Authors: Suzanne Finstad
“Her father was a jackass,” pronounced Barney. “He was just a jackass. I didn’t like him. I shouldn’t talk about him like that, but I didn’t like him at all. He was very strict, very hard.” Barney sensed that Priscilla was afraid of Paul Beaulieu. “She was. Yes. She complained one time to me that he had slapped her or something like that. And I can’t remember anything else. But I just remember her telling me one time, you know, her daddy’d slapped her.”
Priscilla, in her later desperation to disguise her past in Germany, maintained that she “feigned” an interest in a few boys while she was in Wiesbaden to fool her parents into thinking she was adjusting to teenage life and that she was interested in someone other than Elvis: “I went through the motions of going to school, I went through the motions with my friends, I went through the motions of having fun.… My parents had to see that I was participating. But it was all a role.” Priscilla was playing a role, but it was a role she wrote for herself—later, in her revisionist autobiography. To suggest that she dated other people after Elvis left Germany to assuage her parents was the reverse of the truth, for Paul Beaulieu objected to every boy she brought home. Priscilla was sneaking out, behind her parents’ backs, to see Tom, Barney, and Ron.
“She was so excited about going out with Barney,” declared her close friend Ronnie. “He was very, very wild … but that appealed to her the most, I think.”
Barney admitted to being on the dangerous side back then. “I drank a little bit,” he acknowledged, which kept him from driving. “I did pretty good, though, for the time we dated, without a car.” He chuckled, referring to his sex life with Priscilla. “She liked me. Oh, yes! Kind of hit it off right from the get-go.” He described Priscilla as sexually advanced. “Oh, yeah. She was very mature. She didn’t act like a sixteen-year-old girl. Let me put it to you this way: She didn’t act that way at all. Not at all.” He and Priscilla did not have intercourse. “We just didn’t date that long, you know, and we just … I never did have sex with her.”
While she and Barney dated exclusively that summer, Priscilla exchanged love letters with Ron in South Dakota, “writing how we missed each other, and would like to see each other,” he remembered. The two wrote of meeting somewhere, “but I don’t think we ever had any idea how we were going to see each other, unless she came back to the States, and I don’t think that was in the cards for a while.”
At the same time, Priscilla continued to send letters to Elvis on pink stationery, writing, as she put in her memoir: “I need you and want you in every way and, believe me, there’s no one else.… I wish to God I were with you now. I need you and all your love more than anything in this world.”
Elvis, a continent away in Nashville recording “Surrender” and “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame” and on location
shooting
Follow That Dream
, clung to his mental image of Priscilla, the “beautiful little angel” of his memory, his personal Vestal Virgin, pure Priscilla, who so resembled Debra Paget, his dream girl, and who had materialized in his life after his mother died, just when he needed her.
“He always talked about this beautiful girl, this sweet girl, this nice girl,” recalled Joan Esposito, a pretty blond who had just married Joe. “He just said how wonderful she was, how innocent and beautiful.”
B
arney Williams was banished into romantic exile by Priscilla on Halloween, four months after they met, the approximate length of her German rhapsody with Elvis. The reason, he suspected, was that he didn’t drive. As usual, Priscilla had a standby. Her new love interest was an old love, Tom Stewart.
The Tom-and-Priscilla relationship was an enigma to their classmates, who were never certain why they had stopped seeing each other the fall before. Thus they were not surprised when the two reconnected sometime after Halloween. “You never associate Tom with anybody but her,” offered Ron Redd, another senior. “It was serious,” confirmed Barney, who became close friends and “drinking buddies” with Tom after Barney’s romance with Priscilla faded. “It was a serious thing. He said he loved her. When we would go out drinking, he would go into all kinds of stuff.” Tom told Barney he had been intimate with Priscilla. “And I believe that’s true. It’s what
he
says, you know, but more than likely, what he said is probably true.… I remember he used to ask me all the time, ‘Barney, did you ever have sex with Priscilla?’ I said, ‘No, I never did.’ Course he didn’t believe me, because he kept asking me. He was just jealous, and I guess he was in love with the girl, you know? He was
really
in love with her.”
Priscilla, according to her friend Ronnie, felt the same way about Tom: “She really loved that guy.” Al Corey, who was close to both Priscilla and Tom, said they spent the night together more than once, with Priscilla using the familiar ruse that she was at a sleep over. This was plausible, for Ronnie remembered a slumber party at her house that Priscilla and Liz Williams attended, “and they both snuck out the window, and they came back the next morning about the time that my daddy was getting up to go golfing.” Al added that “The old man [Paul Beaulieu] would call the air police to pull Priscilla away from Tommy.”
