Child Bride (64 page)

How much, really, did Priscilla have to do with the estate’s dramatic success story? Less, probably, than the hype would suggest but more than her critics would give her credit for. “If you’ve ever read
The Prince
by Machiavelli,” suggested Beecher Smith, counsel for the estate, “he says there are three types of intelligence. There’s the first, which is both intelligent and learned; the second, which is intelligent but not learned; and the third, which is neither intelligent nor learned. I would say she is—Let’s face it: We are all ignorant about something. I don’t know how sophisticated Priscilla is from the education standpoint, but she seems to have shown very good judgment in picking the people to help her with her management and in putting together a management team. And of course they all keep her advised. You can’t argue with results. The results have turned out to be excellent. I’ve seen what she’s done and how she’s done it. And it’s interesting to watch her go from being a divorcée and a young lady who was just kind of finding her way in the world a couple of years before Elvis died, to where she is today. Very impressive. I think it comes from getting good advice.” Smith likened Priscilla, as chair of Elvis Presley Enterprises, to a politician perusing reports from advisers who have distilled the complexities to the bottom line for her review. “Priscilla can read a financial statement as well as anybody else. Read and look at where things are going and know who is getting things there. And that’s how she makes her decisions. She monitors the progress of various people at different levels. She comes in and spends as much time as needs to be spent in Memphis or L.A., reviewing operations, and then she and the board of directors at Elvis Presley Enterprises make decisions.”

The dark side of this corporate aggressiveness on the part of Elvis Presley Enterprises began to manifest itself by 1987. One of the first to suffer the cold brutality of Priscilla’s and Jack Soden’s business decisions was Joe Esposito. “I wanted to do a video,” said Joe. He had taken home movies of Elvis over the years and had begun piecing the footage together into a video of “Elvis, not on stage performing, just being himself. Great videos.” He discussed the project with Priscilla and the administrators of the estate. “They kept fighting me,” he recalled. Elvis Presley Enterprises had decided that, since Elvis allegedly asked Joe to shoot the home movies, they belonged to the estate, not to Joe. “I was going to make a deal with them.” In the midst of the discussions, Joe accepted an invitation to speak at an Elvis convention in New Jersey. While he was at the convention, he was served with a subpoena. “I went to talk about my friend Elvis Presley, and I got sued by the estate. Which really got me upset. And I realized Priscilla is suing me.
Priscilla
and Lisa are suing me! I’d known Elvis Presley since 1959. Is that thirty-eight years I’d known him? And that’s how I get paid back.” The Presley estate went forward with the litigation, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement with Joe. “Cost me a fortune,” he said. The experience forever altered Joe Esposito’s perception of Priscilla, who, he had believed at first, was simply being misadvised. In truth, he decided, Priscilla hid behind that explanation, for the final decision was hers. “She uses people. She’s Miss Innocent, but she’s the one in charge. She’s a tough person. She’s got a lot tougher in later years.”

Joe had the sympathy of a battery of female supporters, including Barbara Leigh and Sheila Ryan Caan, who deemed Priscilla’s actions betrayal and greed of the highest order. “They were Joe’s movies,” insisted Sheila, who considered Joe “one of the kindest, softest, best human beings you’ll ever meet. Priscilla said, ‘Well, the lawyers told me, the lawyers told me …’ The lawyers
told
her? She’s not an idiot. She could have helped him out. And that I find
inexcusable.”
Cindy Esposito, Lisa’s childhood friend, could not believe that Priscilla was suing her dad. “I mean, how much money do you need?” she wondered.

Priscilla, during this period, began accumulating enemies and a reputation for ruthlessness. The estate became embroiled in a lawsuit against Ginger Alden’s mother, who claimed Elvis had promised to pay the mortgage on her holdings, and Priscilla began soliciting witnesses to testify against Mrs. Alden. Elvis Presley
Enterprises evicted Linda Thompson’s elderly parents from a modest home Elvis had purchased for them. The Thompsons had a letter from Elvis stating that the house was theirs. Linda, who had not protested when Priscilla kept her off the plane en route to Elvis’s funeral, could not constrain her fury. “I wonder how Priscilla would like it if I filed a palimony suit? It’s just like with the plane scene,” she told Lamar Fike. “She expected me to say, ‘Mama and Daddy, get out of the house,’ because I didn’t try to make her let me get on the plane.’ ” Linda and several of the entourage toyed with the idea of distributing the pictures Elvis had taken of Priscilla with one of her female lovers “in a compromising position” to retaliate. “Why would a multimillion-dollar estate care about $250 a month [for my parents’ house payments]?” she queried. “I wonder what Priscilla ever did for Elvis except take him for two million dollars.” Ginger Alden found it offensive that Priscilla “acts more like a widow than an ex-wife. She was out of the picture for quite a while, and I certainly don’t think Elvis would be happy that she has been in charge of the estate.”

