Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Priscilla had returned from La Costa and was at the hairdresser in Beverly Hills when Elvis died. Her sister, Michelle, picked her up around noon, saying that Joe had called from Memphis with an urgent message for her. Once she arrived home, Joe Esposito delivered the news of Elvis’s death to her over the phone. “She was just dumbfounded at first,” he said. “Nothing but silence. She put the phone down and I could hear her crying in the background saying, ‘Oh, no, I can’t believe it.’ ” The first person Lisa telephoned from Graceland, it was said, was Linda Thompson, not Priscilla, though Ginger maintained that it was not Lisa who called Linda but Linda’s brother, Sam, who put Lisa on the phone. There would later be almost a competition within the Elvis ranks as to which of the women in his life responded with the sincerest expression of grief. The winner, in the opinion of Shirley Dieu, Joe’s girlfriend, who called all but Priscilla with the news, was Ann-Margret. Shirley telephoned Ann at the Las Vegas Hilton, where she was staying, to inform her of Elvis’s death before it made the news. Ann’s husband, Roger Smith, answered the phone. Before Shirley said anything, “I heard her gasp. And she knew, exactly! It was weird. And
she grabbed the phone, and then Roger grabbed the phone, and I said, ‘How did she know?’ and he said, ‘She just felt it.’ ”
Joe sent Elvis’s private plane, the
Lisa Marie
, from Memphis to L.A. to pick up Priscilla, her parents, Jerry Schilling, Ed Parker, Linda Thompson, and a few others that day. They were notified by phone via Shirley as to when to expect the jet to transport them to Memphis. While the plane was en route to California, Priscilla telephoned Joe to instruct Shirley to call everyone back, except the Beaulieus, and tell them they would have to take a commercial flight. Priscilla later told Linda that Elvis’s jet was “for wives, not girlfriends.” Shirley Dieu was convinced that Priscilla assumed control that day in the mistaken belief that Elvis had left the plane and everything else to her in his will. Shirley knew otherwise, for she had just delivered a copy of a new will to Elvis the previous March, unbeknownst to Priscilla. Elvis reportedly had revised his earlier will at Vernon’s urging, to disinherit Priscilla, whom Elvis had planned to remove as a beneficiary since 1973, when they divorced. The revised will was cloaked in controversy, due to the fact that it was dated March 3, 1976, instead of 1977, when it was signed, and because Elvis had not initialed every page, the custom with legal documents. Shirley and others were of the opinion that Elvis never read the will before he signed it, for it effectively left everything to Lisa, and he had long said that he would include the entourage.
Shirley, who flew to L.A. on the
Lisa Marie
that day, claimed that Priscilla asserted her authority from the moment she stepped on board, though Carol Boutilier, the stewardess, did not observe it. “When she got on the plane,” recalled Shirley, “she said, ‘I guess I have the say-so around here; it’s my plane now.’ I was upset anyway, because Elvis had died. Priscilla acted like nothing had happened.” Her chief concern, according to Shirley, was that she be awakened an hour before the plane landed so she could freshen her makeup, in case there were photographers waiting. “And I thought, ‘You’re thinking about your makeup?’ That’s when I started to dislike her.”
The anti-Priscilla sentiment began to mount with Elvis’s funeral, which occurred on August 18—the same day as his divorce from Priscilla—and would continue thenceforth. Priscilla said later that she and Lisa cried together in Elvis’s bedroom that day, each choosing a memento of his to take with her. Those who attended the funeral never witnessed Priscilla shed a tear. One of the guests confided that he saw and heard her afterward
with her sister, Michelle, upstairs at Graceland, giggling. “She was wearing sunglasses and she said, ‘Everybody thinks that I’m crying behind these sunglasses. They don’t know that I’m really laughing!’ ” Shirley Dieu compared her, that day, to a queen bee.
With Elvis Presley’s death, Priscilla had at last resumed her childhood position as the center of attention.
P
riscilla and Lisa spent the first several months after Elvis’s death, the late summer and early fall of 1977, in a form of exile, avoiding the reality of the carnival that would be their existence forever more, as the surviving links to Elvis Presley, the greatest rock legend of the twentieth century.
Priscilla’s first act after the funeral was to sequester Lisa from the tabloids in a summer horseback riding camp near Santa Barbara, where the Espositos’ two daughters, Cindy and Debbie, were enrolled. “I remember getting a phone call from my mom at camp,” Debbie said years later. The next thing she knew, Lisa was in the next cabin, using the name Lisa Beaulieu. “The staff was informed who she was, but none of the other kids knew.” Lisa coped alone with the loss of her father during those first days, something Priscilla would later admit might have seemed “insensitive” on her part.
