Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  The major noted Phillip’s southern accent. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Well, I came into the air force from Memphis, Tennessee.”

  “Oh,” Major Beaulieu said. “My daughter lives there.”

  “Really, what does she do there?”

  “She just got out of school.”

  “Memphis State?” Phillip asked.

  “No, Immaculate Conception.”

  Phillip recognized the Catholic girls school.

  “Do you have relatives there?”

  “No, she lives with Elvis Presley.”

  At first Phillip didn’t know what to say. “Oh!” he finally managed. “She lived with him in high school?”

  “Yes, um hum.”

  “Well, are they going to get married?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s been arranged for several years now.”

  But was a perceived promise of marriage really all that it took to get Priscilla to Memphis? Many people think no, that in essence, Elvis “bought” Priscilla, or that her parents “sold” her into marriage.

  Whatever the arrangement, once Priscilla’s parents and Elvis came to some understanding, it was as if Priscilla herself had no say in it. She was infatuated with him, yes, but just before she came to Graceland to live with him, she had major misgivings about the move.

  “My feelings were mixed—grateful and glad that Elvis had pulled off this coup, hopeful and determined that our relationship would last,” she has written. But her friends back in Germany have a different view. When it came right down to it, they say, she didn’t want to go. She preferred staying in Germany with her boyfriend Jamie Lindberg, with whom she was intimately involved. In fact, her mother was afraid Priscilla would throw Elvis over for Jamie, and his own impression, he told Suzanne Finstad for Child Bride, supports that: “Her mom more or less said, ‘You are going.’ ”

  “It was a terribly difficult position for her to be in,” sympathizes biographer Finstad. “She was conflicted because she had her own relationships that were deceptive to Elvis, so she was just in a quagmire.”

  But throughout her childhood, Priscilla had always been compliant and dutiful in terms of her parents’ requests of her. And since she was extremely tied to her mother, the only thing for her to do was to go through with it. If it didn’t work out, she could always come home.

  When her friends in Germany found out, they were aghast—not only that her parents permitted it, but also that she had simply disappeared that March without telling anybody good-bye. The timing of it had been odd, too. Captain Beaulieu had to get special military leave to come to the States, and Elvis was making a movie that March and couldn’t go home to Memphis. Why hadn’t Priscilla just finished out her school year and moved after turning eighteen that May?

  Colonel Eugene Desaulniers, Paul Beaulieu’s friend, neighbor, and fellow officer at Travis Air Force Base, explains the story as he heard it. “In that era, it was a very strange thing that somebody would allow that. But it was a situation where she was going to hightail it out of there one way or the other. And from a family point of view, he wanted to make it [look like], ‘All right, if that’s really what you want to do, then we will support you. I’ll take you there.’ So he went and made the deal with the Presleys to finish her education, and he and Priscilla made their own deal between them, and away they went. If they had announced that she was leaving, the whole place would have been in an uproar with all the publicity. He just snuck her out and took her, and it was all done before anybody really knew.”

  In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Elvis resumed his old way of life. He had moved back into the house on Perugia Way—the Bellagio Road house was a little too fancy for him, said Alan Fortas—and his nightly parties went on as before. He intended to give up nothing to keep Priscilla. She was merely an add-on.

  One of his frequent guests on Perugia Way was singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon. The pretty blonde was then still a teenager but already teetering on the edge of fame as both an artist and a writer (“Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” “Needles and Pins”) and soon she would become an important figure in the evolution of folk-rock. She often came to Perugia Way with her friend Sharon Sheeley, her sometime collaborator, who had been showing up at Elvis’s parties with her sister, Mary Jo, since the Knickerbocker days.

  They sat with Elvis and listened to records, sometimes jamming with their guitars and singing. Jackie and Elvis became good friends—he loved her soulful singing and her laid-back southern personality (she was born in Kentucky), and he appreciated her talent and saw that she was going places. Sometimes he offered her career advice, and in some ways, he considered himself a mentor to her.

