Authors: Suzanne Finstad
During that same summer of 1973, Arthur Toll’s discovery in Priscilla’s fraud case escalated, and he began to subpoena documents related to the profits from Elvis’s records. He then subpoenaed Elvis himself, setting a date for the singer’s deposition, which was postponed and rescheduled several times that fall. As Elvis’s final deposition date of October 1 drew near, Harry Fain, his divorce lawyer, began talking settlement, though he was not convinced, years later, that Priscilla would have prevailed in demonstrating that either Elvis or Ed Hookstratten had defrauded her into signing the original property agreement. She had known, basically, how much money Elvis made and that she was entitled to half of it. Nothing was concealed from her. “It was only later that people told her she gave up too easily, [that] she should have asked for more,” asserted Fain. Vernon Presley nonetheless made a counteroffer to Arthur Toll’s suggested figure in October, based upon Harry Fain’s recommendation, at Elvis’s insistence that they avoid any confrontation or litigation. The revised settlement, for Priscilla, provided her with $725,000 cash, up front, in addition to her original $100,000, plus $720,000 in monthly payments of $6,000, to be paid in full by August 1982. She also received half of the profits from the sale of the Monovale mansion
in Bel Air, 5 percent of Elvis’s music stock in Whitehaven, as well as spousal support of $4,200 a month for a year and child support in the amount of $4,000 a month until Lisa turned eighteen. “I remember very vividly that when we had to finalize the settlement, Arthur arranged for an appointment at the home of Elvis at six
P.M.
,” said Harry Fain, “and I think Elvis was coming down for his breakfast. He was very affable, never hesitated for a moment. We explained the terms, and he said, ‘You have it.’ ” Even Arthur Toll, who was representing Priscilla, later said that Elvis wanted to be fair, “ ‘and if she doesn’t think it’s fair, we’ll change it.’ ” Harry Fain found Elvis consistently a gentleman, no matter the circumstances, ever asking, “Is there anything I can get you, Mr. Fain?” “He was very, very solicitous, very warm. Trying to obtain a warm feeling of connection with you, on the basis of trying to resolve any antagonism.” The lawyer came away from his encounters with Elvis impressed by his natural grace and his heart, convinced that it was more than his talent, but “a warmth and a spirit” that contributed to his exceptional fame; feeling, finally, that Elvis Presley had been given a burden, in the form of that oppressive fame, that no mortal could carry. “Elvis reached a level that very few people in our lifetime have achieved. The vast majority of people, especially women,
worshiped
him. And I mean that.”
The lawyers, the presiding judge—anyone and everyone who came into contact with Elvis and Priscilla during the litigation over their divorce settlement—left the situation amazed. For all its potential for acrimony, noted Harry Fain, the fraud case was settled in four months, “and I believe that he was still in love with Priscilla, or at least wanted to develop a continuing relationship for the benefit of his daughter.” Arthur Toll agreed: “You could feel that he still felt the same way about her and Lisa. To him, the divorce wasn’t something necessary and shouldn’t be done, but if that is what she wanted, what could he do? That’s what I felt.”
The final divorce hearing, on October 9, was both touching and tragic. The rock-and-roll sensation whom Priscilla had idolized at eleven was puffy and bloated, his eyes droopy and dull from prescription pills. Elvis appeared in court wearing his trademark tinted aviator glasses and a skier’s warm-up suit, with a long, heavy gold chain around his neck and a small U.S.-flag pin on his jacket, over his heart. Priscilla, who had not seen Elvis in several months, was shocked at his rapid decline. When they sat
down inside the judge’s chambers, Elvis took Priscilla’s hand and held it as the judge, Lawrence Rittenband, led them through the pro forma hearing that would forever sever the legal ties that bound them. Elvis’s fingers, Priscilla could feel, were moist with sweat.
A few minutes later, the once legendary lovers strolled out of the courthouse from their divorce hearing, walking arm in arm before a disbelieving corps of photographers. Elvis appeared sad and defeated; Priscilla looked like a walking advertisement for her boutique, dressed in tight white trousers, a white mock turtleneck, and a colorful long patchwork coat. She no longer wore the famous black beehive; her hair was now shoulder-length and brown again, as it had been when she was eight; her eyes bereft of false lashes, her brows plucked spare. As they parted, Elvis kissed Priscilla and whispered tenderly into her ear, “For always and ever.” When Priscilla got to her Mercedes, she turned and waved a final farewell to the man she had devoted half of her life to possessing; Elvis Presley gave her a crooked half-smile and winked. Elvis and Priscilla, so extraordinary in their courtship, were equally unique in their divorce. Harry Fain later described their behavior as “just a beautiful quality to achieve.”
