Child Bride (20 page)

Priscilla’s lightning rod, Currie, heard about the “dorm scandal” from some of the teens who frequented the Eagle Club and took it upon himself to investigate, still somewhat piqued at Priscilla for trying to eliminate him and Carol from Elvis’s parties. Posing as a reporter, he phoned the school and asked for details. The dorm incident eventually landed on the front page of the
Overseas Family
, an American newspaper for military families in Europe.

When Priscilla heard that Currie was asking questions, her parents had a friendly telephone conversation about it with him. outraged to hear that Priscilla was being linked to the scandal, Ann told Currie it was “a big mix-up,” claiming “somebody’s trying to ‘get’ Cilla. I guess because she’s been getting all this publicity.” She denied that Priscilla even attended the controversial sleep over. “It kind of burns me up that anybody would think she was in one of those wild parties. What is going around amongst the kids is what’s burning me up. They’re trying to name
her
as one of the ones involved. There’s very little I don’t know as far as she’s concerned, because I escort her to all these things. It’s very rarely—in fact that’s only the second occasion that she’s been allowed to go. I mean, we just don’t let her go anywhere at all.” Former vice principal Donald Trull proclaimed that “Priscilla was definitely there.”

Al Corey, who lived in the dorm, recalled recurring incidents where girls sneaked into the boys’ rooms to spend the night. “Our windows were actually ground height. They were double windows that opened out, so you could step right into one room, walk down the hall, and go in somebody else’s room.” Donna Pollen remembered Priscilla meeting up with Tom Stewart at a party with the other girls from the sleep over that night
before
they sneaked out again at 2:30
A.M.
By the account of one of the boys in the dorm room, Priscilla was supposed to be baby-sitting, not attending a slumber party. According to Al, this was how Priscilla maneuvered her secret rendezvous with Tommy. “Her mom and dad would go away for the weekend and Priscilla
would stay home, or Priscilla would spend the night at a friend’s house and Tommy would go over there.”

Priscilla admitted, decades later, that she was part of the slumber party that raided the boys’ dorm, but she called it “innocent stuff” and claimed that Currie was “stalking” her that night. “The whole time in Germany, I was being stalked by him.” That night, she maintained, “all of a sudden I’d see a car creeping through and it was Currie, parked across the street, watching me. Then there was some article that I was in the dorm. You know, he reverses it.”

Currie called this a “black lie.” He was hosting the Saturday-night
Hit Parade
at the time Priscilla claimed he was “stalking” her in his car. How would he know she was at a slumber party or that she would sneak out at 2:30
A.M.
and go to the dorm? The newspaper, moreover, did
not
mention Priscilla, as she claimed.

The whiff of scandal about Priscilla did annoy the Beaulieus, however, and they vented their anger on Currie for asking questions. “My father was going to have him court-martialed,” declared Priscilla. “My father’s commanding officer called him in the office and wanted to know what it was all about.” Paul Beaulieu did report Currie to
Currie’s
commanding officer for allegedly agitating the situation; Currie met with his superior, “who asked me what had happened. I told him, and that was the end of it.” Priscilla’s stepfather did not say a word to Currie’s superior officer about Currie allegedly trying to rape his ninth-grade daughter, a strange omission if he was attempting to have him court-martialed. Currie continued in the air force without even a reprimand.

The great H. H. Arnold dorm scandal unfolded with no one in the cast of characters coming off too well: Priscilla, looking slightly soiled; Ann, lying to protect her daughter; and Currie, a bit fixated on Priscilla.

T
he weekend after the dormitory affair was Easter. Two weeks had passed since Gene Wagner received the letter from his mother bidding him to travel to Wiesbaden in search of their long-lost Priscilla. He had seen the pictures of Elvis’s girlfriend in German newspapers, “but I didn’t know that Priscilla was
that
Priscilla—that Priscilla Beaulieu was Priscilla Wagner.”

Gene checked into the Von Steuben Hotel, looked up the Beaulieus’ telephone number, and called their house. He eventually found Ann at home and confirmed that she was his former sister-in-law. “Ann said, ‘Come on over,’ ” he recalled. She seemed pleased to hear from him. “I was excited about seeing Ann, ’cause she had been a big thing in my life. I couldn’t imagine how Priscilla looked. I had no idea how tall, how big, what she looked like.” The timing for Ann was fortuitous: Paul Beaulieu was out of town; only she and Priscilla were at home when their visitor arrived.

