Authors: Suzanne Finstad
She was also occupied with choosing the right preschool for Lisa, and turned to Ed’s actress wife, Patricia Crowley, for advice. Pat recommended the John Dye School, an exclusive academy hidden in the hills of Bel Air. “We had friends who had a daughter there,” Pat remembered, “and they … helped get her in.” Lisa, at age four, was becoming a petty tyrant, ordering people about like the princess of rock she was. If she saw someone sitting on the fence at Graceland, she would command the person to get off, “and if they said, ‘How come you can tell me that?’ ” one of the maids recalled, “she’d say, ‘I
own
all this!’ ”
Rick Stanley said simply, “She knew who she was. She knew who her daddy was.”
Priscilla had embarked on a radically different lifestyle as the girlfriend of Mike Stone than she experienced as the cloistered wife of a celebrity demigod. “It was a whole new life for her,” said Bob Wall. “Mike was very physical. I mean, my God, Mike did everything. He became a seven-handicap golfer in like a year and a half. A brilliant athlete. They’d come over to our place and we’d play Ping-Pong and pool, we’d swim, we’d play basketball, we’d go running. We’d do everything, and Priscilla would participate. Volleyball. We were all just a physical group.… Chuck [Norris] had a raceboat at his beck and call, so we’d go out on the boat all the time. I think that period of time opened Priscilla up to what life was like.” Bob believed Priscilla and Mike to be “deeply in love,” and Olivia assumed they would marry, from what Priscilla told her. “She wanted a normal life,” Olivia said. “She wanted to try to have a normal life for Lisa.”
Priscilla had emerged from a sheltered subculture into the real world with the sudden brutality of an infant delivered from the womb and slapped into a new reality. Bob Wall, who had a successful real estate business in addition to his karate classes, was struck by her utter naïveté with respect to money. “Elvis didn’t give anybody much money. Apparently [his attitude toward] money was ‘Whatever you want, put it on a credit card. What do you need money for?’ So she didn’t even really understand money. I remember being amused at her not knowing the value of things. She didn’t know ten dollars from ten thousand dollars; it just had no meaning to her.”
Priscilla asked Elvis for more money to decorate her apartment and to buy additional furnishings for her younger sister, seventeen-year-old Michelle, who was moving in with Priscilla and Lisa. Elvis flourished in the role of father-provider, doling out funds for furniture and giving Priscilla a new Jaguar for Christmas that year. In January 1973, Ed Hookstratten drew up plans for Priscilla’s new 50-50 partnership with Olivia. Priscilla came up with a name for the new boutique—Bis & Beau, a combination of Olivia’s last name and Mike’s nickname for Priscilla. Neither Priscilla nor Olivia had the slightest notion how to operate a business. They were like girls playing Barbie. Priscilla was astonished at the price of fabric the first time she visited the garment center. Their ignorance was almost comical. “We were true babes in the woods,” admitted Olivia. “It was really a
shame that we didn’t know anything at the time. We didn’t [even] know about licensing. What we could have done then with the exposure that the shop was getting and Priscilla was getting, and we had just so much at our fingertips.”
Elvis’s physical decline began during his first Las Vegas appearance after the divorce, in January or February, 1973. He canceled three shows because of illness. Priscilla took Lisa to the Hilton, Elvis’s new venue in Vegas, on February 1, Lisa’s fifth birthday, to watch her daddy perform, an event that would become an annual ritual. Linda Thompson, Elvis’s new girlfriend, sat at the same table but was reportedly ignored by Priscilla. “I know Priscilla and Linda really had a dislike for each other,” said Sheila Ryan Caan, who came into Elvis’s life a few years later, while he was still with Linda. Sheila’s impression was that Elvis’s new girlfriend and his former wife were jealous of each other, even though Priscilla had left Elvis. “She was finished with him, but you know wives—they like to exert control.” Part of the rivalry, in Sheila’s estimation, was “because they were similar in nature, as far as possessiveness and jealousy and envy and all of that.” Sheila saw both Linda and Priscilla as “catty,” an observation that was borne out by their public and private comments about each other. Priscilla would later describe Linda’s redecoration of Graceland, while she was Elvis’s girlfriend, as “a Mae West type of look.” Linda, who was a friendly, demonstrative man’s woman, naturally gravitated toward the brassy Vegas style that Elvis preferred. She had redone the first floor of his Memphis mansion in red, though “it wasn’t just red,” Priscilla once told a reporter, shuddering. “It had
feathers
, it had teardrop lighting, it had leopard-skin pillows, it had fake fur throw rugs.” Linda, for her part, had ceased talking about Priscilla by 1996, saying she “didn’t know her that well, and what I did know was fairly negative.… I don’t know a lot of nice things that I could say.” The evident tension between the two women was almost certainly heightened by Lisa’s obvious affection for Linda, whom she “idolized,” according to Dee Presley. “They were really, really close,” seconded Dee’s son Ricky, who agreed that there “may have been a little bit of envy” on Priscilla’s part for that reason.
