Child Bride (43 page)

Cecile Rhee, then the young wife of Elvis’s Memphis karate master, Khang Rhee, felt, as Barbara Leigh did, that anyone privileged to cross paths with Elvis Presley “was one of the chosen ones. That man had saintly qualities, and there was no doubt about it. I think he was a prophet. A lot of people think that belief is a little far-fetched, but I don’t.”

Kathy Westmoreland found herself confused and torn when her spiritually based friendship with Elvis evolved into a physical relationship later in 1970. Elvis told her that he and Priscilla were “not committed” to each other. “He said that it was an open marriage, and obviously from his end of the deal it was. I didn’t really believe that on her end it was. I just didn’t realize that situations like that existed. And he did have other girlfriends. I didn’t really know what was going on. It was all odd.” Priscilla vigorously denied, later, that she and Elvis had an open marriage in the early 1970s. “Doesn’t that sound like a guy?” she commented wryly. “If he even said that.” Kathy’s impression was that Elvis was bored with Priscilla, realized they were incompatible, and regretted his obligation to marry her. “He kept on saying, ‘I wish she would divorce me so I wouldn’t have to divorce her.’ ”

Elvis carried on at his series of Palm Springs weekend houses as if he
were
a single man. “Palm Springs was his getaway
place,” offered Sandi Miller, one of the women who frequented Elvis’s desert parties. The scene was reminiscent of one of his low-brow pictures. Elvis and his guys relaxed around the pool or watched old movies on television, surrounded by a coterie of young women in bikinis, who, by Sandi’s description, “kept their mouths shut and didn’t cause problems.” One weekend in the early 1970s, Priscilla and Billy Smith’s wife, Jo, drove down to the Springs, where Priscilla found a now-infamous love note to Elvis in the mailbox, signed by “Lizard Tongue.” Some attributed the eventual end of the Presleys’ marriage to this note, but it was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, if that. Priscilla had long since disappeared from the relationship in all but name.

“First of all,” she said later, still evincing bitterness, “when you’re with someone, you want to be
with
them, okay? Elvis was a part of
my
life, but he had
other
things as part of
his
life: he had his music, he had his shows, he had Vegas, he had movies, he had
his
friends. Nothing really changed for
me.
You know, I was not fulfilled. I had my daughter. He didn’t want me to work; he didn’t want me to be in the business. I could dance—I danced. But now I started to create my own life. While he was gone, I was creating friends, I was creating my own life—never having had that before. Really. It had all been him, centered around
him.
”

Priscilla, groomed from babyhood to be the center of attention, had grown tired of standing in someone else’s shadow. Her resentment flared at Graceland that Christmas of 1970. Billy Stanley would later write that she criticized virtually everything Elvis did. The tension in the house erupted into an argument between Elvis, Vernon, and Priscilla concerning the entourage. It was so heated that Elvis, who had not ventured out alone for years, stormed out of Graceland and disappeared for several days. He surfaced in Washington, D.C., for his legendary face-to-face meeting at the White House with President Richard Nixon. The singer, who had left Graceland with no money, telephoned Jerry Schilling, who was in LA., and asked Jerry to fly to D.C. with him, using assumed names. Elvis, who had a great respect for law enforcement and antipathy for substance abuse, wanted to meet with the president to discuss how he could help keep teenagers off drugs. He wrote a letter to Nixon on the plane to that effect and showed up unannounced at the White House on December 21. Elvis wore his traveling costume, a black jumpsuit
and a theatrical black cape, to the Oval Office, and accepted a stunned Richard Nixon’s official Narcotics Bureau badge while high on the prescription medication to which he was becoming increasingly dependent. While he was in Washington on his lost weekend, he stayed in a hotel with Joyce Bova, who was also with him in Memphis the following March, when he feared he was going blind and underwent eye surgery for glaucoma.

