Child Bride (12 page)

The deeper reason Elvis Presley was overcome when he first saw Priscilla would not surface for several months. “We were sitting around, about four of us, and we were talking about girls,” recalled Currie. Currie told Elvis he had been wondering what possessed him the night he met Priscilla. “He gave me that funny one-sided grin,” recalled Currie. “When you pulled her in here by the hand,” Elvis responded, “what I saw was a young Debra Paget.”
That
was the attraction so long searched for by biographers and other students of Elvis Presley. Priscilla’s
Love Me Tender
hairstyle and eerie facial resemblance to Debra Paget triggered memories of Elvis’s unrequited love for his former costar. “He was flipped over Debra,” confirmed Joe Esposito. “From the stories I was told by him and some other people, he carried a torch for her all during the making of that movie and even after it. But it never happened.” Perhaps, when he saw Priscilla Beaulieu, Debra’s apparent reincarnation, Elvis felt he had been given a second chance.

He behaved that night as if a spell had been cast upon him, as in a way it had. Like the spoken words in “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—his signature song—Elvis Presley loved Priscilla Beaulieu at first glance. What few people realize is that
Priscilla did not have the same feelings for Elvis. She had yearned, in her teenage desperation, to meet her idol, but now that she was face-to-face with the man, she did not fall in love at first sight. “No,” she acknowledged later. “No. There was definitely a
pull
there—the energy was very electric—but not in the sense that this is
it.”
What Priscilla did feel, upon meeting Elvis Presley, was that she had discovered, finally, the source of her strange premonition of destiny, the reason she had felt drawn to Germany. “You know,” she reflected, when she was fifty, “I’ve gone through that night many many times. It was a setup that was meant to be. It was something that—again, that power, that drawing power—I felt that night.”

Priscilla barely said a word as Elvis fell over himself trying to impress her; she was sweet, quiet, demure, and submissive, as directed. “She should get an Academy Award for what she did up there, because she was perfect,” Currie said with admiration. Gone was the teenage-girl chattiness, worrying about whether her hair was right, if Elvis would think she was pretty. “She would talk only when he asked her questions—and very softly. Not ‘I’ve got all your records, I’ve seen all your movies, I love you.’ I said, ‘Never ever say that to him,’ and she learned from that first night how to be with him.”

“I was very quiet,” Priscilla agreed. “I was exceptionally quiet. I didn’t say too much.”

Priscilla’s reserve weaved perfectly into Elvis’s Debra Paget illusion, for Debra had barely spoken when they were together. Priscilla was a tabula rasa; because she uttered scarcely a word, Elvis could project whatever he wished upon her—and he did.

He chivalrously escorted her to a chair in the living room and went to the piano, frenziedly tinkling the keys as the others in the room looked on, bemused. Priscilla would later say that he sang “Rags to Riches” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” but others did not recall him singing—and Elvis had not yet heard or considered “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” The point on which they all agreed was that Elvis Presley was showing off like a schoolboy for Priscilla Beaulieu, who sat perfectly still, somewhere between a dream and a hallucination.

Elvis continued grandstanding, eventually lighting next to Priscilla. The other guests filtered into the kitchen, leaving them alone. The conversation was predictably mundane. Elvis asked her if she was in school, Priscilla said later, and when she told
him she was starting the ninth grade, he grinned, exclaiming, “You’re just a baby!”

Priscilla was not amused. “I didn’t like that. He would tease me about that.” Her self-possession, under the circumstances, was almost supernatural. “Well, I didn’t know what to expect, first of all,” Priscilla said later. “I didn’t have a lot to talk about with them. I just remember being very nervous. It just was so out of my realm of being a teenager.” Priscilla spent the evening, as she would much of her remaining adolescence and early adulthood, silently observing.

Elvis left Priscilla’s side just long enough to bound into the kitchen, recalled Elisabeth Stefaniak, urging the rest of them to peek at her through the doorway. “She looks just like a beautiful little angel, doesn’t she?” he exclaimed.