Elvis’s confusion, anguish, and regret about the end of his marriage revealed itself in long, rambling phone calls to Priscilla, during which he would occasionally express hope that they might get back together. Priscilla later cited this as evidence that Elvis
was still in love with her: “Even though he was dating Linda, he was still on the phone with me. I don’t know … how
she
did it, you know, because I never left his
life
, and that’s hard for another woman to have to
cope
with.” Linda and others felt that Priscilla exaggerated—or misinterpreted—Elvis’s communications with her, and they denied that he was still in love with her. “I only heard negative [things],” said Linda. “[Of course,] I was there when he was going through his divorce with her.”
Linda, by many accounts, including that of Cecile Rhee, who spent much time around Linda and Elvis in Memphis, was possessed to marry Elvis, at least in the early stages of their relationship. “Linda put a lot of pressure on him, I think, because she wanted to marry him so bad. Finally she just got to where she didn’t talk about marriage so much because I guess she finally figured out Elvis just wasn’t gonna get married again.” Cecile asked Elvis, in the mid-seventies, if he and Linda were going to get married. “He goes, ‘No, honey! I’ll never marry again.’ He just looked at me [and] said, ‘I’ve just realized that marriage isn’t for me, Cecile.’ He said, ‘Well, experience is the best teacher.’ ” Ed Hookstratten, who later managed Linda Thompson, felt “she was climbing a mountain because of Priscilla, and I think that Elvis was horribly embarrassed.”
The truth of that statement was made terribly, pathetically evident early in 1973, when Elvis again gathered his Mafia about him and told them, in apparent seriousness, that he wanted them to find and hire a hit man to kill Mike Stone. Ed Parker attributed this sad turn of events to an attempt on Mike Stone’s part to restrict Elvis’s access to Lisa, ostensibly out of concern over his increasing prescription drug use. Whatever the catalyst, exacting revenge on Mike Stone became Elvis’s obsession. He called Priscilla at her apartment in Marina del Rey and threatened to come over and terrorize Mike himself. Mike overheard Priscilla’s end of one conversation, when he saw her crying on the phone, “very nervous and scared.” When Priscilla hung up, she repeated to Mike Elvis’s threats—that he was going to bring some of the guys from Vegas on his private plane and “make your boyfriend get on his knees and beg.” “And I said to her, ‘Well, he can come over. I’m here all the time.’ ” Mike later claimed to have been unafraid. “My mentality might be a little different than most people’s in certain respects. I accepted death; it’s inevitable. And at that stage, [Elvis’s reaction] was something we had talked about many times, and we had come to the conclusion—at least
I had—that something might happen. So it didn’t surprise me when the shit hit the fan, so to speak. And I just accepted it. If he wanted to come and take a shot at me, I wasn’t gonna hide.” Sheila Ryan Caan, who was around Elvis and his entourage constantly in the mid-seventies, scoffed at the idea. “He’d talk real big, but nobody was ever gonna really do anything. The Memphis Mafia was better tagged ‘the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.’ They were just a bunch of southern boys! There wasn’t nobody killin’ anybody!” A few of the guys later claimed that Red or Sonny West had found a hit man to kill Mike for $10,000 and that Elvis’s request was at one point just a phone call away from execution. Whether this was true or not, Priscilla was genuinely terrified. “Once Elvis got on something—and especially someone dealing with
me
, I think—he went berserk, he went nuts. It scared Mike too. I got horrible phone calls in the morning, telling me that he was going to do it in front of my eyes.… And Red and Sonny both thought that he was going to do it.”
Elvis’s ego had been destroyed by Priscilla, by the tormenting fact that she would leave him for another man—someone he considered his friend. It was this humiliation, coupled with the death of a cherished dream, that fueled his desire to eliminate Mike and reconcile with Priscilla—more so, it seemed, than any genuine romantic feelings for her. The love Elvis still felt for Priscilla was similar to a father’s love for a daughter, and that love did not die with their divorce. As Cecile Rhee said, “Oh, he
always
loved her! When he said her name, he always had a look in his eye that … I don’t know. It’s like he had two little girls, instead of just one little girl.” Cecile, who was herself a young girl married to an older man, understood. “I remember asking him did he think he would ever get back with Priscilla. He said, ‘No, Cile. We won’t get back together. We’ll always be together in another way, though.’ He said, ‘She’ll always be my little girl.’ ”
Elvis seemed to come to terms with that after a time. Priscilla’s role in his life was a subject he often discussed with Larry Geller, who rejoined the entourage as Elvis’s hairdresser and spiritual mentor after the divorce. Elvis told Larry he had finally figured out that Priscilla was like a little sister to him: “She grew up, and the person that grew up and I are just apart. We’re not in love with each other.” The pain of that realization was almost more than Elvis could bear.
