Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Priscilla was in a strange Twilight Zone, receiving sporadic but heart-stopping phone calls from Elvis, preserving a shrine to him in her bedroom; yet he was, to her, a chimera, a fantastical object of her youthful fancy. Interestingly, that was how her female classmates saw
Priscilla
, because of her contact with Elvis. “It was just like she was in an untouchable category,” explained Debbie. “Not approachable. Too pretty, too unreal, not a part of us.” Debbie was Priscilla’s best friend at that time, but they were not what Debbie considered close.
“I didn’t really get involved or ask a lot of questions about [her relationship with Elvis],” Debbie said years later. “I was interested in her as my friend, not as a way to get to anything, and maybe that’s why we could be friends.” Priscilla did show Debbie her treasure box, however, and lamented how difficult it was to get letters to Elvis, that she had to send them through Joe Esposito on special pink stationery—though Joe would not remember a color code. “She did show me some things [Elvis] had sent her or given her,” Debbie recalled. “She used to bring her album that he had given her over to my house—I think I had a better stereo or something—and we’d sit there and listen to him.” Debbie remembered that Priscilla became extremely upset when Debbie scratched one of her Elvis records.
Elvis shipped Priscilla other albums and .45s from the States, “songs that identified with our relationship,” Priscilla recalled.” ‘Sealed with a Kiss’ was one. ‘Hey, Hey, Paula, Will You Marry Me One Day?’ ” Elvis also sent Priscilla a copy of “Good Night, My Love,” the song that signed off the broadcast they listened to in his bedroom. “So many reminders,” as she put it. Debbie felt, from her conversations with Priscilla then, that she had a love for Elvis but, more significantly, that there “seemed to be some
security
there. Or something she knew there.”
Priscilla began her sophomore year continuing her double life, deeply involved with Tommy, in a fantasy romance with Elvis—who still believed he was the only one. She made another girlfriend, an eighth-grade girl named Ronnie Garland, whose family lived in the apartment just below hers and whose parents socialized with Paul and Ann Beaulieu. Ronnie and Priscilla would keep each other company while they baby-sat for their siblings, and the two exchanged confidences, becoming as close as Priscilla allowed herself to be with another girl.
Ronnie described Priscilla’s romance with Tom Stewart as “really serious,” and noticed her tendency to be attracted to dangerous guys. “She was drawn … not to your clean-cut all-American … she was drawn to the bad ones.… I would have been scared to death with Tom.” Like Al, she perceived Priscilla’s relationship with Tom as a “sneak-around thing,” with Priscilla meeting him down the street or pretending to go to a girlfriend’s house so that her parents would not find out, for “her father did not approve of this.”
Priscilla’s father, Ronnie and her parents observed, had a double standard. “I remember my dad kept saying, ‘For him to be so strict and have so many rules, and then to let her go at such an early age and be alone with Elvis Presley …’ ” Paul Beaulieu’s reputation for keeping a tight rein on Priscilla due to his behavior was
after
Elvis left Germany, when he tried very hard to prevent Priscilla from dating anyone
but
Elvis. “He was promoting this from the very beginning,” declared Ronnie, who remembered Priscilla’s father coming to the house for parties, showing off photographs of Priscilla with Elvis, which he said were taken the night they met—at a small reception the Beaulieus attended, in
his
version. “He was very proud of these pictures,” said Ronnie. In these photos “Elvis had a crew-cut. I think he was sitting at a piano. But I know that Captain Beaulieu—Major Beaulieu, whatever he was—had pictures, and he showed them to my parents and the people they would get together with downstairs. And he’d talk about it a lot, too.” Margaret Iversen Ramis, Ann’s Connecticut cousin, had the same impression. Paul, she observed when she met him, always wanted to be somebody important; serving as Priscilla’s connection to Elvis was his claim to fame.
Ronnie remained Priscilla’s close friend and downstairs neighbor for the Beaulieus’ three remaining years in Wiesbaden, and had abundant opportunity to observe the family dynamics, which she found strange. Paul Beaulieu especially disturbed her. “I was never comfortable around him,” she admitted. Priscilla, Ronnie said, “was afraid of him.… That was real evident. She was absolutely panicked.” Perhaps Suni Ernst had correctly surmised that Priscilla dated Elvis to escape from something at home, for Ronnie remembered that Priscilla seemed desperate to avoid her stepfather. “I just know what you sense as a person,” Ronnie said. “She was definitely afraid of him. She’d have to baby-sit a lot, and that was usually when she would ask me up and we’d
talk. She’d say little things.” Ronnie’s father had a similar foreboding about Paul, occasionally mentioning to Ronnie that he was a “strange man.” Both the Beaulieus, by her recollection, “drank quite a bit.” Ann, she commented, “was such a pretty lady. He was not a good-looking man.”
