Child Bride (63 page)

In truth, there
was
a Joann Nilsen to whom Marco had been married in 1980, a striking blond from South Africa who lived in L.A. Just before Christmas, Joann received a telephone call from a frantic, distraught Priscilla Presley, who asked if she had ever been married to Marco Garibaldi. “She found out from the tabloids,” said Joann. “She wanted to know, was it true or was it tabloid junk? There wasn’t too much I could say to comfort her, except that I hadn’t been in on the story, but that it was basically true.” Priscilla told Joann she had asked Marco about her. “And he denied having known me,” recalled Joann, who related that she’d had an “ugly experience” with Marco. Priscilla, understandably, was devastated. “She was getting married to someone … and she’s a very well known woman. All of a sudden this tabloid thing came out and he was denying it.”

Joann Nilsen referred to her marriage to Marco as “a bad dream, a nightmare.” Marco approached her, she said, as she was leaving a private club in L.A. called Bar One in the spring of 1980. He had spotted her in the club and followed her to her car to offer her a single rose, and “within one month, he pretty much swept me off my feet.” They married in May of 1980. Marco, at the time, was a computer programmer at Hollywood Community Hospital, trying to get into the import-export business with his brother,
“always dabbling in all these things, trying to do something,” stated Joann. “I laugh when people say he’s a producer, writer, all this.” When he met Joann, Marco had written a “very rough sketch” for a novel called
City of Angels
and was, she believed, hoping to capitalize on her connections to get it published. “I’m sure it never went anywhere. He had approached a friend of mine, a publisher in New York, to try to publish his novel, and of course it went nowhere.” The sketch, according to Joann, was written in broken English—“it would be like if I went to Brazil and tried to speak Portuguese. The publishers laughed.” At first, Joann was enthralled with Marco. “He’s very smooth. Obviously I fell for something.” A year and a half into the marriage, she came to consider Marco an opportunist. “It was … hurtful. He had no money. I was young, and I had a certain amount of money. I sold everything I had to help him do what he wanted to do. I was very badly hurt.” The coup de grâce occurred in the spring of 1982, when Joann discovered that Marco was still married to his first wife, Carolyn, and when Marco began to perceive that Joann’s “connections were running dry.” They both wanted out of the marriage. Joann felt that she “was monetarily being used”; Marco “wanted out because he wanted bigger and better things.” Joann filed a petition to have the marriage annulled on the basis of fraud, since Marco was committing bigamy. He tried to persuade her not to mention the fraud, Joann recalled, “because he was going to be rich and famous one day,” and he did not want that to come back to haunt him.

Joann believed Marco’s “whole intention” was to attach himself to a wealthy woman. “I drove a nice car, I lived in Beverly Hills, and I think that was his whole thing with me. And that was his whole goal in life.” When they met, his name was Marco Garcia. He legally changed it to Marco Garibalddi (then spelled with two ds) while they were married, said Joann, for he felt Garcia sounded “too Mexican” and would not create a sophisticated enough image for a producer. “Garibalddi” was Marco’s mother’s maiden name; on his legal application for a name change, he described it as “an ancestral name.” He preferred, remembered Joann, to be regarded as Italian, his mother’s descent, rather than Brazilian, though he was born and reared in Curitiba, Brazil.

Priscilla, Joann recalled, asked her to relate her experience with Marco. “I told her [the relationship] was very hurtful and
very painful to me, and he was not the type of person I wished to be around.” When Joann repeated what happened to her, “she was really distressed. I guess Marco had not told her what had gone on. She and Marco were about to get married, [though] they hadn’t had the child yet.” Priscilla told Joann “that she was going to get some kind of injunction … against Marco ever doing anything.”

Priscilla, who had just come out of the Mike Edwards relationship, doubtless felt she had once again been set up. To discover, on the eve of her wedding, that her fiancé, the father of the child she was carrying, had deceived her, that he had concealed a wife who considered him “cruel,” clearly traumatized Priscilla. “She obviously was,” remarked Joann, “because she didn’t go through with the marriage. And never has.” The Christmas wedding of Priscilla and Marco that had been mentioned in various media reports did not take place.

