Child Bride (37 page)

Whether due to Priscilla’s staged suicide attempt or simply circumstances, things improved temporarily in her relationship with Elvis. They moved out of the house on Perugia Way and took another rental in Bel Air toward the end of 1965, this one on Rocca Place, and symbolically at least, Priscilla felt an emotional release. “I think that one of the problems was that he already had Perugia Way; there was already a standard set before
I ever came into the picture.” The new house on Rocca, set precipitously up in the hills, was more physically inaccessible, which cut down on the transient female population, pacifying Priscilla somewhat. Priscilla also attributed her improved relations with Elvis to the fact that they had purchased motorcycles (hers, to her dissatisfaction, was pink), so she and Elvis could take off alone, as he had done with Ann-Margret. “It was more [just the two of us] on a bike.… We could go out more.” Elvis, being Elvis, bought not two but twelve motorcycles. “We were the original Hell’s Angels,” chuckled Priscilla. “Before Stallone and everybody else used them. We were doing it
way
before that.”

This halcyon period was short-lived. Each time Elvis began a new movie, which was every few months, Priscilla was filled with fresh concern that he might be having an affair with his costar or someone else on the set; she occasionally found love notes in his closet, and she became paranoid when gossip columnists linked him to a costar. During the shooting of
Spinout
, just before Easter 1966, Priscilla decided to visit the set so she could meet Shelley Fabares, Elvis’s leading lady. Elvis, so Priscilla would say, responded much as he had when she confronted him about Ann-Margret—by tearing her clothes off their hangers and threatening to send her to her parents.

The tempests in Priscilla’s and Elvis’s unusual relationship, and her insecurity about marriage, manifested themselves physically in the form of an ulcer when she was only twenty. She felt that Elvis was still spending too much time with Larry Geller, and he had ordered a special shelf constructed under his bed to keep the increasing number of spiritual tomes. The groupies were still underfoot as well. “It was
constant.…
What girl was being invited next? What girl was being passed off? The girls went from guy to guy to guy. It was not your normal home, that’s for sure. By
any
means. I was always on edge. Always wondering, What now? What was the next move? What was the next adventure? Trying to go along, trying to accept it. I wasn’t
married
to him.”

There were also intervals of the sweetest pleasure. Priscilla had spoken, wistfully, of having her own horse, a carryover perhaps from her childhood fantasies of the Black Stallion, when she and Pam would steal off to a pasture near the base and pretend. In the fall of 1966, Elvis surprised her with a magnificent black quarter horse she called Domino, when he was about
to start his latest movie romp,
Double Trouble.
Priscilla, according to Mike McGregor, Elvis’s ranch hand, took to Domino as if she had been born to ride. “I didn’t teach her anything,” Mike said. “She seemed to know … and I don’t know of any formal education she had in riding.” The two together—Priscilla with her flowing black hair and Domino, jet-black with one white stocking—were poetry to watch. “She was a real pretty lady, and she was riding a really good-looking horse, and it was a real striking thing.” Priscilla’s excitement infected Elvis, who bought himself a spectacular golden palomino named Rising Sun, which Priscilla taught him to ride. Elvis came to love Rising Sun, but he was no competition for Priscilla. “The lady didn’t act like she had any fear of anything,” recalled Mike McGregor. “She scared me a lot of times. I felt responsible for everybody who got on a horse, because the horses were my responsibility. And the lady would ride bareback.” Mike was never sure why. “Why do you do anything? Maybe because she just wanted to see if she could do it, and she did it well.” Priscilla had a fierce competitiveness; she challenged the Stanley brothers to foot races, which she invariably won, and she swam and dived in the pool at Graceland with a steely determination.

The strange saga of Priscilla and Elvis took another enigmatic turn at the end of that year, 1966, when he suddenly and inexplicably presented her with an engagement ring and told her they were to be married. Who or what precipitated this development would be a never-ending topic of debate in the Presley mythology. It was a mystery seemingly without resolution, perhaps not even known by Priscilla.

