Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Thus was born the outrageous makeover with which the name Priscilla Beaulieu would be forever synonymous. If the students and nuns at Immaculate Conception thought she resembled a showgirl that spring, they would have presumed she’d turned to prostitution by Christmas. Her back-combed coiffure, which had been a spectacle at the school, now grew in height until it resembled a wedding cake. In retrospect, Priscilla’s hairstyle seemed as ludicrous as the powdered wigs worn by the French aristocracy during the reign of Louis XVI. Patti Parry had started styling Priscilla’s hair, and reluctantly created “the big boomba,” as she called the beehive for which Priscilla would later be lampooned. “I used to comb her hair in this boomba, and she would
say, ‘Make it bigger, bigger,’ and then we would go into the den and Elvis would say, ‘It’s too big,’ and she would blame it on me. And then she dyed it black.” Patti eventually tired of the battle, and of being kept waiting by Priscilla, with whom she did not always get along, “so I said, ‘I am not doing this anymore.’ ”
Priscilla—not Elvis, as she would later claim—was clearly the architect of her famed Elvira look, though she doubtless exaggerated it in a teenager’s attempt to impress him. Elsie Boaz, the owner of a Patricia Stevens charm school in Memphis where Priscilla had enrolled to further her modeling ambitions and occupy her time, remembered the eighteen-year-old as obsessive about cosmetics. “She liked the heavy makeup, the Cleopatra eyes, and the black hair. We would tone it down, and as soon as class was over, she’d go to the bathroom and put more makeup on.” At the height of her mania, Priscilla was wearing five pairs of black false eyelashes simultaneously in addition to jet-black eyeliner extended outward, Catwoman-style, and heavily penciled black eyebrows.
She had become a parody of the painted china doll she was so often compared to. “Well,” commiserated Willie Jane, “you know how a young girl would feel. Elvis was in the movies. He was with all these … like Ann-Margret.… And she was competing with them, she thought. That was my own opinion of why she took on the theatrical look.” In Willie’s opinion, “Elvis didn’t like it. He’d begged her not to do it. But she thought she had to.”
“I was definitely under a spell of what I thought was love,” Priscilla said later to Barbara Walters, in a revealing choice of words. In reality, it was competition, ego, and Priscilla’s goal-driven personality.
The truth of this became almost pathetically obvious when Priscilla suddenly enrolled in a dance class in Whitehaven, the Memphis suburb where Graceland was located, then tinted her long hair Titian and pulled it back from her face in a mod-style bouffant, the way Ann-Margret wore hers in
Viva Las Vegas.
“The one person Priscilla wanted to look like, when she did her hair, was Ann-Margret,” confirmed Dee, who was fashion-conscious herself and noticed the transformation. “Everything like Ann-Margret she wanted to become.” “That’s because [Ann-Margret] was the love of his life, and Priscilla knew it,” commented Patti.
Even Joe, who was less inclined to notice such things, agreed that Priscilla was emulating Ann: “She would never admit it, but I think so.” Joe’s opinion was valid, for Priscilla Presley, at fifty, would belittle the threat Ann had once posed to her love affair with Elvis. “I wouldn’t say Ann was the most difficult [challenge],” she commented, speaking from the comfort zone of a woman who had married, divorced, and buried Elvis. Joe knew better, for after Elvis died, Priscilla asked him to tell interviewers “that he didn’t love Ann-Margret, that he was [just] going out with her, that it was no big deal.” Ann-Margret, despite the protests, struck a jealous nerve in Priscilla. “Still does today,” declared Joe. Elvis’s feelings for the actress remained constant throughout his life; from 1964, when they broke off their relationship, until August 16, 1977, the date of his death, he sent her roses before every one of her performances.
Priscilla’s imitation of Ann revealed yet again how methodically she analyzed her rivals and the lengths to which she would go to accomplish her objectives. “I had an older dance class,” recalled Jo Haynes, Priscilla’s instructor that year. “I would say that maybe they were like seventeen to twenty … and they were quite experienced in ballet, tap, and jazz.… It was very hard for Priscilla to dance with them at that level,” but Priscilla impressed Jo Haynes with both her talent and her tenacity. “I was very proud of her. I really couldn’t believe it, coming into a class with girls who had at least eight to ten years of dance training.” That was vintage Priscilla; when she put her mind to something, as Joan observed of her, “she makes every point to
delve
into it.”
