Child Bride (45 page)

A declaration signed by Elvis in his later divorce papers attested that he knew about Mike Stone by December and that Priscilla informed him, that Christmas holiday, that she wanted her freedom; Becky Yancey confirmed this in a book she wrote in 1977. The divorce declaration also stated that Priscilla effectively left Elvis a few days after her New Year’s “coming-out” toast, just before his thirty-seventh birthday on January 8, when she took Lisa and flew out of Memphis. Willie Jane Nichols, who was in Memphis and around Elvis at the time, was of the same opinion. “She got mad and took that big dog and Lisa and left—before his birthday came around. I won’t say what Elvis said when she left. He couldn’t find her and Lisa for months. We heard it from Grandma [Presley].” Willie, who knew both Elvis and Priscilla well and was fairly objective where both were concerned, had mixed feelings about Priscilla’s actions. On the one hand, she respected Priscilla for having “had the nerve to leave him—the guts. It boggles the average girl’s mind.” She also felt Priscilla was in some ways justified in walking out on Elvis, for Willie believed “she was mistreated. The guys were cruel to her. I don’t know how she survived. I almost admired her when she left.” On the other hand, reflected Gladys’s friend, “she made her own bed. To come over all this way to live with him.” Willie, who had spent many hours talking with Priscilla through the years, perceived that she had no choice. “I wasn’t amazed at her taking off. Really I wasn’t. I wondered how long
she could take it, even though her love was deep for Elvis. It wasn’t she didn’t love Elvis.… She was in a nervous break-down.”

Elvis spent his birthday, January 8, at Graceland with Joyce Bova, while Priscilla rejoined Mike Stone at their tiny apartment in Belmont Shore. Fran Stone would name February 17 as the date of her official separation from her husband. Ed Parker later wrote of a conversation he had with Elvis around this time, when Elvis told him Priscilla was leaving him: “He poured out his soul that night, and I saw him cry for the first time.”

Priscilla, Mike would later recount, decided in February that she wanted a divorce and determined to tell Elvis about her affair. “When you are in love you’re not afraid to do things,” Mike said, “because you think love conquers everything. So you just do what your heart tells you. And we decided we wanted to spend some time together and not hide anymore.… She had wanted—and I give her credit for how she thought about this situation—she wanted to tell Elvis personally what she was doing and didn’t want it to come from other people. So she just decided to confront him with it herself at this stage.” If this was true, she was several months too late, for Elvis had already suffered the embarrassment of hearing about her affair from Joe via Ed Hookstratten, and it was common knowledge in show business and karate circles.

There is still some confusion surrounding what exactly transpired during Priscilla’s infamous divorce confrontation with Elvis, which took place when she flew to Las Vegas for his closing night on February 23. Mike’s impression, and Joan Esposito’s, was that Priscilla planned beforehand to tell Elvis during this trip that she was in love with Mike. Yet it was
Elvis
who summoned Priscilla, as she was having dinner in the Hilton, to come up to his dressing room between shows. When she arrived,
she
said, Elvis forced himself on her sexually, saying, “This is how a real man makes love to his woman.” Priscilla claimed later it was
then
that she made the decision to leave Elvis and that she waited until the next day, as she was preparing to return to Los Angeles, to tell him, never mentioning Mike Stone. Elvis, according to her description, was surprised and anguished.