“I sat in the courtroom and cried,” Priscilla said later, “because his hands … were swollen from God only knows what he had taken. But I was … holding his hands and baby-talking him. And the judge couldn’t believe it.” Priscilla knew the divorce “was breaking” Elvis. “God only knows what was going to happen, but being so condemned for it, it was very difficult for me to break free. Very difficult to survive … The love that I had for him was truly a love for him. I didn’t leave him because I hated him; I left him because I loved him. I wasn’t about to see him go, in front of me. He had to help himself. He didn’t choose to do that.”
The love between Elvis and Priscilla, so like that of a father and daughter, transcended even their divorce. Said George Klein, who had observed the dynamics between them from the day of Priscilla’s arrival at Graceland when she was seventeen: “They were growing apart, and she was maturing. He knew that. He was nice enough a guy not to hold her back. He wanted the best for her.”
There was no love, Priscilla would say to George’s wife, Barbara, like the Presley love.
P
riscilla celebrated her second divorce from Elvis by investing a fraction of her new riches in Bis & Beau. With the cash influx, she and Olivia purchased a more fashionable space in Beverly Hills. She also bought a Mediterranean-style house for herself and Lisa, located on Summit Drive in Benedict Canyon, above the Beverly Hills Hotel, acquiring a maid, a pool, and a tennis court. Her social status, overnight, had risen dramatically. Phylliss Mann, whose advice and introduction to Arthur Toll had increased Priscilla’s fortune tenfold, from just over a hundred thousand to well over a million, went unacknowledged by Priscilla. “I didn’t get a thank-you,” said Phylliss, later. “I’ll tell you, she was so unschooled in the social graces that maybe she didn’t know she had to do that.” “I could have asked for more,” was Priscilla’s comment in 1996.
Elvis’s response to the divorce was a near-breakdown that landed him in Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis with pneumonia and depression. His emotional and physical condition were sufficiently grave that Lisa, who was not quite six, looked up at him one day, and said, plaintively, “Daddy, I don’t want you to die.” She had seen him firing guns at the television, setting off firecrackers, and taking handfuls of pills, and even as a small child, she “picked up on something.” Elvis, said Rick
Stanley, who was with him nearly twenty-four hours a day, adored Lisa. “He would ask me to go to her room at night sometimes and take her out of bed and carry her down to the couch, just so he could watch her sleep.”
Lisa drifted between the sane and the surreal, living with Mike Stone and Priscilla, whom Mike praised as a “good mom,” staying, at intervals, with Elvis, who alternated between benign neglect and heartfelt overindulgence. When he wasn’t sleeping or overmedicated, he would enchant Lisa with magical trips on his private jet, the
Lisa Marie
, just so she could see snow, or he would surprise her with real jewels. “She was pretty much his life,” said Sheila Ryan Caan. “He wanted her to be perfect. He loved her, he just cherished her, and he could not have been more nurturing. I’m sure it was confusing for her, because he would sleep a lot, and sometimes be ‘not feeling well,’ as we would put it. But, to his capacity, he was as good as he could be toward her. And he loved her more than he ever loved anything or anybody in his life.” “The two of them were crazy about each other,” said Dana Rosenfeld, who met Lisa in 1975 and became her closest childhood friend. “She just loved him with all her heart. [To him she was] the little girl who could do no wrong and the most beautiful in the whole world and the most talented. The quintessential apple of her father’s eye.” Elvis, observed Dana, “never said no.”
Lisa, bewildered by the dichotomy of her existence, was a willful, sometimes demanding, child. Sheila Ryan Caan, who saw Elvis’s little girl with Elvis, treated like a princess, would watch Lisa’s face transform when she asserted her authority. “I call it the sugar look.… When children think they’re the boss, they have a fog over their eyes until somebody takes them, jerks them by the neck, and says, ‘By the way, I’m the boss and you’re the mud.’ And Lisa spent a lotta, lotta time with that film over her eyes because she
was
the boss, and kids aren’t supposed to be the boss.… She seemed kind of confused by her ability to control.”
