Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Elvis and Ann-Margret had a relationship that was both intimate and hot. His nicknames for her suggested as much: He called her either Rusty Ammo, after her character in the movie, or Scoobie. “They had a great time and were madly in love,” in the opinion of Joe Esposito, who knew Elvis’s thoughts probably as well as any of those around him. “Ann and Elvis … liked a lot of the same things. They had a good time together. They were always happy.” Even Joe’s wife, Joanie, whose loyalties would lie with Priscilla, considered Elvis and Ann “terrific”
together. “Ann has a great sense of humor, and [their romance] was fun and light.”
Priscilla meanwhile was mad with worry, cloistered at Graceland, hearing rumors about Elvis and Ann, reduced to scouring newspapers for bits of gossip. During the first week of August her worst fears were confirmed in Hedda Hopper’s column, which appeared in the
Memphis Press-Scimitar.
Hopper reported that Elvis and Ann-Margret were dating, and she quoted Ann as saying he was “wonderful.” Priscilla was already despondent over love letters she had found in the office at Graceland from Anita to Elvis, confirming that Elvis had pursued Anita after he left Germany. The fact that Priscilla was herself in love with several other people during that time period did little to assuage her battered feminine pride and not insignificant ego. The problem was that Priscilla and Elvis were essentially the same in matters of sex and romance: Each was accustomed to being the object of others’ intense desire. Priscilla’s dilemma was accepting that she had undertaken to become the girlfriend of a star who would forever relegate her to the background and into a double standard her ego found untenable.
“We already had been talking about
marriage,’
she said later of her reaction to the gossip from the set of
Viva.
What was Elvis doing with Ann-Margret? Priscilla wondered as she waited, anguished and alone at Graceland. “I knew he was dating her. So there was like ‘Wait a minute. What is this?’ And that was where the insecurities were coming in.” Priscilla, as she had with Anita in Germany, methodically studied and ruthlessly critiqued both herself and her latest competition to assess where they stood with Elvis. Ann-Margret, she rationalized, “wasn’t his type.” Or so she tried to convince herself. “As far as a woman to marry, to have children with, it wasn’t there. And I knew how important that was to him, to have kids.”
Elvis Presley was at a turning point in his personal life, faced with a choice between two women, Ann-Margret and Priscilla, that would determine the direction of his future. Several of the Presley aides, later in life—Marty Lacker, Lamar Fike, Billy Smith—would contend that Priscilla was Elvis’s second choice, but it was impossible to know whether their opinions were valid, for they were by then disenchanted with Priscilla Presley and embroiled in power struggles with her in her role as executrix of Elvis’s estate. Patti Parry, who had no ulterior motives and spent time observing Elvis with both Ann and Priscilla, considered
Ann “the love of his life,” and it was clear, both then and later, that Ann-Margret felt the same way about Elvis. Although she refused, out of respect for Elvis, to discuss their love affair publicly, she referred to him in her 1994 memoir as her “soul mate.”
Priscilla distracted herself that August with a visit to her family, then living at Travis Air Force Base in northern California and celebrating Paul’s promotion to major. When the filming of
Viva
wrapped at the end of the summer, she and Elvis were reunited at Graceland, where Priscilla spent a gloomy September, morose and anxious about Ann-Margret, whose calls Elvis was not so secretly taking at the house. According to Dee, Ann began phoning her house on Dolan Street, which Elvis took to using for clandestine conversations with the actress. “He was stuck on Ann-Margret, I think,” Willie Jane Nichols contends. “At that time, that’s all he’d talk about.” Priscilla would mention to Willie how “bothered” she was by Elvis’s affair with Ann-Margret, and she also turned to Dee for occasional consolation.
“She did a lot of crying, and she was angry,” Geraldine Kyle remembers. “She was extremely jealous, as I would have been, very unhappy.”
According to Willie Jane, Elvis invited Ann to Graceland. “I’m not coming there with that woman there,” she reportedly responded.
When Priscilla brought up the subject of Ann to Elvis, “he would keep telling her that it wasn’t happening,” recalled Joan Esposito, who found herself in the uncomfortable middle, friend to Ann, Priscilla, and Elvis, uncertain what to say to whom: “Elvis just denied everything.” Priscilla had little choice but to reluctantly accept his denials. “But you know,” said Priscilla later, “what he would say to
her
and what he would tell me were two different things.”
