Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Her pulse raced, and as she dug inside the trunk for more, she found a stash of photographs of herself as an infant. She’d never seen them before. In some, she was alone. In others, she was with her mother. But in the most puzzling ones of all, her mother, holding baby Priscilla in her arms, stood next to a handsome, dark-haired stranger. Who was this man? The teenager turned the photo over, and there she read the words that nearly stopped her heart: “Mommy, Daddy, Priscilla.”

  Suddenly, as Finstad wrote, her whole life, a different life, one she had not known about, lay before her in the trunk: a birth certificate, baptism records, all with the last name of Wagner. It weighed on her so much that she called her mother at the party, and Ann Beaulieu rushed home to find her daughter hysterical, angry, and confused.

  Yes, she told her. She had been married to a navy pilot named James Wagner. He was handsome and kind and loved Priscilla like nothing in this world, but he was killed in a crash when Priscilla was six months old. Several years later, Ann met and married Paul Beaulieu, and now he was Priscilla’s father, having adopted her.

  Her mother hadn’t told her before, she continued to Finstad, because Paul didn’t want anyone to think Priscilla wasn’t his natural daughter. He, himself, had almost come to believe that she was, so the lie had to be perpetuated. In fact, Finstad learned, the Beaulieus had cut Priscilla’s paternal grandparents out of their life. It was as if Jimmy Wagner had never existed.

  Priscilla would remember it as a terrible moment, a life-changing moment, asserts Finstad, that completely unsettled Priscilla in every way. Her only anchors—the things she took for granted as her sense of constancy and identity—were suddenly demolished. She wasn’t who she thought she was. “That’s an incredible kind of displacement,” says biographer Finstad.

  Psychologists say that concealing information about a child’s biological parents is one of the most damaging family secrets, rating just below incest. Priscilla, predictably, was highly upset to learn that her mother, the person she trusted most in the world to protect her, had lied to her. And now she was being asked to be a coconspirator in that lie, protecting her stepfather and shutting herself off from a set of loving, grieving grandparents who wanted nothing so much as to know the child who so resembled their son.

  At first she told no one about the secret, but it was too much of a responsibility for a girl of her age, no matter how mature. Her only way to deal with it at the time, coming only months before the family’s move to Europe, was to shut down emotionally, even as she was filled with rage and the need for attention.

  However, that did not mean that Priscilla did not act out. Her friends told Finstad they noticed a personality shift, mainly in her attraction to older boys, especially the hoody kids, the tough promiscuous crowd, boys who already had cars and drank beer and spit in the face of authority. By eighth grade, she had a reputation for hanging with the wrong crowd.

  Once she got to Germany, she repeated her pattern, flirting with the black-leather-jacket boys and making poor grades. But more than before, as Finstad relates, Priscilla demonstrated two personalities, the good Priscilla and the naughty Priscilla; the latter was confident and assertive, especially where sex and seduction were concerned.

  In Currie’s telling in Child Bride, when Priscilla approached him and told him she wanted to meet Elvis, she agreed to a Faustian pact. Currie had once taken another girl to Elvis’s house, and she wanted nothing else to do with him once Elvis invited her to his bedroom. Currie was not about to have that happen again. And so the twenty-seven-year-old married man wanted to make sure he was alone with Priscilla before he would take her to meet Elvis.

  According to Currie, at first, it was just kissing. He took her up into the hills around Weisbaden—she concocted a story about going to the movies—and it was obvious she didn’t want to do it. “It was like kissing a table,” Currie said in the Finstad book, and all she wanted to do was talk about Elvis. But eventually he wore her down and she got into it a bit, and then he took her home.

  By their second visit to the hills that late August or early September 1959, she was more eager with him, though they held their activities to kissing and a little touching. On the third trip, she was more effusive. But on the fourth rendezvous, Priscilla succumbed to the married airman.

