Authors: Suzanne Finstad
“So I joined,” she said later. “I joined blindly, because there was a connection there that I felt for it.” Priscilla’s pull to Scientology was understandable in view of her preference for rational thinking and data, for Scientology, as it was conceived, was a philosophy, not a religion. Its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer, had written a best-seller in 1950 called
Dianetics
, which he defined as a “new mental science” that could conceivably cure every ailment through the power of the mind. The basis of Hubbard’s theory was that human beings possess a “reactive mind,” which contains “engrams,” or reminders of painful events from our past. These engrams, he believed, caused illnesses and could be purged through the process of “dianetics” to “clear” the mind. A year later Hubbard developed the concept of Scientology, using the practices of dianetics to “clear” individuals of physical, mental, and emotional ailments, caused by their negative engrams, which he believed could be intentionally inflicted upon others via “implants.” The structure of the Scientology organization held all the intrigue of a Hubbard science-fiction story. Hubbard invented a device called an E-meter, short for electropsychometer, somewhat similar to a lie detector, which he claimed measured the level of anxiety, registered as a “charge,” in the person being tested, in order to uncover problem areas in one’s life. The fundamental of Scientology is auditing, a process similar to psychotherapy, where an auditor—Scientology’s equivalent of a therapist—listens to a member discuss his or her problems, then makes a record based upon an E-meter reading. Scientologists pay varying sums for auditing sessions, just as one would to see a therapist. Scientology condemns psychiatry as, in effect, drug pushing, but critics of the church suggest that this is to keep its members paying for auditing sessions rather than therapy.
Courses are also offered, for a range of fees. The objective, to a Scientologist, is to progress through the religion along what is known as the Bridge, on which available courses and auditing sessions are charted in a hierarchy. Once a certain number of
courses have been taken and auditing sessions completed, a Scientologist achieves the level of “clear,” meaning that person has cleared himself or herself of negative engrams, or painful memories, which Scientologists believe have accumulated from past lifetimes as well. Priscilla achieved the status of “clear” in 1982. To complete the Scientology courses and auditing sessions would cost an estimated $400,000 and take a lifetime, one of the primary complaints lodged against Scientology, since it calls itself a religion—a classification that enables Scientology to maintain a tax-free status. The fact that Scientology charges its members for its services bothered Priscilla at one point, “but then,” she said recently, “I resolved it. They have to make their money somehow. The word has to be spread somehow. I certainly get a lot for what I’m paying. And I look at it from that viewpoint. I don’t mind being charged for a book or a course or a class or for auditing. How else are they going to make money? How else are they going to be as big, and go from city to city to city to get established, if we all don’t chip in? You can go to any other church and you can make a donation here and there, but where is that church? They are all faltering. Scientology is working; it is making a difference. Once you get it, you are not disappointed at all. And you can start out with one small course. You don’t have to get the auditing, so it won’t be as expensive.” Other members, less famous than Priscilla, have complained about receiving incessant phone calls, however, or being followed around by Scientology recruiters who pressure them to sign up for more courses.
Elvis’s most profound wish, throughout his relationship with Priscilla, was that she accompany him on his spiritual journey. How ironic that when he died, she should embark on a quest for a church. More ironic still was the fact that she would choose Scientology, for it was one of the few religions Elvis criticized. One of the entourage remembered driving Elvis to a Scientology center in L.A. in the late sixties or early seventies and waiting in the car while he went in to learn more about the philosophy. Elvis came out over an hour later, shaking his head and complaining, “All they did was try to sell me their books. They’re just after my money and my name.” He told Charlie Hodge about it later. “Elvis said, ‘I looked at a bunch of books. A young man who was one of their people in the bookstore was showing everything and he showed me the price of all that stuff, and I knew it was because I was Elvis Presley.’ He said, ‘Probably
when the bosses found out that Elvis was in there and that he didn’t just give me all those books to try to get me hooked, they probably almost fired the guy.’ And he said, ‘These people want to control your mind, I think, so I’d never be interested in anything like that.’ ” Larry Geller had a similar experience with Elvis in the seventies, when they visited the Hollywood Celebrity Centre, a separate Scientology building catering exclusively to celebrities. “Elvis came out of there saying, ‘No way, man,’ ” recalled Larry. “They’re not interested in your soul or your heart. They’re after your
mind.