Ronnie noticed the unusually tight bond between “Cilla” and her mother. Priscilla “worshiped” Ann, and Ann, Ronnie felt, genuinely “wanted the best” for Priscilla. “Priscilla told me about her mother. She loved her mother. I liked Ann. But her mother was quiet. I really think she was afraid of [Paul Beaulieu] too.” Ronnie’s little sister and Priscilla’s younger sister, Michelle, were also best friends and were the same age, so the two younger girls spent much time together, often spending the night at each other’s houses. “Ann had a black eye one time,” recalled Ronnie. “And Michelle told my little sister, ‘My daddy hits my mommy.’ ” Ronnie didn’t know whether to believe Michelle, since the girls were “just little twerps” of seven or so, but the child’s story was consistent with Ronnie’s intuitive discomfort around Priscilla’s father.
Might this have been another dark secret that Ann and Priscilla shared—an unspoken element of their symbiotic bond? That Paul Beaulieu abused Ann, and possibly Priscilla too? If this was true, it would explain Ann’s almost hysterical fear of revealing—to anyone—Jimmy Wagner’s existence.
The Beaulieus were frozen in a web of fear and denial: Ann, forced to eradicate all traces of her first husband, the handsome, endearing father of her precious child; Priscilla, deprived of her identity and a relationship with her grandparents and uncle, pressured into harboring dark family secrets; her half siblings, kept in the dark about their sister’s background and their mother’s past. Paul Beaulieu had bullied them into enacting a charade to gratify his weak masculine ego, and they existed in an atmosphere of fear and repression. It was the irony of ironies that the fame and glory Priscilla’s stepfather so coveted and finally achieved vicariously sprang from Jimmy Wagner, through the “daughter” Paul was so keen to call his own. Ann Beaulieu, like Paul, turned to alcohol as one way to numb her senses, as a buffer between herself and reality. Did that reality include abuse?
“At the time, all I knew was that [Paul Beaulieu] was creepy and I didn’t like being around him,” Ronnie remembered. “I really think that’s what my daddy was trying to tell me about
this man: ‘There’s something wrong with this guy, Ronnie.’ But it was never said to me, I never saw it. Priscilla really held her emotions in check.… She was always in command of everything. If she was hurting or upset, you were never totally aware of it. Not by words, anyway.”
If there was abuse in the Beaulieu house, confirmation of its existence would never come from Priscilla’s lips. Yet her behavior did raise flags. Mike Stone found it odd that Priscilla “never really talked about her childhood. And it always was kind of a mystery. And I don’t know why that is. Because we’ve talked about my childhood obviously, and there were a lot of things I wanted to share, that I didn’t want to hide. But for whatever reasons
she
had, she rarely talked about her childhood at all.” When Priscilla did speak of Paul Beaulieu, once she was famous, she lionized him, writing in her memoir of “my strong, handsome father, who was the center of our world,” gushing to interviewers about how “wonderful” he was. Classic compensatory behavior for someone who has been abused. Or as Shakespeare wrote in
Hamlet
, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
“She was really afraid of him,” Ronnie insisted. “And I don’t know if it was just because he was strict or what.” This fear of Paul Beaulieu may have forged an even tighter bond between Priscilla and her mother, explaining why Ann was so permissive with Priscilla. Out of mingled guilt, love, and remorse over exposing Priscilla to a harsh home life, and regret over her own lost love, Ann may have allowed her daughter to do things other mothers would never have sanctioned.
This may also have been why Priscilla viewed Elvis, in her friend Debbie’s estimation, as a sort of haven, a sanctuary for her future. Mike Edwards saw the relationship with Elvis as something mystical that was placed in Priscilla’s path as a means of escape from a troubled childhood.
Other clues also pointed in this direction. “I never considered her all that happy,” Ronnie analyzed, “being as pretty as she was. You’d think, with the rest of us looking at her in envy—‘Well, what more could she want?’—you know? But she never seemed all that happy to me.”
P
riscilla’s relationship with Tom Stewart turned turbulent that fall. Friends gave different accounts of who broke up with whom, each claiming the other was devastated. Priscilla, true to what would become her romantic trademark, bounced back instantly.
