancers from her class, one of whom, remembered Steve, was a male hairdresser with an enormous crush on Priscilla—or “C. P. Persimmons,” her false identity. It wasn’t until Elvis introduced Priscilla to the audience during filming of the special that her classmate discovered he’d been pining after Elvis Presley’s wife. Steve expected Priscilla’s secret admirer to be crushed to find out she was married; instead, Steve chuckled, “the first thing he said was, ‘I want to cut his hair!’ Just like a real Hollywood situation.”

Elvis’s affair with Susan Henning lasted most of the rest of the year, as Priscilla carried on with her dancer-lover. They were leading separate lives, although their marriage was still in the post-honeymoon stage and their daughter was less than six months old. Priscilla had effectively made their new house on Hillcrest in Truesdale Estates, an exclusive section of Beverly Hills, a home for herself and Lisa, eschewing Memphis for L.A., which she had always preferred. Though the world envisioned theirs as a storybook marriage, in truth Priscilla and Elvis were married in name only. Being married gave Priscilla the confidence to be herself again, no longer needing to project a facade to induce Elvis to wed her. She later told
Redbook
magazine, “Inside, I was becoming my own person. I wanted to be more me.” She said she had looked at some of her earlier photographs, with the beehive and black eyeliner and concluded that she “didn’t look real in them.” In a way, she wasn’t; Priscilla had created a persona as artificial as the double set of false eyelashes she put on faithfully every morning, whether she was spending the day in the barn or going to a Tom Jones concert.

There was also strain between Priscilla and the Memphis Mafia, who resented her newfound power as Elvis’s wife. She fired several members of the household staff in L.A., and Elvis sent for Mary Jenkins, the Graceland cook, to smooth things over. Willie Jane laid the blame for Elvis and Priscilla’s eventual divorce on his male entourage. “They were against his marriage.
I don’t care what beautiful things they say now. They had no understanding for her at all. She had more for them than they did for her. They made Elvis do things. And they
worked
on her, to a certain extent. They were always introducing girls to him and trying to get him interested in girls. And naturally, that would hurt her.” Priscilla’s barely buried resentment came out years later, after Elvis died and she assumed control of the estate, when she would refer to certain members of the entourage as “has-beens and leeches,” or worse. In truth, though, the guys hung around largely because Elvis
wanted
them around, for he romanticized the idea of having an entourage, and depended upon them for emotional support, possibly because he had been an only child, perhaps because he walked in his sleep and needed someone to spend nights with him, in part due to his intrinsically lonely nature, and he needed a human fortress between himself and the frightening force of fame.

At the end of that year, 1968, after ten months without sex of any kind with Elvis—not even “games,” as Priscilla called Elvis’s preference for foreplay, masturbation, home sex videos, and role-playing—she finally confronted him. “I told him that we couldn’t survive that way. I could the
other
way [with the games as opposed to intercourse], because I mean, we had
that.
But it was like—I felt that it was me.” Elvis, she recalled, “tried to make love to me. I mean, he
tried.
And I knew he was a little uncomfortable with it.” (Elvis
did
have sex, on occasion, with other women who had children, but the fact that Priscilla’s child was his own evidently reinforced his phobia.) The reality of her fantasy marriage had become untenable for Priscilla; the dream she had spun at ten, thrust upon her by her parents when she was seventeen, was becoming her personal nightmare. She was still in a masquerade, keeping secrets, pretending to be the radiant bride of the most famous sex symbol in the world, when she had not made love to him since the birth of their daughter and was carrying on a not-so-secret affair with a male dancer. Priscilla, as a child, had fallen in love with the image of Elvis Presley, not with the man she met in Bad Nauheim; Elvis was in love with the persona Priscilla had assumed in her effort to acquire him; now they were two strangers who shared the same last name. “To be a soul mate you’ve got to have a connection—lust,” Mike Edwards analyzed. “You’ve got to be connected everywhere—philosophically, emotionally, mentally—on every level there is. And they didn’t have it. They didn’t have this
great sex life. They
didn’t.
You can’t be a soul mate with someone if you don’t have that. That’s the true connection: when you get together and you can’t
breathe
, and you’re looking in someone’s eyes and pressed so close you just want to get inside of each other. Elvis and Priscilla—that was a fantasy world.”