Get me outta here.” That was precisely the attraction for Priscilla, who wanted something that appealed to her logic, not her soul.
Priscilla’s greatest draw to Scientology, according to Marco Garibaldi, who would become her lover in the mid-eighties, was that it gave her a sense of belonging. For Priscilla, who had felt as a child that she was not in the right family, that her parents were not really her parents, who had spent a nomadic youth moving from base to base, without a sense of permanence or roots, that was a powerful pull. Scientology was also, interestingly, an organization founded upon
secrets.
A secret society, with its own vocabulary—souls are called “thetans,” and so on—a coded form of behavior, and a “hidden” answer to the riddle of life, provided to Scientologists only after they complete the final $6,000 course, called, appropriately, Truth Revealed.
Above and beyond all this, Scientology provided Priscilla Presley with a form of insulation from the prying eyes of the public. “I think,” said artist Brett Livingstone Strong, a longtime friend, “that it was some sort of balance in the hull of the ship, weights to make sure the ship didn’t flip over because it had such a high, high mast. And I think that basically Priscilla didn’t feel that these people were after her because of her association with Elvis and [perhaps they] could generally help her achieve balance in her life. And that if people were knocking on her door, she could feel that [Scientology] was a form of protection … so I think she felt at home.” Becoming a Scientologist and enrolling Lisa would become one of her more controversial decisions.
In June of 1978, Priscilla marked the end of her several-year relationship with Elie by giving a “coming-out” party, with a 1950s theme, at her house on Summit Drive. One of the guests that night brought a friend, a soft-spoken, devastatingly handsome male model named Michael Edwards, who had set his
sights on Priscilla, much as she had set hers on Elvis years before. Priscilla lusted for Mike at first glance and with one dance, thinking he was from Europe, where he had spent time. She was thrilled to learn he was a model. At the end of the evening, Mike, who was high on cocaine, took Priscilla to a friend’s apartment on Peck Drive. Each harbored a hidden agenda. “It must have been two or three in the morning,” recalled Mike. “I’m sitting there, doing a line.” Priscilla, unfazed, pressed ahead with her objective. “And I’m going ‘sniff-sniff,’ doin’ coke. ‘Well what do you wanna do, baby?’ You know?… She says, ‘I’ve never told anyone this. I want to be a model.’ I’m going, ‘Wait! You’re Priscilla
Presley!’
” Priscilla’s ears had perked when she heard Mike mention, earlier that night, that his agent was Nina Blanchard, who had rejected her the year before. Mike, she figured, might be able to help her with her career.
Mike Edwards had designs of his own on Priscilla. When they returned to her house on Summit in the middle of the night, he pretended to misplace his car keys so he would have to spend the night. This was the beginning of an elaborate plan—reminiscent of some of Priscilla’s maneuvers—to seduce her. After that night the game proceeded according to Mike’s careful strategy, which included the purchase of an enormous black Jeep to replace his sports car—the better to appeal to Priscilla’s preference for powerful men—and calculated late arrivals at her house, presenting himself as a challenge, to keep her interested. He also accepted $25,000 from Joe Levin, who was later famously murdered by Joe Hunt of the “Billionaire Boys Club,” as payment for an introduction to Priscilla. Levin and Mike Edwards were friends, and Levin had hoped to interest Priscilla in one of his investment schemes. She had been, Priscilla said later, set up. “And I don’t know why. Why would Mike set me up? Why?” Priscilla had bad vibrations about Levin, “and I told Mike that I didn’t want him here. Then I came home one day and they were both in my pool! Unannounced. You don’t do that. He crossed the line with me. And I told Mike I never wanted to see him again. I should have kept to it … [but later] I made the mistake of letting him come to my house.”
