Child Bride (42 page)

Elvis was gradually becoming a prisoner of his fame, remaining inside his dwellings in California and Tennessee or his hotel suite in Vegas, and Priscilla was feeling trapped by association, in conflict with her essentially adventurous spirit. She extended herself into the world in every way imaginable within the confines that Elvis had constructed for her. Joan Esposito recalled that Priscilla took “calligraphy at UCLA, cooking classes at the extension school, art classes. We took ice-skating lessons, we took French, she took Spanish.” Joan was in the same circumstance as Priscilla. “We were trying to find ways to amuse ourselves. Joe was gone over nine tax-deductible months in one
year. [He and Elvis] would show up two to three days here and go back for two weeks and come back.”

Priscilla tried, at times, to include Elvis in joint pursuits, and originally took up French, she said, because one of their favorite albums was by French balladeer Charles Aznavour, called, appropriately,
Where Has Love Gone?
“That particular album was something that Elvis loved. There were a lot of wonderful songs on that album, produced by Barry Devorsian, and we both loved it and it really conveyed a lot of feelings that we had for each other. And it’s just a beautiful language. As they say, ‘the language of love.’ ”

Sadly, Elvis and Priscilla could not connect on a more temporal level, for their interests, schedules, and basic natures were light-years apart, to his soul’s devastation and her more quotidian dissatisfaction. In 1969, Elvis met a pretty twenty-four-year-old government employee from Washington, D.C., through a backstage introduction in Las Vegas. Joyce Bova became Elvis’s steady girlfriend that year and part of the next and had tender feelings for him, believing him to be, as he was, unsatisfied in his marriage. Priscilla was not the only one who felt incomplete in the relationship; Elvis told Joyce, a demonstrative Italian, that he found Priscilla “cold.” This was something he told others as well, saying that he married her because he “felt pressure” and had an “obligation” to her. One of the things that struck Elvis, about Joyce, was that she was an identical twin, a circumstance that fascinated him and tapped into his own deep longing for the brother he never knew. He told Joyce he had come to believe that because he was the twin who lived (the letters in “Elvis” also spelled “lives”), he must have some higher purpose on earth, and he derived meaning from the fact that Joyce had a twin sister, “like we were meant to be or something, because of that common denominator.” Elvis was still searching for answers to the spiritual questions that both haunted and compelled him, issues that did not intrigue Priscilla or most of his male companions, whose interests were more shallow.

The other thing that drew Elvis was Joyce Bova’s resemblance to Priscilla, or to the look that Priscilla and Elvis had invented, for Joyce was petite with long, shiny black hair and dark, dramatic eye makeup. “He encouraged me to dress in a certain fashion,” she said, “overdone clothes, overdone makeup, and overdone hair, and of course I did. Almost from the beginning, people were mistaking me for Priscilla. I would ask him if I
looked like Priscilla, because that did bother me, and he would say that we were not similar at all. I hate to put Priscilla down or anything, but he said that I was a much warmer person inside, and she was not at all [warm] or friendly.” Joyce felt that Elvis was possibly attempting to reproduce Priscilla, but it was not Priscilla he was yearning for, really; rather it was the fantasy of Priscilla he had been carrying in his heart, coupled with a regret for what might have been. The “Priscilla look,” moreover, was actually Elvis’s re-creation of Debra Paget, his first, lost love, who never left his mind.

Both Elvis and Priscilla had emotionally and physically abandoned the marriage by 1969. Elvis’s new policy forbidding wives on the road afforded him the opportunity, and his empty shell of a marriage provided the motive, to seek other female companions. His entourage proved more than willing to procure young candidates, generally while they were in Vegas or on tour. Elvis’s one-night stands acquired the nickname, within the entourage, of “Queens for a Day.” Whenever Priscilla arrived for the closing night at the International, Elvis assigned Ricky Stanley the task of rearranging her clothes in the hotel closet where she had hung them before his latest girlfriend visited the room, so she would not know he had been with someone else.

This was not the life Priscilla had fantasized about when she was twelve years old and imagined herself married to Elvis Presley. Nor, presumably, was it the destiny Elvis envisioned for himself and his soul mate.

E
lvis and Priscilla began the seventies on an optimistic note, purchasing a new mansion in Beverly Hills on Monovale Road, which Priscilla planned to decorate, creating her vision of their dream house.

