Child Bride (7 page)

Priscilla sat in front of the trunk, unable to move, cognizant that in her hand was the solution to the riddle of her childhood, that she was face-to-face with the secret. She was not who she had thought she was: It was both her greatest fantasy and her deepest, darkest fear. “First you go into denial it’s somebody
else.
And then you go into shock. That you’ve been betrayed. That someone has lied to you. You have so many different emotions that peak.
I
was in hysterics.” Priscilla telephoned her mother at the party, “begging her to come home. Because I needed an explanation. I needed somebody to tell me the
truth.
What was this I was discovering?”

Ann Iversen Wagner Beaulieu raced home to her daughter, alone. She did not tell Paul Beaulieu she was leaving the party or where she was going. After years of denial, the call may have been almost a relief.

Ann arrived at the house to find Priscilla half crazed. She calmed her daughter, and then told her the truth about their past: She had been married to a handsome pilot named James Wagner who died in a plane crash, and he was Priscilla’s real father. “And [she said] that he was wonderful,” recalled Priscilla. “He loved me, he was coming home to see me. And that I was his
life
, and her
life.
And that she met my father [Paul Beaulieu] a few years later and married him. And that
he
was my father. He adopted me.”

As her mother was talking, an image suddenly flashed in Priscilla’s head—the vision of her mother on stage, one of the recurring images that had tormented her since she was five or six. “And I started realizing, Oh, my God! That was the
party
I went
to! I remembered I was in my grandmother’s lap, and I remembered seeing my mother—to me it was like on a stage—but it was in a church, it was at the Catholic church, a very big Catholic church. Everything was so big! My mind went right to the picture of that church. And all those flashbacks from when I was three started to make sense.”

It was “very bizarre,” Priscilla later acknowledged. The seeming delusions that had confused her since early childhood began to crystallize. “And it made sense to me why we had lived with my grandmother then, that there was no man in my life. That was why my grandmother took care of me. All the [pieces of the] puzzle were starting to fit now.” She understood, finally, where her unearthly beauty had come from: “My
real
father. I look
exactly
like him!”

Priscilla would later say that discovering the truth about her identity from a hidden trunk at the age of thirteen was a devastating blow. In the hierarchy of family secrets devised by John Bradshaw, concealing a child’s real parent is the second most dangerous, just below incest. For Priscilla, the
discovery
of the lie was almost worse than the lie itself. Her mother, the person she trusted most, had betrayed her, deceived her, was not who Priscilla had thought she was. Who did that make Priscilla?

Ann tried to console her daughter, telling her that she had been “haunted” by the secret all these years, that she had wanted to tell her beautiful daughter the truth, but that she’d been afraid. The critical word was “fear”—fear of upsetting the apple cart, fear of upsetting Paul.

“The big fear was my father,” Priscilla admitted. “I don’t think my father ever really
accepted
the fact—he really looked at me as his daughter. And now to have my real father come up … it was very important to my mother protecting
him
[Paul], protecting his feelings, his sensitivity.” Ann Beaulieu still feared the consequences of revealing the secret. “The fear was that anything like this would maybe separate us. So let’s just keep it the way it is.”

Even after Jimmy’s existence was out in the open, Ann barely dared to speak of her beloved first husband to his own daughter. Priscilla was provided with few details of the father Ann had hidden from her for ten years. Priscilla would later explain that Ann “doesn’t want to really do anything that she thinks may sway me from my [adoptive] father.”

Why
was Ann so protective of Paul Beaulieu? The purpose of
family secrets, according to John Bradshaw, is to preserve the status quo. Was Ann hiding something else, some more dangerous family secret? Her distraught reaction suggested that possibility. She pleaded with Priscilla, as they both cried beside the trunk, to keep Jimmy Wagner their secret, never to speak of her real father again, especially to Paul Beaulieu.

