Child Bride (16 page)

Suni, who also baby-sat regularly for Currie and Carol’s two small daughters, never had a problem with Currie. “He liked the ladies,” she said, “but … he was always a gentleman. He
never
crossed the line.”

Albert Corey Jr., a football player at H. H. Arnold who was a year older than Priscilla, spent the night in the maid’s quarters of the Beaulieus’ basement a few times after football games the next fall, a school practice for athletes who lived in the dormitories. He remembered his first extended encounter with Captain Beaulieu: “He came down to talk to me about the football game, and he had a drink in his hand and he was drunk and he wouldn’t leave.” Priscilla’s father “always had [a drink] in his hand,” Al recalled, “every time I stayed with them, from morning until night. Mother, too. Cognac all the time. ’Course over there it was like running water.”

Suni also remembered Ann Beaulieu drinking heavily on the nights she baby-sat. Priscilla would be at Elvis’s house, according to Suni, still not home by one or two in the morning when the Beaulieus returned. Paul and Ann never asked where Priscilla
was. “When they came home they were both sloshed. She always went right to the bedroom. And you could tell, the way she was weaving.”

Suni Ernst’s and Al Corey’s recollections were consistent with Mike Edwards’s later impression of Paul Beaulieu as an alcoholic, the dark secret of military life.

“There is a lot of alcoholism in the military,” observed Katie Neece, a classmate and acquaintance of Priscilla’s. “I think it’s a way of coping. And of course in Germany there wasn’t a drinking age, and for the most part, people drank.”

“In a military family,” another Wiesbaden friend of Priscilla’s, Joe Delahunt, stated, “what goes on and what people see on the outside—and how dysfunctional it is—is something else. But I would say, as a typical military family, [the Beaulieus] had problems.… [Priscilla’s] dad was kind of a hard-ass.”

When Suni baby-sat, she noticed how intimidated the rest of the family was by Paul Beaulieu. “They weren’t happy,” she said. “It was not a happy home life. The whole
behavior
of the children—you know, quiet when he was around. He was to a certain extent a male chauvinist, like he was head honcho and that was it.” Robbie Jones, who attended summer school with Priscilla the next year and visited the Beaulieus’ house several times, formed the same impression. “I’m not sure Priscilla had a really joyful home life,” she recalled. “I think she had a stepfather, and I don’t
think
she was abused or anything, but I compare it to my life and I have wonderful parents.”

“He was not a nice man,” Al Corey concluded from his sleep overs at the Beaulieu home. “Everything was ‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’ I don’t know that he ever physically
did
anything, but I do know that Priscilla had a lock on her bedroom door. And she used it.” John Reddington, a reflective man who was principal of H. H. Arnold during Priscilla’s sophomore and junior years, observed her with a concerned eye. He met with Captain Beaulieu for a parent-teacher conference, and formulated an opinion of the family dynamics. “And the lock on the bedroom door …” he later speculated. “If there was actual abuse there, it’s doggone complicated, because at a certain stage of little girls’ development, they can’t even be seductive toward their fathers. So if you have a guy that, say, he’s slipping over into drink, you don’t know what kind of secrets there might be in the family.”

Priscilla had been brought up in an atmosphere of illusion, and it extended to her intense, clandestine romance with Elvis, which
continued throughout the fall, as she adjusted to high school. By day, she attended classes with other fourteen-year-olds, pretending to study world history and German, trying earnestly to blend in; when seven o’clock arrived, her chariot awaited, driven by Lamar or one of the others in Elvis’s merry band, and off she would ride to her secret nightlife of sex, adult parties, and midnight celebrity confessions. It was a schizophrenic, extraordinary existence, and it was taking its toll on Priscilla. Cliff Gleaves perceived her as “overpowered. Every human being she was around was older. It was sort of another world for her, so that could stifle a younger person’s personality.”

Missing was the confident, effervescent Priscilla of Del Valle fame, queen of her domain. She had been replaced by an insecure adolescent under enormous pressure, striving desperately to fit into an unreal adult scene, to sustain the attention of a teen idol. “I know I didn’t eat, I couldn’t eat,” she said years later. “I remember [Elvis’s] grandmother always trying to get me to eat. I was always starved and feeling hungry but never wanted to look silly eating. I was always afraid I was going to have something on my mouth—you know, how when you first meet someone …? And he always tried to get his grandmother to make me bacon sandwiches, things like that, but I never ate.”

