Captain and Mrs. Beaulieu bought the con. By early March, the captain had brought Priscilla to Los Angeles, where they met Elvis, and then took her to Memphis, where she settled in with the Presleys and matriculated at Immaculate Conception High School. As soon as Elvis finished the film he was working on, Fun in Acapulco, he returned to Memphis. Priscilla promptly moved into Graceland and into his bed.
Priscilla staggered through school days at Immaculate Conception after nights spent with Elvis. He supplied her with all the necessary drugs to survive, especially uppers. Elvis had been exploring them for himself ever since his days in the army. She had to cheat to pass her math exam, but she nevertheless graduated as planned on May 29, 1963. Elvis waited in his car during the ceremony so as to cause no disruption. Afterward, he threw a graduation party for her, and they had a month together at Graceland, much of it spent on his huge square bed in his bedroom with blackout windows.
Thereafter, year after year, Priscilla slept in Elvis’s bed. Almost anybody who cared to know about it could know about it, but it never became a news item. No outsider knows why the Beaulieus allowed their barely fourteen-year-old daughter to become so deeply involved with America’s sex idol, ten years her senior. In Germany, she was with him almost nightly for six months and stayed so late that in the morning she had to drag herself out of her bed to go to school. Two years later, after her graduation from high school, they allowed her to move into Graceland to live with him for an undetermined length of time in an undefined relationship.
In Elvis and Me, Priscilla attempted to answer the question concerning her parents’ possible lack of responsibility and put the matter to rest. She vigorously asserted that she herself shielded her parents from knowledge of the depth of her physical intimacy with Elvis. For some time, she managed to keep her family away from Graceland entirely. Then, when they insisted on a visit, she made a great show of demonstrating that she did not sleep in Elvis’s bed or share his room. She had her own bedroom at Graceland. When it became clear that she would have to give them a tour of the whole house, she hastily moved her things to Charlie Hodge’s room down the hall. Only when she was showing them Elvis’s room did she notice that she had left one of her shoes next to the big bed. She barely managed to kick it out of sight under the bed before they saw that display of intimacy.
Lamar Fike, Billy Smith, and others argued that Captain and Mrs. Beaulieu knew full well that their very young daughter was sleeping with a man who used her sexually, but they guessed that the captain had made a deal with Elvis. He would marry Priscilla at some later point in time when his career would allow him to give up his highly marketable bachelor image. With that marriage, their daughter, and they too, would be well set for life, emotionally and materially. That made the game worth the gamble. Suzanne Finstad, in her thoroughly researched Child Bride, argued that not only did Priscilla’s parents know what was going on, but Priscilla and her mother had plotted the marriage from the beginning.
Such interpretations are persuasive but perhaps underestimate Priscilla’s passion for Elvis and her determination to control her own life. In fact, she had just turned eighteen when she graduated from Immaculate Conception, and she was legally free to marry. Her parents might have wanted her to find and marry a man closer to her own age, but the choice ultimately was not theirs to make. Priscilla loved Elvis body and soul. She was exactly where she wanted to be. She did not care about school or an ordinary teenage life. She was not bothered by his age, and gave every evidence that she could keep up with his sexual appetite and performance. Indeed, her complaints were that she did not have more time with her lover and that he refused to have intercourse with her. Elvis was simply the great love of her youth. When she grew older, she moved on.
With Priscilla now safely attached to him and free from outside influences, Elvis proceeded to the consummation of his ideal. He re-created her in his image. He chose her clothes and shaped her looks in closest detail—hair, eyes, lips—as carefully as his own. He had her hair dyed a deep black, just like his. He darkened her eyes, as he had come to do very early in his show business career, wearing the dark makeup offstage as well as on. He put her in high heels, just as he put lifts in his own shoes to give the appearance of height. Some have speculated that Priscilla looked like Gladys, hence Elvis’s obsession with her. It may be more accurate to speculate that Priscilla looked like Elvis himself, certainly after he completed his remodeling of her appearance. She was, in her looks and in her behavior, exactly what he wanted her to be. She was the girl he would have been were he a girl.