Less than ten minutes later, when Carol and Currie returned to the living room, “he had Priscilla backed up against the wall,” recalled Currie, “kissing her.” By eight-thirty or so, Elvis was taking her up the stairs to his bedroom. Priscilla would later claim, publicly, that she and Elvis were downstairs all evening, talking, but others who were in the house remember them disappearing to Elvis’s upstairs room. Priscilla later admitted this to Mike Edwards. “He just took her by the hand, went up the stairs and said, ‘We’ll be down later,’ ” Currie recalled. “And she just went right with him. That’s when I began to worry, because I know Elvis. There were many times when he’d taken girls up there. He’s got no idea of timing. I had to get this girl back by midnight.”

Thus Priscilla Beaulieu, who had just a few months earlier completed junior high in Del Valle, Texas, daydreaming of Elvis Presley, found herself in his bedroom in Germany their first evening together. The unlikelihood of this scenario captured perfectly the circumstances, for theirs was a match based entirely in unreality. He was literally her fantasy come true, the successor to Mario Lanza in Priscilla’s childish fancy—
Elvis Presley!
Every teenage girl’s paradise found. She was his dream girl, the perfect child-woman Elvis had created in his mind. He told Rex Mansfield the next day that he had “been looking for someone like that all of his life.” Priscilla, he explained to Rex, had the physical look he was attracted to “and she was young enough [for him] to raise her up to suit himself.” Mike Edwards characterized it as a “fantasy world, not a man and woman dying with love for each other.”

On a deeper level, Elvis and Priscilla’s union could only be construed as karmic. She represented the beloved mother he had just lost; he was the dead father she had just found—a beautiful, black-haired soldier who could remove her from reality, who would be her guardian angel and protector. Priscilla’s resemblance to Debra Paget linked her with Elvis’s mother in his mind, for as Joe Esposito would recall, Elvis considered Debra’s face strongly similar to that of Gladys Presley. Of course, the person Priscilla Beaulieu really resembled was Elvis himself; they were mirror images of each other. This may have been the more mystical attraction, for Elvis still grieved over the death of his still-born twin, Jesse Garon, and felt that he was missing his other half. He and his mother, recalled Gladys’s best friend Willie Jane Nichols, would have “conversations” with Jesse in a special language; after Gladys Presley’s death, Elvis became preoccupied with look-alikes. On a subconscious level, finding Priscilla may have symbolized a reunion with his dead twin.

There were clearly psychological and emotional undercurrents to the attraction within Elvis, for he felt instantly intimate with Priscilla in a manner that surprised even her. “He was very lonely over there,” she said in the seventies. “And he wanted to talk to someone. And he
trusted
me. For some reason, he really trusted me. And he poured his heart out. I look back now and I go, ‘My gosh. Yeah, I
was
so young. And I
was
only fourteen years old. How did that trust develop? I mean, how,
why
did he? But he did.” Priscilla, at fourteen, was far more aware than Elvis of the surreal nature of their relationship—that she was a young girl, a stranger, sharing intimacies with a twenty-four-year-old international movie star. She was the practical one in the relationship, even then. Remembering that first night, she would recall in typical teenage-girl fashion only that “I just knew that we hit it off. He spent a lot of time with me, joking around.” For Elvis, something deeper, more profound, was occurring. He spent much of their time in the bedroom talking to Priscilla, mostly about his career; and her natural inclination to shyness, the intimidating circumstances, and the advice she had gotten from Currie played into Elvis’s needs beautifully, for Priscilla had been conditioned to listen, raptly, to his every word.

For all her poise and apparent maturity, the experience had to have been mind-bending for Priscilla Beaulieu. The previous October she had been the only eighth-grader to attend the high
school homecoming dance, to which she was escorted by a sophomore who barely tried to kiss her. Apart from her secret dalliances with Currie and her liaisons with forbidden boys the year before, she had never been on an official car date. Now, at fourteen, she was being pursued by the most famous sex symbol in the world. Currie Grant would question her a few days later about what she and Elvis did that night up in his room. Elvis, Priscilla told Currie, was sweet and tender; they lay on the bed together while Elvis “kissed her very gently,” then became more sexual. “He just played with her. 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.”