Linda Williams, Priscilla’s classmate in Austin and Wiesbaden, noticed a personality change in her. Priscilla went from being a fun-loving, outgoing “bit of a clown” at Popham and Del Valle to being a more somber and serious person. “She had sort of withdrawn,” Linda remembered. “We stayed friendly, but we really weren’t friends.”

Priscilla had been drawn into a complex, stressful adult situation. Her relationship with Elvis forced her to face issues and situations that were beyond the grasp of a teenager. “Now I had
another
burden that I was concerned about—him and his welfare,” she said when she was fifty. “I was concerned about his career; I was concerned about his acceptance after being in the army for two years. My problems now were not my own problems. They were someone else’s problems that I inherited.”

She had no friends. Part of this, and an aspect of Priscilla’s celebrated aloofness, may have been psychological in origin, for children who are taught to keep secrets often grow up to be observers. They may find it difficult to talk, fearful they may reveal what they have sworn to keep private. Priscilla’s secrets now included a sexual relationship with Elvis Presley. How could
other fourteen-year-olds possibly relate? “It might have contributed, in her own mind, to being far more sophisticated,” as her high school principal, John Reddington, opined. “That she was in on secrets that other girls just giggled about, or talked about behind their hands. After all, the secrets of sex are great secrets.”

What was mystifying about Elvis’s sexual liaison with a fourteen-year-old was that no one questioned it. Everyone seems to have had a rationalization for looking the other way. Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father, chose to ignore the Priscilla predicament, projected Lamar, because “he had his own deal goin’,” dating someone else’s estranged wife. Gerta, Cliff’s fashion model girlfriend, would not comment later on how she felt about Elvis dating a ninth-grader. “Well, I’d rather not answer that. I did not know how old she was. When I met her, I could tell that she was young.” Priscilla’s principal at the time, Leslie Murray, “didn’t think it was a concern at all, and certainly her parents would be the responsible party for that type of thing.” Lamar Fike reportedly hooted and hollered at Elvis, “God Almighty damn! Eighteen is one thing, but fourteen? My God! There’s a law called statutory rape, and it applies anywhere, I think.” Elvis, so the story goes, said he had spoken to her parents and it was all right with them.

Priscilla’s defense of her parents in her book,
Elvis and Me
, was weak and unconvincing. By her fourth date with Elvis, she wrote, “Dad had laid down the law: ‘If you want to continue seeing Elvis, we’re going to have to meet him.’ My parents weren’t so enthralled with his celebrity status that they were willing to compromise their principles.” As long as they met Elvis, it was acceptable for their ninth-grade daughter to stay in his bed until two and three in the morning?

Currie and Carol Grant just shook their heads in wonderment. “Her parents used to take her there and drop her off after she got to know Elvis,” Currie recalled. “And Carol and I both thought, Man, if they only knew what was going on in there. It’s like leading a lamb to slaughter.”

Dee Stanley, the soldier’s wife who eventually married Elvis’s father, accompanied Vernon when he drove Priscilla home. “It’s almost like selling your child, when you really get down to it,” she later remarked. “A child at the age of fourteen going home, in high school, at two o’clock in the morning.”

Whispers of scandal were ever swirling, recalled H. H. Arnold schoolmate Donna Wells. There was “chatter around the school
because apparently her parents were not discouraging the relationship.” Though Priscilla was nothing if not discreet, her romance with Elvis Presley was too provocative to remain a secret. Before Christmas, Elvis fired an eccentric South African pseudo-dermatologist named Laurenz Griessel-Landau, who made a pass at him during a skin treatment. Landau later wrote several letters to Elvis, threatening to expose his teen lover and ruin him, a charge that made its way to FBI files before Landau dropped it.

Gerta Heylmann, who would later marry Elvis’s close friend Cliff Gleaves, regarded Elvis as protective of Priscilla, mindful that she not be touched by scandal. Perhaps that was why, late that fall, Priscilla did something entirely out of character. Her school held a slave auction, with boys bidding for the services of a female student “slave” to carry their books and run errands for them for a day. Priscilla, because of her beauty and the Elvis mystique, generated the most money. She was pitted against a junior, Donna Wells. Though they barely interacted, “she came and asked me if I would like to go to a party at Elvis’s place,” Donna recalled. “Back then, Elvis wasn’t the cultural icon that he is today. People either were into someone like him or they were not, and I was not.… I wasn’t sure what her motive was in asking me, because I didn’t know her very well, and I said no. Then she came back another time, about two weeks later, and asked would I care to come with some other American teenagers, and I agreed. My curiosity got the better of me.”

