Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Priscilla flew to Kansas City for the funeral with Bob Wall, who had introduced her to Morgan. Paramount in her thoughts was Graceland. “Flying to Kansas City, that’s what we talked about,” said Bob. “ ‘God, who’s gonna run Graceland?’ Morgan
was
going to run it.”
The solution appeared, as if on cue, at the funeral, for Maxfield’s junior colleague, Jack Soden, had been waiting for just such an opportunity for years. Jack, who would often be described, in later articles about the estate, as a wizened, wizardly investment adviser when he connected with Priscilla, was in fact a disgruntled young former stockbroker with modest business experience who had majored in English and dreamed of doing something “exciting” rather than “cold-calling doctors.” He had a sense of manifest destiny, “a great sense of wanting to build something, to make something happen.” Like Priscilla, once he had his goal in mind, Jack made a thorough study of how to achieve it, by asking questions and meeting key people. “For about a year I asked people: I’d say, ‘I am just fascinated with your job. How did you get from an accounting firm to this job?’ ” The common denominator, he concluded—the “lesson”—was to place himself in a position where he could meet people he envied and “let them know that I’m looking.” His “short-term solution” was Morgan Maxfield, whom he knew only slightly, socially from a Kansas City bachelor club. Jack Soden quit the brokerage business to accept a position as a glorified
assistant to Morgan, planning to stay for a year or two, with the unabashed ambition of meeting and mingling with the rich and fascinating, with whom Morgan surrounded himself, hoping serendipity would strike. Later, when he had achieved his own success, Soden would distance himself from Morgan, whose reputation had been sullied when he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and it was revealed that he was married with children, after having achieved notoriety as Bachelor of the Year in Kansas City society. Other allegations surfaced that he had misled the public about his financial status and educational background. Maxfield’s estate ultimately ended in controversy and near poverty, belying his admirers’ contention that he was a financial genius.
Following Morgan’s funeral, Jack Soden, Priscilla Presley, and Bob Wall spent the afternoon in his old office, repeating Morgan anecdotes. Priscilla was concerned about her outstanding investments with Morgan’s company and felt an immediate camaraderie with Jack, who was soft-spoken, polite—and deferential to her. By the end of the day, they had confirmed plans for Priscilla to meet again with Jack during a Wella promotional trip to Missouri at the end of the week so they could talk seriously about Graceland. Jack Soden’s strategy for finding his dream job had worked brilliantly. He had discovered his key person in Priscilla Presley. The two met for breakfast in a coffee shop at the Alameda Plaza Hotel, where Jack scribbled out his thoughts for Graceland on a place mat. “All I remember about that place mat was writing down these things: ‘Graceland’ and Memphis,’ ” he said later. Priscilla, recalled Jack, had been subjected to intense pressure by legal advisers to sell the estate, pay off the taxes, invest the remaining money, and turn the profits over to Lisa. That was, he admitted, the conservative route, but “her instincts were just screaming at her, ‘Don’t sell it.’ ” Jack compared Elvis Presley’s death to Kennedy’s, selling Priscilla on the notion that Elvis’s name was a marketable commodity, like a brand name, with brand-name recognition. He would take credit for suggesting to Priscilla that day the idea of opening Graceland as a permanent museum, claiming Morgan’s plan had been to open the house for six to eight months as a “one-shot deal” and then to create a foundation. “It’s so self-serving to say [that Morgan] didn’t ‘get it’ and I did and that’s made all the difference, you know what I mean?” commented Soden, doing just that.
Whatever the genesis of the plan, by the end of breakfast Priscilla
had targeted her man and made her decision to open Elvis’s estate to the public. Jack Soden, henceforth, would become the very image of Graceland. Never mind that he was not, and never had been, a fan of Elvis Presley. Critics of both Priscilla and Jack Soden would later assert that this indifference, if not aversion, to Elvis was the tie that bound them.
Elvis’s fans, already devastated by the lacerating biography of Elvis that had recently been written by Albert Goldman, now heard the rumors that his house was to become a tourist site and began writing letters of protest. Priscilla once again received hate calls and threats. “She got over a hundred death threats,” said Bob Wall. “A horrible way to live. There are a lot of pluses in Priscilla’s lifestyle, but there’s lots of negatives.”