It was ironic that Priscilla had fallen in love with a man whose past, like hers, was scattered with secrets. “His life,” stated Joann, “was quite a bit of a lie.” Rumors abounded that, prior to meeting Priscilla, Marco was the escort-boyfriend of a sixtyish Beverly Hills socialite. “He’s very beautiful,” said a Hollywood wife he pursued at the same time, “and it’s paid well.”

On the other side of the coin, Marco Garibaldi (he dropped the second “d” sometime after the annulment), from the description of the Monderines and the majority of those who met him through Priscilla, was a charming, personable, thoroughly likable guy, “a genuine gentleman,” said Brett Strong, who remained friends with both Priscilla and Mike Edwards after their split, and who regularly went to the movies with Marco. He was intelligent, well read, and knowledgeable on a variety of subjects. In fact, remarked one of the women he earlier pursued, “I always thought he wasted his talents, in a way.”

Marco’s explanation of his marital history was that he married his first wife, Carolyn, to obtain his American citizenship, so it was not a “real” marriage and he was not committing bigamy with Joann Nilsen. His marriage to Joann, he would argue, was never a marriage, legally, since it was annulled. Carolyn Garcia, however, did seem to consider her relationship with Marco a bona fide marriage. They lived in Chicago after the wedding, attending Southern Illinois University, and she had only glowing things to say about her former husband, who was then known as Marco Garcia. “He’s a nice guy and Priscilla lucked out,” Carolyn
said. “And he lucked out because she’s a nice lady. And I wish them lots of happiness.” Joann Nilsen, his second wife, was not surprised when Priscilla decided to stay with Marco after she evidently canceled the wedding. “He does have that way about him,” Joann remarked. “Then of course, from what I understand of the way Elvis treated her, I would probably say she could be suckered in.… There was definitely a multitype personality with Marco.”

Priscilla evidently resolved her internal conflicts about Marco, though it must have bothered her on some level. Still, her second pregnancy brought her perhaps the greatest joy of her life. She and Marco learned, that fall, through amniocentesis that they were having a boy, and they chose the name Navarone Anthony-Navarone, explained Marco, from the film
The Guns of Navarone
, the “river that brought two different sides of people together.” Anthony, he said, “because all Italians are [named] Anthony,” and if the child ever wanted a more conventional name, he could call himself Anthony. Navarone Garibaldi was born on March 1, 1987. He was, from birth, Priscilla’s love child, the center of her universe, in a way Lisa had never been. This time around, Priscilla reveled in her pregnancy, had classical music playing in the delivery room, and a man who fully shared the childbirth experience. Marco was by her side, placing the baby in warm water as soon as he was born. If anything, the birth of Navarone bound her more tightly to Marco, in stark contrast to her traumatizing experience with Elvis. Priscilla happily attended Mommy and Me classes, took Navarone to bed with her and Marco, and turned down any location work that would separate her from her son.

The pregnancy also drew her closer to Lisa. This was ironic, for Priscilla had brooded about the effect on her daughter of having a half sibling—one of the strange legacies of her own upbringing. Vestiges of the Beaulieu-Iversen pathology were still in evidence. Priscilla did not display any photographs of Elvis in her home, for, she explained in 1996, “I would never do that to Marco and Navarone.” Journalists had puzzled over this oddity for years, but it made perfect sense, in light of Priscilla’s past. She had absorbed, by osmosis, the family paranoia about acknowledging a dead first love. Just as her mother was pressured to destroy all evidence of
her
first love, Jimmy, to assuage Paul Beaulieu’s ego and to avoid creating conflict between siblings
from different fathers, so too Priscilla had obliterated Elvis from her personal life.

Lisa, in fact, took such great delight in Navarone that she determined to become pregnant herself, another case of daughter emulating mother. She had been dating an aspiring young musician named Danny Keough, whose family was deeply entrenched in Scientology. Suddenly, in October 1988, several months pregnant, Lisa married him. Priscilla, by all accounts, including her own, was not pleased, for she now believed it was a mistake for a woman to marry or have children before she was thirty, that she should experience life first. This, no doubt, was the voice of her own bittersweet experience as a reluctant child bride and a neglected young mother. Obviously she had also fully assimilated her years of financial homework, studying
Barron’s
, managing Elvis’s estate, and picking the brains of millionaire moguls, for Lisa, at Priscilla’s insistence, had Danny Keough sign a prenuptial agreement, according to their friend Brett Strong. “She wanted some protection for Lisa’s inheritance.”

