Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Priscilla would later maintain that her appointment as coexecutrix of Elvis’s estate was a curse to her at first, for it replanted her squarely in the spotlight of Elvis’s world—the world she had fought so feverishly to escape. Mike Edwards, in fact, perceived her as taking on an obligation, something it was necessary for her to do for Lisa’s benefit.
Other evidence suggests that Priscilla embraced her new power from the outset. At Vernon’s funeral, she was already seeking releases from the Stanley brothers for the right to market home movies in which they appeared, and she seemed willing to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain them. She told the Stanleys, at Vernon’s funeral service, that she wanted to sell the home footage for a TV special, and she apparently promised them they would be paid if they signed and the movies were sold. After Vernon was buried, Priscilla—who had been, by Billy’s description, “cold” to the Stanleys at Elvis’s funeral two years before, their last contact—invited David, Ricky, and Billy to a Mexican restaurant in Memphis, where she swapped Elvis stories and ordered an extra bottle of wine for them to keep. The seduction of the Stanleys continued throughout the night. Priscilla took the three brothers bar-hopping, and between stops, Billy would later recount, he stumbled upon Priscilla making out in the backseat with David. According to all three brothers, she suggested they stop at Graceland for a quick skinny-dip before she left for Los Angeles. Rick had to catch a plane for Florida, but David, Billy, and Priscilla’s sister, Michelle, accepted the invitation. Both David and Billy would later say that Priscilla became suddenly shy once they got to the pool and stripped instead to her bra and panties. After the swim, Billy would later write, Priscilla stood—completely naked—in an open doorway in front of him and David and asked for something of theirs to wear. “Oh, yeah,” chuckled Rick. “I heard all about it.” By the time she caught her plane for L.A., Priscilla had her signed release. David and Billy never heard from her again. She sold the home movies soon afterward for a large sum of money, but she never compensated the Stanleys. All but Ricky—who remained friends with Priscilla and did not consider the footage was his to sell anyway—felt
misled and deceived. “But see,” he explained, “that’s a part of a prevailing mentality. It was like sharks in a frenzy after Elvis died. Nobody is gonna do anything unless it is for money. Which is really weird. Where is the compassion and understanding?”
Nancy Rooks, the Graceland maid with whom Elvis shared his vision of the afterlife, noticed an immediate change in Priscilla after Vernon’s funeral. “She became the boss after Vernon died,” she said simply. “She took over.”
Priscilla, in one of her first actions as an executrix, met in Memphis with Joe Hanks, the Presley family accountant and a coexecutor since Elvis’s death, to discuss the state of the estate. She was shocked, she would say later, to discover that Lisa’s fortune—the value of Elvis Presley’s estate—had dwindled to less than $8 million and that it could diminish to zero if she did not take drastic action. Elvis, it seemed, had not died as rich a man as one would have believed. “Elvis had a very high lifestyle,” said his probate lawyer, Beecher Smith. “Elvis would spend his money as he went along. He enjoyed life. He had a lot of people who were depending on him for their livelihood.” The estate, Smith noted, did not have many liquid assets. One of its chief assets, Graceland, was in fact a cash drain, for it required an outlay of nearly half a million dollars a year to keep it open.
Vernon’s death was the catalyst for change in the management of the estate, for reasons that are still being debated. A new regime, symbolized by Priscilla, had taken control. The other coexecutors—the Memphis bank and Joe Hanks—according to Beecher Smith, needed to find a way to turn the situation around, now that Vernon had passed on. “Vernon Presley had been in bad health, and it had been hard to get things done,” was Smith’s explanation, “and when he died, we had people who were basically healthy and were trying to move things along. Basically, they were playing catch-up ball.” The original coexecutors and Smith brought Priscilla up to speed that summer. “She had to have an overview,” said Beecher Smith, “because she had not been involved at all, and here she comes in as an executrix, and we had to come up with a business plan for where we needed to go.” According to Smith, the idea of opening Graceland as a tourist center—to offset the cost of its upkeep—was discussed “pretty early on.”