Priscilla and Mike Edwards had an erotic pull to each other that they both found dangerously seductive. Priscilla promptly canceled her trip to New Guinea in order to pursue her new infatuation. Mike, the quintessential bad boy—drugs and sex without the rock and roll—appealed to the bad girl part of Priscilla’s
split personality. E. J. Preston, then the head of BMI, who would become a friend of both Mike and Priscilla, “used to call her Dragon Lady,” Mike laughed. “He’d call me and say, ‘Who
is
she today? A dragon or a lady? Is she breathing fire or is she all cozy?’ He’d say, ‘Well, you know, Michael, she’s a Gemini. You gotta watch that!’ ” For Priscilla, Mike was her high school sweetheart Tommy Stewart of the Spartans, revisited. “There’s an edge there, and there’s a side of me that is a bit attracted to that edge,” she admitted. “And I know that’s a part that I was attracted to. He was very adventurous.… Being a model, there’s this part of him that’s very—There’s a rawness there. And I was really attracted to that.” Mike noticed immediately, he would say later, that there were “two Priscillas.”
There were also, in a manner of speaking, two Michaels. Part of Mike Edwards was attracted to Priscilla because she had been married to Elvis Presley. Not so that he could possess the King’s wife, as Mike Stone’s ego had propelled him to do, but rather because, on some level, Mike Edwards was in love not with Priscilla but with
Elvis.
He admitted to having felt a deep fascination with Elvis Presley from boyhood, and he had always felt that Elvis, not Priscilla, might one day be part of his life. “I sensed that something with
him
first of all. First of all it was him.” Mike was struck by the fact that Elvis had once played a character named Mike Edwards in a movie, and he felt they were kindred spirits. He sensed the presence of Elvis hovering about his relationship with Priscilla, he would later write, like some sort of spirit guide. Barbara Leigh had done a commercial with Mike Edwards, “and we knew each other very well,” she said. “And when Priscilla started dating him, I knew that Michael was an interesting guy. He was bisexual. I don’t know about him today—my son is gay, so that doesn’t bother me at all—but he was very sensitive when I first met him.… I think that he might have been in love with everything that came along with that whole package.”
Both Priscilla and Mike, by his description, tended to be repressed until they’d had a drink; then they would lose some of their inhibitions. He took a photograph of Priscilla, shortly after they met, during a sensual, wine-filled weekend at a little house on Fire Island. Mike considered this Priscilla the “true her,” with her barriers down, wrinkles and all. “She was kind of sitting, sort of looking into the camera. I think she was topless.” Mike took a series of nude photos of Priscilla that weekend. He
was beginning to perceive for himself how inhibited Priscilla had been throughout her life, “repressed by her childhood, and then with Elvis,” where she had played a role and was suffering a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome from the strain. To Mike, this role was “the Mask,” and he would devote much of his energy in their relationship to “pushing” Priscilla to “tear it off.” He was disturbed when he saw her strain to keep from smiling, as Elvis had instructed her to do, so she wouldn’t create wrinkles in her face, and when he watched her spend an hour in the bathroom before presenting herself to make love. “I remember every time we’d go to bed, when we first met, she always smelled like Doublemint chewing gum, ’cause Elvis didn’t like smells. She’d always take a little piece and chew it. And then the makeup and everything was perfect. I was going
‘Wow!’ ”
She had been, as Priscilla herself described it, “programmed to please.” Mike’s self-appointed mission was to deprogram her.
Mike learned, fairly early on, the secret of Priscilla’s real father, and he understood that it was “a taboo subject” in the Beaulieu family, whom he considered almost pathologically closed—another source of Priscilla’s severe repression. “They just didn’t confront the issues. Priscilla’s whole drive was to try to get
out
of that [repressed atmosphere] because she was raised that way, being suppressed.” Priscilla concurred with this statement. “Everything was kept quiet,” she said. “Your life was very private. My parents are very private, just like my grandparents. No one shared secrets, or pasts. Everything was on a superficial level. There was never anything deep.” Her dysfunctional family, according to Mike, was the reason “she got into Scientology,” which was founded on the concept of confrontation: confronting the past, confronting one’s problems. Mike, who was
“way
out there, trying to get away from that sort of repressed thing myself in
my
family,” became a Scientologist too. For Priscilla, however, confronting her past was a losing battle. “I guess I’m the same way now,” she said in 1996. “I don’t share things with certain people.” There was still that imaginary line she had drawn at age four to keep the real Priscilla in reserve, preserving her secrets, protecting and enshrining the myth that she, her parents, and Elvis had created.