Ginger’s comment was the prevailing opinion among the members of Elvis’s entourage. They were like a dysfunctional family brawling over Daddy’s will, which had come under the control of the wicked stepmother. Jack Soden, Priscilla’s estate alter ego, characterized Elvis’s aides as “people who seem to blame the world because Elvis died and forced them to confront their lives and get jobs.” Priscilla described three of them as “total has-beens and leeches of another mentality that I don’t quite understand,” stuck in a “time warp.” Rick Stanley, who overcame a severe drug problem and became a minister after Elvis’s death, agreed with Priscilla that some members of the entourage, who had taken the low road with exploitive books, were “greedy gutless wonders.” On the other hand, Rick himself felt displaced, almost orphaned, after Elvis Presley died, for the entourage had become a family of sorts. “Everybody scattered around. You know, that really wounded me, ’cause I was there with these guys when their children were being born. And I was really torn up. [Elvis] was my life—big brother, best friend, everything.” Priscilla, as executrix, was a divisive rather than a unifying force. She created resentment over her control of the money, and she made Elvis’s entourage feel left out. Red West, by 1996, had no real interest in talking about her. “We’re not too close,” he explained, “on her part, I guess. We have no animosity toward her, but she’s my son’s godmother, and he
hasn’t heard from her since the christening—and he’s twenty-four years old.”

The great disappointment, for the entourage—a heartache, really—seemed to be the realization that Priscilla was
not
Elvis and never would be, even though she had assumed that parental and fiduciary role. “Elvis,” said Joe, “was the type of person, if you had a friend, should always be a friend. And she doesn’t even talk to them anymore. It’s more like business, making a dollar, making herself a big star. I think she’s got really wrapped up in all that. He wasn’t really wrapped up in being a big star as much as she is.” The difference, distilled to a single concept, was that Elvis came from the heart, whereas Priscilla reacted with her mind. That, in essence, was why Elvis’s religious quest had led him to ponder, endlessly, the deepest spiritual questions and Priscilla’s took her first to Science of the Mind, finally to Scientology.

It was “totally unfair,” argued Priscilla’s brother-in-law, Gary Hovey, a member of the estate management team, to paint Priscilla as “this bad person.” He perceived her as a businesswoman doing her job. “She was in a tough situation with people she’s known a long time, who felt that they should get something—jobs or whatever—and that wasn’t easy for her. This is a business and look what it’s turned into.” Priscilla herself seemed wounded by the suggestion that she would be so “petty” as to exact revenge on Ginger or Linda, and denied she had anything to do with the estate’s decision to sue for possession of their parents’ homes.

It was not just Elvis’s ex-girlfriends and aides who criticized the Presley estate’s aggressive tactics. Elvis Presley Enterprises (known as EPE) began to acquire a barracudalike image to go along with its reputation as a well-run, profitable machine. In 1989, EPE threatened to sue the producers of
Designing Women
for an episode in which the characters visited Graceland. Filmmakers hoping to make a movie about Elvis or his music dared not go forward without the approval, and the control, of the estate, without risking costly litigation. Vendors could no longer sell merchandise depicting Elvis in any shape or form without paying a fee to the estate. Lawsuits initiated by EPE proliferated throughout the early 1990s, occasionally extending to the ridiculous. While arguments were advanced that Priscilla and Jack Soden were protecting Elvis’s image—and in the majority of cases, they probably were—critics found this obsessive control
and profit-mongering in stark contrast to the very spirit of Elvis that his fans worshiped. The idea persisted that Elvis Presley belonged to the world, not to the estate or even to Lisa—and certainly not to Priscilla.

A fresh controversy sprang up in the early 1990s, when two events occurred. Lisa—who turned twenty-five on February 1, 1993, the age at which Elvis’s estate was to be distributed to her under the terms of his will—decided to keep her mother’s management team, and the estate, in place indefinitely. Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s ex-wife, and Jack Soden, a self-admitted non-Presley fan, thus became the permanent symbols of Elvis, in control of his estate, image, and likeness, in conceivably lifetime positions. The reason for Lisa’s decision was obvious. She had no interest in the inner workings of the estate; her mother and Soden were making more money than anyone had ever dreamed of; and Lisa had the power to dismantle the operation if she so chose. Soden explained that “there’s a new trust that will stay in place as long as she wants it to. When she wants to change it, she can, and she should.” After her twenty-fifth birthday, Lisa would appear, obligatorily, at an occasional meeting of the estate management team, “clearly bored to death” at times, said Soden. “She looks like a kid in Latin class. There are parts where she dives in, because it’s something she likes, and it’s something she’s interested in … like a company that has proposed an idea for a television show.”