Ricky Stanley saw her as a normal, spirited kid. She appointed herself treasurer of the Sweet Inspirations Club, and collected the singers’ quarters each week faithfully. “She was a tiny little thing,” Myrna Smith recalled. She “used to walk around on tiptoe, and she hung out in our dressing room.” Elvis and Priscilla bought her a golf cart for her sixth Christmas, and one of Lisa’s favorite memories was of zooming about the grounds and
driveway at Graceland. Both Rick and Sheila remarked on Lisa’s “good heart,” even as a little girl. “I don’t think Lisa has a mean bone in her body,” said Sheila. “I just think that she’s a victim. Of circumstances: a father and her mother.”
Jerry Schilling and Sam Thompson, Linda’s brother, were two of the select few whom Elvis allowed to transport Lisa back and forth between Las Vegas and Los Angeles or between L.A. and Graceland. When she was with Elvis, “the only people he trusted to take her around for the day were Kathy Westmoreland and the Sweet Inspirations,” said Myrna. “I don’t think he let many people take her out of the house.” Jerry and Joe and Paul Beaulieu took Lisa to a Michael Jackson concert that year while Elvis and the Jackson Five were appearing in Lake Tahoe. Lisa was six and Michael Jackson sixteen. “We went backstage and said hello and that was it,” said Joe.
When Priscilla took over the parenting, Lisa adhered to a different set of rules. She found it confusing, according to Dana Rosenfeld, whose family lived next door on Summit Drive and who was in Lisa’s first-grade class at the John Dye School. Priscilla was the disciplinarian, attempting to establish boundaries; Elvis “was always showering Lisa with love and presents.” She had
respect
for her mother, according to Dana’s account, and
happiness
with her father. Dana recalled once when Elvis took the two of them to Schwab’s drugstore in Beverly Hills, closed the store, “and we got everything that our arms could hold … huge pieces of saltwater taffy.” Dana’s mother admonished Elvis, saying the girls would never understand the word “no.” “And he was like a little boy. He said, ‘I just love them and want to make them happy.’ ” Lisa took Dana with her occasionally to the Monovale house when Elvis was in L.A., “and we would sit and sing Christmas songs with him—not his songs, just songs—and rounds, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ ”
Elvis, who had come to terms with his anger and anguish and had forgiven both Priscilla and Mike Stone, was bothered by the fact that Priscilla was living with a man, that his daughter was exposed to a situation he considered immoral. Though she was officially divorced from Elvis, Priscilla made no move to marry Mike. She was also telling reporters for women’s magazines she would not have another child, that it wouldn’t be fair to Lisa or the baby for them to have different fathers—a carryover from her own strange upbringing and Ann Beaulieu’s distinction between full-blood siblings and adopted or half siblings. Priscilla
was becoming, Olivia Bis noticed, increasingly savvy about interviews, appearing on her second magazine cover—another
Ladies’ Home Journal
profile—in June of 1974. Priscilla engaged Phylliss Mann to decorate her new house in Benedict Canyon, and she began to pick Phylliss’s brain. “She was always interested in what I was doing,” the decorator remembered, “because I moved in art circles and that was a world that she was not well known in. [She was] curious, because she thought that I was very cultured, and she wanted to learn.”
Priscilla’s emerging upper-crust lifestyle and Mike Stone were an incompatible blend. The karate teacher felt out of place in Priscilla’s new milieu and could not afford the luxury travel she foresaw for the two of them. She was also becoming disenchanted with Mike, “with his lack of goals, and his lack of drive,” Bob Wall surmised. “And Mike is pretty self-centered; the world rises and sets around Mike.” Priscilla also began to resent what Olivia called Mike’s “macho Hawaiian thing,” a lifestyle “where the women stay at home and the men are with the men, and that’s what he was doing with her. And he was trying to launch a business in Hawaii, so he had to spend a lot of time in Hawaii, and there she was, alone again.” It was Elvis “all over again.” Mike moved out of the house on Summit and into a small apartment nearby, as Priscilla eased him out of the relationship. By 1975 he was a footnote in her autobiography. Mike, according to Al Coombes, a reporter to whom he told his tale in the early 1980s, was embittered, for he felt he had left his wife for Priscilla “and she dumped him.” Bob Wall described the relationship from Priscilla’s perspective: “He was a great guy as a transition for her from young girl … to mature woman.”