Elvis was playing a cagey romantic game with two strong-willed, jealous females, just as he had juggled
Anita
and Priscilla the year before. Sooner or later something had to give.
The situation reached a flash point in October, when Elvis went back to Los Angeles to film his next movie,
Kissin’ Cousins.
Ann-Margret was in London promoting the British release of
Bye Bye Birdie
, so Elvis took Priscilla to Hollywood, which temporarily cheered her. Priscilla found both the movie business and L.A. stimulating, in contrast to Memphis, where she had nothing to do and which she considered dull. Yvonne Craig,
Elvis’s female lead in
Kissin’ Cousins
, had met Priscilla briefly during her spring visit to L.A. the year before and noticed a tremendous difference in her bearing and confidence. She had successfully transformed herself into something of a Hollywood sophisticate already, and Yvonne, a starlet of the first order, considered Priscilla stunning and “would never have guessed her to be seventeen
[sic].”
She thought Priscilla seemed proprietary toward Elvis, as if “she had a sense of her place in his life now.” Elvis’s five-star sapphire had moved from Priscilla’s pinkie to “the correct finger,” as Yvonne put it, a not so subtle suggestion of an engagement ring. Yvonne, in fact, thought Elvis had secretly married Priscilla, which was no doubt the teenager’s intent.
During the
Kissin’ Cousins
shoot, quotes attributed to Ann-Margret, taken from London newspapers, began filtering back to the States. It was reported that Ann told the British press that Elvis had given her a round pink bed and that they were going to be married. Elvis, by a number of accounts, was furious. This publicity, according to Priscilla, led to a much-written-about fight between Priscilla and Elvis at the Bel Air house. “He was angry,” Priscilla explained. “He was infuriated, and it [the marriage gossip] caused friction between the two of us. So I asked him what was wrong, and he said I had to leave because [Ann-Margret] was coming back and he had to settle things.”
Priscilla claimed that she used Elvis’s response as an opening to confront him about his affair with Ann, “and then he got
really
angry with
me
because now I
knew.
And he told me that that was it. He confided—not confided, it was an argument—that he [had been] seeing her [but] that he was not seeing her anymore. And he told me that he got this bed for her. I mean, he just
told
me
everything.
And then I said, ‘Well, what attracted you to her?’ And he told me he was attracted to her because she was the ultimate complement to
any
man. To his ego, more or less. She imitated him. And he was attracted to that. But he knew that [she] wasn’t what he was looking for … that she was very … nice, but that she would always be competitive with him. And that she was very career-minded, and that he was looking for someone to marry. And that she was a novelty for him. Not long after that, I went back to Memphis.”
Others, including Priscilla’s soon-to-be best friend Joan Esposito, offered a different account. “What happened,” said Joan, “was that [Elvis] called Priscilla’s bluff.” Priscilla, according to Joan and others in the Perugia house, confronted Elvis about
Ann-Margret, and he pulled Priscilla’s clothes out of the closet and tossed them out onto the driveway, threatening to send her back to her parents—Elvis’s typical reaction when charged with infidelity. “The best defense is offense,” as Joan interpreted his pattern. “He would say, ‘Well then, we’re finished.’ She wasn’t ready for that, so she would get back into line.”
The fight about Ann “hurt deeply at that time,” Priscilla acknowledged later. She retreated to Graceland as commanded, while Elvis remained in L.A. another two weeks or so, the duration of his
Kissin’ Cousins
shoot. Exactly what transpired between Elvis and Ann-Margret in the weeks that followed is still something of a mystery and is likely to remain that way, for Ann will not discuss it, or Elvis—“even with me,” remarked comedienne Mitzi McCall, “and I’m her closest friend!” Ann-Margret considers Elvis and his memory too special. She insisted, then and later, that she never told British reporters she was going to marry Elvis, only that they were dating, and she wrote in her book that she cleared this up with Elvis that fall. Yet from that point on, Elvis did a mysterious slow fade from her life, despite the fact that he was in love with her. “I think that [the marriage publicity] was sort of an excuse for him,” was Joe Esposito’s theory on the breakup. “How to end [the romance]. He knew it wasn’t going to go any further. I think that was his reasoning how to break off [with Ann].”
Ann-Margret later referred cryptically to a “promise” Elvis had made that prevented them from being together, though in her words they had “talked about” marriage. “His wish was that we could stay together,” she wrote in her 1994 memoir. “But of course we both knew that was impossible, and that’s what was so very difficult about our relationship. Elvis and I knew he had commitments, promises to keep, and he vowed to keep his word.” Though she has never said so directly, Ann-Margret was obviously referring to the Beaulieus’ arrangement with Elvis for Priscilla. “I really believe Elvis told [Priscilla’s parents that] he was going to marry her … and that was the deal,” Joe explained.