Elvis told a different story in his divorce declaration several months later. He said that it was he who confronted Priscilla about Mike Stone that night in Vegas and that she was surprised he knew about the affair. This was very plausible, for Elvis had
already heard about Mike from Joe, and Priscilla had told Elvis at Christmastime that she wanted out of the marriage. Priscilla’s claim that Elvis was “surprised” to hear that she was leaving him just did not make sense. Jerry Schilling, who later worked on the miniseries based on Priscilla’s autobiography, which included the rape scene in Elvis’s dressing room, admitted that it “didn’t sound like Elvis” to force himself on Priscilla sexually. Nor did Priscilla tell Joan, who was her best friend and who flew back to L.A. with her the next day, that Elvis had raped her. It would have been illogical for Elvis, without any discussion of Mike or divorce, and without provocation, to call Priscilla to his dressing room and force her to make love to him. “I can see,” offered Joan, “that a man and his ego might think, ‘Okay, I’ll get her back one way or another,’ that it will all turn around”—
if
, as Elvis depicted it, he confronted Priscilla about Mike. Moreover, Joan recalled Priscilla telling her that she had mentioned Mike’s name to Elvis, and Myrna Smith of the Sweet Inspirations remembered that Elvis was extremely agitated before his second show. Ed Parker, who was at the Hilton the night after Priscilla checked out, said Elvis told him she had left him for another man. This was all consistent with the recollections of the entourage, who recalled Elvis gathering them about, after his second show, and announcing that Priscilla was seeing someone else. Kathy Westmoreland also spoke to Elvis shortly after Priscilla flew back to L.A. Elvis told Kathy he had confronted Priscilla about Mike Stone and that Priscilla had told him she wanted a divorce.

Elvis, according to Joe’s characterization, was not heartbroken that night, as Priscilla portrayed him. “He was pissed off that someone would do something like this to him. He was really mad. Very upset.” Everyone recalled that Elvis was depressed, but more than anything else, he felt betrayed—not just by Priscilla but also by Mike Stone, whom he had considered a friend and who excelled at the sport with which Elvis was obsessed. “I am a cocky fighter,” Mike said later. “I’m extremely confident. I humiliate my opponents. Nobody’s gonna beat me. And I think Elvis resented the flamboyant way I fought. I think he liked it. That somebody could do karate the way he sang on stage.” That Priscilla would leave him for a karate champion was, in Mike’s phrase, “another little twist of the knife, so to speak.” Ed Parker, Elvis’s friend and karate master, claimed that Elvis’s ego was shattered by the fact that his wife would leave
him—Elvis Presley—for another man. What, he wondered, would the public think of him, the most famous sex symbol in the world? Sheila Ryan Caan, who discussed the situation with Elvis more than once when they dated several years later, said he still felt betrayed by Priscilla
and
Mike, “because Mike was his friend and he thought that was a big disappointment. And I think that was what was most hurtful. And it was going on behind his back for a time before he found out about it. That’s just humiliating. And unnecessary.”

There was an epic, tragic quality to the unraveling of the Presley marriage, which may explain why it fascinates, still. The Elvis-Priscilla-Mike triangle was, in reality, a variation on the legend of Camelot. Elvis, who was known as the King, was a modern King Arthur; Priscilla was his Guinevere. Mike Stone was the martial arts equivalent of Sir Lancelot, the premier knight at the Round Table. Elvis admired Mike Stone, even as King Arthur respected Lancelot; Elvis urged Priscilla to study karate with Mike, much as Arthur pressured Guinevere to befriend Lancelot. Once together, Priscilla and Mike, like Lancelot and Guinevere, became sexually addicted to each other in a way that Elvis and Priscilla, like King Arthur and Guinevere, were not. The result was the betrayal of the two kings’ and the undoing of both mythic kingdoms.

Priscilla later called her decision to leave Elvis the most difficult of her life, but “it was a decision that I had to make. I
had
to take Lisa, and leave, unless he was going to change.” Sheila Ryan Caan would later disagree: “I don’t think it was a hard thing to
leave
him. I think it was a hard thing to
stay
with him.” Sheila’s would be the majority opinion, for Priscilla would be perceived, forever after, as the woman who had abandoned Elvis Presley, despite the comments of such as Willie Jane, who stated, after the fact, that Priscilla tried “desperately” to make the marriage work. Priscilla, the consummate achiever of goals, felt she had done everything. “Believe. I gave it every shot possible. I just wouldn’t walk off. [Marriage] has to be good for both of you; it can’t be good for one and not the other. You both have to be happy and you both have to work on it. That’s a relationship.” By her own definition, Priscilla and Elvis had not had a real relationship in years, if ever.