Priscilla, in those early months, admittedly leaned on Joe Hanks, the Presley accountant and her coexecutor, for she was
more interested at that time in establishing herself as an actress or model. She engaged Arthur Toll, her former divorce lawyer, to represent her and brought in Arthur’s attorney-son Roger to assist in overseeing Elvis’s estate and Lisa’s inheritance. Arthur Toll found Priscilla an eager student from the first. “She wanted to accept the challenge of being involved,” as he put it, and she “thought she could learn to do that.” Priscilla’s lawyer was surprised at “how little money there really was” in Elvis’s estate.
He
felt the problem was its existing lawyers in Memphis, who had been advising Vernon and who, in his opinion, “were not being very aggressive about the estate.” Priscilla, he said, “wanted to make sure that it was maximized to Lisa’s benefit.”
Joe Moscheo, who had been discussing Elvis-related commercial ventures with Priscilla since the singer’s death in 1977, two years earlier, dived in, with Priscilla, to explore the opportunities her new role as executrix presented her. “It was time to—I hate to use the word—cash in on him,” said Moscheo, “but it was time to do this in a businesslike way and form some real strong business relationships, or this whole thing was just going to go by the wayside.” Moscheo intensified his “bird-dogging” for Priscilla. By September he had sent her a letter outlining his progress. He had spoken to representatives of the state of Tennessee about opening Graceland as a state park; he’d met with RCA to discuss repackaging and reissuing Elvis’s records; he had examined the possibility of recouping some of Elvis’s lost royalties; and he had entertained the thought of the estate joining forces with the Country Music Foundation to create a permanent exhibit at Graceland. Priscilla, in those early months, was “real, real confused,” allowed Moscheo. She “didn’t know what to do,” particularly about Graceland, knowing it was a sensitive issue and that Elvis’s fans would erupt at any decision they felt was contrary to the wishes of the King. The experience was both bewildering and intimidating. “Lo and behold, she’s an executrix of this extremely complicated estate,” said John Robert Soden, or Jack, as he was called, a junior associate of Morgan Maxfield’s in Kansas City, later director of Graceland, “and now the pressure’s really on her, because they keep dragging her into rooms filled with bankers and lawyers, and she’s supposed to hold her own.”
Priscilla approached her new position as executrix of Elvis Presley’s estate with a vengeance, as she did everything else she had chosen to pursue—from marrying Elvis to becoming a socialite
to establishing an acting career—by total immersion in her subject, asking questions, making lists, meeting the right people. “I don’t want to fail,” she said. “I do my research. I do what I have to do. I’ll talk to anybody I have to talk to before I make a decision, [people who] know their field and are leaders in their field.” Priscilla began subscribing to the
Wall Street Journal, to Barron’s.
“She read everything,” said Bob Wall. Morgan Maxfield, her would-be suitor and financial wunderkind, spent hours with Priscilla, dreaming up financial schemes for her and for the estate. Priscilla—unlike Elvis, who was an artist, first and only—found the business world, and the prospect of making money through investments, to be sexy, exciting. Jack Soden remembered taking a call from Priscilla at the office one day while Morgan was out. “She was calling from a pay phone in an airport, and she had read an article in the business section of the
New York Times
, and it was about gold,” he recalled. “Gold had gone bananas.” Priscilla “had scribbled down about four questions as a result of this article. So I ended up having this discussion with her.” As her interest in high finance piqued, she utilized her formerly romantic relationship with Kirk Kerkorian, and developed friendships with other rich and powerful men, then ferreted out their business secrets, just as she had earlier studied Joan Quinn in order to become the perfect Beverly Hills social mannequin. “You pick their brains,” Priscilla explained, “and you find out what they do. I love it when I’m around people like Kirk Kerkorian and Morgan and Bill Holland and Lee Iacocca, and people who have made their mark. Steve Winn. Kenny Winn, his brother. Colonel Parker. I love sitting for hours talking to them, thinking, They are brains.” Priscilla had, by the strangest fate, stumbled onto her calling.