Priscilla seemed not to harbor any such illusions or regret for what might have been. Mike asked her from time to time if she would ever consider going back to Elvis, “and she said she would not, that it was another part of her life and it was over and she would never go back. I think she found complete freedom for herself and what she wanted to do with herself.” Mike likened Priscilla’s life with Elvis to a form of near-imprisonment. With Mike, Priscilla seemed more relaxed, less standoffish. “At the time that we were involved, we were in love, so it’s a different situation than her with Elvis. So my experiences were very joyous, and it was a happy time.”
Priscilla carried on in her delayed adolescence, learning for the first time how to balance a checkbook, moving into a larger apartment in the marina, shopping for furniture with Phylliss Mann. She had to go through Ed Hookstratten for the money Elvis had promised her to redecorate, and she had difficulty, she would later complain, collecting it. Vernon, she said later, finally sent a check. Priscilla was discovering the financial realities of life outside the rarefied world of a superstar, and it was a harsh awakening. The $50,000 in cash, which she had thought would be her future security, was quickly dissipating to meet her weekly expenses and to start up her boutique. “Trying to make ends meet was very difficult. It was the first time I’d tried to deal with it. Sending my daughter to school, having braces, it was all piling up, it was all a reality—My God, this is a life! This is what people struggle with every day. And I was putting things on layaway and I was thinking, My God! Where is [the money] going to come from? I was allotted so much—gas, rent, everything was piling up.” She was also, Mike observed, beginning to miss the luxuries of being a superstar’s wife, perquisites Priscilla had taken for granted when she was Mrs. Elvis Presley. “She’d lived a particular lifestyle since she was fourteen, and she couldn’t keep it up on what she got,” said Mike.
Roughly a year after she left Elvis, with the newness of her independence and the excitement of her sexual adventure with Mike wearing off, Priscilla tired of apartment life in the marina and decided she wanted to buy a house in Beverly Hills. “So I went back … to Ed Hookstratten, and I said, ‘I’m going to need more money.… I’ve decided to stay in L.A., and I need to get a house; I need to give my daughter a place to live.… This is not the place for me.’ ” Elvis’s lawyer’s response triggered something in Priscilla. “He goes, ‘Oh, well, the next thing you
are going to want is a house in Bel Air.’ When he said that, it was like—my God, the light went on. My God, I’d asked for nothing! I’m barely making ends meet, my daughter now needed to wear braces, and saying ‘the next thing I’d want was a house in Bel Air’? And I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, you are darn right I want a house in Bel Air!’ ”
Priscilla, for whom the point of leaving Elvis was to emancipate herself, felt chained to him still. Like a teenager seeking her allowance, she had to go to Elvis or—more annoying still—Ed Hookstratten, his attorney, to ask for money. She eventually complained to Phylliss Mann, her interior decorator, about her lack of funds. “I thought, ‘I’m desperate. I know no one.’ And he had all these attorneys and I had no one.” “She told me that she had a settlement,” recalled Phylliss. “She told me the amount, and I said, ‘You are kidding!’ ” Phylliss was astounded that the wife of the most popular entertainer in the world had received only $100,000 in her divorce settlement. Ed Hookstratten, she said later, “in effect was giving Priscilla the shaft. Priscilla was naive.” Phylliss was not. She promptly recommended that Priscilla hire a good divorce attorney. “And she said she didn’t know any attorneys, and I said that I knew a lot of attorneys. So I gave her several names.” One of them was Phylliss’s lawyer, Arthur Toll, who listened to Priscilla’s story and agreed to challenge the settlement, which Toll considered “unfair.” Ed Hookstratten took umbrage, then and later, at Priscilla’s lawsuit, blaming Phylliss, whom he described as a “pushy, pushy individual. She began to run [Priscilla’s] life. Started giving her all kinds of advice and brought in her lawyer.” Olivia Bis denied that Phylliss was an unsavory influence. Priscilla, Olivia said, never had many close friends and had a hard time trusting people. “She really needed somebody to advise her, and Phylliss … really helped her.” Phylliss’s husband’s succinct characterization was that “She saved [Priscilla’s] ass.”