Donna found the evening strange and discomfiting. She said that Elvis and Priscilla were there, as were “some people from Frankfurt High School whom I didn’t know. [Elvis’s] dad was there, I believe, and his grandmother. It was an uncomfortable situation. I was uncomfortable with the idea of meeting someone who was in his twenties.… GIs weren’t supposed to be spending time with American girls. Here he was having parties, meeting some of the kids.… I remember I went into the kitchen with Grandma and made popcorn for everybody. And Elvis and Priscilla disappeared shortly after, and the rest of us who didn’t know anybody from Adam were left standing around with a few GIs and Grandma and Dad. It was kind of odd.”

To Donna, Elvis and Priscilla seemed “smitten” with each other, “shy, kind of,” though the Lolita aspect disturbed her. “She was a little girl, really, in a lot of ways. She didn’t act older than her age, except that she was kind of a self-possessed person; she wasn’t giggly.” What bothered Donna most was that
she and the other teenagers who had been recruited for the evening “felt like we were kind of a shield of respectability.”

Despite her unnatural circumstances, by many accounts Priscilla was cool, calm, and collected when she was at Bad Nauheim with Elvis. Whatever awkwardness she felt paled beside the sheer force of her ambition. Priscilla was almost inhumanly focused; she kept her eye always on the prize. “I did feel out of place,” she admitted in a revealing conversation when she was fifty. “They were all older. But my main purpose was not to be with everybody; it was to be with him.” Now that she was authentically dating Elvis Presley, Priscilla’s competitive nature set in: She wanted him to herself.

Priscilla’s key rival for Elvis’s affection was someone she had never laid eyes on. Her name was Anita Wood, a sweet, bubbly blond from Memphis who had her own successful singing career. Elvis had been dating Anita since he filmed
Jailhouse Rock
in July of 1957; she was his first serious post-Debra Paget romance. Since he arrived in Germany, Anita had been writing to him faithfully from Memphis, and Elvis called her from time to time. Priscilla knew of Anita Wood before the Beaulieus moved to Wiesbaden; once she gained access to Elvis’s bedroom, she became obsessed with her. “When he would be downstairs,” she later confessed, “every letter that he got—he had a stack on the night table—and I would read them.”

Priscilla had cause to be concerned, for Anita was no passing fancy. Elvis was charmed by her petite beauty and had affectionately nicknamed her “Little” for her size-four-and-a-half feet. Feet, which he and his mother called sooties, were one of Elvis’s fetishes. Willie Jane Nichols, Gladys Presley’s bosom friend, remembered how, on the day his mama was buried, Elvis had thrown himself on her casket, “wild to see her feet” one last time. There was nothing perverse about this, according to Willie; Elvis was simply “staggered” by grief. “Steady-talking all the time. It was breaking your heart. He’d just sit on the doorstep and cry.” Anita was with Elvis the day of his mother’s funeral, and as a southern girl, she understood their intimate connection, the deep ties of family. “He was just a real sweet, baby-talking guy,” was how she remembered him.

She and Elvis, Anita declared, had talked marriage before he was drafted, but publicly downplayed their romance under the strict direction of Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. “I was supposed to go to Germany to visit him,” Anita said. “I’d already
had my shots, packed, and everything, but the Colonel put a stop to that. He’s the reason I didn’t get to go.”

Ninth-grader Priscilla Beaulieu, stealing glances at Anita’s love letters to Elvis while waiting to go to his bed, was sick to her stomach with jealousy. “I just remember thinking, Okay, I will cherish the time that I am with him, as long as I’m with him. And I can’t control what happens after he leaves.”

Anita, in the interim, had heard of Elvis’s teenage playmate through the Presley grapevine, “and he assured me all the time he was over there—he was such a good persuader—that this poor girl … He just had a way of assuring me that this was nothing other than a friend, another army man’s daughter. They were just friends. She was so young. There was nothing to it.” Elvis wrote a few letters to Anita from Germany—a rarity for him. Anita recalled that “in one of the letters, he said when he got married, it would be to me.”