Elvis’s NBC special, which aired at the end of 1968, offered both the silver lining and the cloud in the Presleys’ married life. Elvis had been fortuitously matched for the special with an innovative young director named Steve Binder, who challenged him to revive the rock-and-roll spirit that had originally defined him. Binder suggested a simple setting: Elvis seated on a chair, in the round, with his guitar, before an intimate studio audience, performing live on tape in addition to several production numbers—a concert that would bring him back to the purity of his rock roots. Bill Belew designed a pair of tight black leather pants and a black leather jacket for the special, an outfit Elvis feared might make him look foolish. The night the television show aired, December 3, 1968, the singer was a mass of raw nerves, Priscilla would recall, fearful that people would find his music, and his costume, ridiculous. But that concert electrified Elvis’s career and would be referred to ever after as the “comeback special.” Elvis Presley had never looked trimmer or handsomer; the tight black leather against his black hair projected a smoldering, Brando-like sexuality that recalled Elvis’s early live performances, and his simple, classic rock arrangements helped obscure the inferior movies that had come between. He told Steve Binder, who had helped to mastermind it, “that the show had influenced him to never do another lousy movie or record another lousy song.” Binder, nonetheless, had an ominous feeling, and told Elvis so. “I said, ‘I hear you, but I’m not sure you’re strong enough to back it up.’ I didn’t feel Elvis was all that strong to fight the elements and people and entourages and so forth.”

Elvis followed the special with two critically and commercially successful singles, “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds,” and the comeback briefly revived his dormant sexual relationship with Priscilla, though it was still a “different kind of relationship,” in her words, meaning there was little intercourse. The heat from the comeback special and his two hit singles in early 1969 generated for Elvis a stunning new contract, negotiated by the Colonel, to perform live at the Las Vegas International Hotel twice a year, in August and January. Elvis
filmed the last movie under his MGM contract, another tepid picture called
A Change of Habit
, in which he played a doctor opposite Mary Tyler Moore, who portrayed a nun.

It was the beginning of a new era in the lives of Elvis and Priscilla. For the next several years their routine revolved around his performing schedule, which consisted of his two concert dates in Vegas with six months of touring in between. Elvis eventually instituted a no-wives-on-the-road policy, which telegraphed the dismal state of his sexual and marital relations with Priscilla. She and the other wives were invited to Vegas for opening and closing nights only; the three weeks of shows in between were off-limits. She and Elvis, Priscilla said, usually had sex on the nights he opened and closed in Vegas each January and August, a ritual that resembled the mating habits of some exotic species, since they were seldom intimate on other occasions. After one of Elvis’s 1970 openings or closings in Vegas, Priscilla missed her period for two months and thought she was pregnant. She told Elvis, and he was “elated.… He was calling me every single day to see if in fact I was. And then when I told him that I wasn’t, it was a disappointment.” Priscilla later claimed that she wanted another child, too, though this seems unlikely in light of the recollections of Willie Jane and others to the contrary—and Priscilla’s own comment to the Memphis paper in 1969 that she didn’t want to be “inconvenienced.”

She was not happy in her lifestyle with Elvis; this was plain to all who knew Priscilla and from everything she said after their divorce. One of her primary complaints was that she and Elvis did not spend enough time together, but by show business standards, theirs was a relatively standard marriage in terms of family time as a couple: From 1967 to 1970 they took regular holidays in Hawaii, skiied once in Aspen, vacationed in the Bahamas, and spent Christmas at Graceland each year. Charlie Hodge remembered those years, after Priscilla and Elvis married, as “the happiest time, it seemed like, because we were more a family then. In the evenings we’d sit down and have dinner. In Memphis it would be Patsy and GeeGee [Elvis’s cousin and her husband] and Elvis and Priscilla and me and the baby. And that was the family. And then when we were on the West Coast we’d have dinner every evening and sit together, and Joe and Joanie would come up some evenings; some evenings Colonel Parker and Tom Diskin, his associate, would come up. And it was just a wonderful
time, wonderful dinners, a lot of laughs. All of my memories were so pleasant of that time.”

Myrna Smith, who in 1969 joined the Sweet Inspirations, Elvis’s Vegas backup group, and who eventually married Jerry Schilling, regarded Elvis and Priscilla as “two gorgeous people who looked very much in love.” Becky Yancey, the Graceland secretary, remembered Elvis buying Priscilla diamond rings, watches, charm bracelets—expensive jewelry for which Becky saw the bills.

This would have been some women’s Cinderella story, but the glass slipper did not fit Priscilla. She was restless, sexually unfulfilled, dissatisfied, and bored—as she had been, in truth, from her first days at Graceland, if not her first nights with Elvis in Germany. The difference now was that she had realized her goal—to marry Elvis Presley—and she could move on. Nancy Rooks, the longtime Graceland maid, always felt, interestingly, that Priscilla “was not as much in love with Elvis as he was with her.” Elvis told Kathy Westmoreland, his friend and backup singer after 1970, that Priscilla never loved him, that “she only wanted a career for herself.”

Their incompatibility was due in part to the fact that Elvis was nocturnal, by choice and by profession. “They were just not together,” Pat Crowley observed. “He was up all night, and she was working all day on her career.” Priscilla remarked, only half jokingly, in 1996, that she and Elvis might still be married “if I’d had my own room. We were on such different schedules. He was up all night, and I needed my sleep. We had different interests.” They were, and had always been, mismatched on a practical level, whatever callings of the soul brought them together.