While on the rebound from Tom, she dated Al Corey and then switched to a junior on the football team, Darrell Johnson. She and Darrell had a three-month fling consisting mostly of “passionate kissing” and sock hops, by his recollection. “She was a busy girl then,” Al recalled. Priscilla painted this period with a different brush, describing herself as still pining for Elvis and declaring that “my head wasn’t into dating.” Classmates begged to differ, however. She was
always
dating, scoffed Donna Pollen. “There were so many it was kind of a joke.” Elvis became almost a figment of Priscilla’s imagination, a comet that passed through her life in the form of a phone call every few months.
By the middle of football season, Priscilla had bagged the star of the team, a good-looking senior quarterback named Ron Tapp. She was wearing his football jacket within days, going steady. This relationship demonstrated her democratic dating policy. “She did an about-face from dating the hood types,” as Donna put it, to “a Joe College football player.” Like a chameleon,
Priscilla would adapt to the image of her latest beau. “She was very feminine, very refined, always very beautiful,” Ron rhapsodized. “Maybe that was part of the overall aura of her.”
Currie, who had been discharged from the air force and was living with his family in California, returned to Germany after Christmas for a short visit, and Elvis continued to socialize with him in Hollywood. When he heard that Currie was going to Wiesbaden, Elvis asked him to stop by the Beaulieus’ and take some photographs of Priscilla. “Please, Currie,” he entreated, “take some pictures and bring them back. I want to see what she looks like now.” Priscilla, despite her claim that Currie tried to rape her, was thrilled to oblige, “desperate” for word from Elvis, through Currie. Outtakes from the photo session reveal an ebullient Priscilla and Ann, laughing and joking with Currie and Peter Von Wechmar, who was no longer dating Priscilla but tagged along. Currie recalled Priscilla as giddy at touching him, because
he
had touched Elvis.
Elvis was bobbing in and out with different women, his attention span lasting approximately as long as the six-week shoots of his increasingly formulaic films. Since leaving the army twelve months earlier, he had shot
G.I. Blues, Flaming Star, Wild in the Country
, and part of
Blue Hawaii
, enjoying serial romances with costars Juliet Prowse, Anne Helm, Tuesday Weld, and Hope Lange, as well as a brief affair with a script girl and his steady relationship with Anita Wood. His life was like an endless bachelor party, re-created nightly at a house he was renting on Perugia Way in Bel Air, cast with eager, comely starlets from his pictures and anyone else who was fortunate enough to meet him and catch his fancy. Elvis, in 1960, was the dashing prince in the kingdom of Hollywood who, with a wave of his magic wand, could transport some lucky girl into his fairy tale.
“When I was fifteen,” remembered Patti Parry, “a girl I was working with at a beauty school decided that we were going to a frat party at L.A City College. And we were driving this old Buick down Santa Monica Boulevard in November of 1960 and we see this black Rolls-Royce. We pull up and it’s Elvis Presley! We pretend we don’t know who it is. And he rolls down his window and says hi. I said, ‘You look familiar. Do we know you from somewhere?’ And he started laughing.” Elvis, on his way to record the sound track for
Flaming Star
, gave the girls his phone number and invited them to come to one of his parties. Patti and her friend went to the fraternity house, behaving as if
they had encountered a god. “He was gorgeous. Black hair, blue eyes. And he was wearing a sailor hat, always wore a sailor hat in those days. He did not like to wash his hair.” When Patti called the house later and reminded Elvis’s cousin who she and her friend were, he offered to send a limousine. Patti and Elvis became instant platonic friends when she visited him in Bel Air. Elvis, who was amused by her brash sense of humor, gave her a pet name (Patricia), hired her to cut his hair, and folded her into the entourage as its only female. “I don’t call myself Elvis’s hairdresser,” Patti said. “I was his little sis.” As such, she was privy to the revolving door of women in Elvis’s life. “Every night there were parties at the house, and every night the girls would drive up. It was like an open party.… He was dating everyone that he was working with.”
Priscilla was but a distant dream. Elvis, Joe declared, “never said to me, ‘Hey, did we get a letter from her today?’ He had Anita, his girlfriend at the time. He was busy with his movies. And Elvis—all his life he loved women. He always had affairs, no matter how much he loved somebody, he had to
be
with someone … but there were times he said, ‘Hey, let’s call her up.’ So he did have [Priscilla] on his mind.”