Child Bride (46 page)

When Elvis and Priscilla were around Lisa, they both pretended that nothing had changed. That wasn’t difficult to do, Priscilla said later, for Elvis was so often gone. Lisa, who was four when they separated, was not aware that her parents were getting a divorce. Priscilla and Elvis did have vastly different parenting styles. Priscilla was determined to teach Lisa the value of a dollar, to impose some form of discipline so she would not become spoiled; Elvis furnished her room at Graceland with a round canopy bed covered with faux fur and bought her diamond rings. Lisa, at Graceland, was akin to Eloise at the Plaza. “She would just tell us what she wanted,” recalled Elvis’s cook, Mary Jenkins. “One time she said, ‘I want a different cake every day of the week, but don’t tell Mama—she’ll put me on a diet.’ ” Priscilla had Elvis return the jewels and furs he had bought for Lisa. “Priscilla was the stabilizing factor,” said Rick Stanley. “You can count on her. She was predictable. You knew what she was gonna do. And that child needed that.”

Even after Priscilla left Elvis, there was still a bond between them. Priscilla, at least, considered that “it worked out actually better, because then [Lisa and I] could pick our times to be with him. It was actually a better relationship.” She told
Life
, years after he died, that to Elvis she was “like this kid he had raised.” Like a father, Elvis had mixed feelings about the child he had brought up leaving home. “When I first spoke to him, he was resigned to the fact [that the divorce] was inevitable,” said Kathy Westmoreland. “And then he vacillated between ‘She has to have her own life and be happy’ and being jealous and angry at the way that it happened.”

Elvis did not view Priscilla as his romantic one and only, for George Klein, by that spring, was arranging for him to meet Cybill Shepherd, whom George knew from years earlier, when she won the Miss Teen-Age Memphis pageant. Cybill, in 1972, was twenty-three, at the height of her movie-star glamour, several years after
The Last Picture Show
and just before the release of
The Heartbreak Kid.
“She was in town,” said George. “I mentioned it to Elvis, I mentioned it to Cybill, she said of course she’d like to meet him. She’d just broken up with Peter Bogdanovich, so I took her to Elvis. It was no big romance. Elvis really enjoyed her personality. She’s … quick.” She was also, according to Ricky Stanley, extremely adventurous and aggressive,
sexually and otherwise. Ricky remembered Elvis’s slightly startled reaction after he left Cybill’s place at the Saint James on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. “Let’s put it this way,” she said once. “I think that before I met him, he was sexually conservative, trapped in a stupid macho thing.” The romance was torrid but brief. Cybill returned to Bogdanovich, and Elvis again embraced his old-fashioned southern sexual mores. “I couldn’t handle the whole thing with the pills,” said Cybill. “Pills to go to sleep. Pills to wake up. I think that lifestyle limits you.” Elvis reconnected with Ann-Margret after one of her performances in Vegas that year. He called her late that night while she was in bed with her husband, Roger Smith, hinting that he wanted her to come to his room. Ann declined.

Priscilla and Mike further solidified their love relationship late in March when Fran Stone filed for divorce and Mike moved in with Priscilla and Lisa at their Marina del Rey apartment. By June, Fran had been awarded custody of the Stones’ two small daughters, and Mike was a free man. A few weeks later Elvis was introduced to a tall, long-legged former Tennessee beauty queen named Linda Thompson—another George Klein fix-up—who would become his permanent live-in girlfriend. She was not the great beauty Priscilla was—Linda had the requisite long brown hair, but had a coarser, flashier appeal—though she was a virgin and, some believed, the most compatible of all Elvis’s inamoratas. “She was really good for him,” said Kathy, who spent a great deal of time around Elvis and Linda. “He laughed a lot with her. She was an intellectual and she was a poetess and enjoyed music to an extent. She had an understanding about the artistic side, and was very into metaphysical stuff. They had a good friendship.” Ricky stressed that “Elvis’s thing was not a sexual encounter. Elvis’s thing was
companionship
, he wanted somebody around.” Linda comprehended and accepted this, and put in her time.