  Before she first went up to the house, Elvis told her he was going to send one of the guys to pick her up. She was living at home then, and she realized that wasn’t going to work. “I come from a background where no matter who you are, you come to the door and you say, ‘Is Jackie home?’ ”

  But Elvis persisted.

  “He would call and track me down and say, ‘Come on up. We’re going to sing tonight.’ And I would say, ‘Elvis, I can’t come. My mother will not have it.’ This went on for several months, and so finally, I came home from ballet class one night, and there was Elvis talking to my mother with a huge pink dog—bigger than I was. From then on, my mother didn’t care how I got there.”

  Actress Teri Garr, who danced in nine of Elvis’s movies, was also a familiar face around the Perugia Way house starting at age sixteen. She remembers going to a party there with her friend, Carrie. (“No chips, no dips, just Elvis, his boys, and a couple of girls sitting around.”) Soon, Elvis and Carrie began flirting, and eventually they disappeared into Elvis’s bedroom. “I was usually such a Girl Scout,” Teri wrote in her autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood. “Just so you know, she swore they didn’t ‘do it.’ Knowing Carrie, it’s the truth.”

  One woman Elvis was not about to romance was Ursula Andress, his leading lady on Fun in Acapulco. One, she was married (to actor-producer-director John Derek), and two, the Swiss-born sex goddess intimidated him. He was uncomfortable in their romantic scenes, believing that her shoulders were broader than his and made him look weak. “I was embarrassed to take my damn shirt off next to her,” he told Alan, laughing. Later, he elaborated to Mindi Miller. “He didn’t think she was pretty. She had this big, broad back.”

  He masked it well, though. “The only way I knew Elvis was from television,” Ursula later said. “Here was this new idol, this hip-swinging lover with the guitar. I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ And the first day I went to work, here comes over this humble man, full of charm, love in his eyes, and kind, and considerate, and warm. I was so surprised.” She liked him well enough to drop by on another picture later in the year—and according to Sonny West, to pester him, always asking for Alan as a way to get around Priscilla. “She went after him. She wanted him bad. And Elvis told us never to leave him alone with her.”

  Fun in Acapulco, another tame Hal Wallis musical, marked a new low in Elvis’s career. He sometimes referred to his films as “travelogues,” but this time, he didn’t even get to travel, since the Colonel refused to let him go on location. In 1958 a rumor had circulated that Elvis found Mexican women unattractive, and Parker was afraid that someone might try to harm him.

  “We had to do all kinds of trick shots,” says screenwriter Allan Weiss. “A lot of it is background projection. We all knew that making money was the basic thing, but at the same time, we wanted to preserve a little bit of his dignity.”

  All background settings were shot without him, including the breathtaking 136-foot dive off the cliffs at La Quebrada. For that, Elvis modeled his swim trunks, mounted two stairs to a platform on the set, and with his arms rigidly fixed in a diver’s pose, stared resolutely down at the floor.

  It might as well have been an abyss of self-loathing. Fun in Acapulco was, as journalist Chet Flippo has noted, another of the “worthless movies that o
bviously began to drain his self-confidence.”

  RCA publicist Anne Fulchino, concerned about Elvis’s spirits and the quality of the music of the soundtracks (“Bossa Nova Baby” would be the film’s only notable song), visited him on the set. “That kid was not only unhappy, he was ashamed for me to see him prostituting himself with those crummy pictures,” she recalled. She took him aside and advised him to take better control of his career, citing Colonel Parker’s “nonguidance,” and “practically drawing him a diagram on how you build a star.”

  Elvis promised Fulchino he would speak with the Colonel about finding both better scripts and songs. “He knew Parker was not the right manager for him—the way the Colonel wanted him to go was not the way Elvis wanted to go.” But Elvis seemed paralyzed to make the kinds of changes Fulchino told him were necessary to revitalize his standing in the music world.

  When Elvis received his release from the picture in late March, he hurried home to Priscilla, who felt isolated, lost, and awkward, making no real friends at school, and knowing only Grandma, Vernon, Dee, and Patsy in the entire town. Though Vernon was tight in doling out spending money (thirty-five dollars every two weeks), sometimes she went shopping at nearby Southland Mall, where her frightening vampire look drew stares. Jacque Carter, who lived in Whitehaven, remembers seeing her there. “She had jet-black hair that was all backcombed, heavy eye makeup, and white lipstick. She was very quiet and shy.”

