Child Bride (48 page)

Priscilla, defending her decision to sue Elvis, claimed years later that she heard from the “inner circle” that Elvis’s strategy in giving her $100,000 was that “I’d run out of money and have to crawl back to him,” a charge Jerry Schilling denied. Jerry attributed the small settlement to “very bad advice” and said Elvis did not knowingly shortchange Priscilla. “Elvis was not a stingy person, especially when it came to Priscilla, especially the mother of his child, whom [Lisa] was going to be living with.” Priscilla later admitted that Elvis never refused her anything,
even after their divorce, and ultimately gave her $10,000, a ridiculously high sum in those days, to decorate her tiny apartment. “He’d send a thousand dollars just because—for nothing. Or mink coats, this and that.” However generous Elvis was, Priscilla was not happy, for this arrangement defeated her purpose in leaving, which was to resume control of her own life. “I didn’t want to keep going to Elvis for money every month. That’s bad control.… So no, I couldn’t do that. Then I would not have my life.”

Arthur Toll, Priscilla’s newly retained divorce attorney, did not dispute that Elvis would have continued to provide for Priscilla; his perspective was that she needed legal protection to
ensure
that he would. “Who knows what could happen to him?” There followed what Priscilla later described as a “tense period,” as her lawyer and Elvis’s representatives renegotiated her divorce settlement. Elvis’s side balked, finding it “insulting,” Toll hypothesized, “to think that he wouldn’t take care of her. His father’s stance was generally ‘Elvis would take care of everything, don’t hassle him, leave him alone.’ And [Elvis] was very fond of Priscilla, and … he didn’t want to hurt anything; he just wanted everything left alone.… I just couldn’t see that it was to her best interests.”

Toll decided to press ahead with a lawsuit to set aside the original divorce settlement, and Priscilla agreed, claiming extrinsic fraud on the part of Elvis and his lawyer. To support her claim, she filed an affidavit explaining in detail that she had moved in with Elvis at sixteen [
sic
], that she knew nothing about his finances, and that she had in effect been manipulated into signing what she was told and believed was a fair settlement. It also alleged that Elvis’s true net worth had been concealed from her. Ed Hookstratten was still incensed more than twenty years later. “They phonied up an affidavit. She filed a scathing affidavit against me, [saying] that I used duress and all that baloney, and it was a joke. I didn’t use duress at all. [Elvis and Priscilla] were the ones who came to an agreement, in the master bedroom in their house in Holmby Hills. [The alleged duress] was not true. [Priscilla] got led down a path by an attorney and an interior designer. It was a disgrace.” Arthur Toll dismissed Hookstratten’s grousing and Priscilla’s affidavit, as “the dynamics of litigation.… Ed Hookstratten had already advised Elvis and Priscilla that this was fair, and he didn’t want to come along [later] and say it wasn’t.”

The divorce and Priscilla’s adultery had been enough to immobilize Elvis; now her affidavit lifted the veil on her hidden years at Graceland as his teenage concubine, in addition to suggesting that he tried to defraud her out of her fair share of his marital property. This caused a fresh scandal that made its way to movie magazines, resulting in headlines such as “Priscilla Charges Elvis Tricked Her! Intimate Secrets Spilled in Sizzling Courtroom Battle!” Despite the bad press and Priscilla’s decision to sue Elvis for fraud, recalled Harry Fain, the divorce lawyer Elvis hired to defend him and Ed Hookstratten, “I honestly must say that I don’t think … I ever heard a single word of criticism [from Elvis] with respect to Priscilla.” Ed Hookstratten was less charitable. “I did not have a lot of respect for her after she filed that affidavit. Because she knew exactly what she’d said and done and what she wanted. And what she was up to.” Arthur Toll, Priscilla’s lawyer, said, “I’m sure Ed did tell her [what she was entitled to], but he didn’t make it very clear. I think it was a pro forma operation. She clearly didn’t understand what her rights were, not only technically but what was involved financially; she didn’t know. She had no concept of what was reasonable under the circumstances. She didn’t know what the law was and community property. She knows it meant split something, but she didn’t know exactly what.” Harry Fain, who took Priscilla’s deposition, perpetuated the legal Ping-Pong game years later. “There was no doubt that Priscilla was the very person who asked for and received what she wanted.” There was no fraud involved, he insisted. In Fain’s opinion, the agreement was not as lopsided as it appeared, since Elvis and Priscilla were married only five years, and much of his wealth derived from music royalties dating from before the wedding, making them his separate property. Priscilla’s financial ignorance was evident in her deposition, where she referred to the value of the Hillcrest house—$350,000—as “thirty-five hundred thousand,” a figure that does not exist.

