Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Lisa’s self-image as the princess of rock, spoiled utterly by a superstar father, with a staff at Graceland at her command at the age of six, continued even after Elvis died. She was imperious even with Dana, the one close friend she had. “It was always very clear that whatever Lisa wanted to do, or whatever game she wanted to play, that you’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll play this game,’ or there would be a fight.… She had to have her way.” In later years, Dana attributed this trait to Lisa’s unexpressed anger over losing her father. “And even though Priscilla was a very attentive mother, there is no replacing a father who is your knight in shining armor.” Priscilla, according to Mike, did her mothering as she did most other things in her life—by control. “She was in control of Lisa. Priscilla is in total control. She’s got to be. Otherwise she would fall apart.” Lisa, he observed, had a hard time simply being Lisa.
Dana Rosenfeld, in retrospect, regarded Priscilla as a good mother. She remembered sitting with Lisa once while Priscilla, who was being interviewed on television, was asked whether she would ever spank Lisa. When Priscilla responded that she would if Lisa misbehaved, Lisa became upset, embarrassed that her mother would say that on television, and she confronted Priscilla about it when she returned home. “And Priscilla said, ‘You are no different from Dana, and don’t you ever forget that you are a normal little girl. When you get out of line and need to be spanked, I will do it.’ She wasn’t Mommy Dearest or anything, but she was a really strong mother who tried to instill the absolute best values, and [Lisa] wouldn’t get away with anything.” Dana’s recollection of Priscilla, as her childhood friend’s mother, was of someone tender and kind. “She really was a woman who loved to love. I remember I used to skin my knees all the time,
and they had this bumpy cobblestone driveway, and I slipped and ripped my knee open. And Lisa was like, ‘Omigod! Omigod!’ and Priscilla came out with Bactine and a cotton ball, and I looked at Priscilla and I thought she was going to cry. And I said, ‘I’m like a Timex watch—I take a licking and keep on ticking.’ And she started to laugh. I have only the fondest, sweetest memories of her being the best mother she could be. And being so kind to me and always making sure that if I wasn’t staying the night at her house, that she or her sister would walk me to my house, even though it was just down the hill. She just exuded … charisma. There was something inner about her, that would come out and … just kind of wrap you up. She just tucked in the corners of … I can’t describe it. You felt good when you were around her. And we wanted to come up with little projects to show her. [Priscilla] loved to love—I can’t say it any differently—and she loved to have fun and be silly and giggle. She had this shining, beaming smile, and it always made you feel good.”
Priscilla had a sweet, nurturing side, the same quality she had exhibited as a child, rescuing stray animals and bringing them home to nurse them back to health. When her house on Summit went through a massive remodeling, in 1996, she saved a pack of fourteen feral cats that had turned up around the property, naming each one. “I trapped them all, I got them spayed, I brought them back. And now they trust me. I call and they’ll come to me. It’s great, because you feel so at one with them and with nature.”
Lisa, in 1979, had an even more arduous time at the Lycée Français, academically, than she’d had at the John Dye School. Priscilla was forced to transfer her to classes that were taught in English, for she could not keep pace, dashing Priscilla’s dream that her daughter would speak French. She “always had a tutor,” according to Mike, though Dana insisted that Lisa was “not dumb. You’d explain something to her and she would understand, but she was preoccupied a lot of the time, and she fought things all the time. If it wasn’t something she wanted to do, she wouldn’t be able to understand it. She chose what she gave her attention to.” Lisa also felt overwhelmed by the Scientology courses her mother enrolled her in, at nine, which Priscilla admitted later “was a little too young for her.” Lisa “rebelled against it” at first, said Priscilla. “There’s a lot of studying that you have to do, and of course the auditing, for nine-year-olds, is
a bit boring; they don’t quite understand it. They don’t know what they are doing.” Cindy Esposito noticed that Lisa was up and down in her feelings about Scientology as a child, depending upon her mood, though “it doesn’t matter,” said Cindy. “Priscilla forced her into it.”
Dana Rosenfeld, who was a musical prodigy at nine, took lessons from the same piano teacher as Lisa, Helena Lewin, “and there was no question who had the gift,” Dana said charitably. Lisa’s interests were gymnastics and dancing. “And we would constantly come up with another dance routine for ‘Heart of Glass.’ ” Lisa’s favorite singers were Blondie and Olivia Newton-John. “ ‘Grease’ was our song when it first came out, and ‘Xanadu.’ We saw
Grease
when it first came out; we knew all the words.” Lisa’s voice, at the time, seemed unremarkable to Dana, and she never mentioned anything about wanting to sing when she grew up.