  Over the next few weeks, Elvis bought Priscilla a red Corvair as an early graduation present so she could drive herself to school—she was embarrassed at Vernon’s chauffeuring her every day—and $1,400 worth of clothing at Laclede’s on Union Avenue. He encouraged her shopping habit: It gave her something to do while he was off making movies.

  “Elvis expected her to be totally loyal,” says Billy Smith. “He thought, ‘I’m in California, and I can fool around and it won’t mean anything, because it’s going to be over and done with. But when I get back home, I know I’ll have somebody there.’ He had that old southern belief—‘A woman’s place is in the home.’ ”

  Several years ago, Siouxzan Perry, manager of Tura Satana, Kitten Natividad, and other stars of Russ Meyer’s sex-and-violence porn films, sat around a table with author Pamela Des Barres, who was writing a book about rock stars and groupies. A number of the Russ Meyer girls were there, and predictably, they played the “Who Have You Slept With?” game. The names came fast and furiously. “Somebody said, ‘Jim Morrison,’ ” Siouxzan remembers. “And somebody else said, ‘Elvis.’ And practically everybody at the table went, ‘Oh, I slept with Elvis.’ It was just the funniest thing ever.”

  “He did not want me in Hollywood,” Priscilla admits. But, of course, she wanted to be with him wherever he was, and as their separations grew longer and more frequent, their relationship grew strained. She felt as if she were living a double life, not unlike the way she lived after she met him in Bad Nauheim. “I was a prim-and-proper schoolgirl by day, and Elvis’s girlfriend by night.” That meant she stayed up until 5 A.M. to attend all the outings, and then had to be at school by 8:30 A.M. “I would average maybe one and a half hours of sleep to make all the good grades for my father. That was the difficult part.”

  But it was obvious that Elvis, too, compartmentalized his life. “Hollywood was there and Graceland was here, and never the two should meet,” as Priscilla has put it. For Elvis, “The two worlds represented a balance, or perhaps a perpetual imbalance, between his professional life and his home life.” When a movie wrapped, he couldn’t wait to get home. But then he felt trapped there and got anxious for his freedom and the companionship of other women. Then there was the matter of explaining just what he was doing with a teenager. And so Priscilla was kept back.

  When he was home, though, “the place lit up. I lit up. And I was willing—even eager—to cater to his every whim. We all were.” And so she forgave him for not attending her graduation ceremony, knowing it would cause too much commotion. She also overlooked his constant criticism: If she slumped, he straightened her back. If she had a chip in her nail polish, he pointed it out. He asked her not to eat tuna fish, her favorite food, because he hated the smell. But she despised the way he repeatedly rapped her on the forehead to remind her not to frown or wrinkle her brow. “Pow! I still feel his hand there,” she says. “If I looked up, it had to be with my eyes only, so the skin would stay smooth.”

  “I was someone he created. I was just a kid, and I was consumed by him. I could never speak my mind. All I desired was not to disappoint him.”

  He stayed in Memphis for several months that spring, and Priscilla insists she still hoped each night would end with Elvis “finally making love to me. I was drunk with ecstasy. I wanted him. I became bolder, reaching out to him, totally open and honest in my need.” Again, he stalled her, she wrote, and they fought about it. Elvis’s compromise was to play sex games, dressing her up in tarty disguises and capturing their fantasies on Polaroid film. She became what she calls “his femme fatale.”

  Almost every night she made quick trips to the drugstore to buy more packs of film. She was certain that the clerk knew what they were up to, and Priscilla would blush as she approached the counter, paid, and then hurried back to Graceland. There Elvis would direct her as he might any starlet. She’d wear her schoolgirl uniform to seduce him, or pretend to be a teacher coming on to a student, or a secretary pleasuring herself. Eventually, they worked up to include another girl, a hairdresser Elvis knew, for simulated lesbian sex. And in time, they moved up to videotape.