That spring, as her lawyer continued discovery, Priscilla and Olivia celebrated the grand opening of their new boutique, Bis & Beau, with a champagne party. Phylliss Mann, who had decorated the store in a Victorian style, described the fashions, some of which Priscilla helped conceive, as “elegant rags,” long, flowing, romantic dresses and bare-midriffed hip-hugger pants, heavily fringed. The attention the store received—it was packed with the curious, eager to see the schoolgirl Elvis Presley had
kept secreted at Graceland all those years—taught Priscilla an invaluable lesson about the commercial potential of the surname she had just relinquished. She later told
Working Woman
, “I realized that it wasn’t the clothes people wanted to see—it was me. They would come in the store and ask for Priscilla. They wanted to see what Elvis saw in me. That left a big impact on me. I saw then that there was a lot of interest in him.” That lesson, and the folly of her blind compliance in the original divorce settlement, burned themselves into Priscilla’s brain.

Not all of the publicity the ex-Mrs. Presley received was positive, of course, particularly among Elvis loyalists. The
Memphis Commercial Appeal
ran a photo story of Priscilla modeling bathing suits from her boutique that May, describing her as “neither an actress nor a model,” and noting, critically, that one would think being Elvis’s wife would be enough.

Priscilla was coloring her long hair a light henna now, abandoning her blond streaks, and she purchased a white Excalibur to complement her new image. Taking a cue from the response to the grand opening, she and Olivia decided to grant an interview with Priscilla to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, her first public profile, hoping to boost sales in Bis & Beau, for the two partners still had little money and even less practical business knowledge. Olivia recalled the two of them taking Priscilla’s Excalibur downtown to the garment center to buy fabric, “so we buy all this fabric, but where are we going to put it? It doesn’t fit [into the car]. So I had to drive back and pick up my station wagon and go back. And then when I did, I forgot to bring my I.D.” She said, “We realized at one point that we weren’t making any money, [and] … 
Ladies’ Home Journal
wanted to do a story on her.… She didn’t want to do that, but she decided that she would do it as long as it advertised the store.” Priscilla made the decision to begin calling herself Priscilla Beaulieu
Presley
, keenly aware now of the commercial value of Elvis’s name. “We needed the exposure,” admitted Olivia. “And that’s basically why she did it.”

For Priscilla, who was trained to keep secrets, and struggling as well to protect Elvis’s privacy, the interview with
Ladies’ Home Journal
was nerve-racking. The piece, published in August 1973, was Priscilla’s coming-out. The magazine described her, appropriately, as Hollywood’s “best-kept secret,” the “mystery woman” in Elvis’s life. She followed it with appearances on
The Merv Griffin Show
and
Donahue
, anything to promote
her business, even though it was a form of personal torture for Priscilla, who was still mortified at speaking in public. “It was the first time she’d ever been on TV, being interviewed,” recalled Olivia, who watched from backstage, “and … Merv Griffin couldn’t get a word out of her. He would ask her questions, and she would answer yes or no, and the producer was sitting back with us and she was like, ‘Come on, Priscilla, say something!’ ” When Priscilla and Olivia appeared on
Donahue
, promoting their fashions—the first of several appearances—Priscilla was accused by a heckler of using Elvis’s name to promote herself. “She didn’t know she was going to be interviewed by the audience,” said Olivia, “and they were really mean. Really mean. She was very poised. She wasn’t defensive or anything. She handled it very well.” Priscilla and Olivia’s media campaign paid off in sales: The boutique, which was now located on Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills, soon began attracting a celebrity clientele that included Michelle Phillips, Suzanne Pleshette, Natalie Wood, Diana Ross, Jill Ireland, Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Dyan Cannon, and Victoria Principal.