Elvis returned to Memphis, and to Priscilla, early in November. What happened next at Graceland indicated that he might have communicated his decision to Ann-Margret, who sent him a telegram that read, “I just don’t understand.” It was signed “Scoobie,” Elvis’s pet name for her. “And then I found the telegram,” related Priscilla, “and in that telegram was what happened.
[There were]
two
telegrams. One said, ‘I just don’t understand,’ and I believe there was another one with a song title on it, and I don’t recollect what it was. But it indicated that [the affair had] ended. It was over.” Ann-Margret, according to Joe, who kept in touch with her, “was devastated [by] the way it ended.”
Elvis’s choice of Priscilla over Ann-Margret was persuasive proof that the die had been cast for Priscilla Beaulieu’s future; that in fact Elvis had committed himself to an eventual marriage.
“Elvis did tell me,” affirmed Charlie Hodge. “Annie used to come up to the house, and he said, ‘Charlie, I stopped going with Annie on purpose, because I was beginning to feel too much for her, and I knew I was going to marry Priscilla.’ ”
There were, in the collective judgment of Elvis’s friends, supporting arguments for the decision to eliminate Ann, most of them turning upon Elvis’s perception that he could more readily subjugate Priscilla. “She represented something that he could bring up,” suggested Patti. “He brought her in at fourteen, and he was going to bring her up. He liked to control her.”
“It was a different kind of love,” according to Joan. “Priscilla was still the home and strength. Ann was making him stretch. I think that Ann made him get outside his comfort zone; in many ways he liked that, but was also afraid of that. And Priscilla was malleable.”
By casting aside Ann for Priscilla, Elvis had rejected an adult relationship with a woman, an opportunity for a mature love. He was threatened, in the judgment of virtually everyone who knew him, by Ann-Margret’s fame and independence. “Priscilla was like me,” Patti said. “I was in awe, but Ann-Margret—she and Elvis were equals. She was the best girl, the most fun. They would have been the perfect pair. But she wouldn’t give up her career, she wouldn’t be with him twenty-four hours a day, and he wanted someone who would be there twenty-four hours a day.”
Many of Elvis’s intimates shared this opinion. “Ann-Margret was a great time,” Joe reported, “but Elvis knew Ann had a career and wasn’t going to give it up for him. He wouldn’t expect her to. And he knew he could never be with someone who was in the limelight; when he wanted them there, he wanted them. Not like ‘I’m on location, I can’t do it.’ Priscilla he knew would be there whenever he wanted her; he raised Priscilla that way. And that’s why he would take her, knowing he could still fool
around. Ann-Margret wouldn’t have let that happen.” Elvis apparently told Charlie Hodge, “Charlie, it wouldn’t work, anyway, with both of us in show business. She’d have her managers and I’d have my managers. There’d be conflicts all the time.”
There was also the ever-present issue of Priscilla’s alleged purity, the importance of which never diminished for Elvis. Geraldine Kyle overheard Vernon’s side of a telephone conversation at Graceland shortly before Elvis and Priscilla finally married in 1967. “I was leaving to go out the front door through what they would now call the Jungle Room,” Geraldine recalled, “and … Vernon was talking on the phone. I don’t know who he was talking to, but I heard him say, ‘Well, Elvis told me that he knew for sure and certain Priscilla had never been with a man, and that is what Elvis saw in her.’ ” Priscilla’s original pose as a vestal virgin, untouched by anyone but Elvis, had become not only her image but also part of her hold on Elvis, her raison d’être. How could she look back now?
Though she had seemingly prevailed in the triangle with Ann-Margret, Priscilla was anything but confident of her footing with Elvis. He remained romantically involved with Ann for another seven or eight months after the London publicity incident, making her a continuing threat to Priscilla’s emotional, financial, and domestic security. Her reaction, true to her conditioning, was to focus obsessively on her appearance, to make herself so alluring, so sophisticated, so glamorous, so
Hollywood
, that Elvis would not think of looking at another woman. Priscilla already felt inferior to the starlets who passed through her movie-star boyfriend’s working milieu; she, by comparison, was an eighteen-year-old girl, several months out of high school, determined to level the playing field.