  “It actually started getting better on the third,” he said in Child Bride, “but she did everything humanly possible to please me on that fourth time.” It was then that Currie agreed to take her to meet Elvis, and by that time, he contends, “she became a little aggressive herself.” On the way back to her parents’ house, Currie wanted her again and pulled his car over to a dark area near the Wiesbaden Museum. Her skirt was up and her blouse was open when a German police car pulled in behind them. Currie told Finstad he feared he’d go to prison—she was a minor, and her father was an officer in the air force. But the German cop let him off with an admonishment: “You’d better be careful, and take her on home when you get ready.” Priscilla denies Currie’s account, in a classic case of he said, she said.

  Currie would say later that Priscilla had not bled when he penetrated her, leading him to believe that she had already had intercourse, perhaps with one of the older “bad boys” she ran around with in eighth grade. Later he decided that probably wasn’t right—she seemed so inexperienced at lovemaking.

  The bottom line, if Currie’s account is to be believed, and from what Priscilla’s schoolmate Tom Stewart told her biographer, Suzanne Finstad, about his own sexual relationship with Priscilla in 1959, is that in 1967, when Elvis and Priscilla married, she was not the virgin bride that Elvis always said he wanted. She was not even a virgin on the night he first met her.

  When writing her biography of Priscilla, Finstad interviewed both Currie and Priscilla and found their versions of the story at great variance. Hoping to reconcile their accounts, Finstad arranged to interview the two of them together. Presented with Currie’s story, Priscilla became hysterical. “May God strike me dead if that ever happened to me,” Finstad quotes her as saying. “I am telling you on the life of my son and my daughter, that never happened. That man is a liar!”

  But by Priscilla’s later account to her then-boyfriend, Mike Edwards, related in Child Bride, she did have some kind of episode with Currie in the German hills that led to her meeting Elvis.

  In 1998, Priscilla sued Currie for defamation, arguing in her legal action that his statements were fabrications. She and her attorney sought $10 million in damages. In August of that year, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Daniel Curry entered a default judgment against Currie for libel and ordered him to pay $75,000, far less than the $10 million Priscilla sought. Neither Finstad nor her publisher, Harmony Books/Crown, were ever sued.

  Priscilla used the default judgment to make it appear that the information that Currie provided was tainted. While there is a default judgment against Currie on file, there is also a confidential settlement agreement, a secret arrangement dated August 11, 1998, between Currie and Priscilla that underlies and supercedes the default judgment.

  In the private side letter agreement, apparently prepared by Priscilla’s attorneys, Currie is not required to pay Priscilla a dime as long as he does not repeat his accusations or disclose the existence of the secret settlement. According to the settlement, he and Priscilla agree not to discuss each other in public, other than a statement from Priscilla in which she says she “feels vindicated.” In exchange, Priscilla does not enforce the default judgment against Currie and pays him $15,000 for pictures he took of her in Germany.

  The confidential side letter states:

  The parties stipulate and agree that the parties can state to the Media that a judgment for defamation has been entered in favor of Presley against Grant. No mention will be made by Presley or her attorneys to the Media of the dollar amount of the judgment. Presley can state to the Media that she feels vindicated by this result. Grant will make no comment to the Media other than the fact that Grant is glad to m
ove on.

  Furthermore,

  The parties stipulate and agree that Grant will no longer state to the Media or any other individual that he had sex with Presley and Presley will no longer state to the Media that Grant attempted to rape her.

  Per the side letter, Currie must pay a minimum of $75,000 if he engages in any “prohibited communications” regarding Priscilla. Clearly Priscilla has taken extraordinary measures to silence Currie, presumably to protect the myth of how she met Elvis and whether she was a virgin at the time.

  When Currie brought Priscilla back to Elvis’s house a second time, he knew that Elvis would waste no time in taking her upstairs. A few days after Priscilla’s first visit, Currie voyeuristically pressed her for details of what had happened that first night. Elvis was sweet and tender with her, she told Currie. They lay on the bed and he kissed her gently, and then things got a little hotter. “He just played with her,” Currie told Finstad. “He was doing the hand thing: He was feeling her up, so to speak. He went under with his hand, very slowly, rubbing the skin, rubbing across her chest, stuff like that, and telling her to relax, that he wasn’t going to hurt her, talking to her like she was a kid—which of course she was.”