Elvis invited Joyce to spend New Year’s Eve with him at Graceland, and though she did not, his request to have someone other than Priscilla with him to see in the year 1971 foretold the turbulence that was to come. Priscilla was by Elvis’s side at Graceland in early January, as he personally wrote a short acceptance speech for an award that held great meaning to him: He was named one of Ten Outstanding Young Americans by the Tennessee Jaycees. Priscilla attended the ceremony with Elvis in Memphis on January 9, at the height of her Natalie Wood-style glamour. She wore dangling hoop earrings, long, sweeping chestnut hair, a romantic choker, a ring on nearly every finger, and a low-cut white minidress. Several sets of false lashes had been removed from her makeup routine, leaving Priscilla with a more natural, though still dramatic, dark beauty; her frosted lips were pursed, in a picture taken at the event, in a sexy moue. At nearly twenty-six, she had never looked more exquisite. Elvis had adapted to 1970s fashion equally wholeheartedly; he now wore oversize tinted aviator glasses and longish hair, and he favored the more wretched excesses of the decade, such as fur-trimmed bell-bottoms, his outfit of choice for Sonny West’s wedding a few months before.

Early in 1971, Priscilla and Elvis discussed the prospect of Priscilla taking private karate lessons from Elvis’s great friend Ed Parker. Elvis saw karate as a diversion for Priscilla, one that would also give her a way to protect herself; Priscilla viewed karate, in Ed’s recollection and her own, as a means of maintaining some connection to Elvis, for all they really had at this point was Lisa. “It was Elvis’s idea,” recalled Joe, of the suggestion that would topple Elvis and Priscilla’s marriage. “Because he was so into karate and thought this would keep her occupied while he was out of town. That’s how it all started. Very innocently.”

Priscilla saw Ed Parker three times a week for private lessons in Los Angeles that January and February. “It gave us something to talk about,” Priscilla recalled. “It gave us something to do.
It gave us a
bond.”
It was a tenuous link at most. Priscilla and Elvis were essentially living in separate houses by March, as she put the finishing touches on the Monovale mansion and Elvis stayed at Hillcrest, a few blocks away, when he was not in Vegas or on the road touring. That spring, following his eye surgery, he told Joyce that he and Priscilla were separated, “that their marriage was over. That they were going to get a divorce and he wanted me to think about moving to Graceland.” It was much the same story he had told Kathy Westmoreland. Who knew whether Elvis was sincere or if it was a convenient line to offer a mistress? Yet Elvis’s romance with Joyce, like his relationship with Kathy, had more to do with companionship than sex. When he was with Joyce, he often showed more interest in his metaphysical books than in making love. “At the beginning it was romantic—[but then] it wears off,” Barbara Leigh agreed. “And then you become kindred spirits together, and the thing we had was our spiritualism. That’s what we shared.”

Jamie Lindberg, the boy Priscilla Beaulieu loved and left for Elvis Presley that fateful spring she was seventeen, wondered, more than once, what might have been.

He went to college after Priscilla left Germany and then to Vietnam where, like Priscilla’s real father, Jimmy, Jamie became a pilot. He married in the spring of 1971 and honeymooned in Las Vegas. On his honeymoon night, Jamie took his bride to Caesar’s Palace to watch Tom Jones perform. Sitting directly behind him were Priscilla and Elvis Presley. “And I about died. I was really in love with the gal that I’d married, I was just back from Vietnam, so screwed up you wouldn’t believe it, and I thought, isn’t that ironic?” Jamie tried to make contact with Priscilla that night, “but the little guards wouldn’t let me back, and I thought, So who needs that humiliation, anyway?” His bride, he recalled, was also “hyperjealous.”

Priscilla was still intent, that spring, on learning karate and had proved as dedicated and athletic at the sport as she was at dance, or whatever her focus in life was. She enrolled in Khang Rhee’s Tae Kwon Do classes in Memphis in June, so she could keep up her training whenever she and Elvis were at Graceland. Her nickname, at Rhee’s karate studio, was Tigress. (Elvis was Master Tiger.) When Elvis performed at the Sahara Tahoe that July, Priscilla and Lisa flew back to L.A., where Priscilla resumed her private lessons with Ed.