Shirley Dieu, Joe Esposito’s girlfriend at the time, remembered Priscilla calling Joe around this period, to ask if he wanted to contest Elvis’s will. Priscilla employed tactics similar to those she had used to obtain the Stanleys’ signatures on the release of home movies. “She invited us out to dinner,” said Shirley. “And I was, like, Why is she inviting us out to dinner? We haven’t talked to her in a year. And as we were eating dinner, she said, ‘Joe, Elvis wanted you to have something. He wasn’t coherent when he signed that will. And if you want to contest it, I’ll back you all the way.’ ” Joe, who had never seen through Priscilla’s maneuvering, accepted the offer at face value. Shirley, disenchanted with Priscilla over how she had mocked Elvis at
her house on Summit Drive and by her behavior prior to and during his funeral, suspected that her offer to help Joe was a ruse. “After we left, I said, ‘Joe, are you nuts? The reason she wants you to contest the will is so that everything will go back to her.’ ” Shirley’s point was that if Elvis’s March 1977 revised will was thrown out, his earlier will—in which Priscilla was the primary beneficiary—would prevail, and Priscilla, not Lisa, would be Elvis’s chief heir. “I don’t think [Joe] really comprehended that,” Shirley would say, long after their breakup. “But once we talked about it, he decided, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ Joe is not a money-hungry person, an evil person.”
Priscilla Presley made her debut as a spokesmodel, the role she had worked so assiduously to attain, just as she began to assume her duties as Elvis’s executrix in the fall of 1979. Her first appearance, appropriately, was in Memphis, where she represented Wella Balsam at a trade show. It was, she would say later, “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Priscilla’s crippling insecurity around crowds came back to haunt her, as did her fear of speaking in public. “I had to speak in front of so many people,” she said of the Wella conference. “To be able to speak to a group of women and to answer their questions forced me to come out a little bit.” She requested that she be called Miss Presley during her Wella appearance, and she discouraged questions about Elvis, the beginning of her public efforts to separate herself from her former husband, to keep the spotlight on
Priscilla.
She and Mike decided to participate in a Scientology program that fall called the Purification. The Purif, as it was known to Scientologists, was a treatment of variable duration that cost several thousand dollars and consisted of eight-hour days spent in a quasi-sauna following a special diet, designed to rid the body of toxins, chiefly from drugs. Scientology doctrine forbids the use of drugs, and Mike had resolved to quit using cocaine, a decision that he credited with saving his relationship with Priscilla, who disapproved of his drinking and drugging. “I don’t think we would have stayed together as long as we did if it wasn’t for Scientology. But I know we would have stayed together longer if I had gotten into AA. Because there are some philosophies that Scientology just doesn’t realize—that you’ve got to cut out alcohol till you take care of your life, confront yourself.” Priscilla further strengthened her commitment to Scientology that fall, transferring Lisa from the Lycée Français, where they had
threatened to hold her back a year, to the Scientology-run Apple School in west Los Angeles. It was Lisa’s third school in eight years.
Mike and Priscilla flew to New York in October. Joan Quinn had been pushing her colleagues at
Interview
to do a piece on Priscilla, and when Henry Kissinger dropped out of a cover story, Andy Warhol brought in Priscilla as a last-minute replacement. Warhol, the quintessential gossip and people-watcher, had long been an enormous Elvis fan and harbored a fascination for Priscilla, the “widow Elvis,” as his right-hand man, editor Bob Colacello, dubbed her. Colacello saw Elvis, like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and John F. Kennedy, as one of “the saints of our secular culture. People seeing Elvis in parking lots—that’s straight out of seeing the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.” The fixation on Priscilla, in Colacello’s analysis, was that “she’s the link. She’s the widow [sic] of a saint.” The equivalent of Jackie Kennedy, he believed. “And it is intimidating to be the widow of a saint. The Elvis myth was so overwhelming, and people are so curious about it.”
Andy Warhol’s only comment about Priscilla, later, apart from remarking on her beauty, was his catty speculation that she must have had a nose job. Colacello found her closed to the point of paranoia, “very unforthcoming, very nervous and uncomfortable, frightened, and tense about the whole situation. She seemed really worried about saying the wrong things.” This was apparently another vestige of Priscilla’s lifelong practice of secret-keeping, the fear of revealing something that she had been instructed, or that she preferred, not to disclose. One of her few comments to Andy Warhol that day—and it said more about Priscilla than she realized—was “Sex is everything.” Apart from that, according to Bob Colacello, Mike Edwards dominated the conversation to a degree that Colacello found slightly discomfiting, though he liked Edwards immensely. “She seemed to be almost controlled by him,” Colacello remembered. “She did not answer a question without looking at him first.… She was kind of weird, very much under his spell, almost. There was a slight … Svengali aspect to it.” According to Mike, Priscilla was too shut down, too insecure, to speak for herself.