Elvis appropriated Priscilla’s femininity just as he appropriated other people’s songs. In her, he found a deeply feminine presence that was inherently beautiful, and he made it his own. He saw in her the beauty that he wanted for himself. Certainly he wanted the looks and the body, but it went much deeper than that. Priscilla was by her nature a superbly feminine creature, a phenomenon that people recognized on sight. He used the considerable means at his disposal to gain nearly total control over her—the walled compound of Graceland to confine her and a host of people on his payroll to guard her—and then he proceeded to possess what she possessed, in a sense to meld himself with her and somehow become whole, the feminine Elvis.
Sex Games at Graceland
Elvis still refused to have intercourse with Priscilla, but within the privacy of his quarters at Graceland they improved marvelously upon the sex play they had enjoyed in Germany. They invented sex games in which Priscilla might play the part of the teacher and Elvis would be her pupil, a very young boy susceptible to seduction. Or Elvis might be the patient and Priscilla the nurse, handling, fingering, and probing his body seeking to discover his malady and find a cure. At times, Elvis introduced another girl into the sex scene in his bedroom. In this play, Elvis had Priscilla and the girl pretend to make love while he watched, videotaped, and sometimes joined in.
They also got into the game of photographing themselves in various poses and scenes using a Polaroid camera, a handy new invention. Elvis and Priscilla could photograph the most private things, and no one else need ever see the picture. They became avid photographers, and they needed great quantities of fresh film. It was Priscilla’s job to buy it, usually at a local drugstore. In time, clerks began to look askance at this girl who seemed to need so much Polaroid film. Priscilla was embarrassed and felt she had to explain herself. “I lost the last batch,” she would say, or offer other white lies. The couple built a collection and kept it in a silver suitcase. Now and again the guys saw some of the photographs, and probably stole some. After Elvis’s death, the silver suitcase was brought down from the attic in Graceland and delivered over to Priscilla.
The Movies
Elvis would make a lot of movies in the 1960s, twenty-seven of them in eight years, and his movies would earn him and the Colonel a lot of money. Elvis kept hoping for a great script and a great film. He told one young starlet with whom he was sleeping that he was offered the part of Val Xavier in a film based on Tennessee Williams’s play The Fugitive Kind (1959). As it happened, Marlon Brando got the part of Val, the young singer with the guitar and the snakeskin jacket who grew tired of offering his body to homosexuals for money on a street corner in New Orleans and hit the road. In the story, Val drifted into disaster in a little town in the Mississippi Delta. After seeing Brando in the role, it is hard to imagine Elvis playing the part. It is also hard to imagine that the Colonel would allow his boy to play the part of a prostitute to male homosexuals. Interestingly, the starlet, twenty-two-year-old Annie Helm, thought that he would have been perfect for the part; “it was almost written for Elvis,” she said.
Elvis had hardly launched his post-army career as a movie star before the light in his eyes began to dim. He did best when he played himself, a talented but striving singer, as in Viva Las Vegas. His next film, Kissin’ Cousins, was more typical. It was made in seventeen days, and at that it was two days over the time allowed by the studio. It was produced
by Sam Katzman, who was well known for his ability to turn out movies at minimal cost. The Colonel liked Katzman’s style for giving only a little in the art of filmmaking and getting a lot back in money. Under the contract, Elvis was paid $500,000 plus half of the proceeds after the costs of production were met.
Only a few years into his film career, Elvis was rolling in money, but he was artistically bankrupt. Cheap movies included cheap songs, and RCA put them out as records. Director Gene Nelson thought that Elvis could have done better as an actor, but “he wasn’t adventuresome, he didn’t really want to learn.” But then, he didn’t have to. “Mostly he would just be his charming self and get away with it—because he was Elvis Presley.”
Nelson puzzled, as almost everyone did, over Elvis’s relations with the boys. “Why would he isolate himself with this bunch of idiots?” The trouble, Nelson concluded, was that Elvis “suffered an acute lack of self-esteem as a human being.” He thought that “he felt that he was uneducated and had nothing to contribute to a conversation.”