Yet to the outside world, comparing Elvis Presley—one of the most famous, charismatic, gifted, and wealthy men in the world—to Mike Stone, a crudely masculine karate teacher who
earned under $25,000 a year, Priscilla’s decision seemed incomprehensible. Even Mike was mystified. “I would ask Priscilla, ‘Aren’t you giving up a
lot
?’ ” Elvis’s fans, and to some degree Mike, had only seen the myth; they were unaware of Priscilla’s reality, as a person repressed first by her childhood and then by her life with Elvis, a life that was imposed upon her by her parents and by her own stubborn adherence to a faded dream. Priscilla was declaring her independence, both from her parents’ edict and her surrogate parent, Elvis. Leaving Elvis Presley’s mansion and moving into a cramped beachfront apartment with a karate teacher was comparable to the willful daughter of a rich and controlling father running off with a poor poet. Priscilla was not thinking about money, only her freedom, something she had not had since she was fourteen years old. She had a phenomenal—some would see it as cold—ability to just walk away, another vestige of her military past, where every three years the Beaulieus would pack up and move to another state, a new neighborhood, another set of friends, without a backward glance.

Priscilla, by leaving Elvis, had, in effect, grown up and left home, for Elvis Presley had been, from the first, her replacement for Jimmy Wagner, the fantasy father she had recently discovered and had never known, her protector and guardian and savior from an unhappy girlhood. She revealed as much in an interview with
McCall’s
magazine in 1979: “He was not only a lover but a father to me, and as long as I stayed with him I could never be anything but his little girl.”

Mike Stone, when asked if he believed Priscilla was ever in love with Elvis, responded in an illuminating way: “Well, I can’t speak for her, but I think any girl at fourteen may not necessarily know her mind that well. And being the man that he was, as far as the image, I can understand that she was infatuated with that. I’m not saying she wasn’t in love with him; I’m sure at some stage of the relationship she was. And probably still is, as far as certain things about him.”

That was the mystery of Elvis and Priscilla’s enduring love, for it was just that—love, not a love
affair.
Theirs was the timeless love of a father and daughter, not that of a husband and wife.

T
The perfect home Priscilla had spent a year decorating for herself, Lisa, and Elvis scarcely saw the three of them in it at the same time.

Priscilla, with Lisa beside her, drove up to the apartment she and Mike rented in Belmont Shore within a few days of her final confrontation with Elvis, behind the wheel of a station wagon loaded with a few belongings. She and Mike found a slightly larger two-bedroom shortly afterward in Marina del Rey, an apartment-dominated community in west Los Angeles. She put her maiden name, Priscilla Beaulieu, on the front door and streaked her hair blond, evidence of what Mike called her rebirth.

Elvis, once past his initial anger over Priscilla’s betrayal, slipped into a frightening decline. The maids at Graceland noticed that he lay around much of the time, exhibiting “a lot of depressed feelings and loneliness,” as Nancy Rooks stated it. “There was a lot of talk about his mother. On Mother’s Day he would cry. He wanted her picture by his bed.” The catalyst was Priscilla’s departure: “He thought they should always be together.” Elvis and Red West wrote, and Elvis recorded, the song “Separate Ways” that year, a transparently autobiographical account of his breakup with Priscilla. Ricky Stanley, who was a teenager by then and traveled with Elvis as a personal valet,
witnessed the devastation firsthand. “I was with him every moment of that divorce. I mean, I slept [on] a cot in the bedroom.” The breakup “wiped him out,” said Ricky. “Mainly at first, he was hurt by it all. And then you kinda go through different phases. He went through phases of anger, betrayal, anger, and then ‘Hey, it’s me.’ ”