No one present at the house that night said a word about Priscilla Beaulieu being fourteen years old, either before or after Elvis disappeared with her into his bedroom. “It was not even discussed,” Rex Mansfield confirmed. “Because she was there with her parents’ approval.” Such was the power of Elvis Presley. “It was just a whole different world,” Rex said, “that world he was in.” Conventional rules were not enforced, and no one questioned the propriety. “To me, to be honest, she looked like a little girl,” Rex confessed years afterward. “A little young girl … I’m not even sure how I found out she was fourteen. Maybe it was mentioned later.”

The only one who expressed concern that night was Currie, who expected to face the wrath of Priscilla’s father, an air force captain and his superior, if he brought her home past her midnight curfew. “At eleven-thirty, I started pacing the floor.” Lamar Fike, who was sitting nearby, merely laughed. “You might as well sit down,” he said lazily. “You know once he gets up there he forgets all time.”

“So I paced the floor for another hour and a half,” declared Currie. “They came down a few minutes after one o’clock.”

Priscilla and Elvis were holding hands, and Elvis was still reluctant to let her go, despite Currie’s urgency. “He walked her out the front door,” Currie remembered, “which he rarely did for anybody. He was still holding her fingers when we got to the steps outside. And when he let go of her hand he said, ‘Bring her back, Currie.’ ” Currie hurried Priscilla into the car with Carol, clearly agitated, barely looking back. “I’ll try,” he responded.

Once inside the car, Priscilla seemed to be in a mild state of shock, Currie recalled. She questioned the Grants endlessly: “Do you think he likes me? Do you think he likes me?” “All the way back,” Currie said later. “She was very unsure of herself.” Stepping into his mentor role, he calmed Priscilla down, saying, “He wouldn’t have taken you upstairs if he didn’t like you, Priscilla.” The performance had ended.
“Now
she started acting like a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl after her first date,” noted Currie, which, in effect, she was.

What Priscilla did not know was that Elvis Presley was in a trance over her, talking about her to Charlie Hodge, just as he had to Rex Mansfield. “He called me over and said, ‘Charlie, did you see the structure of her face? The bone structure? It’s almost like everything I ever look for in a woman!’ ”

The first meeting had gone beyond Priscilla’s wildest games of Imagine If. She had spent four hours alone with Elvis Presley in his bedroom. Though she was breathlessly agog at the fantasy she was living, there were hints of ambivalence on Priscilla’s part that first night. She was bothered, she would say many years later, by Elvis’s constant teasing. “I didn’t know if I liked him or not. It was this energy that was there that I had never felt.”

The Grants did not get Priscilla home until two o’clock that morning. Despite Currie’s grave apprehensions, there were no repercussions from the Beaulieus. “I got kind of a funny look from the old man, so I talked ninety miles an hour: ‘Elvis was real tired,’ ‘He was real happy to meet her.’ I just kept it rolling. But [Paul] hardly said anything at all. He said, ‘It is a little late.’ That’s about as grumpy as he got. Within five minutes I was out of there with Carol.”

Currie seemed more concerned about the late hour than Ann Beaulieu did. Far from being disturbed by her fourteen-year-old daughter’s midnight date with Elvis Presley, Priscilla’s mother was thrilled. Her cousin Margaret later recalled, “She wrote me from Germany and said, ‘Guess who Priscilla met? Elvis Presley!’ She was all excited! Saying that Priscilla had met Elvis Presley and, you know, it was a big deal.”

Ann seemed unfazed by the difference in Elvis’s and Priscilla’s ages or by the monumental chasm between them in life experiences. Priscilla Beaulieu may have looked older and
played
older than her fourteen years, but as Martha Smith, her eighth-grade English teacher from Texas said of her, “she was just a
little girl
to me. Back then little girls were little girls.”

Priscilla told Currie, the next time they spoke, that she lay in bed wide awake after he dropped her off. “She couldn’t even sleep, she was so excited.”

“There are two tragedies in life,” George Bernard Shaw wrote. “One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” Priscilla Beaulieu was too young, at fourteen, to appreciate the irony of thanking God for
un
answered prayers.

T
he sole person who seemed focused on the absurd difference in Priscilla Beaulieu’s and Elvis Presley’s ages was Priscilla. After their unlikely meeting and even more improbable bonding at the house on Goethestrasse, Priscilla continued her first days of ninth grade, dubious she would ever see the singer again. “Currie had introduced me to him and that’s all I ever thought it was, so when I left I put it out of my mind.”