In Hollywood, Elvis also made a minor and successful career out of having sex with his female costars. He privately boasted of his conquests, and once allegedly said that he had slept with every female costar except Mary Tyler Moore. Some of the women with whom he had affairs, such as Juliet Prowse and Ann-Margret, were powerful personalities, who were more than a match for Elvis and used him more fully than he used them. Ann-Margret, for example, got some priceless publicity by practically announcing from the relatively safe distance of Great Britain that she and Elvis were to marry. Elvis had no such idea and had to scramble to set the record straight, not only with the public but with Priscilla.
Some other movie-set affairs were simply pitiful. For example, on location in Florida, his leading lady became his sex partner, but she finally had to give up on it. She said that things got very confused with all the guys hanging around all the time.
One of Elvis’s brief lovers was Donna Douglas, who later became America’s darling as Elly May Clampett on the tremendously popular television show The Beverly Hillbillies. Donna was a beauty queen, Miss New Orleans, propelled out of the South and onto the stage. By the time she gained recognition in Hollywood, she was a single mother with a small child. She was not at first highly successful, but in 1965 she won the female lead in an Elvis movie, Frankie and Johnny. On the set, Donna and Elvis soon realized that they shared a huge interest in spiritual matters, especially Eastern religion. Donna could hold her own in any discussion. She was very bright and well informed. Off-camera, they would spend hours together poring over Elvis’s heavily underlined and annotated books on the subject, and off the set they spent a lot of time in bed. Donna really believed that Elvis loved her and would marry her. Then, just as the filming was completed, it all dissolved, and Donna was heartbroken. It was a disappointment she never quite got over and later publicly lamented.
Elvis explained away news reports of his movie affairs to Priscilla as Hollywood hype concocted to sell films. Priscilla was never at ease with all of this, but she was also unwilling to leave Elvis. It was the Colonel who came to her rescue. He finally decided that it was time to change gears. Elvis and Priscilla needed to marry. In Elvis and Me, Priscilla insisted that Elvis himself decided that they should wed. Just before Christmas 1966, he knelt down before her in Graceland, made his proposal, and gave her an engagement ring. On May 1, 1967, they were married in Las Vegas in a quick civil ceremony in a relatively small space in the Aladdin Hotel, with few witnesses, had a small reception, posed for the news people alerted to the event only hours before, and then retreated quickly to Elvis’s less than elegant Palm Springs house while the world absorbed the news.
Colonel Parker, of course, could not allow the world to know that his boy had been playing sex games with this young woman since she was barely fourteen years old and had kept her in his bed at Graceland for the last four years. The world accepted the marriage as the consummation of a beautifully romantic relationship. Again, it was a brilliant public relations coup for the Colonel. A year later Elvis’s marriage had become a disaster, and his career was approaching the same end.
CHAPTER NINE
GIRLS AND GUNS
Priscilla
Even though Elvis had wanted to keep Priscilla in his bed, he had not wanted to marry her. After he learned of her pregnancy, he rued to Lamar Fike that he “didn’t pull out in time.” As Priscilla’s pregnancy progressed, he bought a farm and created the Circle G Ranch. He settled Priscilla and himself in a cozy little house on the ranch, and for a time he romanticized his life with her there. Happily, they waited for the arrival of the baby. In the seventh month of her pregnancy, however, Elvis suddenly proposed “a trial separation,” a phrase for a phase in a declining marriage that usually ended in divorce. She was shocked, hurt, and confused, but he quickly dropped the idea and never brought it up again. The baby, Lisa Marie, came on February 1, 1968. He beamed over his little family for a while, but he stopped having sex with Priscilla immediately after the birth. She tried everything, including donning a black negligee and cuddling up to him in bed, but her best efforts only ended in her own humiliation.