Priscilla decided, that August, to put her quest for an acting or modeling career on hold for a year. The death of Elvis, the idol she had pursued from the age of ten, the man who had formed her identity since the age of fourteen, the one who had dominated her life for the past eighteen years, was suddenly gone. “I didn’t know what I was, who I was, what I was going to do.” Even though his passing emancipated her—“it was the
happiest day of her life,” Larry Geller said sardonically—Priscilla suffered a temporary identity crisis, as did her daughter. When Lisa, who was “a very young nine,” in Priscilla’s description, came home from camp at the end of August, the reality set in: She finally understood that she would never see her daddy again, that she would not be able to pick up the telephone and talk to him. She looked up at Priscilla with great bewildered eyes and asked, “Mommy, what’s going to happen to us?”
Priscilla’s response was to flee the country with her daughter and embark on a grand tour of Europe, which had been her own fantasy since adolescence. In November, Ann-Margret hosted a radio special called
Memories of Elvis
, a tribute to the late superstar. The madness had begun. Priscilla avoided it from Paris and London, then took Lisa to Hawaii in December. They spent Christmas at Graceland, for the first time without the man whose presence dominated, still
inhabited
, its rooms.
Priscilla returned to Beverly Hills with Lisa early in 1978. Her survival skills were showing, for she leapt into the new year with a passion. Her life in the shadows had officially ended; Priscilla determined to develop her
own
talent, her own personality, her own persona. She kept no photographs of Elvis in her house, and hadn’t since she left him, a natural response for an ex-wife, though an underlying hostility toward Elvis had filtered through Priscilla’s behavior from the time she exited his realm in 1972. The focus now was on
Priscilla
.
Priscilla had kept Lisa out of school that fall, and was now playing with the notion of sending her to a European boarding school, an extension of her current infatuation with all things French. The previous year, Lisa was in the third grade at the John Dye School in Bel Air, a struggling student with no interest in schoolwork, recalled her friend, neighbor, and classmate Dana Rosenfeld. Her schoolmates were the daughters of Dean Martin, Sydney Pollack, Carol Burnett—a celebrity student body that was “the
National Enquirer’s
dream,” said one student—and Lisa, who was accustomed to the
Beverly Hillbillies
nature of Graceland and the fantasia of Vegas, felt out of place. Priscilla compromised her dream of a European boarding school by enrolling Lisa in the Lycée Français, the stylish, academically rigid French school in west Los Angeles she had considered for her the prior summer, before Elvis’s death. It was a decision Priscilla later admitted was “stupid” on her part. “I was a young mother. I probably would have been much better off leaving her at John
Dye. She was having some problems. She needed to be tutored, and I felt maybe she wasn’t quite getting it. So what did I do? Put her in a school that was much more stringent. I wanted her to speak French. You know, you have this ideal—your child is going to speak French. And the uniforms—it was my ideal scene for her. And I never should have done that. I should have kept her in school with her friends. It was a mistake.”
Priscilla’s obsession with her appearance sent her to a fitness class taught by Kim Lee on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. She filed a claim against Elvis’s estate in February to collect the remainder of her unpaid monthly divorce settlement, proving she was no longer an innocent in money matters. “That was when he was alive,” assessed Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s original divorce lawyer. “Once he died, then that all changed.” Joe Moscheo, a family friend who was advising Priscilla at the time, said she took an interest in Elvis’s estate, even though she was not a beneficiary in his will, “but there was always friction with the family,” primarily from Vernon, who had been named executor. Lisa was the sole heir, Priscilla was her guardian, and “Priscilla had her settlement agreement; that kept her involved.”
Contrary to her later claim that she was reluctant to capitalize on her link to Elvis, by that first spring Priscilla was already seeking in earnest to exploit her connection to the King—an enterprise that was fast becoming a cottage industry. “I never had the idea that she wanted to distance herself,” proclaimed Joe Moscheo, who met with Priscilla that May to discuss Elvis-related moneymaking possibilities. Priscilla put out antennae in every direction in the spring of 1978. She engaged John O’Grady, the private investigator who had once gathered evidence of her affair with Mike Stone, to look for “any way in which she could capitalize on the fact that she had been married to the world-renowned singer, Elvis Presley.” She promised O’Grady a finder’s fee for any introductions he made that led to a contract.