After all her years of frustration and boredom with Elvis’s spiritual search, Priscilla began, ironically, “looking for a church” for herself and Lisa. “After the divorce, I really felt that Lisa needed something, I needed something.” As a child, she had never related to Catholicism, Paul Beaulieu’s religion. Priscilla wanted something
tangible
, when the essence of religion is faith. “I hated Catechism because there was [sic] never any answers. It was always ‘Trust me.’ It just didn’t make sense. Is there a God? ‘Just believe there is a God.’ So it didn’t work.… The service was in Latin, and you don’t [sic] even understand what they are saying. And … you keep going to confession. It wasn’t answering—it wasn’t giving me [what] I needed as an individual.” She “dabbled,” by her description, in Elvis’s philosophies, but “I just didn’t really get involved with any of them.” The only religion Elvis studied that interested Priscilla, even slightly, was Buddhism, for its “strong ethic and moral value,” though she “found something missing.” She considered Buddhism “very much for self—not that I minded.” Priscilla was looking for something “realistic,” she said at the time, and she began “toying with the idea” of Science of the Mind. The impetus, according to Olivia, was Michelle Beaulieu, who was living with Priscilla by then. “Her sister was involved with a guru, and so, through her sister, she was curious and had been
interested in that. She was involved in the Eastern religions.” During this phase, Priscilla also became a vegetarian.

In her interviews to promote Bis & Beau, Priscilla continued the ruse she had begun at thirteen, identifying Paul Beaulieu as her father, concealing James Wagner, her real father. She also began publicizing
her
account of her original meeting with Elvis, telling Mike Douglas and others how Currie Grant, a complete stranger, had approached
her
for an introduction to Elvis Presley in Germany—the raw beginnings of what would become the Priscilla-and-Elvis myth. Mike Stone would later hint at an inner torment he observed in Priscilla. Despite his descriptions of their relationship as joyful and happy, there was always something dark, he perceived, lurking just below the surface with Priscilla. He remembered taking her to a karate tournament once, where they encountered a female friend of Mike’s who picked up feelings and insights and whom Mike considered psychic. She took Priscilla’s hand and later told Mike, “That girl will never be happy.” Mike later said, “I’ve thought of it many times, and I think that’s somewhat true. I’ve known Priscilla in a lot of ways that other people don’t know her. There is a lot of anxiety there. And I don’t know what different things are there that are twisting at her. But she’s lived a very unique life.”

Elvis’s demons were more visible. Barbara Leigh, who had not seen the star since their breakup in the fall of 1971, shortly before Priscilla left him, was shocked by the changes when she visited him at the Hilton in Las Vegas in the summer of 1973, less than two years later. Elvis was alarmingly bloated and dependent upon his prescription pills to fall asleep, to wake up, and to stay alert once he was awake. “He didn’t do drugs when I knew him,” said Barbara, speaking of 1970 and 1971. “He just did his downers.” Although Linda Thompson was out of town, Elvis did not take advantage of her absence to take Barbara to bed. “I don’t think he was interested in [sex],” she said. “He was lonesome and just wanted to talk and catch up and see me. We just did our normal spiritual stuff.”

Elvis was still tortured to the point of being deranged over losing Priscilla to Mike Stone. He was apprehensive about others thinking “he wasn’t man enough to keep his woman,” as Barbara put it. He continued to make threatening calls to Priscilla occasionally. “He called me at my shop, at Bis & Beau, and told me—just heavy breathing,” Priscilla recalled. “It was an
obsession
, almost, you know? ‘You’ve done this to me, you
broke my family up. [Mike Stone will be] dead, he’s gone, in front of your eyes.’ And then [he would] make the same call early in the morning, while I was sleeping. He’d wake me up with a phone call: ‘Just remember, he’s going to be dead.’ I mean, he was talking insane.” Priscilla later said she lived in fear.
“Living
it and watching every move that one makes, especially if you believe [the death threat], and you know that there is anger, and anger promotes whatever: I knew he had an obsession with guns, I knew that he was very unpredictable, depending on what state of mind he was in.…”

On the other hand, remembered Olivia, Elvis would send flowers to Priscilla at the boutique. “And the next day he would call. He would have given her anything she wanted. He had a real rough time with it. He was very hurt.” Priscilla did not discuss the death threats with Olivia, nor did she mention anything to Lisa. “Never,” she stressed later. “Never. I never put anything on her,
never.”
Barbara attributed Elvis’s erratic behavior and increasing dependence on prescription drugs, quite simply, to Priscilla; she believed that he was slowly dying of a broken heart. “She killed Elvis. That was the beginning. I believe that and I always will.”