It was a side of her mother that Priscilla had never seen before. She sensed Ann’s desperation, but still felt betrayed. Priscilla realized she had a crucial decision to make. She could either allow the truth to surface and accept the consequences, or protect her mother and herself by perpetuating the lie. “Any child who finds out that that’s not your real
father
and that your mother was married to someone else—it’s a very devastating impact that one has to deal with,” she acknowledged years later. “And then how do you resolve that? How do you
resolve
that? Where do you fit in? And
do
you make something of it? Or do you just let it go? And I decided to let it go. Because my father—my stepfather, but I thought he was my father—I could never
hurt
him. So the decision was, ‘Let’s not ever discuss this. It will
never
come out.’ ”

The truth of Priscilla’s identity became, as Priscilla put it, “a secret between my mother and myself.” The subject—the very existence—of her real father became a forbidden topic.

It was the formative moment of Priscilla Beaulieu’s young life. She had shifted from being the victim of secrets and lies to a coconspirator. At her mother’s knee, she was learning that secrets and lies are acceptable, that the truth can be dangerous. Like her mother, her maternal grandparents, and her adoptive father, she was learning to act, to pretend, to keep secrets. That was a family tradition.

She put away the trunk that contained the mysteries of her childhood and she and her mother “never talked about it again.”

Priscilla still had no idea she had paternal grandparents in Pennsylvania who were mourning her ten-year absence from their lives. She didn’t know, couldn’t know, that her grandfather Wagner would die a few months later, at fifty-six, “of a broken heart,” his widow believed, at the loss of his son and his only grandchild. Kathryn Wagner had adopted a fatalistic attitude toward Ann and Priscilla’s disappearance, “but Harold didn’t look at it that way,” she asserted. “He thought it was
meanness
or something.” Through all of this, Jimmy’s mother harbored “no animosity whatsoever” toward Ann. “I used to think, if I could
only know where they are, I wouldn’t hurt [them]. There’s no anger in my heart. I just want to
know.
”

For Priscilla, all that remained of the life-altering discovery of the trunk was a gold locket Jimmy had given Ann, which Ann presented to Priscilla as a memento. Priscilla wore it around her neck thereafter. Hidden inside the locket was a tiny photograph of her real father, dark and handsome in his pilot’s uniform. Knowing nothing about him, Priscilla fantasized that her long-lost father died a great war hero. “In times of emotional pain and loneliness,” she said, “he would become my guardian angel.” For a brief time she wondered whether the discovery of her real father was the event she had been intuiting since she was five or six. But the premonition of “something big” coming into her life recurred. Priscilla decided there was something else awaiting her.

That July, according to Carol Ann Heine, she and Priscilla went to see
King Creole
, Elvis Presley’s latest movie. As they were leaving the cinema, they caught a glimpse of the back of a dark-haired young man. According to the theater manager, it was Elvis Presley. “He was in the army then and was stationed in Fort Hood and hadn’t seen the movie in a theater yet,” recalled Carol Ann. “The manager told us [Elvis had] asked if he could come in after the lights were out and sit in the back so no one would see him.” The story may or may not be apocryphal, but one thing is certain: Priscilla Beaulieu and Elvis Presley were circling ever closer to each other.

P
riscilla nearly collapsed under the strain of her sacred pact of silence with her mother. Ann Beaulieu had placed an enormous burden on a thirteen-year-old child by asking her daughter to keep her paternity a secret, even from her siblings and from the man she now knew was not her real father.

Other children might have cracked under the pressure or prattled the news to everyone at school; Priscilla was made in a different way. She assumed the responsibility with great seriousness. As she later explained: “If someone has entrusted me with something, I could never betray them.” She told no one about the discovery of her true identity, not even Pam. As time passed, she became conflicted about wearing the locket containing the picture of her real father. “I felt
guilty
, because I felt now that I was betraying my
stepfather
, who was so good to me. Because now it’s like I was hiding something from him.” Ann Beaulieu had spun a tangled web of deceit and Priscilla was unwittingly ensnared.

The trauma of her mother’s betrayal and her own suppression of the truth affected Priscilla’s behavior. Her grades dropped, eliminating her from eighth-grade cheerleader tryouts, “and it was a big blow to her,” recalled Carol Ann. Pam Rutherford moved to England just after school began, leaving Priscilla without,
as she later wrote Pam, her “first real friend.” Friends and neighbors, including Charlie Clements, noticed a “sudden shift” in Priscilla’s behavior. “She went through a real change of personality,” reflected Carol Ann.