Priscilla’s eagerness to please, to get her man, was nowhere more evident than in her sex life with Elvis. She was willing to do virtually anything he asked to gratify Elvis, whose sexual tastes still occasionally ran to the unorthodox. “I knew what he liked,” as she said recently, “and where his head was. And I wouldn’t say that he was different; I wouldn’t say that he was abnormal. He was very healthy—very healthy in a sexual way too—but, as with many men, they have their preferences.” Heavy make-out sessions, rather than penetration, continued to be Elvis’s sex of choice with Priscilla; he got more pleasure, other sexual partners would attest, from dry-humping than from intercourse, due at least in part to his performance anxiety.
“Yeah, he had hang-ups,” confirmed Sheila Ryan Caan, Elvis’s girlfriend in the seventies. “He had a hang-up about having an ejaculation inside of a woman.” This was in some measure,
Sheila believed, a residual fear of getting a woman pregnant and being sued for paternity. “Plus, he was a southern small-town guy. I mean, he kind of never grew up and dry-humping was kind of a thing, you know? Actually, I kind of liked it, because it was high school. At the time I thought, Oh, my God!—but that’s not bad after what I’ve been through with other men. He was not perverse at all. He liked the
playing
part.”
Elvis’s reluctance to complete the sex act with Priscilla left her frustrated, but as an impressionable young girl, her ego must have been shattered. Sheila Caan, who was a teenager herself when she met Elvis, had a similar experience. “I remember the first time that we had sex and he masturbated instead of having completed intercourse,” Sheila reported. “And I thought, This is gonna be like all of Hollywood! ’Cause your dreams just shatter one by one by one by one by one. And this was only like the second man I’d been with! So I just thought this is what men were like. Instead of having orgasm inside, when we were about finished, Elvis finished off the job himself. I was devastated. I thought, Oh my God! I’m not enough. What’s the matter with me?”
Priscilla suffered her insecurities silently, keeping her own needs to herself, focused solely on pleasuring Elvis, motivated by the fear that she might lose him to a rival. While she was still at Immaculate Conception, she acted out his favorite sexual fantasies, dressing up as a nurse or secretary or schoolgirl while Elvis took photographs of their sex games. She became a regular at the Whitehaven all-night pharmacy, picking up developed film of her sexual role-playing with Elvis Presley before getting into her Catholic school uniform to study religion with Sister Rose Marie.
To keep Elvis happy, Priscilla later admitted, she consented to have sex with other teenage girls while he watched. Elvis sometimes videotaped these encounters, which occurred in his bedroom at Graceland, and occasionally he would join Priscilla and her female partner afterward for a ménage à trois. “They were all handpicked,” she made clear later, uncomfortable at recounting her private sex life with Elvis, “so there was a trust level there.”
“Elvis loved watching two women together,” affirmed Joe, who was aware of his boss’s ultimate fantasy, seeing two girls wrestle in white panties: “Not naked. White underwear, cotton. I guess the virgin thing.” Alan Fortas, a Presley aide, claimed
the singer once explained that this stemmed from a time when, as a boy, he saw two girls fall down, exposing their white underpants.
According to Priscilla, Elvis would later watch with her the videotapes of her lesbian encounters instead of having intercourse with her, “and that gave him a lot of sexual gratification.” She characterized Elvis’s sexual preferences, to a degree, as part of his need to be “different. And I think that’s what he resorted to, something different. Because that was expected from him.… You know, he was always so identified with being different, being an innovator.”
There was about Priscilla’s acquiescence to lesbian sex and video voyeurism an air of pathos and quiet desperation, so tragically fixated was she on acquiring this flawed fantasy man as her husband at any cost. And still the Beaulieus allowed their little girl to cohabit with the singer-superstar, unaware, presumably, of the dark side of the fairy tale that Ann, who was ostensibly ignorant of the emotional torment Priscilla was enduring, so desired for her daughter.
That Elvis Presley was keeping a teenage lover hidden at Graceland became an unspoken scandal, an open secret in the corridors of the music industry in Nashville, common but hushed gossip in Hollywood. Columnists either ignored the rumor, pretended not to believe it, or blindly accepted Elvis’s transparent ruses. May Mann, a former actress who interviewed the star for movie magazines and questioned him about his love life, admitted she “hadn’t met or given Priscilla a thought” from the time she moved into Graceland in 1963 until Elvis married her in 1967. May professed to be under the impression that Priscilla had moved back in with her parents in Sacramento once she graduated from high school and that she occasionally visited “all of the Presleys” or “reportedly” stopped by the set to see Elvis. “It was considered a very private personal matter,” May later wrote. “Even Elvis’s studio press agent admitted to me that while he had worked on three pictures with Elvis, he’d talked to him only twice, very briefly. He had never asked Elvis a question, not even one.” The press of the sixties subscribed to a gentleman’s agreement that veiled the sex lives of certain celebrities, and Elvis Presley’s secret child-lover fell into the same exalted category as Jack Kennedy’s White House mistresses and Rock Hudson’s homosexuality. The divine right of kings.