Priscilla and Tom were in their own world that fall, the first semester of her junior year, his last year of high school, just as they had been during Priscilla’s freshman year and part of tenth grade. Sometime after Christmas, however, the relationship fell apart again. Another Spartan gang member, Tom Muldoon, insisted that Tommy ended the relationship and that Priscilla was crushed. Barney thought otherwise: “[Tom] was really, really torn up about her. I think he’d gone out with her, all total, two and a half years at least. Broke his heart. Poor guy.”
Something unexpected and extraordinary happened around this time that precipitated the breakup. Elvis, who had called Priscilla less than ten times since he left Germany in the middle of her freshman year, suddenly telephoned one afternoon in February or March, saying he wanted Priscilla to visit him in Los Angeles, where he was shooting a film. Priscilla had not seen Elvis Presley in two years, had not expected ever to see him again. “It had been months,” she stated later, “since we last spoke.” Elvis, up to then, was a black-and-white glossy taped to her mirror; she would sit in class sometimes, Priscilla told Barney, and think about Elvis and say to herself, “It’s just a dream. A dream.” By her own description, she was unprepared for and flustered by his sudden invitation.
According to her memoir, Priscilla did not give Elvis an immediate answer. It was Paul Beaulieu who got on the telephone and began negotiating with the star. This coming-to-terms lasted over several conversations and was conducted in a manner more befitting a talent agent hammering out the fine points of a performer’s contract than a strict father worried about his daughter’s honor. Captain Beaulieu’s “demands,” as Priscilla later described them, could hardly be called demanding: a first-class round-trip plane ticket for Priscilla, a two-week stay in L.A. once school was out for the summer, an itinerary, and unspecified
chaperons. Barney laid the blame for Priscilla’s breakup with Tom on the Elvis factor. His unexpected reemergence in her life that spring coincided with the end of their relationship.
Paul Beaulieu accepted Elvis’s offer in March; yet interestingly, Anita Wood remembered finding a letter from Priscilla in Elvis’s study in May, while he was on location filming
Blue Hawaii
, referring to a future visit to L.A. as merely a possibility. Anita, who read it top to bottom, did not consider it a love letter. Both facts hinted at possible doubts on Priscilla’s part.
There were other indications that Priscilla may have had mixed feelings about seeing Elvis. That fall she bonded in a platonic way with Tom Muldoon, who was considered the class character. Priscilla and Tom Muldoon pretended to go to Catholic catechism together, but ducked out to the Teen Club or some other forbidden venue to talk. Tom, who became her confidant, described her later as despondent over her breakup with Tommy, which
he
insisted was Tommy’s doing, presumably because he was jealous and angry over Priscilla’s planned trip to California. “He was upset,” Barney affirmed. “But who can compete with Elvis Presley? I told him he should just forget about her. Course he didn’t. He really loved her a lot.”
Priscilla reacted by spinning into a dating frenzy from March to May, when her trip to see Elvis was scheduled. The mythic version was that she did this for her “parents’ sake.” She later said, “I had to be very careful. I withdrew a bit, and they were concerned about me. Even though I had no desire to date, I had to become normal again, get back to reality, because my parents would see this change in me and they would be concerned, and I was afraid that would be a deciding factor of whether I would be able to visit Elvis or not. So … I had to … start calculating or manipulating my own feelings so that I could participate as a typical teenager.” The reality was that Priscilla had been dating nonstop in the two years since Elvis left Germany; if she “withdrew” after he invited her to California, it was over her breakup with Tom Stewart. Her dating marathon that spring was the behavior of a teenage girl on the rebound. What was interesting about her fictional version, however, was Priscilla’s choice of words—“calculating or manipulating my own feelings”—for that was what she would soon do, except that, ironically, it would be with respect to Elvis.
Priscilla selected, as her first candidate to make Tom Stewart jealous, a conservative BMOC named Mike Kimball, an all-around
jock later voted Best-Looking Senior, the type that normally produced yawns in Priscilla but was certain to ignite Tom. The Spartans, Tom’s fellow gang members, “were not real pleased with me taking her out, to be honest,” Mike admitted. Priscilla, he recounted, consorted with a different crowd, Tom Stewart’s crowd. “The girls puffed their hair up like the Germans; they wore their hair in, I would say, like a beehive. And she ran around with some of the kids who wore leather jackets and sort of dark clothing, and they weren’t really involved in a lot of school activities.… I played football and ran track and wrestled.”