Priscilla took a wild gamble in deciding to transform Graceland into a museum and in following her instinct about Jack Soden. Both decisions would profit her immensely in the years to come. In the beginning, the plans for Graceland appeared more like a high-wire act, for the money needed to convert the house to a tourist attraction—roughly $500,000—would almost deplete the liquid assets of the estate, though Elvis’s royalties would continue to accrue. She and Jack had definite, and similar, ideas for the museum. They flew, that fall, to the Biltmore estate, to the Hearst castle at San Simeon, to Mount Vernon, and to other estates they admired, to glean ideas to incorporate into the Graceland Museum. Priscilla had been following this same pattern since she was fourteen: immersion in a subject, copying an accepted role model, studying the options, talking to experts, meeting the right people. The very model Jack Soden had used to place himself in proximity of Priscilla. Graceland, the museum, Jack later admitted, “was honestly a composite of all the successful pieces we’d found at other famous homes and museums. There wasn’t one little experimental piece in the whole machinery.… There isn’t one original idea working up here. Every single piece was taken from someplace else that had worked out all the kinks. We reaped the benefit on opening day of tens of thousands of hours of experience and money.” Jack Soden had mastered the Priscilla technique.
Jack Soden and Priscilla Presley’s vision opened to the public less than a year after he scribbled the words “Graceland” and “Memphis” on a coffee-shop place mat. Within a month the house had earned back its original $560,000 investment, and the profits would grow exponentially in the years to come. Jack
claimed, a number of years later, that he never doubted Graceland’s ability to recoup the investment, though Priscilla’s instinct not to sell, he said, was admirable. “It was easy to do the safe, conservative thing, and [her decision] took a little more courage—it took a lot more courage, honestly—at that time. Now, in retrospect, it looks like a no-brainer. But believe me, it wasn’t a no-brainer in 1981.”
Priscilla had made up her mind, said Steve Binder, the producer of Elvis’s spectacular 1968 Comeback Concert and, later, the producer of a Graceland special, that the museum be a class act. “I’m convinced without a shadow of a doubt that without Priscilla, Graceland would have been a circus,” Binder said. “She went in and literally undressed it so it would at least have some quality aside from its normal tackiness. I’m sure she brought some quality to the project.” George Klein, remembering Priscilla at seventeen when he had met her, and then through the Elvis years, “wouldn’t in my wildest imagination have seen her doing this.” She had advanced light-years, from the twenty-nine-year-old divorcée who didn’t know the difference between ten dollars and ten thousand dollars.
As her reputation for transforming Elvis’s estate swelled into hyperbole, skeptics often questioned her intelligence. Variations on a theme would recur. Mike Stone, for one, referred to Priscilla’s acumen as “practical” knowledge. Phylliss Mann likened it “more to curiosity” than to intelligence. Jack Soden, who was in the best position to assess, “thought that in a way she was trying to compensate for the fact that she was not formally educated; she really wasn’t focused on school, and she came out of that experience with not a good deal of education. And a tremendous desire to be educated. And kind of soak it up. She’s kind of like a street student.” Arthur Toll, who met Priscilla at her financial nadir, during the divorce from Elvis, described her in 1996 as a “bright girl who really didn’t have an opportunity to get into those things.” He said, “There are two Priscillas. The one then and now. And it’s the same woman. She had all of the abilities that she didn’t use before and that she’s using now.”
Now that she was entering a new phase of her life, as the “widow” Presley and First Lady of Graceland, Priscilla set about, in her usual way, creating a persona. Her role model, according to Steve Binder, who witnessed the transformation in the early eighties, was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “I see that every time I see her being interviewed. And I think it’s, truthfully,
very calculated. This is the face she’s going to wear in her public persona.” Steve also noticed the two faces of Priscilla. There was “the public image, which is very conservative and ladylike. And then the
other
Priscilla—a fun-loving woman who really enjoys life.”
That was the secret to the contradictions that would forever follow her, and it was the key, concluded Mike Edwards, to Priscilla’s mystique.
P
riscilla, ever since Elvis’s death in 1977, had been browsing for someone to publish her memoir. In 1982, with the publication of Albert Goldman’s deeply unflattering biography of the father of her only child, she had fresh incentive.
The motivation, for Priscilla, was more personal than redemptive of Elvis. She told Mike Edwards, with whom she shared her thoughts in bed during “sleepless nights,” that she wanted to set herself free, to “get out from the shadow” of Elvis. To become something
else.