It was Elvis who filed for divorce from Priscilla on August 18, 1972, six months after their final encounter in Las Vegas, though the instigator was clearly Priscilla. “He did not want the divorce,” asserted Ed Hookstratten, who filed the petition for Elvis. “But then he agreed to it, apparently from the discussions they were having, and he agreed to do it with taste and style.” Priscilla had been pressing for the divorce since February, and was about to go to Hawaii with Mike. She wanted the divorce from Elvis handled quickly—like their wedding, it could be said.
Her subsequent attorney, Arthur Toll, said Elvis wanted to initiate the proceedings “to save his persona.” Priscilla acquiesced to this request blindly, as she acquiesced blindly to virtually anything and everything that was presented or suggested to her in connection with the divorce, for she was naive, ignorant, and she desperately wanted out of her marriage to Elvis Presley.

She and Elvis discussed the settlement at what was to have been their dream house, on Monovale, in July, in a textbook example of the blind leading the blind. Elvis, who had no concept of money and even less interest in it, tossed out the ludicrous figure of $100,000 to Priscilla, who kept insisting she “wanted nothing.” What happened next is a point of dispute between Priscilla and Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s lawyer. Hookstratten’s version: “What basically happened was very simple. She had a boyfriend and she wanted a divorce, so she and Elvis worked out what they thought was fair. I was called to the house and said it was not fair, you are going to have to do more for her. And so they went back to work and the next day sent me a sheet of paper [showing their settlement figures], in which this was fair.

All right?” Priscilla later claimed that Elvis told her $100,000

was “more than some people could make in a lifetime.… I thought I was going to be taken care of.” Bob Wall, who became close to Priscilla during her romance with Mike, observed that, “To her, $100,000 was a billion. She had no concept [of money].”

Elvis and Ed Hookstratten asked Priscilla, after the original offer was extended, to calculate her monthly expenses so they could arrive at a settlement figure that would cover her financial needs. At the time, she had never even opened a checkbook, much less looked at a balance statement. Priscilla went to her friend Joan, who remembered that “she would say to me, ‘You pay the bills. How much does it cost you to live?’ She was trying to figure out a budget. She had no idea.… She couldn’t have known how much it cost for groceries; she never bought them.… [There were] always twelve to fifteen people at meals. It was open house. And I had a three-bedroom house over in Beverlywood, nothing ostentatious; a maid came once a week, but it was very middle class. And so I showed her my books and took out the little ledger: ‘This is what it costs me. The gas, the insurance. Yours is going to have to be more. Lisa’s probably going to have private school …’ She had no concept. She couldn’t have. And I tried to help her in that way.”

The revised settlement amount, arrived at and mutually agreed to a few days later, on July 19, included the original $100,000, to be paid to Priscilla in cash, tax-free; $50,000 up front; and $50,000 within a year, in addition to her new 1971 Mercedes, a 1969 El Dorado, and a 1971 Harley. Elvis also agreed to furnish Priscilla’s apartment and to cover her monthly living expenses for the next five years, which she had budgeted at $1,000 a month. Lisa was to receive $500 a month in child support plus tuition, health care, and health and life insurance, along with Elvis’s pledge that he would always take care of them.

Ed Hookstratten prepared the marital termination agreement and had it ready for Priscilla to sign on August 15, as she requested, just before her scheduled trip to Hawaii with Mike Stone. On that date he sent the settlement agreement and Priscilla to another attorney in his building, Robert Brock, for a quick meeting before she signed it, so it would be clear that she understood what she was doing. The “consultation” with Brock was cursory at best, for he barely had time to glance over the document, nor did he discuss it at any length with Priscilla. Priscilla, however, had repeatedly made it clear that she did not want anything from Elvis. Mike Stone occasionally would ask her about the houses, the cars, the clothes … all the riches she was giving up by divorcing Elvis Presley, “and she said, ‘At no point in our relationship did I ever feel that any of the things were mine. They were always
his
things. I never felt like I shared in any of his life anyway.’ She said, ‘I could walk away from this right now with what I have—and what I have is mine, and what is back there is his.’ ”

“I did not go in there looking for something that was extraordinary,” Priscilla confirmed later. “I didn’t go in there to sink him. I didn’t go in there to rip him off. I wanted to do this amicably.” She wanted
out
at any cost.