The second hot-button development, in early 1990, was Priscilla’s decision to restructure the management of the estate, resulting in a power struggle. The architect of the change was Jack Soden. He described himself as a “peacemaker,” but others characterized him as a despot who manipulated Priscilla into creating an even greater power base for him at EPE. “Anybody with knowledge and foresight,” complained one insider, “he will start a campaign to get rid of.” Soden persuaded Priscilla to “streamline” the management of the estate. As part of the purge, Priscilla and Jack removed Joseph Hanks, the Presley accountant and a coexecutor; Fletcher Haaga, who represented the Memphis bank; Joe Rascoff, a New York music attorney; and Jerry Schilling. In the process, Jack Soden became CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises, with Priscilla as president.

Jerry Schilling, who had become almost as close a friend to Priscilla as he had been to Elvis, had worked with Priscilla on her miniseries and had been running the music division of EPE.
It was he, said Jerry, who negotiated with RCA to release the royalties to Elvis’s records, a source of enormous profit to the estate. Priscilla replaced Jerry with her sister Michelle’s husband, Gary Hovey, who worked in his family’s car business. This decision, Jerry said, “almost destroyed” him. The explanations were as varied as the participants. Jack Soden said he wanted EPE staffed by individuals for whom the job was a full-time occupation, and that Jerry was freelance. Joe Esposito likened Priscilla’s brother-in-law to a male Eve Carrington, or to Priscilla, when she spent time with Fran Stone, studying her relationship with Mike so she could replace her. “Gary was a car salesman. And he kept wanting something to do in the music business. So Jerry had him hang around with him, to learn a lot of it. And little by little, he eased Jerry out of the position. And that’s how they got rid of Jerry—backstabbing by somebody who [was] supposed to be helping [him] out.” Gary would not comment on being hired by the estate. “I don’t really want to talk about it,” he said. “That was a decision people above me made and that was their decision.” Priscilla said that the decision to restructure management was made “for the greater good” of the estate. “It wasn’t even that people had to be let go. There are people that just, in some cases, weren’t doing their job up to par of what we were looking for. And there isn’t a bad feeling there. It’s just that we have to move on and we have to make decisions for the greatest good. And that’s how we base our decisions.” Rick Stanley later said that Jerry was told he could stay if he became a Scientologist.

Priscilla had become, to Elvis’s estate, what Elvis had been in life: the center of a financial fiefdom, the person upon whom the entourage, and others who were vicariously connected to Elvis Presley, depended for their livelihood, since she made the decisions regarding the use of his name, image, likeness, and music. With that power, she exercised a tremendous amount of control. The Elvis aides now deferred to her. Anyone with any business connection to the estate dared not speak freely about her without fear of repercussions. Even George Klein, who had been a close friend of Elvis’s since high school, was reticent to comment on the Presleys without seeking Priscilla’s permission. He explained, “She is real picky about what is printed on her, so I’m in a very precarious position, because I work for the estate on a freelance basis.… I try to be real guarded about what I say.”

Priscilla, acknowledged Jack Soden, had the final authority on
any decision made at Elvis Presley Enterprises, an irony many found difficult to bear. “The fact that she ends up running this institute … has always pissed me off. It always will,” commented Barbara Leigh, who still held Priscilla responsible for destroying Elvis—emotionally and physically—by betraying and divorcing him. “It’s not fair that she became famous and rich on Elvis’s death, when Elvis is the one who put her there, and then she killed Elvis and she gained from it.” Ed Hookstratten, who as a Hollywood lawyer and manager had seen nearly all there was to see, found it an “unbelievable story” that Priscilla should assume control of Elvis’s estate not “because of anything Elvis decreed [but just because] she’s the guardian of [his] daughter.” Even Jack Soden conceded that “it’s an odd thing.” Priscilla, he noticed, had become the subject of more than one comedian’s monologue, a running joke. “It’s a lot of guys’ nightmares that their ex-wife would come back to be an executor of their estate.” What bothered Jerry Schilling most about Priscilla’s authority was that she “didn’t have a clue about music.”