Elvis kept the house on Hillcrest to live in during the Monovale makeover, which was a wise plan, for Priscilla’s redecorating project took nearly a year, during which she kept Elvis from setting foot in the new house so that she could surprise him with the finished product. Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s lawyer, recommended a Beverly Hills interior designer named Phylliss Mann, who had decorated Sammy Davis Jr.’s residence and redone the Ambassador Hotel and the Coconut Grove.

Priscilla was a complete naif when it came to decorating. “I was really retained because I was the taste expert,” declared Phylliss, who found Priscilla “a very willing pupil” who “learned in a hurry what she liked.” During the summer and fall of 1970, Phylliss took Priscilla to wallpaper shops, art galleries, and antique stores. The redecorating of Monovale became a rite of passage for Priscilla, the beginning of her education in the home decorating habits of the rich and cultivated. According to Phylliss, who observed the process, Priscilla “wanted to express herself and … to find herself. And she wanted to please
Elvis.” Priscilla’s preferences ran to the “romantic soft look” and “old things.” Her bath and dressing room were yellow and “very feminine,” in Phylliss’s words. “His dressing room was very Elvis, early Elvis. Black patent leather ceiling, antique barber chair. All of his clothes and costumes could be seen; it was really quite interesting, it was an octagonal room.”

The years 1970 and 1971 were a time of personal growth for Priscilla. In addition to putting her individual stamp on the new house, she was still dancing, which gave her greater confidence and independence. “I think it was the most honest time of her life, that moment, that time, that two or three years,” said Steve Peck. Priscilla grew her hair past her waist and began lightening it to a golden brown rather than the silky black Elvis favored. She also took to dressing in a sexually provocative manner, particularly at Elvis’s Vegas openings and closings. Myrna Smith of the Sweet Inspirations remembered Priscilla coming to the shows with her “belly out and the little hip-huggers. She dressed the way I always wanted to dress!” Priscilla’s objective, presumably, was to arouse Elvis, to startle him into noticing her. “She knew that kind of thing would get his attention,” said Myrna.

Priscilla had discovered a young designer named Olivia Bis (née Echeverria), who had a boutique on Doheny in Beverly Hills, when she drove by one day and noticed some cunning mother-daughter outfits in the store window. Olivia, strangely, had been expecting Priscilla Presley to come by her shop, purely by an intuition; when she finally did, the designer had no idea who she was. “There was this beautiful girl with two big boxer dogs at my door. She came in, she was trying on things, and she was wearing a beautiful diamond, and she was very young. And no one knew what Priscilla looked like at that time. Everybody, as I did, thought of her with the black hair and the eyelashes.” Priscilla and Olivia were instant friends, with similar taste in clothes. “We would start to collaborate on designs; if she saw something that she liked, she’d buy it from me, but then if there was something she liked that she saw, I would make it for her.” Priscilla favored “the bare midriffs, and she had a beautiful figure.… She used to love to wear long, bare midriff, hip-hugger skirts and flowing things, and then hot pants came out and we did hot pants. Everything that was coming in, everything that was different. And the thing that she loved about the shop was that everything she had was unique, designed just for her.” Priscilla, as she had at thirteen, still obsessed about her hair, something
Olivia noticed. “She had this thing with the brush and the hair. She had beautiful hair and she used to bend over and brush it. I used to tell her, ‘If I ever want to drive you nuts, I’m going to take that brush away from you, because you will end up in a mental ward.’ ”

Priscilla’s and Elvis’s separate houses in Beverly Hills were a symbol of their divided lives. Priscilla had taken up photography, another time-filler, and sent pictures of Lisa to Elvis while he was on the road to keep him up-to-date on her development. “The only thing that really kept us together, of course, was the baby,” she said once in a documentary, “and I was struggling to keep him involved.… Our link, you know, was her.” Lisa, Priscilla said later, showed an early interest in music. “At three years old, or two, she was playing records like ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane.’ She had her own little music box, and she’d play, three years old—I have pictures of her doing this. So she always loved music, she has an ear for music.” Jerry Schilling, who would later manage Lisa, said, “it’s been in her soul since she was a baby.” As a baby, Lisa led a somewhat lonely life, despite the carnival that often surrounded her. Priscilla was dancing, ice-skating, studying calligraphy, French, Spanish, or acting, and Elvis was performing, while Lisa crawled in her crib, often alone, according to Geraldine Kyle, Dee’s best friend in Memphis, who felt sorry for the child. Priscilla herself wrote of being concerned, when Lisa was two or three, that she was becoming too attached to her nanny. One girlfriend of Elvis’s enduring memory of Lisa, at the Hilton in Vegas with Elvis, was of a little girl of three clutching a doll that had a head but no body, “combing the hair and singing to her dad.”

