Child Bride (8 page)

The relationship did not last much beyond the homecoming dance, though “I would just maybe kiss her in the halls,” remembered Henry, who found Priscilla very receptive. “We liked each other, but she was so much younger. It was all a new experience to her. She was too young to really feel like she was going to be getting serious with anybody. I could tell that.” He could also tell, Henry said later, that beneath her dutiful facade, Priscilla was chafing at the bit. “She was the type of girl I knew wouldn’t be held back. If she wanted to do something, she was going to do it.”

When the relationship with Henry cooled, Priscilla moved on to more notorious older boys. “She hung around with some guys who weren’t in our crowd at all,” recalled Carol Ann. “These were guys who were in school, but barely. It wasn’t the kind of guy she should have been dating. They just sort of hung out around the corner of the school. They had cars and drank beer. She rode around with these guys.”

Her close friends, Carol included, were baffled. “All of a sudden her personality just
changed
tremendously. She hung around the lockers with these really hoody boys. And you could tell that she didn’t care about them, but … you really wondered about her. I guess if we had been less into ourselves and more into finding out what was wrong with our friends … but we didn’t. I don’t know if it was just a personal choice with her, or if something at home had caused her to rebel or what.”

Something
had
happened at home. Priscilla had found her missing childhood, her true self, and had been pressured into denying that reality. She had been inducted into the society of secret-keepers. Keeping the pact with her mother, she found, was “a big responsibility,” too big for a thirteen-year-old child.

She was also, classmates noticed, maturing faster physically than the other eighth-grade girls. Beyond the purely physical attributes, Priscilla had an ethereal quality that made her appear older: She was possessed of a poise that was worlds beyond her years and her family’s social standing. It gave Priscilla the aura of the wellborn, an innate kind of class. Moreover, Priscilla was an instinctively sexual creature.

By the middle of eighth grade, Priscilla’s reputation at school was suffering. “People didn’t think much of her because she
hung around with these guys who were not liked and were the kind who would be promiscuous,” said Carol Ann, who stopped spending the night at the Beaulieus’, “because it was really not a very good thing to hang around with her. She was beginning to get a poor reputation.” What transpired between Priscilla and those older boys is not known, but it is clear from her class pictures that Priscilla had matured a sexual light-year between twelve and thirteen. For her eighth-grade picture, she assumed a sultry pose, looking worldly-wise, her lips a cherry-red pout.

Priscilla was still a sweet girl, but her “other” Gemini side now surfaced more often. She was bolder, more assertive. She attempted to dye her light brown hair coal-black, Elvis-style, that spring, “and it turned out more like blue-green,” recalled Evangeline Segura, another friend. Priscilla wasn’t fazed. “She had a lot of confidence,” said Evangeline, “so things like that really didn’t bother her.” Mary Ann Holstrom, whose family moved to Austin that year, formed the impression that Priscilla Beaulieu “was a person who was used to getting what she wanted. A very exciting-looking person who got a reaction wherever she went. Here we were, all these gangly, adolescent types running around like idiots, and here she was. Obviously there was a big difference.” Mary Ann considered Priscilla aloof, preoccupied with her looks. “One day I pushed her into the pool. She was fixing her hair, and it got wet. She never spoke to me again. Her hair was a big point with her.”

Acclaim for Priscilla’s beauty never wavered, even during her walk on the wild side that year. The Del Valle Junior High newspaper popularity poll voted her Most Beautiful, Prettiest Eyes, Best Dressed, Best All-Around, Prettiest Hair, and Class Couple (with Chuck Burns). Diane Edenbo, one of Priscilla’s closer friends in eighth grade, claimed that strangers in downtown Austin would stop her on the street and ask if she was Priscilla Beaulieu. “I often wondered,” pondered Mary Ann, “what it was like to be her parents and how they handled that, you know?”

The second great blow of Priscilla’s adolescence came late that spring, when Paul Beaulieu informed the family that he was being transferred to the U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany. “I was devastated,” Priscilla recalled. The Beaulieus had lived in Austin for four years, a lifetime to a military brat; moving overseas seemed like the end of Priscilla’s life.

She turned fourteen the day after graduating from junior high
on May 23, 1959—a bittersweet experience for Priscilla, as she reluctantly prepared to move to Germany. At the same time, she later confided, “I felt this incredible
pull
to go there. Even though I wanted to stay, this
force
was pulling me to go. It’s unexplainable. Sometimes when I talk about it, I can still feel the
pull
of wanting to go—but yet I was leaving all my friends and
didn’t
want to go.”