  Priscilla was only too eager to please Elvis, and she complied. At first she just listened while he talked. To a background of sad music on the radio, Elvis shared his heart, telling her of his insecurities about keeping his fan base, talking again of his grief over losing his mother, and confessing how disappointed he was that his father was involved with another woman so soon after his mother’s death. He seemed not only to trust Priscilla, but also to speak to her as if she were his age.

  That night, they forged an integral psychological bond. If Priscilla became a projection of everything Elvis wanted and couldn’t have, as Finstad wrote in her biography, he would become a stand-in for the lost and romanticized Jimmy Wagner. Elvis also offered her an escape from her complicated relationship with her stepfather, even as Elvis would quickly replicate the captain’s control. Eventually she would tell Elvis the family secret.

  “I felt more comfortable with him and had more trust in him,” she would say about that second night. “I felt that he was a trustworthy person that I could depend on.”

  And perhaps that was part of the reason why Elvis was able to get as far as he did on Priscilla’s second visit to his bedroom. Priscilla didn’t want to tell Currie about it when he asked for a running report of their activities. But he controlled her fate with Elvis—she was dependent on him to take her back to the house. Plus, she needed someone to talk with about her situation—she was fourteen years old and playing adult games with an international film and music star. According to Currie, Finstad wrote, when he demanded the details (“Don’t play coy with me!”), she told him everything—how Elvis had her blouse and bra off, how his hands were going everywhere, and how he started to get under her dress.

  As her nights with Elvis continued, Currie would insist on hearing about the intimacies on the very night they occurred. But Priscilla would want to know what he knew, too, particularly about the other girls. Not only would Elisabeth Stefaniak crawl into Elvis’s bed after Priscilla left (“not necessarily for sex,” Joe Esposito offers), but sometimes fifteen-year-old Heli Priemel would be leaving Elvis’s bedroom when Priscilla arrived. And one night, she had sneaked a peek at Anita Wood’s letters and knew that Elvis was heavily invested at home. Her competition was keen, and she needed Currie to both quell her anxiety and help her level the playing field.

  However on one of their drives back to Weisbaden, Currie told Finstad he became excited at Priscilla’s recounting and pulled off the autobahn for a quick assignation. He tried to kiss her, and she resisted, and then he fondled her breast, and she wriggled away. Finally, he quit. It was the old syndrome—she’d been up in the bedroom with Elvis, and so she didn’t need him.

  Priscilla would describe the event to Finstad as more of an attempted rape. “I was terrified. I did everything in my power to keep him off me. There was a house there . . . [and] I was going for that. I kicked doors open and blew horns.” When the lights came on in the house, it scared Currie, she said, and he stopped. She told no one, “because I thought I wouldn’t see Elvis anymore.”

  And she had to see Elvis again. But she later said to Finstad that when Currie tried to rape her a second time, taking her by the Rhine River, she told her parents and Elvis what had happened.

  Her parents had become concerned about her friendship with Elvis, they said, when Elvis started calling her. Priscilla talked about him every minute at home, too, and suddenly the captain needed some answers.

  “I don’t think he was prepared to know what was going to happen, because I only went for a visit,” Priscilla has said. “But I just kept visiting and visiting. And then we started to fall in love. I visited a lot, but it was always with other people. And there were parties. In [my father’s] mind, there were always a lot of people, and I wasn’t the only one Elvis was seeing. When you are a parent, you never really see the full picture. And when you are a child, you don’t really give the full picture.”

  Captain Beaulieu insisted that Elvis come to the house before Priscilla would be allowed to see him again. Elvis agreed, and when he arrived, he wasn’t alone. “I’m Elvis Presley,” he said. “And this is my father, Vernon.”