For all his womanizing, Elvis cherished the institution of marriage and the
illusion
, at least, of a family. Barbara Leigh had ended her affair with him just the previous fall, because, ironically, she believed “he never would have left Priscilla.” Elvis, who had such a complicated moral and spiritual code, was no less complex with respect to his marriage. “He really did say to me, ‘I don’t think I was the marrying kind,’ ” averred Kathy Westmoreland. “He felt that he shouldn’t have ever married.” Elvis married Priscilla, almost certainly, to honor the promise he had made to her parents when she was seventeen; once wed, he believed it was until “death do us part.” The divorce left him torn. “He was worried about what was going to happen to Lisa,” said Kathy. “He worried about the baby. He vacillated between ‘he wants a divorce, the whole thing is a nightmare’ and ‘it was against the way that he was brought up—once you are married, it’s forever’ and knowing he felt like a failure.” A common feeling, among people who knew him, was that Elvis belonged to the world, not to any one woman, which may have been the heaviest burden of his supernatural fame—and the source of his epic loneliness.

A great many of those close to Elvis regarded Priscilla’s affair with Mike Stone and her decision to divorce Elvis as the trigger for the physical deterioration that led to his death at age forty-two in 1977, five years later. “She left Elvis and left him on this terrible spin that I think was the beginning of the end with him,” declared Barbara Leigh, who maintained contact with Elvis. The star’s loyal fans, who were not fond of Priscilla anyway, did not desert him or think less of him after she rejected him for another man, as Elvis feared they might; rather, the breakup calcified their disdain for Priscilla, for they held her personally responsible for their idol’s physical and emotional deterioration. A number of Elvis’s girlfriends, even those who had experienced his double standard and idiosyncrasies, shared the public’s opinion that Priscilla had let Elvis down, abandoned him, failed to fulfill her end of their marriage contract. “She couldn’t deal with it,” Barbara Leigh said flatly. “She cheated on him. He cheated on her. Listen,
when you are married to the King, come on, expect him to be faithful? I mean, she knew what he was when she married him.” Even Willie Jane, who was sympathetic to Priscilla, allowed that Priscilla was aware she would never have a normal life with Elvis: “that was impossible and should have been
understood
by her.” Priscilla had dated Elvis for seven years before she married him, and she had lived with him for four of those years. There were no surprises after the wedding; Elvis remained quintessentially Elvis. She should not have married him if she wasn’t willing to honor that commitment, particularly since she and her parents had forced his hand. So the fans’ argument went. “I don’t think I would have divorced him like Priscilla did,” Anita Wood confided, “because I knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t going to change. And there were girls everywhere all the time. Why should that change just because he got married? I think he would have always come back to her and loved her, if she had hung in there. But I guess you do what you have to do.” Barbara Leigh had little sympathy for the story Priscilla would later tell of her hellish life with Elvis: “I think she tries to paint herself as this saint, as the good one in the picture, when I know, in truth, that she broke his heart forever.” Ed Hookstratten, who handled the divorce, held Priscilla responsible as well. “After that, Elvis … started to slide,” he said. “And after that, he slid and slid, until he finally died. [The divorce] was the turning point, and I was close to that situation.… I saw it with my own eyes.” Sheila Ryan Caan didn’t believe that Elvis lost the great love of his life so much as “he wanted to present an image to the world, and being left by his wife wasn’t one of the things that he really wanted to present as his image. And I think that’s what
really
killed him. I mean, obviously you don’t love a woman if you sleep with every woman in your path. That’s not love.” Strangely, Linda Thompson, another of Elvis’s girlfriends, would remember Elvis telling her how his mama had warned him to “beware of the blue-eyed woman,” and both Linda and Barbara said that Elvis’s mother advised him to marry a girl with brown eyes. Many of Elvis’s fans saw Priscilla as the blue-eyed woman of Gladys Presley’s apocalyptic prophecy. Yet Barbara Leigh would admit that Elvis “led a hard life. Living with those guys, eating that kind of food. After a while the glamour wears off and the real man comes out. Which is wonderful. I loved
him, to the end, still do. But the glamour of the life wears off. And it’s hard. It’s a really hard life.”