Child Bride (9 page)

At H. H. Arnold, Priscilla quickly fell into the pattern of her troubled eighth-grade year at Del Valle, making poor grades and attaching herself to older guys. Linda Williams, Priscilla’s friend from Austin, moved to Wiesbaden that same year and immediately tried out for the cheerleading squad, but Priscilla gravitated toward the black-leather-jacket clique, most of whom were members of the Teen Auto Club. She had no close friends and did not seek to rekindle her acquaintance with Linda. Part of the problem was physical isolation. No base housing was available to the Beaulieus that first year; after a month or so at the Helene Hotel, just as school was starting, they moved into a vintage apartment building in downtown Wiesbaden.

Priscilla’s estrangement was more emotional than physical. She was oppressed by the burden of carrying the family secret. “As you get older,” she said later, “all of a sudden you forget that you have to answer questions. Every day. And that’s what happened.” She wore the locket concealing her real father’s picture less and less often, feeling she was betraying Paul Beaulieu. Priscilla was a confused teenager, riddled with guilt and overburdened with adult responsibilities. She was ripe for an escape, ready for her fantasy of Elvis.

As if on cue, Currie Grant emerged as the deus ex machina
in her quest to meet her idol. How that happened is the source of a bitter dispute between Currie and Priscilla.

Contrary to the Elvis-and-Priscilla legend, Currie claims that Priscilla approached him, seeking entrée to Elvis Presley, after walking past him at the Eagle Club three or four times. His recollection of the day is vivid: “I got to the Eagle Club about five o’clock … and I was hungry. I went in the snack bar, got a hamburger, and went way back to the last table in the farthest corner so no one would bother me. I’d no more than taken a bite of that hamburger when I saw the swinging glass doors open and there’s Priscilla. She looks around a minute, sees me sitting in the corner, and starts walking straight for me. She came directly to the table and stood there and said, ‘Hi.’ And I said, ‘Hello.’ First words out of her mouth: ‘I understand you know Elvis.’ At that split second, it was such a letdown—my ego just went straight to the floor. She’s coming over only because she’s found out that I go up and see Elvis all the time. And I said, ‘I sure do.’ She says, ‘Well, I sure would like to meet him.’ Her exact words. My exact words were, ‘Well, so would a lot of other girls, but sit down and we’ll talk about it.’ ”

Priscilla’s version, as set forth in her 1985 autobiography, is that a stranger, Currie Grant, came up to her and her little brother Donny at the Eagle Club when she first arrived in Germany, introduced himself, told her he was a friend of Elvis Presley’s, and invited her to accompany him and his wife to Elvis’s house. This is the account that has been repeated as gospel in hundreds of Elvis biographies, documentaries, and movies, the Cinderella story of a young, innocent girl tapped by fate to meet Elvis Presley. But is it true, or is it a romantic fairy tale concocted by Priscilla?

Priscilla has her parents to support her version, and Currie has his former wife, Carol, to support his, but they were not present. The only other witness, according to Priscilla, was her brother Don, and he was a child.

Ever since he met Priscilla Beaulieu, Currie Grant has offered the same account of how she approached him and asked to meet Elvis. When she married Elvis Presley in 1967, Currie began to compile materials for a biography to be called
Elvis and Priscilla
, but the project was delayed several times and later put aside. When Priscilla published her own memoir in 1985 stating that Currie invited
her
to meet Elvis, “I really didn’t pay that much attention to it,” Currie stated, “because I had my own book
coming out, and I’d think, ‘Well, that’s her story. I’ll tell mine when my book comes out’—and mine was going to be the
truth.”
Currie’s reaction was similar to Pam Rutherford’s when she read Priscilla’s autobiography and saw that Priscilla had reversed the story about the carnival queen contest, claiming it was Pam’s grandparents, not her own, who reportedly sent in money to fix the contest. “But people now are taking it for the Bible,” Currie said of Priscilla’s version of how she met Elvis. “And they are quoting lies. They don’t bother to dig into things. They just pick up the book and think this is the way it happened, the way she’s telling it, because she has a big name now.”

On closer examination, Priscilla’s rendition of how she met Elvis is seriously flawed. While Currie has related the same account for nearly forty years, Priscilla’s story is inconsistent from telling to telling. Recently, in October of 1995, she claimed that Currie introduced himself to her and her brother as “Johnny Appleseed,” which conflicts with her own book, where she said he introduced himself as Currie Grant. At times she contradicts herself
in the same conversation.
In her October 1995 version, she repeated her contention that Currie Grant was a stranger when he approached her with the invitation to meet Elvis Presley: “I never even knew this man. I never knew Currie Grant.… I never knew him, never saw him before.” Then she contradicted herself, saying she “actually saw him a couple of times staring at me.”

There is a witness who corroborates Currie’s version. Peggy Dotson, the manager of the Eagle Club, with whom Currie claimed to be in conversation when Priscilla walked in, remembered the encounter exactly as Currie related it: “We were both there in that round lobby, and she came in and I said, ‘Gosh, that sure is a pretty girl.’ And Currie said, ‘I’m gonna go check that out!,’ being the young-man-about-town that he was. So he went over there, and she sat in one of those little chairs in the lobby. And he went over and talked to her … and then about an hour later we saw each other again, and Currie told me that she had just moved here and her father was a captain, I believe.”