That summer Priscilla and Joan and a karate instructor named
Bob Wall drove to Orange County, south of L.A., to watch a martial arts tournament. Part of Priscilla’s homework in karate was to study other practitioners’ techniques; she combined the exercise with her photography hobby, taking pictures of the better fighters so that Elvis could study their moves. By what appeared to be happenstance, Mike Stone, the aggressively macho karate expert who had captured her fancy at the Hawaiian tournament three years earlier, was in the audience, seated near Priscilla and her group. Mike had since grown his dark hair into an Afro; with his swarthy Hawaiian complexion, he appeared almost black. His wild, unkempt look held Priscilla in thrall. She spotted him instantly and, according to Mike, began devising a plan to entrap him. Chuck Norris, then in his pre-movie star days as a karate legend, introduced Priscilla to Mike in passing. When two of the fighters lunged in their direction during the tournament, Priscilla leaned back in her chair, hoping Mike would catch her. Instead, he stepped out of the way, and she fell flat on the ground. His coolness merely stoked Priscilla’s interest. “Mike wasn’t the kind of guy who would come up to you and just goo-goo ga-ga. He stayed indifferent, he kept his distance, almost to the point where you had to go to him. He wouldn’t come to me.… Most guys were all over me, and he [wasn’t]. He was very reserved and very noncommittal even in talking to me. He’d look, and then he’d look away, and it was almost like, ‘This is interesting. I’m gonna talk to this guy.’ ”

Soon afterward, Ed Parker left town for summer vacation in Hawaii, and sent Priscilla to study with Tom Kelly, who managed the Parker karate school in Santa Monica. A few weeks later, the first of August, she returned to watch another karate tournament, the Long Beach International, this time in the company of Lamar Fike’s wife, Nora, and Jerry Schilling. Priscilla would later claim her attendance at the tournament was part of her continuing karate instruction, or that she was there to photograph the match for Elvis, but her presence appeared to be a continuation of her familiar, calculated modus operandi, once she had focused on a goal—which in this case seemed to be Mike Stone. Mike was there as a spectator, and Chuck Norris again introduced him to Priscilla, then sat between them to watch the tournament. Priscilla flirted over Chuck’s shoulder with Mike, who was still standoffish, thus intensifying her pursuit. After the tournament she saw Mike in conversation with a mutual friend, singer Dick Dale, and seized the opportunity to talk to him. By
the end of the conversation, Priscilla had learned that Mike ran a karate school in Westminster, near Huntington Beach, and she suggested she stop by to watch the classes. “I said it was way too far from Huntington Beach to Beverly Hills,” recalled Mike.

Within forty-eight hours, Priscilla, who had never driven on a freeway before and was terrified, recruited Nora Fike to drive her the hour or so to Mike’s studio. “It didn’t take much time to understand that she was interested,” said Mike. “Because … it’s a helluva drive. Normally nobody drives that kind of distance to watch somebody teach a class. And she wasn’t that anxious to leave. We went next door to get a pizza. She still wasn’t that anxious to leave. And then she came down several more times. And she wasn’t that anxious to leave.” Mike, who was married with a four-year-old daughter and a second baby due that month, seemed perplexed by Priscilla’s aggressive attention and invited her to his house after one of the classes to meet his wife, Fran. Priscilla accepted and spent the evening chatting with Fran Stone—calculating, it was said later, how to lure her husband. Priscilla and Mike’s friendship quickly shifted into dating, with Priscilla the seductress, according to Mike. “Things just kind of naturally take a course. For example, if she comes down and you say, ‘Well, what do you want to do afterward?’ That becomes a date. And then other things would come up—martial arts events. And then one thing just leads to another. And when these other things came up, I guess they were considered dating.”

Priscilla would later describe Mike Stone as “just the right person at the right time. I mean, it wasn’t like I was out looking for anyone.” Bob Wall, a black belt who was close to Mike, Chuck Norris, and the others in their karate circle, considered Mike one of the few men who would have dared to have an affair with Elvis Presley’s wife. Wall described Mike as “a masculine, manly kind of guy. Funny, good-looking, somebody that—How many people wouldn’t be afraid of Elvis? Afraid of his image, afraid of his money, his ability to have them knocked off or something. A lot of things the average guy wouldn’t be interested in taking on.”

That was precisely the quality that attracted Priscilla, and had since she first laid eyes on him, for Mike Stone fulfilled the sexual power that Elvis only symbolized. “He was like an
animal
to me,” she later explained, giggling. “I mean he was—I don’t know. He was different. There was something about him that was very powerful. I mean he had a lot of strength; he was
so good at karate, it was unbelievable.” She was sexually excited by the fact that “he was the best at what he did; everyone raved about Mike Stone.”

“I think it was partly the sexual part,” Mike analyzed several years later. “That Elvis was maybe too busy with other things and didn’t spend enough time with her, taking care of business. And a whole lot of other things that accumulated over the years. She was always very strongly wanting to be her own person, and that was a very driving thing for her at that time. To get out and experience things.”