In spite of her frustration in the bedroom, Priscilla behaved very much as a wife and mother should. She attempted with some success to take over the management of the household at Graceland, establishing regular meal times and regular routines. She also attempted to improve the decor, not at all a difficult task. Even so, one staffer at Graceland remembered that most of the new furniture came from Sears. In November 1967, Priscilla persuaded Elvis to buy a house in Beverly Hills for their family at 1174 Hillcrest Road, a house with space for guests but no space for “the guys.” No more two-way mirrors, no more sex parties, no more “fun.”
Elvis countered Priscilla’s push for domesticity by reinventing his Palm Springs house, the house where he and Priscilla had spent their honeymoon. He turned the place into a poor-boy’s version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion for himself and the guys. They spent virtually every weekend there and as much time otherwise as they could manage. Invited showgirls provided a ready and willing reservoir upon which they could draw for sex. The place boasted a patio with a large swimming pool where the boys and girls played.
In the early 1980s, Priscilla and her companion, Mike Edwards, a well-known male model, visited the place. It had been locked up and empty since Elvis’s death in 1977 and was just as he had last left it. Mike had adored Elvis, and he was eager to get an intimate sense of him in his retreat there. He pulled down cans of Vienna sausage and pork-and-beans from the kitchen cabinet and examined the dishes, which were “plastic and mismatched, some cream-colored and others with little green leaves printed around the rims.” He saw a cracked Frisbee lying in the corner of the patio where it had last fallen. He sat down, as Elvis often must have, on the oversized couch in the recreation room, which contained a giant video screen, a pool table, and a jukebox filled with records. In the bathroom, he found a couple of used syringes, small bars of motel soap, and a bottle of Brut. Priscilla called out, “I want to leave.” Riding back to Los Angeles in Elvis’s 280SL while Mike drove, Priscilla leaned her head out of the car window to let the hot desert air blow through her hair.
“What really happened between you two?” Mike asked.
“I grew up,” Priscilla replied.
Wives and serious girlfriends were strictly excluded from the Palm Springs place; groupies were welcomed wholesale, and often carefully selected Las Vegas dancers were invited to swim naked in the pool and pair off with the guys in the bedrooms arranged around the patio like a motel. Elvis liked especially to retire to his room with a number of the girls along with a very special Vegas showgirl who was a lesbian.
During the summer of 1971, Priscilla and Joanie Esposito, Joe’s wife, had raided the place while the boys were away. In the mailbox, Priscilla found a highly appreciative thank-you note to Elvis from a recent female guest. Another guest had written a note to Sonny West in w
hich she had fondly referred to him as “Lizard Tongue.” Furious, Priscilla phoned Elvis in Las Vegas. He pled total innocence. He could not control the fantasies of his fans, he said. Furthermore, how dare she bother him for no good reason when he was about to go onstage in the Showroom. Priscilla ended up apologizing to Elvis. The guys saw great humor in the boss’s clever handling of the situation. Priscilla was not deceived.
Neither were Joanie and the other wives. For a time, marriage had been the fashion among the guys; now divorce crashed through the Elvis coterie. After Elvis hung up the phone in Las Vegas, Lamar Fike quipped that maybe the boys could get a “group rate” from a divorce lawyer. “That little liaison,” he said, “eventually cost Joe his wife, cost me my wife, and cost Elvis his.”
Seeking relief from her demands, Elvis encouraged Priscilla to get out into the world more. She took dance lessons and had an affair with her middle-aged instructor, her first short run at adultery. She next became interested in karate, and Elvis, busy elsewhere, encouraged her to take up the art. She did so with a passion, hanging out with fellow students, attending tournaments, and visiting local karate schools, including that of Chuck Norris. In the swirl of supple male bodies clad in white pajamas with black belts, she encountered Mike Stone. Mike was part native Hawaiian, the world karate champion in 1964 and 1965, and very muscular. Priscilla pursued Mike steadily even though he was married, with a four-year-old daughter and a baby on the way. Soon, they became secret and passionate lovers. He provided the bridge, she said, over which she crossed from girl to woman. She was then twenty-six.
Elvis Presley Page 18