Priscilla had enough ambition for both of them. She became annoyed when casting directors, auditioning her for a commercial, wondered why she bothered, or suggested, as one did, that she “take up needlepoint.” Even Joe Moscheo, who was negotiating to sell Priscilla’s memoir and set up her proposed two-part television interview, was surprised, at first, that Priscilla exerted herself working, until he understood her motivation. “She wanted
Priscilla
to be the name, not Elvis. I think she hid behind Elvis all those years, and now it was time for her to come out of the closet or whatever.”
Priscilla flew to New York, around Christmas of 1978, and nearly froze pounding the pavement with one of Norman Brokaw’s junior agents at William Morris, going from ad agency to ad agency, attempting to sell herself as a pitchwoman. She was nothing if not determined, refusing to allow herself to become just another celebrity divorcée, a forgotten, faded image, once known in the reflected glory of someone else. “I started looking at women who had really survived a relationship—the wealth, the celebrity. What ‘wife of’ had come through with anything? It’s usually the humiliation, the embarrassment—get drunk, go to another guy, go to another guy. What wife made it? Without being another ‘wife of’?” Priscilla’s ego was too enormous for that result. “I just could not be the ‘ex-wife of.’ It’s … like you are nothing. It’s like you meant nothing: being the ‘ex-wife of’—and you are stuck with that. That’s what you carry around the rest of your life.”
Priscilla began pursuing her modeling and acting career as ferociously as she had pursued Elvis at fourteen. “I did not want to fail. I just couldn’t be a laughingstock.” She hired Joel Stevens to manage her on the recommendation of one of her Scientology auditors, because she wanted a Scientologist to represent her and, perhaps more importantly, because “he was tough,” said Mike Edwards. “If I wanted a personal manager, I’d certainly want someone like Joel.… People hate him in the industry—hate him. But they sure pick up the phone when he calls.”
Things began to happen once Priscilla assembled her entourage, made up of William Morris agents, a personal manager, and the independent scouts she had prowling the industry to find her a contract, make her a star. Hollywood executives, interested in the curiosity value of Priscilla Presley, came forth with offers, badgered by Joel Stevens. Kate Jackson had just left
Charlie’s Angels
, and Priscilla was asked to replace her, or at least read for the part. She turned down the offer, saying later,
“Charlie’s Angels
just didn’t appeal to me. I was afraid of getting typed, just like most of the girls did. Once you do a
Charlie’s Angels
, you are a
Charlie’s Angels
girl. And you are just pretty. I wanted to do more.” Priscilla posed for a
Playboy
layout and approved the cover shot but then backed out, a perfect illustration of the good girl–bad girl split that conflicted her. “I reneged on it. I guess they offered quite a bit of money to do it.… I couldn’t live with myself. I’ve always been a bit shy in that area, and I always thought, It will come back to haunt me. I always think of that. And thank God, because look at all the girls it’s come back to haunt.”
The
Charlie’s Angels
producers and Hugh Hefner saw Priscilla Presley as a name that would elicit attention and interest from the public. She got her first major contract shortly afterward as a spokesmodel for Wella Balsam, for essentially the same reason. “Because it was
‘Priscilla Presley
represents Wella Balsam,’ ” recalled Mike Edwards, who had listened to Priscilla earlier announce that she would drop the Presley name when she got her first job and be known thereafter as Priscilla Beaulieu. Reality—
financial
reality—intervened, however. Mike said, “She’s smart enough to know, ‘Wow, I should probably … keep this [name], because it’s a moneymaker.’ ” Priscilla was replacing Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett—two of the original Charlie’s Angels, ironically—as the face of Wella Balsam, but she regarded the Wella contract as being “less cheesecake” than the TV series.
She and Mike and Lisa were featured in a
People
magazine cover story in December 1978. Priscilla taped a Tony Orlando special—he was a friend of hers—that same month, though her part would be cut before the show aired. In January 1979, Burt Sugarman issued a press release stating that Priscilla Presley was “about to happen,” announcing that she would be starring that year in a national television commercial, a TV series, and a television movie. Only one of Sugarman’s claims (the commercial) was true, though the hype signaled the building momentum of her career and the zeal with which her representatives strived to make it happen.