Fate was intervening once again, setting Priscilla Beaulieu’s and Elvis Presley’s lives on an unexpected course. Seven months before Captain Beaulieu received his orders to report to Wiesbaden, Private Presley was shipped to Friedberg, then Bad Nauheim, Germany, just an hour’s drive from the air force base where Priscilla’s father would soon be stationed.

Priscilla and her friend Evangeline, an Elvis fanatic, looked up the two cities on a map of Germany that May, calculating the distance between them. “My dad kidded her,” recounted Diane Edenbo, “and said he didn’t want her to go over there and meet Elvis!” Priscilla, she recalled, laughed.

“I think she was excited,” said Evangeline, “but I don’t think she ever dreamed she was going to meet him.”

“We all kidded her that she was going to Germany and she was going to meet Elvis Presley,” confirmed Charlie Clements, Priscilla’s across-the-street chum. Chuck Burns, who was holding hands with Priscilla during Saturday matinees that fall, dismissed it all as “girl talk,” just as Pam did not take seriously their childhood games of Imagine If. They had seriously underestimated Priscilla Ann Beaulieu.

Diane Edenbo gave Priscilla a farewell party in June. No one knew then that it would be Priscilla’s farewell, at fourteen, to childhood. The Beaulieus, minus Paul, who had been sent to Nevada for a three-week survival course, flew to Connecticut to say goodbye to the Iversens and the Beaulieus. Priscilla palled around with her fifteen-year-old cousin Margaret Ann. The two girls went to dances at Ocean Beach Park and talked about rock and roll. Before the Beaulieus left for Wiesbaden in August, Priscilla told her cousin that she wanted to meet Elvis.

Priscilla had a goal that summer of 1959: to meet Elvis Presley in Germany. And once Priscilla Beaulieu had set a goal, nothing would stand in her way.

W
hen Priscilla arrived in Germany in the middle of August, she was “a lost kid, missing my friends.” The Beaulieus temporarily checked into the Helene, a hotel in downtown Wiesbaden, far from the base, to await military housing. School had not begun yet, so Priscilla knew no one.

“I don’t think she was real happy in Germany at first,” recalled Christine Laws, who read Priscilla’s letters to her friends back in Austin. Wiesbaden was a literal and figurative ocean away from Priscilla Beaulieu’s glamour days at Del Valle. “She had to start all over again,” as Christine put it. Ann Beaulieu had given birth to her fourth child, Jeff, a few months before the family left Texas, giving Priscilla three younger siblings under the age of ten to baby-sit. She was a teenager who was physically isolated from her peers and alone in a foreign country, except for her ever-present and demanding family.

Fate, however, had not forgotten Priscilla. The Helene Hotel was a ten-minute walk from the Eagle Club, a community center for American military personnel in Wiesbaden. The club had been converted from a majestic pre-World War II mansion built by a wealthy brewer for his daughter and modeled after the White House. It offered a travel service, a restaurant, a library, a record room, and, on Saturday nights, a live variety show called
Hit Parade
, featuring entertainment acts from around Europe. Priscilla quickly discovered the Eagle Club, and, as was the custom of her fourteen years, she did not go unnoticed.

One late summer afternoon—possibly her first at the club, though like so much Priscilla and Elvis lore, that is not certain—Priscilla strode through the castlelike entrance on Paulinen-strasse, perhaps with her younger brother Donny. The precise time—5:30
P.M.
—was noted and engraved upon the brain of the attractive twenty-something man who spotted her, just as he would recall in minute detail each of his subsequent encounters with Priscilla Beaulieu. His name was Currie Grant and he was a Louisiana-born-and-bred airman first class who moonlighted evenings and weekends as assistant manager of the Eagle Club. He was also something of a local celebrity as the host of the
Hit Parade
on Saturday nights, when up to a thousand people jammed into the auditorium adjacent to the Eagle Club. Although he was married with two small girls, Currie Grant was a notorious ladies’ man, the self-described “club Casanova.” On this late summer afternoon, his radar zeroed in on Priscilla Beaulieu.