To restore herself to the Priscilla she was before she assumed the persona necessary to marry a legend. The book, Priscilla kept insisting, would tell the
truth.
Finally. She met with writers throughout that winter, conducting interviews over high tea at the Westwood Marquis Hotel, finally settling on Sandra Harmon, who had once been married to the actor who played Bozo the Clown. They connected, Sandra would later say, for they were “both girls from a low-middle-class background who moved into glamour worlds,” both “ambitious women who were attracted to men in that world.” Priscilla would devote three years to the book project, meeting with Sandra between acting assignments. Mike described the process as “grueling” for Priscilla, who he believed was reencountering the demons from her past—all the secrets and fears—so she could confront them and
triumph over them. Sandra Harmon described her interviews with Priscilla as “difficult,” saying that “it took her a year to trust me. It took a year for us to get close.”
Lisa Marie Presley turned fourteen that same year on February 1, a dangerous age for the women in Priscilla’s family, for it was at just past fourteen that Anna Iversen met and fell in love with Jimmy Wagner, to her parents’ horror, and at fourteen Priscilla realized her fantasy of dating Elvis Presley.
Lisa did not break from family tradition.
Priscilla was away much of the time auditioning or tending to the estate, so Mike and Lisa continued to spend great expanses of time alone together, growing increasingly close. One day, Mike said later, he realized that his love for Lisa had shifted from that of a father figure to something more erotic. “I fell in love with her,” he said. Mike Edwards’s “love” for Lisa was a complicated psychological conundrum, much as Elvis Presley’s and Priscilla Beaulieu’s relationship, in 1959. There were no deviant Lolita undertones, asserted Mike, no older man sexually obsessed with nubile teenager. “It wasn’t like Humbert Humbert. It wasn’t like that. I just loved her.” Part of the love was a form of sympathetic identification, for Mike could perceive, in Lisa, the sensory deprivation from her mother he himself was experiencing with Priscilla. “I guess sometimes love can stem from different things. Can come from different areas. But I just felt so sorry for her, ’cause her mom would do this kind of nonhug hug. I never saw the little girl with someone who’d just give her a wonderful, wonderful hug.”
The other fascination for Mike, more compelling, was intricately entangled with his own childhood obsession with Elvis Presley, for he saw Elvis in Lisa, who so resembled her dead father, just as Priscilla resembled hers. Just as he had tried to connect to Elvis through Priscilla, Mike now attempted to merge somehow with the King via his daughter. “She was the epitome of her father, and as a little boy, he
saved
me with his music. I’d go to the movies, and … he was a person who [stood up] against authority. And when I met Lisa she was the same way. She was this wonderful little kid who would go into her room and listen to her music after school every day and was like the antithesis of her mom. She’d give you a hug and you knew you’d been hugged. She’s got a heart of gold. She’s a lovely, lovely little lady.” It was also not lost on Mike—deeply embroiled in a love relationship with Priscilla—that Lisa was the same age,
fourteen, as her mother had been when Elvis fell in love with her. The Freudian implications were dizzying.
Mike did not physically consummate with Lisa the relationship he had in his mind, though he would, once or twice, stand beside her bed, as she was sleeping, and pull the sheets back and stare. Lisa awakened during one of these vigils, and it so unnerved both her and her mother that Priscilla ordered Mike out of the house, one of several separations during their tempestuous seven-year relationship. He eventually returned, and Priscilla said later she had no idea he was actually in love with her fourteen-year-old daughter. “I thought it was a flirtation on
her
part. You know, she’d flirt around and he’d chase her around and things like that. But when it’s not a part of your thoughts, it’s very difficult to see. I never in my wildest dreams thought that there was anything there. Never. He played hide-and-seek with her. But Michael was a very different type of being, as far as I was concerned. He was sexual anyway … so he would show signs, not just to Lisa, but to all these women. He didn’t do anything, really, but … there would be little flirtations here and there: ‘Mmmm, she looks cute,’ or ‘Don’t you look cute today, Lisa?’ But it’s like ‘Okay, so it’s a guy saying she looks cute.’ So I had nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing there.” Priscilla, in fact, regarded Mike’s demonstrativeness—the fact that he hugged tightly and wished to be hugged back—as aberrant, the very thing he cited as evidence of Priscilla’s repression. “He would say,
‘Feel!
You are used to having your feelings guarded. You are used to suppressing your feelings. Just let go. Just let go and hold me.’ ”