Priscilla, Mike confirmed, did
not
go out with him to please or appease her parents. The Beaulieus, he recalled, treated him with veiled disdain when he arrived to pick up Priscilla, just as they had all her suitors, with the exception of Elvis. “I wasn’t welcome. Her father didn’t sit in the living room and talk. I just wanted to get out of there.” Mike shared the impression that Priscilla’s parents actually discouraged her from dating high school boys. “I think they found excuses for her to be involved in the home, things like baby-sitting, which would be a logical excuse why you couldn’t go out.”
The dates with Mike Kimball were not solicited for Priscilla’s amusement, for she was bored senseless, according to Ronnie, who double-dated with them. “Mike was an absolute all-American apple-pie kind of guy—just precious. But that just did not turn her on. I remember the double date. She would look at me and make these little eyebrow lifts.” Despite her lack of interest, Priscilla was characteristically responsive to Mike’s sexual advances. “If you went out with her, you made out. I mean we didn’t have intercourse. And I’m not sure, at that age, that I was initiating anything like that.” That may have contributed to Priscilla’s boredom, for the boys Priscilla Beaulieu had dated—Tom, Peter Von Wechmar, and their ilk—were known for exploring deeper sexual waters, and Priscilla was their companion in danger. “My father’s dead,” remarked Mike, “but my mother still jokes about the fact that my dad enjoyed my bringing Priscilla over because her dresses were so tight.”
Priscilla endured only so many dates with Mike before she flitted from Spartans Joe Delahunt to Danny Mason to “Spider” Murphy, also accepting a date or two with boys outside the gang, such as Daniel Dodd. “Spider! Ooh!” Ronnie recalled gleefully. “He was sort of the leader of the outlaws.” Most of the Spartans,
Tom Stewart among them, were also members of the Teen Auto Club, or T.A.C. Both groups wore special jackets with secret insignias, the self-proclaimed Wild Bunch of Wiesbaden, racing cars, smoking cigarettes, quaffing cognac, and having sex. Priscilla and Spider doubled one night with Ronnie and another T.A.C. member, Bruce McKay. “He took us around … the Nürnberg Ring. Nürnberg was the racetrack over there that Steve McQueen raced at several times. They had a course mapped out there in Wiesbaden that was dangerous. I still cannot believe … drinking beer and riding with those guys around that course.” Priscilla had to slip out of the house for these adventures, sometimes borrowing clothes from Ronnie, but she was fearless. She took Ronnie to a few parties given by the brother of another friend, Becky Lippett, “and they were wild!” Ronnie recalled.
Yet she also still managed to project the tender innocence Elvis found so beguiling. Ron Redd was a football player who’d had his eye on Priscilla since her freshman year and could not believe anyone so refined would date Tom Stewart. “That was a perplexing question—why was she attracted to him?” Ron made a play for Priscilla that spring, as soon as he saw his opening. He saw Priscilla Beaulieu in the same idealized light as Elvis, and she played the role to perfection. “There was a sweetness about her. Almost innocence. Her face was so chiseled; it’s like she didn’t even put soap on her face, her skin was so incredible.” Ron spent a good deal of his time with Priscilla in the backseat of his car, “making out and trying to get really heavy into the petting [but] she wouldn’t have any of it.” Like Mike, Ron did not attempt intercourse; he was “too scared. We didn’t have the Pill, so we didn’t do any of that stuff.” Priscilla nonetheless stood out. “Damn, she could kiss! Oh, man. She was just a very passionate kisser.” The relationship did not last more than a few weeks, with Priscilla as Ron’s trophy date at the Senior Graduation Ball.
Priscilla charmed men of all stripes. John Love, who taught her history that year, was so overcome by her perfect manners and dress that he extended liberties to Priscilla not afforded lesser beauties. He asked her in class one day what Grant said to Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, “and she kind of smiled and looked up at me and said, ‘I don’t know, Mr. Love.’ And I just remember saying, ‘Ahhh, that’s all right, Priscilla,’ and asked someone else. She was so pleasant and courteous and polite you kind of let her off the hook.”