“I was sitting in the foyer talking to Peggy Dotson, the director of the club. You had to walk up about six steps when you came in from the front door. And as she was walking up these steps, I looked up from talking to Peggy—and I saw Priscilla.” Her Dresden-doll face and daintiness drew Currie like a magnet. Being a meticulous dresser, he was also impressed by Priscilla’s immaculate grooming. She was wearing a cinched-waist 1950s style dress with a full skirt that billowed over several petticoats, and her long dark hair was styled in sophisticated tendrils. “She was one of the most beautiful things that I had ever seen. She carried herself like a princess. She looked like a charming little princess, and that’s the God’s truth.”

Priscilla Beaulieu could not have captured the attention of a more fortuitous person in Wiesbaden, for Currie Grant was a friend and occasional guest at the Bad Nauheim residence of Elvis Presley. In a way,
this
was the serendipitous encounter of her adolescence.

“Peggy was in mid-sentence. I jumped up and left her sitting there and went straight to Priscilla, threw out my hand, and said, ‘Hi, my name is Currie Grant and I’m the manager of the club. Is there anything I can do for you?’ ” Priscilla, according to Currie, was reticent. In hot pursuit, he began questioning her, learning her name, that her family had just moved from Texas,
and that she was waiting to meet her parents. After ten minutes of strained dialogue, mostly one-sided, Currie invited Priscilla to attend the
Hit Parade
, told her he was around most evenings if she needed anything, and rejoined his boss.

“When she walked away, down the hallway to the snack bar, I kind of watched her, and grown men—two of them—stopped and watched as she went past. That tells you a million things right there. They couldn’t keep their eyes off her, her face was that beautiful. From then on, I felt the same way.”

In reality, Currie Grant fell for Priscilla before Elvis Presley did. That was not surprising, for both men had the same taste in women—petite, extremely young brunettes. Their high sex drives were also similar. They even shared the same birthday, January 8—though Currie, at twenty-eight, was three years older than Elvis.

Currie Grant was not just attracted to Priscilla Beaulieu; he was
mesmerized
by her.

Over the next week or so, Priscilla visited the Eagle Club several more times. Currie tried to strike up a further conversation, eager to talk to her alone, but “every time I tried to stop her, she gave me a really sweet little smile, either looked down or looked forward, and just kept on walking. And I let it go at that. I didn’t want to make a pest of myself with anybody. I wasn’t demanding.” But the playboy in Currie burned with the challenge, and his ego was bruised. He was entranced by Priscilla Beaulieu, and her cool, ice-princess mien aroused him further. “I was interested in her, period. Whatever it was for.” Currie was not certain of her age, which added to Priscilla’s sexual mystique. “She looked very young,” he recalled, “but dressed like an older girl.”

Priscilla started the ninth grade, her first year of high school, within days of meeting Currie Grant. Her arrival at H. H. Arnold, an American military high school adjacent to the base, caused a minor frisson. “Oh, darling!” recalled Mary Ann Barks, a classmate. “Everybody had been talking about ‘Oh, God, you gotta see the new girl!’ These military kids come and go, and over the summer there’s always a buzz about who the new kids are. So it was like ‘Who is this kid that everybody is talking about?’ ”

Priscilla had created a new look for herself upon arriving in Germany. She began wearing her hair in an unusual style: short and curly about the face and long in the back, with tendrils she would sometimes bring to one side or in a ponytail. Debbie Ross,
a classmate who became friendly with her a few months later, got a firsthand glimpse into the styling ritual. “She used to pull it up. She had long hair, maybe halfway down her back, and then had the front cut short and curly, and she used to take it and pull it up on her head so it all became part of the same curl.” To Debbie, at fourteen, the style seemed “very sophisticated.”

To anyone who had seen
Love Me Tender
, the look was familiar: It was a replica of Debra Paget’s hairstyle in the movie, the look that Elvis Presley fell in love with. Ann Beaulieu, who had seen
Love Me Tender
at the Majestic in Austin, used to help with Priscilla’s hair and makeup in Wiesbaden, Debbie recalled.

The unique hairstyle, and Priscilla, captured the imaginations of the other teenage girls at H. H. Arnold. “Well, she was just exotic,” Mary Ann Barks explained. The principal fascination, at first, was the hair. Priscilla’s beauty habits even caught the eye of the faculty. Paul Büngener, one of the native German instructors, still remembered her makeup thirty-five years later. “She had special lipstick on: a bit of dark red, and with a purple touch!”