Peggy Dotson’s confirmation of this exchange proves that Currie did not approach Priscilla as a stranger and invite her to meet Elvis the first time he spoke to her. Peggy Dotson’s memory also verifies that Priscilla
had
to have known who Currie was when they had their eventual conversation about Elvis—
whoever
instigated
it—since she had met him in the foyer and talked to him.

After thirty years’ estrangement, Currie Grant and Priscilla Presley agreed to meet in my home in May of 1996 to discuss their conflicting accounts of how she met Elvis Presley. Priscilla offered the “Johnny Appleseed” version of Currie’s invitation to meet Elvis the first time he approached her at the Eagle Club. Currie repeated his usual, unwavering story: that he spotted Priscilla in the foyer and chatted, that he tried to engage her in conversation several times afterward, and that she later approached him in the snack bar asking to meet Elvis. Then the two bickered back and forth:

The exchange later grew more heated:

As the debate continued, Priscilla modified several key details of her story. She admitted that she had “seen Currie around” the Eagle Club before he invited her to meet Elvis and that “he was known there, he worked there.” She also admitted that she “vaguely recalled” Currie interrupting a conversation with Peggy Dotson to introduce himself.
And
she changed her sequence as to when Currie invited her to meet Elvis, suddenly declaring that now she was “not saying” it happened the first time he spoke to her.

By her own admission in May of 1996, Priscilla’s fairy-tale account of a complete stranger walking up to her to ask if she would like to meet Elvis Presley was untrue.

Since Priscilla admittedly knew, or knew of, Currie before they discussed meeting Elvis, it was conceivable she had learned that he was a friend of Elvis Presley’s, thus she
could
have asked Currie to introduce her to Elvis. She also acknowledged, as she and Currie argued back and forth, that she “saw him rehearsing” for the
Hit Parade
and might have been to a show before he allegedly invited her to meet Elvis—indicating that she knew more about Currie than she had previously let on. Moreover, she confirmed that Currie was “looking at me and watching me for the few weeks that I was there”
before
the two of them discussed meeting Elvis—which was consistent with Currie’s account of trying to say hello to Priscilla at the club three or so times after their initial encounter.

Since she had already revised so many points in her earlier accounts to conform with Currie’s version, accepting Priscilla’s word about the
key
element—who asked whom to meet Elvis—becomes problematic.

During her May 1996 confrontation with Currie, Priscilla offered yet
another
version of how he invited her to meet Elvis, which conflicted both with her book and with her subsequent “Johnny Appleseed” variation. This time she suggested that she and Currie were talking at the club and that Currie introduced her to a young Elvis impersonator named Peter Von Wechmar, whom he represented. “And that’s how it all came about that Currie knew Elvis,” she declared. “And he came to me and said, ‘I know him. Would you like to meet him? My wife and I go there.’ And I remember that
very
vividly.”

She also challenged Currie’s scenario by arguing that it was “
so
unlike” her, “so unlike” what she would do, to boldly walk up to someone, say she understood he knew Elvis, and state that she would like to meet him:

Was it? It was virtually the same modus operandi Priscilla had employed at age eleven when she strode up to a startled Drue Foradory, told him he looked like Elvis, and asked him on a date. This dual aspect of Priscilla’s personality, the good (shy and demure) Priscilla versus the naughty (brazen and sexual) Priscilla, would be recognizable to her classmates in Germany as well. The girls who didn’t know her well at H. H. Arnold regarded Priscilla as “quiet and shy,” but her closer male friends remembered a “ballsy” girl. In the words of one boy who recalled a history exam their sophomore year: “Priscilla got up, walked up the aisle, opened a finished test that was on somebody’s desk, looked at the answers, turned around, walked back, and wrote on her own paper—and the teacher watched her and never said a word to her.” Priscilla’s male friends in Texas—Drue, Henry, and Mike—remembered her as aggressive when she had a goal. “When she wanted something, she went after it,” to quote one boy. As an adult, Priscilla often referred to this same quality in herself. “When I get involved in something,” she said when launching a new perfume in the fall of 1996, “I go crazy with it—all out.” In the summer of 1959 she was going “all out” to meet Elvis Presley, and asking Currie to arrange an introduction was consistent with this “other” Priscilla.

Priscilla’s second defense in her face-to-face encounter with Currie that day was that she wasn’t even a
fan
of Elvis Presley’s when she met Currie, therefore she would not have requested to meet him:

Priscilla had not counted on the memories of her Austin acquaintances, the ghosts from her past: Drue Foradory, the Presley look-alike she pursued because she told him she was “nuts” about Elvis; her neighbor in Del Valle, who heard her playing Elvis Presley records nonstop from the fifth grade on; girlfriends for whom she bought Elvis records as birthday gifts. And, most importantly, her onetime best friend, Pam Rutherford, with whom she played Imagine If for two solid years, pretending she was dating, honeymooning with, or married to Elvis Presley.