Her friends had no idea what was going on with Priscilla. She had closed ranks with the rest of her family, locked into a drama of denial. Paul began doing extracurricular work for the CIA that year, which added to the secrecy and intrigue that prevailed at home. He would tell Priscilla of his covert work, but caution her not to say anything to anyone else. It was business as usual for the Beaulieu household.

Priscilla, instead of confronting the emotions aroused by her discovery of who she really was, simply shut down. It was not only the Iversen-Beaulieu way; it was the
military
way. “A ‘good’ military family,” Mary Edwards Wertsch explained, “displays to the world what ought to be displayed—and conceals the rest.” Mike Edwards, her adult beau, considered Priscilla’s childhood “oppressed” and believed that Paul Beaulieu was an alcoholic, the secret problem of many military families. None of her childhood friends had a clear sense of Paul or of Priscilla’s relationship with him. “I couldn’t get a fix on it,” Carol Ann admitted. “With Pam’s parents it was a real comfortable setting. It wasn’t the same at Priscilla’s. I can’t put my finger on anything.”

“There were things that went on,” Mike Edwards offered suggestively, mentioning “an oppressed family, the father is drinking.” Priscilla, he maintained, was looking for an “escape.”

Her twin sources of salvation were her fantasy father, Jimmy, who was her guardian angel, and her fantasy lover, Elvis Presley. She was unaware that destiny was about to intervene, causing her two worlds—real and fantasy—to collide. The first development was Elvis Presley’s draft notice, early in 1957; the second was Gladys Presley’s death on August 14, 1958. Elvis’s mother died just weeks after Priscilla’s real father was reborn through her discovery of the hidden trunk.

A different Priscilla emerged after finding out her mother had lied to her. While she had long been a flirt, casually interested in the handsome boys two or three grades ahead of her, “Priscilla got to messing around with an older crowd,” recalled Cal White. “She had the older boys going after her, and she started hanging around with them. And that kind of put her out of the ‘in’ crowd, you might say.”

“She went for the big football stud,” recalled Chuck Burns, who dated Priscilla intermittently. “Somebody who had a car.” Sonny Washington and Henry Smith, two sophomore heartthrobs, hotly pursued Priscilla. “They would walk a mile on their knees just to hold her hand,” recounted Mary Ann Holstrom, a classmate. “And everybody was just sort of gaga over her even when she was thirteen years old, because of the way she looked and the way she carried herself. And she had a lot of confidence. She knew what she had.”

Unlike the fictionalized version of her life that Priscilla would later create, Paul Beaulieu was
not
a caricature of the strict military father, nor were her parents overprotective. “She could date more than the rest of us,” recalled Carol Ann. “The rules and regulations at [her] home were fairly lenient, for air force parents. Most were
very
disciplined, and when we went to base movies with a boy, we were chaperoned, but Priscilla was not chaperoned that much.”

That fall, with her mother’s complicity, Priscilla became more daring. Henry Smith, the star of the high school football team, wanted to ask her to the homecoming dance, but “it was kind of frowned upon by the school administration for a junior high kid to go with a high school boy,” recalled Christine Laws. Henry mentioned his intention to Priscilla in passing, and Ann Beaulieu took it from there. Henry’s mother worked at the daycare center where Ann dropped off Priscilla’s younger brother and sister, “and my mother talked to [Ann],” Henry recalled. “And I think [the idea] excited her. I was the captain of the football team, and—not to be bragging—a lot of girls wanted to go with me.” Henry felt it was Ann Beaulieu “who pushed for Priscilla to really go.” Ann abetted Priscilla for two reasons: because she enjoyed the fact that her daughter was so sought after and, in the words of her cousin Margaret, “because Priscilla reminded Ann of Jim.”

“I think all the guys were kinda figuring me to be a little crazy for being interested in a girl that young. But she could compete with the seniors! She was a little girl—but jeez, she just looked so mature!” recalled Henry. Priscilla wore a long, formal, low-cut dress to the dance.

The date that scandalized Del Valle High was actually very tame. Priscilla was not allowed to go on car dates, so Henry drove to her house and Paul Beaulieu chauffeured the couple to the dance. Henry was a perfect gentleman; at evening’s end he
and Priscilla did no more than kiss. “She was too young. She was just a kid. And I was really a nice guy. I didn’t really mess around intimately with any woman until I was in college.”