  Watching two women together isn’t an unusual fantasy for men—there’s a purity to it, since nobody but a woman knows what a woman wants. But involving a teenage girl is more than just imposing artifice. It’s a bent use of power and control, something akin to slavery, or human bondage. It’s also a bit sadistic.

  But Priscilla says she didn’t mind doing it—it brought them closer, she thought. “I was ready to indulge him any way I could.” And that included carrying a small, pearl-handled derringer in her bra, or in a holster around her waist, since Elvis had taken to always carrying a gun under his coat. Before she graduated, she’d sit in class and daydream about how surreal it all was. “While my classmates were deciding which colleges to apply to, I was deciding which gun to wear with what sequined dress. I was tempted to say to Sister Adrian, ‘Oh, by the way, Sister, does gunmetal gray go with royal blue sequins?’ ”

  Almost every night, Elvis gathered a group to go screen movies at the Memphian, renting three or four and watching them until daybreak. As was his habit, he also let in a few fans who waited outside the doors. One evening, he was surprised to see an old love there. June Juanico was in town for the WIBC, the women’s national bowling tournament. Her friends goaded her into stopping by Graceland, the “surprise” Elvis so wanted to show her six years before. The gate guard, most likely one of his uncles, recognized her name and told her she could find him at the theater that night.

  Her heart raced as she peered through the glass doors at the Memphian, and she pounded hard on the thick metal in hope someone would let her in. A man came, and she was flabbergasted when he said, “You’re June, aren’t you? I’ve seen pictures of you at the house. I’ll tell Elvis you’re here.” June grabbed his arm. “No,” she pleaded. “If you don’t mind, let me just go surprise him.”

  Elvis was one of the most famous men in the world now, and he lived in a different universe than the one they’d shared in the 1950s. With his streamlined features, tailored clothes, and razor-cut hair, he hardly looked like the same person. It took all the nerve she could muster, but she made her way down the aisle.

  “I went in the row behind him and I tapped him on the back, and as he turned around and looked at me, our eyes just locked. He got up and put me in a death grip. Joe Esposito ran over because he thought someone was hurting him. But Elvis was holding on to me. Priscilla was sitting next to him, and she just kept her eyes glued to the screen. She was very gracious.
But when I got back to my girlfriends, I said, ‘If y’all want to buy some makeup in Memphis, Tennessee, you ain’t gonna find any, because Priscilla’s got it all on her face.’ ”

  Just after the Fourth of July holiday in 1963, Elvis returned to Hollywood to make Viva Las Vegas, his best MGM picture since Jailhouse Rock. The plot revolved around Elvis as Lucky Jackson, a guitar-playing race-car driver whose life is upended after meeting Rusty Martin, a swimming instructor with show business aspirations.

  With the casting of the delicious and dynamic Ann-Margret, Elvis found the first costar who could match him in looks, musicality, and screen appeal. Together, they were nothing short of electrifying—Viva Las Vegas, directed by George Sidney, would plug two live wires together and make a formula musical sizzle.

  Yet Elvis would find an even higher voltage connection with the twenty-two-year-old actress offscreen. Ann-Margret Olsson, born in Sweden and reared in suburban Chicago, had just made a splash in her third film, Bye Bye Birdie, a satire about the Elvis phenomenon and the teen mourning that accompanied his entering the armed services. Three months after its premiere, Sidney, who had directed her in Bye Bye Birdie, introduced her to Elvis on the set of Viva Las Vegas. He believed the meeting would be so momentous that he arranged for a studio photographer to be on hand.

  “Elvis Presley, I’d like you to meet a wonderful young lady, Ann-Margret,” the director said. “Ann-Margret, this is Elvis Presley.”

  Simultaneously, the two stars started to say, “I’ve heard a lot about you,” then stopped in midsentence, and broke into nervous laughter. They were both dressed like young professionals, she in a white knit, double-breasted jacket and A-line skirt, and he in a suit and tie. Their conservative appearance hid the fact that they both shared a devil within, she would later write.