  “I enjoyed speaking with Elvis and was impressed with his manners,” the captain said in 2005. “Anyone would be. He seemed impressed by my military service and asked a number of intelligent questions about my work. All this was fine. But at a certain point I had to ask him, ‘Why my daughter? With millions of women throwing themselves at you, why Cilla?’ His answer was straightforward. ‘I feel comfortable talking to her,’ he said. ‘She’s more mature than her age. And don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her.’ I concluded that he was genuine, and now I am absolutely certain that I came to the right decision.”

  Ann Beaulieu felt the same.

  “When we met Elvis that first time, our entire outlook changed,” she said in a documentary DVD. “I’d never met such a polite young man. He addressed my husband as ‘sir’ or ‘captain.’ He addressed me as ‘ma’am.’ He was soft-spoken and sincere. You couldn’t help but like him. He treated us with complete respect.”

  As Joe Esposito observed, “Elvis could talk anyone, particularly female, into anything.”

  But there were other reasons, perhaps, why Priscilla’s mother was so willing for her to attach herself to Elvis, as Finstad wrote in Child Bride. Ann had been only fifteen when she snuck out to see another handsome dark-haired serviceman, Jimmy Wagner, at the USO. And there was another factor: Ann loved it that her daughter was seeing a celebrity, as if some of his stardust would rub off on Priscilla and on her, as well. Ann had always dreamed of a career in show business, perhaps as a dancer, if not an actress. In fact, Ann had become infatuated with Elvis while watching The Ed Sullivan Show.

  The surprise, then, was that she didn’t just let Priscilla go to see Elvis—she encouraged it, in part to live vicariously through her daughter. When Currie first spoke with the Beaulieus about getting permission to take her to the house, he told Finstad, “It was not a question of if Ann would let Priscilla go,” he said. “It was rather a question of when I would take her.”

  The Beaulieus had to have known what eventually would happen with a twenty-four-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old girl who kept such close company. But Elvis assured them they were just playing music.

  Priscilla wrote in her autobiography that she begged Elvis “to consummate our love” before he left Germany, and that he refused to do it. But in this case, “consummation” becomes a matter of semantics. Elvis’s young visitor was apparently not sexually shy in the slightest. Joe Esposito remembers Elvis telling him, “She’s a beautiful girl. I wouldn’t lay a hand on her. But to have her sit on your face!”

  On the third or fourth nights, the temptation got to be too much, and after the tickling, and the te
asing, and the kissing, Elvis and Priscilla had intercourse, she told Currie. And not just once. But Elvis didn’t consider it going all the way, because he would pull out before he felt that they had consummated the relationship. That way, in his mind, she was still untouched. But in time, Elvis would tell members of his entourage that, indeed, he and Priscilla had had sex in Germany. And Priscilla would later confirm it to Billy Smith’s wife, Jo.

  Once that behavior began, Priscilla returned to Goethestrasse three or four nights a week, becoming a part of the group that regularly congregated at the house. With such hours, it took everything she had to keep from falling asleep in class, and Elvis began slipping her pills to keep her awake. She swore she didn’t take them, though, only keeping them in a box with her other Elvis souvenirs. “I was leading two lives,” she says, “ninth grader by day, Elvis’s girl by night.”

  After each visit, Currie, or Lamar, or Joe would drive Priscilla home. In dreadful weather, the forty-five-minute drive would take far longer, and they would sometimes get her home at two or three in the morning, far after her curfew. Instead of a dressing-down, however, they received only pleasantries from her parents. Priscilla could hardly get up for school the next morning, but all her mother would say, Currie told Finstad, was, “What time do you want her ready the next time?”

  Priscilla was right to worry about Anita Wood. Late that fall, while out on winter maneuvers in Bavaria’s Wildflecken, where he spent thirty days sleeping out on the ground, often in snow, Elvis wrote Anita a four-page letter. Postmarked November 6, 1959, it was the last of three letters Elvis wrote her during his military service, and it was by far the most revealing, as he rolled out in frank terms his homesickness, mother need, and hormonal desire.