Gene Wagner, a shy, sensitive teacher, had no idea why his family had been kept from Priscilla for the past eleven years or why her name had been changed to Beaulieu, and he did not wish to make trouble for his late brother’s wife. So he stood in front of his only niece, whom he had not seen since she was three, uncertain what to do. “I didn’t know if Priscilla knew who
I was. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to embarrass Ann. I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, I’m your dad’s brother!’ I didn’t know if Ann had even told her.… I just said, ‘Hello. How are you?’ ”

The circumstances were made equally awkward for Priscilla. “My mother said that my uncle Gene was going to come by,” she said later. It was the first time Priscilla had heard that her real father had a brother, that she had an uncle and grandmother she never knew about. “But I was very
contained.
There was only so much I felt comfortable with, because I knew my mother was uncomfortable. So I didn’t really ask a lot of questions.… I didn’t really go into anything. I mean, he was a stranger to me.”

Ann and Gene had a “nice visit,” by his description, laughing and reminiscing about Jimmy and old times. “In fact, she mentioned things that I had completely forgotten when she stayed with us for those couple months after my brother was killed.” Ann also presented a considerably sanitized version of Priscilla’s relationship with Elvis for the Wagners, reassuring Gene that the press accounts of a romance between Elvis and Jimmy’s fourteen-year-old daughter “were not true. They were exaggerated. Elvis was not taking her out, they were not spending all night out and all that.” Ann stressed that “school came first.”

Gene had made hotel arrangements for the week, hoping he would find his niece and they would get reacquainted. When he returned to the Beaulieus’ a day later, however, the atmosphere was tense. Paul was back in town, and Priscilla’s two half brothers and her half sister were at home. Ann took him aside, Gene remembered, and asked him, sotto voce, if he would pretend he was just a “friend” and not Priscilla’s uncle, because the other children did not know who her real father was “and [Ann] didn’t want to have to explain to them that she was married before,” though Priscilla knew. “So I visited as a friend of the family,” recalled Gene.

“She was concerned because the other kids were going to be there,” declared Priscilla. “And here was this
stranger.
I think my mother talked to Gene and asked him please not to say anything to my father.”

Paul Beaulieu came home shortly after Gene arrived, making the situation even more tense. “When Ann introduced me to Beaulieu he left immediately,” recalled Gene. “I sort of felt that he was a little uptight that I had shown up. He left the room,
and I didn’t see him again. In fact, I don’t even [remember] if he shook my hand. He hardly acknowledged me. He was very cool and didn’t say anything.” Gene sensed the antagonism. “Well, there was something,” as he put it later. “I sort of felt maybe I shouldn’t have shown up unexpected. Maybe that was the problem.”

Gene took photographs of Priscilla for Kathryn Wagner, who was waiting anxiously back in Pennsylvania. She posed prettily, first alone, then with her mother and siblings. Ann was no longer the Rooney whom Jimmy’s mother had known. Her face had grown hard with the passing years. She still tried to project an aura of glamour, however; her figure was pencil-slim despite her four children, and she posed, model-style, with one high-heeled foot in front of the other. Priscilla’s anxiety was nowhere apparent in the pictures. She was costumed neatly in a blue hoop skirt with a sweater draped over her shoulders, smiling like the girl who got Elvis—as she was.

Gene Wagner handed out gifts to all the children and left shortly afterward, without so much as a single conversation alone with his niece. “I think he brought me something,” affirmed Priscilla. “I just know it was a very uncomfortable feeling and a very uncomfortable situation. And I know my mother was
extremely
uncomfortable. He didn’t stay very long.”

Gene wrote his mother in Titusville and broke the news that her missing granddaughter had been found, enclosing the snapshots he had taken. Kathryn Wagner was ecstatic. She wrote Ann a fourteen-page letter expressing how thrilled she was to have found her and Priscilla again, bringing her up to date. Not a word was mentioned about the eleven years she had missed of her only grandchild’s life. She sent the letter in care of Paul Beaulieu at his military address in Wiesbaden and waited once more, this time with joy, for a letter or phone call from Ann and Priscilla. None ever came. Days passed, then weeks, finally months.

Kathryn Wagner concluded that Paul Beaulieu had gotten the letter and never passed it on to Ann or Priscilla. It was he, her women’s intuition told her, who had kept them apart all these years. “I know it as if … oh, as if I’d read it someplace or somebody had told me,” she later remarked. “Everything was perfectly all right till she married this person. It was just through him that Ann wouldn’t share Priscilla with us after she was married. He just didn’t want that. I know Ann would listen. Whatever he would say, she would do.” Mrs. Wagner could not figure out
why.
Perhaps, she conjectured, “Ballou,” as she pronounced Paul’s surname, bore a grudge against the Wagners because they were German Protestants and he was a French Catholic. She was grasping at straws. Gene Wagner would barely acknowledge, later, how hurt he was by the slight: “I keep it hidden, my feelings.” He also was at a loss to understand why Ann excommunicated them. A female friend of his stumbled upon the reason Ann’s cousin Margaret had revealed. “I had a close girlfriend, Connie,” said Gene, “who told me she read someplace that the second husband can be very, very jealous of the first husband. And insecure. She said maybe he was very jealous of Jim.”