In May of 1970, Priscilla turned twenty-five and Elvis threw her a surprise birthday party. “In the home movies we have,” recalled Charlie Hodge, “she was crying, just so shy.” Elvis’s decision to give her a surprise party and Priscilla’s emotional reaction showed there were still feelings between them, but not enough to overcome the fact that they had nothing in common except their daughter.

Elvis entered into another liaison in the fall of 1970, with a sexy brunette he stole from legendary Hollywood womanizer Jim Aubrey, who made the mistake of flaunting actress Barbara Leigh in front of Elvis in Vegas. Barbara was a realist who understood the ways of the show business world and did not delude herself into thinking she would ever be anything beyond Elvis Presley’s
mistress. “When I was his girlfriend, I didn’t tell anybody, I kept it private, and I didn’t have my picture taken with him. I was a known actress in those days and it would have been too public; it wouldn’t have been good for him. I respected his privacy, and I respected Priscilla’s privacy and protected them.” Barbara felt there was nothing immoral about her relationship with Elvis.
He
had pursued her, and he was not fulfilled in his marriage to Priscilla. Barbara also perceived Elvis as someone who had attained mythic status and for whom the rules no longer applied. “I didn’t see it as cheating on Priscilla. I didn’t look at it that way. Maybe good Christians out there would hate my guts. The world that we lived in, in Hollywood, was a very different world, and I never felt any guilt at all about it.… He wasn’t just a man. He wasn’t just a husband or a father. He was bigger than life. I think he belonged to the world, to anybody that wanted him or loved him. I think he belonged to everybody.”

Joyce Bova, who started dating Elvis not too long before he met Barbara Leigh, naively believed their relationship
was
exclusive and entertained the thought that she and Elvis might even marry someday. Kathy Westmoreland, a pretty brunette from Abilene, Texas, who became his backup singer in 1970, had a similarly bittersweet romance, beginning roughly around the same time. “Actually, Kathy had a very, very serious time with Elvis,” said Myrna Smith of the Sweet Inspirations, “because he was the first man she slept with, so she went through a difficult time. Because she actually believed that when Elvis told her he loved her he meant ‘I love you’—as in a relationship. Elvis loved
all
of us.”

Elvis told Barbara Leigh that the spiritual dimension was missing from his relationship with Priscilla. Kathy Westmoreland was a kindred spirit. “I knew nothing about him,” Kathy said of her first days as Elvis’s backup singer in the summer of 1970. “I had no idea he was such a special person. I was so surprised by that, and how talented he was, until I saw him live and saw he had a thousand times the charisma that the majority of stars that I worked with before had. He had this gift—even though he was an untrained singer—he had this glorious gift of interpreting songs, and style. I had put him in this niche of rockabilly, and I had no idea that he was interested in such a variety of music.” Kathy, like Priscilla, had a childhood connection to Mario Lanza, Elvis’s musical idol. “One of the first conversations we had was about Mario Lanza,” Kathy recalled. “My father had sung in
some movies with him, and [Elvis] knew the movies—scene by scene what had happened. That surprised me too.”

Kathy understood what Priscilla seemed to disdain: Elvis’s great attraction to the spiritual realm. “We carried around a lot of the same books,” she said. “Our relationship began with the metaphysical and spiritual aspects in life. We both were concerned with truth, you might call it. To me it wasn’t strange at all; it was very healthy. He was surrounded by a lot of people who had no understanding of that. That’s what drew me to him.” Kathy related to Elvis’s quest to understand why he had been given this great power over people. “He had questions and went to great lengths to study and find out what the truth was, and [he] came back to the thought that ‘This is nothing I am ever going to find the answer to,’ and [so he would] just rely on faith. Maybe that’s why he had such a great love and empathy for people, for any living thing or creature. And his love of God. He was a Christian, but he had an extended awareness and thought out those answers. He continued to think out those answers.”