The wedding, in the Presley family tradition, was veiled in secrecy, abetted by the Church of Scientology. Lisa and Danny were married at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre by a Scientologist minister in front of the immediate family. So carefully protected had Lisa’s life been, both by Priscilla and by the cloak of Scientology, that it was reported in the Suzy’s society column, two days earlier, that she was dating Prince Albert of Monaco. Lisa and Danny honeymooned, as well, under the auspices of Scientology, on a yacht owned by the church, where higher-level members were allowed to take special courses. Priscilla, a few years later, would admit to a certain relief over Lisa’s marriage and pregnancy, for it diminished the relentless media speculation “about what she was going to do with her life. It was always, ‘Is she going to follow in her mom’s footsteps? Or is she going to follow in her dad’s footsteps?’ And she’d go, ‘Mom, what am I going to do?’ ”

One area in which Lisa had clearly exhibited little interest was the Presley estate, to which she was the sole heir. She began to attend occasional estate meetings in February of 1986, her eighteenth birthday, but she did not share her mother’s passion for corporations or the finer points of making money. Lisa, in fact, had remarkably little concept of what others had obsessed over for years—her inheritance from Elvis Presley. Her friend Dana Rosenfeld remembered sitting at the dinner table with Priscilla,
Lisa, Michelle, and a few friends once when she and Lisa were preteens. “And one of the kids said to Lisa, ‘So is it true that you are going to get $50 million when you turn eighteen?’ And Michelle said, without a beat, ‘We do not discuss that. Ever. And don’t ever bring that up again.’ And that was that.” Lisa’s ignorance about her legacy was reminiscent of Priscilla’s as a new divorcée. She told a Memphis newspaper, on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday, that she had only recently understood what her inheritance comprised. “I thought I was getting cash,” she said, “not an estate.”

Priscilla, by way of contrast, embraced her accidental position as executrix as she had once embraced karate, Chinese cooking classes, Beverly Hills society, French culture, and false eyelashes. She and Jack Soden, her hand-selected executive in matters involving Elvis’s estate, shared an outward demeanor of gentle affability that belied the business instincts of a shark. The positive consequences of this characteristic, with respect to Elvis Presley Enterprises, the corporate spin-off of Lisa’s inheritance, was a dramatic financial turnaround that increased the value of Elvis’s estate from $4.6 million to $50 million by 1988, a figure that would double by 1996. Under Soden’s direction and Priscilla’s stewardship, the estate had reacquired the rights to Elvis’s record royalties, which the Colonel had sold to RCA, transformed Graceland into a cash cow, and turned Elvis Presley Enterprises into a cottage industry. The key to the takeover, and similarly to Priscilla, was
control
.

Soden had ingeniously acquired the land across the street from Graceland, which had been a huckster’s carnival of Elvis exploitation, selling Elvis sweat and worse. His strategy was to purchase the property for the estate through a coalition of anonymous Kansas City investors who were front men for Elvis Presley Enterprises. With that land acquisition, Soden and Priscilla cleaned up the image of both Graceland and Elvis, removed the competition of other vendors, and set the stage for Soden’s vision of a Graceland Hotel, convention center, movie theater, and rock-and-roll museum—four more venues from which the estate could profit. He and Priscilla, through attorneys for Elvis Presley Enterprises, successfully lobbied for a Tennessee statute to extend the commercial rights to a celebrity’s name
past his death
, thereby ensuring that any profits arising through the sale of anything related to the image or likeness of Elvis Presley would belong to the estate. Elvis Presley was making more money dead
than he ever did while he was alive, and the instigator was Priscilla.

She told
Us
magazine in 1988 that she had “done better with the estate than anyone,” and she commented to a reporter, only half jokingly, that Elvis should have hired
her
as his agent.
Vanity Fair
published a profile of Priscilla, in 1991, calling her “The New Colonel Parker.”
Working Woman
featured her as its cover girl in September of 1993, praising Priscilla as a businesswoman extraordinaire who projected a “cool, tough quality” in an article entitled, in an unintentional double entendre, “Making Elvis Pay.”
Primetime Live
devoted a segment to Priscilla Presley, multimillionaire, portraying her as a control freak made rich by her ex-husband’s estate.