Elvis and Priscilla were “outed” late in 1963, when
Photoplay
magazine ran the first of two articles with the cover headline “Elvis Secretly Engaged! Love Began When Priscilla was 15.” The source of this information was Currie Grant, Priscilla’s future nemesis and former entrée to Elvis, the “only person,”
Photoplay
hyperbolized, who “could write this story—the man who introduced Elvis to Priscilla Beaulieu!” Currie decided to sell one of his photographs of Priscilla to
Photoplay.
“They wanted the picture, but they wanted the story to go with it,” he explained, so he agreed to provide the magazine with a superficial account of Priscilla’s first dates with Elvis, to be written by a
Photoplay
writer but published under Currie’s byline. When the article and several of his photographs of Priscilla came out, Currie was annoyed by
Photoplay
’s reworking of the story, which stated inaccurately that it was Currie who had asked Priscilla if she wanted to meet Elvis—a point that would become their future bone of contention. “This guy who took the story from me changed it around, so I got mad and called them up,” Currie said. Nancy Anderson, then West Coast editor of
Photoplay
, took Currie’s call. “She tried to gloss it over,” Currie explained, “saying movie magazines had to be very careful and really nice, that it was a family magazine and it wouldn’t look good to publish a story about a young girl asking to meet Elvis, and I let it go.” Nancy Anderson recently confirmed that Currie was upset when the piece came out and that his story had been reversed. “That’s where Priscilla got the idea, I guess,” proposed Currie.
The
Photoplay
piece was actually relatively harmless, repeating the Presley propaganda that Priscilla was living with Vernon and Dee, omitting any reference to Priscilla’s sexual relationship with either Currie or Elvis. What it
did
do, however, was put the spotlight squarely on Priscilla Beaulieu, Elvis’s teen lover, which no publication had done before.
Photoplay
printed photographs of her and even suggested that Elvis planned to marry her. This claim was based on a statement the singer had made the year before when, after a phone conversation with Priscilla, he said to Currie, “You introduced me to the girl I’m gonna marry.”
The
Photoplay
piece, according to Charlie Hodge, annoyed both Elvis Presley and Paul Beaulieu, “because Currie had taken pictures of her and [had sold] them to magazines.… If we wanted a story leaked, we had our sources that we used.” At that point, according to Charlie, Elvis’s group began freezing Currie out.
They needn’t have worried, for the exposure did no damage
to Elvis’s immense popularity or public image. The press, which easily could have made a scandal of the Priscilla affair, instead perpetuated the sweet romance depicted in
Photoplay.
“It was like Rock Hudson,” confirmed Rona Barrett, the premier gossip of the era. “Why didn’t anybody ever talk about his sexuality? One of the reasons was that [Rock] was always one of the most considerate movie stars.… He always went out of his way to be accommodating. He was always kind to the press, and … the Hollywood press, at that time, were not about to go out of their way to destroy somebody like Rock. I’m only using Rock as an example because that’s the way Elvis was treated. He was so polite, so deferential—that was really it. And his people always knew how to couch it, so you really didn’t know for sure.” Elvis Presley, moreover, occupied a status in show business that Rona Barrett considered unparalleled: “Nothing destroyed Elvis Presley, and nothing ever will.”
A few weeks before the first
Photoplay
story hit newsstands, Nancy Anderson asked Currie to telephone Priscilla at Graceland to find out whether she and Elvis were already married, so she could use the information in the follow-up. It was this phone conversation with Priscilla, Currie believed, that led to his eventual estrangement from Elvis. Currie and Priscilla, who had not seen each other since the photo session in Germany two years earlier, chatted for a long time on the phone, with Priscilla asking “very subtle” questions about Ann-Margret, “pumping me about what goes on at the house at Bel Air, but in a very vague, childish, schoolgirl-type way.” The conversation meandered agreeably until Currie asked Priscilla whether she and Elvis were married and Priscilla refused to answer. “She was,” he perceived, “like a caged animal. She became very, very aware of what she said to people, didn’t want it to come back to the wrong person. She was very, very afraid that she might lose her position or be sent back to her parents.” Currie “got a little huffy” with her. “I said, ‘How do you think you got where you’re at?’ I told her, ‘I just want to know … if you guys got married.’ ” When Priscilla still refused to tell him, “I probably made a few remarks I shouldn’t have,” said Currie, who was having marital problems and had reduced his visits to the Bel Air house because he disapproved of Elvis’s developing lifestyle. “I made the mistake of saying, ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing: I have a family. I would never—with all the booze and the pep pills and the things
going on—I’d never bring my two young kids over there around Elvis.’ I wasn’t even thinking it would get back to Elvis.”