The catalyst for Priscilla’s long-standing dream may have been, ironically, Currie Grant, the man who had made her original fantasy come true when he took her to meet Elvis in 1959. When Currie was in northern California on business in October or November of 1966, he called the Beaulieus, who were still stationed at Travis Air Force Base outside Sacramento. Paul and Ann invited him to dinner, he recalled, and Currie mentioned to Paul that he had heard Elvis “was about to dump Priscilla.” The source of this rumor was Wes Bryan, the James Dean look-alike who occasionally stopped by Graceland at Elvis’s invitation and who saw Currie from time to time. (Wes’s information was substantiated indirectly in a book by aide Alan Fortas, who wrote that while Elvis “cared about Priscilla, he wasn’t on fire about her the way he was in the early days and he wasn’t sure he could
ever settle down with one woman.” ) “I kinda felt sorry for Priscilla,” Currie recalled, “because she had put in all that time waiting, and I didn’t think that it was right for Elvis to get rid of her, and I ended up unloading on Paul Beaulieu, telling him what
really
went on up in Elvis’s bedroom back in Germany.” Priscilla’s stepfather, Currie remembered, “turned ashen … the look on his face wasn’t good. And the more I said, the worse his face got.” Shortly afterward, Wes told Currie, Paul Beaulieu telephoned Graceland and “told Elvis he would put him
under
the damn jail if he didn’t marry Priscilla.”

Priscilla, already locked in battle with Currie in 1996 over how she was introduced to Elvis, angrily repudiated this account. “My dad would never—My father is not that kind of man. He’d never do that. That’s embarrassing. He has too much pride.”

Yet Currie’s account did explain and reinforce the recollections of several in Elvis’s inner circle, among them Marty Lacker, who remembered Elvis getting a phone call at Graceland from Major Beaulieu around Thanksgiving, reminding him that they had made a deal and that the time had come to fulfill his obligation to marry Priscilla. Both Marty and Lamar Fike told biographer Albert Goldman in 1980 that Priscilla was making anxious phone calls to her parents around this time, wondering whether Elvis was ever going to marry her. By her own admission she was consumed by doubts as to whether there would be a wedding. Mike Stone, Priscilla’s lover while she was married to Elvis, was also under the impression that Paul Beaulieu had put pressure on Elvis. Mike understood “that he really did not want to marry her, that she actually made a big fuss about it—that he had to.” Elvis said as much later on to his backup singer Kathy Westmoreland, with whom he shared confidences. “He did not want to marry. All he said to me was ‘I had to.’ ” Elvis Presley was a man, everyone agreed, who would honor a promise. His reluctance to marry seemed to arise more from his inability to remain faithful than from dissatisfaction with Priscilla. Elvis, according to everyone who knew him, did not feel he was suited to monogamy, although he respected the sanctity of marriage and believed a person should marry once and forever. He also had serious concerns about how being married would affect his image and his career.

The circumstances of the proposal were not what would traditionally be called romantic. Elvis knocked on Priscilla’s bathroom-dressing room door one night in November or December
carrying a box with a three-and-a-half carat diamond ring and announcing, “Sattnin [their special name for each other—one of Gladys’s terms of endearment], we’re going to be married. You’re going to be his. I told you I’d know when the time was right. Well, the time’s right.”

It was not so much a proposal as a declaration of intent. Priscilla herself later seemed confused by the timing and unsure of what had prompted Elvis’s sudden interest in a wedding. In her own autobiography, and in a 1984 interview with Barbara Walters, she attributed the proposal to Colonel Parker, Elvis’s manager, as have many of the Elvis Presley biographies. The theory was that the Colonel was concerned about Elvis’s image and felt he should legitimize his relationship with Priscilla. Yet nothing had occurred to provoke the Colonel’s anxiety. Why would he suddenly press Elvis to marry Priscilla after five years of cohabitation—and would Elvis have acceded to his manager’s demand on such a personal issue? Priscilla admitted, in the spring of 1996, that she included the story about Colonel Parker’s involvement in the wedding in her memoir because she had read it in an earlier biography of Elvis. “I heard from some book that Colonel told Elvis, ‘Well, it’s time to get married,’ and approached Elvis and said, ‘Well, if you’ve been with Priscilla, you need to make a decision.’ ” Priscilla asked the Colonel about it a few years before his 1997 death. “I said, ‘You know, Colonel, out of curiosity, [after] hearing different things and reading different books, it was said that you probably prompted Elvis’s proposal to me.’ He said, ‘That
never
happened.
Ever.
I would never tell Elvis that.… That was none of my decision.’ ”

Priscilla’s explanations for Elvis’s sudden wedding plans in late 1966 are confusing and contradictory at best. She said, on the one hand, that she and Elvis wanted to start a family, yet she admitted, in the same conversation, that she hoped she
wouldn’t
have children right away. “We were ready to get married,” she said in one breath, then declared, “I was
afraid
of getting married.” There
was
no catalyst, she also said. “It was just
time.
It was just the fact that we’d been together, and it was time to get married.”