“Maybe Ann was afraid of him,” Kathryn Wagner speculated. “I can’t fathom it. I can’t solve it. So I just forget about it.”

Mrs. Wagner decided to do nothing further. “I always look at it this way,” she said in the 1970s. “It’s the way God wanted it to be. My heart was broken for a long, long time. But I’d think, Well, if that’s the way she wants it, that’s the way it will be.” At least she had the photographs of Priscilla, looking so like Jim, and she knew her granddaughter was alive and well—and dating Elvis Presley.

Priscilla never knew that her grandmother had sent her a letter that spring, expressing her constant love, anxious to reenter her life. She never saw it. Whether Ann did was another of Anna Iversen Wagner Beaulieu’s closely held secrets.

Ann Beaulieu encountered a ghost from her past that April; in June, Priscilla nearly faced a ghost of her own. Pam Rutherford and her family, who were stationed in England, made plans to stop in Wiesbaden for a few days over the summer holiday. Pam wrote to Linda Williams in advance to arrange to spend time with both her and Priscilla, whom she hadn’t seen in two years. The famed photograph of Priscilla waving good-bye to Elvis Presley had even made the British newspapers, and Pam had clipped it out in disbelief, stunned that her former best friend had realized her fantasy about Elvis from their games of Imagine If in Texas.

When the Rutherfords arrived in Germany, Pam met Linda as planned, but when she got to the Beaulieus’ at the arranged time, Priscilla was nowhere around. Pam waited and waited for her childhood friend, but Priscilla never appeared. Pam left Wiesbaden feeling snubbed, and wrote Carol Ann how hurt she was. “I don’t remember what the problem was,” Linda said diplomatically.

In retrospect, Priscilla’s motivation is clear. She
couldn’t
see Pam Rutherford now, for Pam was the keeper of one of Priscilla’s secrets: She knew that Priscilla was a longtime Elvis Presley fan and that she had hoped fervently, for three years, that she would one day meet Elvis, date Elvis, and marry Elvis.

The Beaulieus moved soon after Pam’s visit, the summer between Priscilla’s freshman and sophomore years. Base housing became available, enabling them to leave their flat in downtown Wiesbaden for more spacious officers’ quarters in Aukamm, adjacent to the school. H. H. Arnold was situated picturesquely on one of the numerous hills above Wiesbaden, with military housing extending from its grounds like spokes on a wheel. After a brief stay in a smaller apartment, the Beaulieus took up residence on the third floor of a three-story building on Westfalenstrasse. Each floor contained two apartments, with maid’s quarters in the basement.

Now that Priscilla was no longer physically isolated downtown and emotionally distanced by Elvis’s presence, she spent more time with Al Corey and made her first real girlfriend, Debbie Ross, whose family lived across the hall from the Beaulieus. Debbie was Priscilla’s physical and intellectual opposite—a cute, bookish blond cheerleader—which may have drawn Priscilla to her. “Because there was no competition.… I guess I was somewhat in awe of Priscilla, but I also knew that I had things she needed, in terms of just being a friend. I was one of the few girlfriends she had there.” Debbie ate dinner with the Beaulieus, spent the night in their apartment, listened to records, and occasionally helped Priscilla with her homework.

The Elvis part of Priscilla’s life, Debbie recalled, “was all sort of mysterious.” Mary Ann Barks, who was in Debbie’s clique, remembered spending the night at Priscilla’s with Debbie when Elvis called. “I thought, Oh, my God, Elvis is on the phone! At that time calling the States was like calling the moon. You had to practically put a phone call in and wait a day to get the call back, and there would be crackling and God knows how much it cost. You’d only call back to the States if somebody was dying or you had to get some emergency information. And he was just calling her!” Mary Ann knew that Priscilla had gone to the airport to see Elvis off, and she’d heard the rumors, but still wasn’t sure whether to believe them. “I just remember going into her room and seeing Elvis’s combat jacket on her wall. That stands
out. She nailed it up in her bedroom. I’m going, Oh, my God, this is for real!”