Mike, Priscilla’s cheerleader, helped her create a new image, with lightened hair and a more sophisticated wardrobe. At the same time, she was becoming discouraged about her ability to act, and she froze at an audition, unable to perform. Priscilla, Mike observed from coaching her, could not drop the veil with which she protected herself, nor could she transcend her preoccupation with her appearance long enough to lose herself in a character. She was stiff and, at times, too shy to emote in public—the legacy of the child who was taught to keep secrets.
O
n June 26, 1979, Vernon Elvis Presley died and a new Priscilla was born.
This transformation occurred due to a clause in Elvis Presley’s will. Elvis had appointed his daddy executor of his estate and had directed that Vernon appoint whomever he chose to succeed him upon his death. Vernon elected to empower his two coexecutors—the National Bank of Commerce of Memphis and his accountant, Joseph Hanks—to continue in their respective positions. Then he pondered, long and hard, whom he would choose to succeed himself as executor of his son’s estate, which was primarily held in trust for Lisa until she reached the age of twenty-five.
Vernon Presley’s decision, reached when he was in ill health and knew he was dying, would forever alter the course of Elvis Presley’s estate, image, and likeness, and be one of the more controversial actions of his lifetime. His choice, upon great reflection, was Priscilla, the once shy teenager who had come to him for handouts to go to the movies. Why Priscilla? According to Joe Moscheo, Dee Presley, and others, there was no love lost between Vernon and his former daughter-in-law, nor had Priscilla demonstrated, to Vernon, any financial savvy. One of Vernon’s last experiences with Priscilla was the divorce debacle,
when she blindly agreed to accept $100,000 from Elvis. Priscilla was not even
married
to Elvis when he died. She was an ex-wife, not a widow—not even a beneficiary in Elvis’s will. Elvis, in fact, had rewritten his will before he died specifically to
remove
Priscilla. “He was really upset,” said Shirley Dieu, who hand-delivered Elvis’s revised will to him in 1977, “and he’d gotten to a point where he’d just had it with Priscilla. He told his dad, ‘Daddy, I want Priscilla taken out of the will.… Everything goes to Lisa.’ So what Vernon did was have
everyone
taken out of the will, including the guys. When Elvis signed the will, he didn’t even read it. And so Elvis didn’t know the guys were taken out. All he knew was that Priscilla was taken out, and that was his main concern.”
The key to Vernon Presley’s otherwise inexplicable choice was Lisa. His only grandchild would become, upon Grandma Presley’s death, the sole heir to Elvis’s estate. Vernon wanted to ensure that whoever was named coexecutor to replace him had Lisa’s best interests at heart. Whom could he trust more than her mother? “I think that my dad didn’t have any other choice,” commented Rick Stanley, Vernon’s stepson. “He couldn’t hand it to Lisa, and who else could protect her interest? You see, my daddy adored Lisa. In my dad’s way of thinking, Priscilla was blood contact.” Said Dee Presley, “Lisa Marie was the only reason [Vernon] would tolerate Priscilla. And Priscilla didn’t care for Vernon, either. In the end, she really didn’t care for Elvis. I’m not sure if she ever did.” Vernon and Dee had divorced shortly before Elvis died, and Vernon became romantically involved with his nurse, Sandy Miller (a different person than Sandi Miller, the Elvis fan who spent time at his Palm Springs residences). The last woman attached to Vernon Presley agreed with the second Mrs. Vernon Presley. “I think,” she said, “he felt that Elvis’s intention was to leave a legacy for his daughter. And of all the people in the world, Priscilla had more knowledge and more understanding of that. And she provided a balance with the other two people who were named, in order to provide her with the expertise.” Beecher Smith—the Memphis attorney who drew up Elvis’s will, represented the estate, and discussed with Vernon whom to appoint as his successor—later acknowledged that Priscilla was “a stranger to the estate,” as he put it in legal jargon. “And Lisa’s best interest became the paramount question after Vernon Presley knew that his health was declining. If Vernon had done nothing, there would have been a bank involved. And the bank would have been well and good … but he
wanted to have a couple of individuals he knew and trusted to make things work and make an orderly transition.” Vernon, said Beecher Smith, “knew that Priscilla could get competent assistance where she needed it. And he trusted her to do what she needed to do as a mother.”