Jerry Schilling, who was a friend to both Elvis and Priscilla and had no ax to grind, subscribed to the theory that Major Beaulieu telephoned Elvis late that fall and pressured him to make good on his agreement to marry Priscilla. “I’ve heard that. And you know what? I can believe that. I do really, for a few reasons,
I do think that happened. That’s like—it’s almost sure it happened.” Jerry, who maintained a relationship with the Colonel through the years and witnessed his meddling in Elvis’s personal life and those of others, was not
un
-convinced that Colonel Parker might have played a part in the decision, possibly in combination with Paul Beaulieu. “There was pressure. I guarantee there was pressure on Elvis.”

Priscilla’s later confusion might have sprung from embarrassment that Elvis was pressured into marrying her, or she might not have
known
what transpired between her father, the Colonel, and Elvis, just as she might not have known the machinations behind her parents’ arrangement with Elvis for her to move to Graceland when she was seventeen.

The details of the impending nuptials were as puzzling as the proposal. Elvis wanted, at first, to be married around Christmastime, Priscilla said, “because he was off at Christmas, and that seemed a good time to do it,” though the holiday was just days away when he proposed. The only person who seemed to be informed about the upcoming wedding was Marty Lacker, whom Elvis had asked to be his best man, implying, Marty said, that he had been pushed into the decision. Jerry Schilling, too, found this silence odd. “I mean I never heard. You would think … If I had gotten engaged, I would have told all the guys. But I never heard him say that, and I don’t think anybody else did.” The mystery wedding was then postponed “because,” said Priscilla, “we didn’t want it to be in Memphis because then everybody would be in Memphis and it would have been a fanfare and we didn’t want it to become a circus. So then we moved it to March.”

Soon after the secret engagement, Elvis bought a ranch thirty minutes by car from Graceland. Ever since she had gotten Domino, Priscilla had dreamed of living with Elvis on a horse farm, a longing that was realized in February 1967, when they both fell in love with some ranch property on Horn Lake Road. The final selling point, for Elvis, was a fifty-foot white concrete cross that served as a marker for approaching airplanes, but which Elvis took, said Alan Fortas, “as a mystic sign.”

Elvis adored being a gentleman farmer and leapt into ranch life with more than his usual freneticism and generosity, buying trucks and trailers for everyone in the entourage and setting them up on the property until it resembled a KOA trailer park, accumulating bills that sent his conservative father and Colonel Parker
reeling. “I can still see him out there in the dirt,” Priscilla said once, “in his jeans and heavy coat and cowboy hat, going around writing everybody’s name on the stalls with a red marking pen, watering the horses, blanketing them. He looked so satisfied, so simple.” Those first days on the ranch, which Elvis had named the Circle G
—G
for Graceland—were among the happiest of Priscilla’s life with Elvis. They took up residence in a custom-built trailer. “It was just darling,” remembered Joan Esposito, who stayed in the tiny ranch house with Joe. “It had been done by one of the big decorating stores in Memphis. Everything matched. They had done an absolutely perfect job; the kitchen was red, white, and blue and the pots red.” Priscilla became as domestic as she would ever be. “She was able to cook breakfast for him,” Joan recalled, “and have that intimacy.”

As so often seemed the case with Elvis and Priscilla, there were storm clouds on the horizon. Elvis’s spending escalated into a disturbing, almost manic spree, necessitating the Colonel to put him into another high-salary, low-art film,
Clambake
, to counter his losses. March arrived with no sign of a wedding. When Elvis received the script for
Clambake
, he became dangerously depressed and consoled himself by eating, bloating from 170 to 200 pounds within a few weeks. He had a tendency to carry weight, like his mother and her family, and favored the deep-fried, starchy southern foods that showed on his body immediately. Elvis’s weight fluctuated as he let himself go between films and then turned to diet pills in order to shed pounds quickly before a shoot. This time the studio ordered him to go on a diet. Priscilla, meanwhile, had grown agitated by communal life on the ranch, which contrasted sharply with the cozy hideaway she had envisioned for herself and Elvis. More than one of the entourage found her prickly, irritable, and domineering as she and Elvis prepared to leave for California for the
Clambake
shoot.