She and Joe Moscheo, a former member of the Imperials who played piano for Elvis and became a friend of Priscilla’s, ensconced themselves in her house on Summit for two weeks that May and brainstormed how she could profit from the phenomenal interest Elvis had been receiving since his death. “I was just kind of bird-doggin’,” Moscheo recalled. “Everybody was coming at her with things, and I was just a set of ears and eyes that was looking out for her. I kind of weeded through some of it,
listened to the good stuff, and passed it on to her.” Moscheo and Priscilla emerged from their two-week confab with a seven-year contract for Joe “to exploit some of her memoirs.… I wouldn’t say I was her agent, but I was acting as a negotiator on a couple of deals that we had.” Joe sketched out a handwritten business plan for Priscilla that included a two-part network television interview to air as a special, based on her “Cinderella story” with Elvis. It was to be conducted by a “name interviewer,” possibly Barbara Walters, Phil Donahue, or Tom Snyder, in a “strictly first-class” production, possibly using “never before seen and exclusive” home movies, photographs, and mementos. “Priscilla must be able to maintain her mystique and reputation and never compromise her integrity,” Moscheo wrote in his notes from their sessions. “After all, she
is
the
only
woman E. P. ever really loved, and she alone knows who, what, where, when, how, and how much!” Joe Moscheo hoped to put together a package deal, tying the TV special in with a book, foreign rights, and a television movie. Priscilla had learned well from her divorce debacle with Ed Hookstratten and her conversations with financier Kirk Kerkorian. “She said, ‘Hey, if you come up with something, I want to be in control, and legally,’ ” recalled Moscheo. “We used her lawyers, and they drew up the original contract.”
Priscilla had connected with a financial mentor shortly before this, a flamboyant, showboating Texan named Morgan Maxfield, who ingratiated himself with the billionaire Hunts of Dallas and moved to Kansas City to join financial forces with Lamar Hunt. Maxfield had an eye and a taste for beautiful women, famous names, and potential moneymaking opportunities, all of which happily coexisted in Priscilla Presley. They were introduced by Bob Wall, who had become an interim adviser to Priscilla during the second phase of her divorce from Elvis. “I kept saying to her, ‘Priscilla, you’ve got to know these things yourself. You’ve really got to study it. You are going to have a lot of income in your life, and you are going to have a lot of people trying to take it away from you, and you’ve got to know enough so that people don’t bullshit you.’ ” Priscilla, said Bob, “got fascinated” by Morgan’s daring and his flashy rise from H. L. Hunt’s parking attendant to his financial adviser, and she began reading the economic pamphlets and other financial books that Bob passed on to her. She “was a sponge. Anything you gave her, she read it … and came back with questions.” Priscilla, he observed, “asks smart questions. And she’s not afraid to ask a
dumb question, which is the sign of a smart person.” Priscilla and Morgan Maxfield, by 1978, were eager to meet and became instant financial soul mates. Morgan was the Wall Street equivalent of Colonel Tom Parker, a high-rolling showman who had his own private jet and thought nothing of flying to NASA in Florida to watch a lift-off in the morning and then hopping up to Mount Rushmore for dinner that night. Priscilla, so long starved for adventure and eager to make money, was captivated. Maxfield was awed by Priscilla’s fame and face, and immediately insinuated himself into the negotiations in her attempt to profit from her association with Elvis Presley. “I think there was a little jockeying for position there,” said Joe Moscheo, her original adviser. “And [Maxfield] said, ‘Well, I can help you do things, I work for ABC, I can make some deals for you,’ whatever. So she was loyal to him at that point, saying, ‘If anything happens through your efforts you can be involved.’ ”
Elie Ezerzer, meanwhile, had exited stage left, recalled Samira Goldman, who worked at Elie’s salon. He was too busy with his hairdressing career to accompany her on her travels and to serve as her escort to the constant round of parties Priscilla was beginning to attend. She came close to a romantic involvement with Morgan Maxfield, according to her later boyfriend Mike Edwards. Priscilla was still exploring Eastern religions for herself and Lisa—she was a believer in karma and life after death—when she had a conversation with John Travolta, a high-profile Scientologist. Lisa had a schoolgirl crush on Travolta, the fantasy of every teenage girl that year because of
Grease
, and Priscilla arranged for her to spend time with him for her tenth birthday in February 1978. (She and Dana Rosenfeld also visited him on the set of
Welcome Back, Kotter
, courtesy of Priscilla.) Priscilla was already drawn to the
name
“Scientology,” for it reminded her of Science of the Mind, her earlier interest through her sister, Michelle. Both were founded in reality, where Priscilla felt more comfortable, as opposed to faith. Travolta told her a little about Scientology, which he called a “second cousin to Buddhism,” an appealing comparison to Priscilla, and followed up their conversation by sending Priscilla an article to read. They met again for lunch, and John “had someone from the church come and talk to me,” remembered Priscilla. She and John Travolta became friends that spring, “and I liked how John was. I mean, I liked how he thought. I liked, when we had conversations, where he was coming from. He seemed so clean, so concerned about
not just himself but the planet. He told me about what Scientology does and what it gives you and how you are audited, and how there’s a strong ethical bond with the universe. It was stuff I was just coming out of in the Eastern philosophy, and I thought, ‘I’m going to try this. I can understand this a little bit better.’ The other religions … go off the deep end a little bit.” Significantly, Priscilla also admired John Travolta’s
career
.