Rona Barrett, who had broken the news of Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding before it even happened, now announced their impending divorce on her television broadcast on July 13, a month before Elvis actually filed the petition. A week earlier, gossip Joyce Haber had reported the breakup in her column as a blind item, hinting that the wife of a superstar singer had more than a “casual interest” in her karate instructor. The coming months, in some ways the happiest of Priscilla’s life according to Mike, were also, by her own description, “her struggle.” Priscilla telephoned Elvis from Hawaii during her holiday with Mike, according
to a later affidavit filed in the divorce, telling him they’d had a fight and that she might want to come back. The argument with Mike blew over, but it signaled Priscilla’s confused emotional state.

When the movers drove up to her new little apartment with some of her belongings, Priscilla stood in the living room, “watching them set down the cartons, thinking, My God! Can I
do
this alone?” She was having an anxiety attack. Since July, when the Joyce Haber column had hit newspapers with a reference to her affair with Mike Stone, Priscilla had become the pariah of the Elvis world. “I had no idea the bigness of what I had encountered. The world loved this man. The world
loves
this man. And I was looked at, at that time, as the traitor. And no one really looked at it from [my] point of view.” She saw herself as a victim of circumstance.“ ‘She’s this,’ ‘She’s that’—and knowing you are not that way. So you realize you have to move on in life. The moving on that I did was to survive.” Priscilla eventually stopped taking Lisa to the supermarket, for the divorce was the cover story of every tabloid. “The media blew everything so out of proportion. I felt like a little pea in this big world [that was] condemning me.… All I wanted was my life. I had no idea the impact [the divorce] was going to make.” Priscilla eventually started taping her phone calls, because she got some threats. “I had no idea that it would be that ominous. Getting death threats from fans all over the world, that I had broken his heart. And I got threats for
marrying
him! No matter what I did, I was condemned. It was a no-win situation.”

Priscilla did not feel responsible for Elvis’s subsequent deterioration. “If there was any way of making things work out, it would have been great. But unfortunately, it didn’t. It was a different time. Not that I grieve about it, you know. I mean Elvis was his own worst enemy. Elvis had a lot of demons that he carried with him. And when you are living with a person who is like that … Listen, his own
father
couldn’t get through to him. He had a lot of baggage that he brought into our marriage.” Priscilla, by leaving Elvis, was looking out for
Priscilla
, a survival skill she would advocate, two decades later, for other wives in similar situations. “I don’t want to be portrayed as a victim. I’m not a victim. And I think that’s the worst thing one can do. I want women to know the worst thing you can do is be a victim. Because then you’ve submitted. Then you’ve given [up] hope. You have got to be strong, know there is a way out, know there
is a solution. But once you become a victim, that’s it. You are no good to anybody. Your children, your husband, your future. And I’m sorry, I can’t take the victim route. There is a way out; it may take a while, but there is a light at the end, but you have to have the right attitude, too, and know that there is.”

She was not nearly so triumphant in the autumn of 1972, when her divorce was finalized. Phylliss Mann, who had helped Priscilla decorate the Monovale house in Bel Air the year before, was stunned to see the ex-wife of Elvis Presley living in a modest two-bedroom apartment in a singles complex in west L.A., and even more aghast when she learned the decorating budget her client allotted. “All of her furniture she got from Levitz,” recalled Olivia Bis, the young fashion designer who owned Priscilla’s favorite Beverly Hills boutique. “Which really astounded me.” To say that Priscilla was caught by surprise at her financial struggles as a single mother and divorcée was “an understatement,” declared Phylliss.

She began casting about for something to do with her time and energy, now that she was not constrained by Elvis’s dictates, and she approached Olivia about taking on a partner in her clothing store. “At the time,” said Olivia, “I was going through a lot of financial problems. I was more an artist; I was not a businessperson, and I had something happen with the IRS in which they had closed me up.” Priscilla offered to buy into Olivia’s boutique, thereby keeping Olivia from going out of business and providing Priscilla with an identity. Olivia needed $7,000 to keep the IRS at bay and to bring Priscilla in as a full partner. “And so she looked at me and said, ‘You know what? I’m going to get the money from my lawyer, and I’m not going to tell him anything. I’m just going to tell him I want to open a business.’ ” The lawyer in question was Elvis’s attorney, Ed Hookstratten, whom Priscilla asked for start-up money for her boutique.