Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Exactly how much Priscilla Presley earned as coexecutrix of the estate and president of Elvis Presley Enterprises was, like so much of her life since birth, a closely guarded secret. She and Jack Soden deliberately structured EPE as a privately held business so they would not be required to divulge the numbers. Not even the profits of Elvis Presley Enterprises were known with certainty. “We never talk about that,” stated Soden. “Never. We just don’t.”
The entire enterprise had an air of mystery. The estate offices on Sunset Boulevard had an unlisted phone number and an unmarked door. The parking attendants downstairs would claim that no such company existed in the building. And Priscilla’s office, as president of Elvis Presley Enterprises, had no photographs and not one memento of Elvis Presley.
“M
ogul” would be the word used to describe Priscilla Presley as she entered her late forties. Elvis Presley Enterprises, she would say, was a “nice family business.” Her sister, Michelle, was employed as Priscilla’s personal assistant. Michelle’s husband ran the music division of the estate. Lisa was the beneficiary.
Priscilla had emerged as a conglomerate. Her exposure on
Dallas
had led, in the late eighties, to a phone call from Larry Pesin of Colonia, a subsidiary of a German perfumery, inquiring if Priscilla would be interested in endorsing a perfume. She agreed, on certain conditions: She wanted something other than Priscilla as the name of the perfume, and she wanted to select the fragrance, design the bottle, and plan the ad campaign. In short, she wanted total control—and she got it. In her now familiar pattern, she visited six perfume houses over a two-year period, tested two hundred scents, and launched Moments. The television ads, featuring Priscilla and an actor portraying Elvis capturing the legendary “moment” when they met—“We were just two people, not a myth”—were savaged by
AdWeek
, which mocked Priscilla’s “Brooklyn accent,” but the perfume was a modest success in America and a triumph in Europe. Another perfume, called Experiences, followed several years later and became the top-selling
European scent. Indian Summer, Priscilla’s third perfume, debuted in 1996, with Priscilla, an eternally youthful fifty-one, seen in the television commercial driving a sports car through farm country on an Indian summer afternoon to meet a handsome young man.
More endorsements accumulated, Kathie Lee Gifford-style, throughout the nineties: Priscilla in an advertisement for L.A. Gear; Priscilla drinking Crystal Light; Priscilla creating and designing a line of children’s clothes called Gioco, Italian for “playful”; Priscilla and Lisa in a mother-daughter Oldsmobile commercial; Priscilla promoting hair extensions on the Home Shopping Channel. Elvis, she told a newspaper reporter, might not like the woman she had become. Mike Edwards was not so certain
he
did, either, though he did not condemn Priscilla. “I understand what the business can do to you,” he said, “and it took her like it did most everyone else.” Priscilla was, it seemed, in perpetual overdrive, pedaling furiously to make up for those lost years when she was subjugated to an idol.
The once scandalous Lolita of the rock world and Most Hated Woman in America had metamorphosed into a role model who received letters from mothers asking her advice on rearing children, on surviving as a single parent. Priscilla, beyond anything else, was the consummate survivor. She had endured the torment of her confused identity in childhood; the discovery of the secret in her mother’s trunk; the trauma of her sexual experience with Currie Grant; her indoctrination, at fourteen, into sex, drugs, and rock and roll; her parents’ dictate separating her from the boy she loved and forcing her to move to Memphis to live with a complex rock star she no longer desired; the scandal and embarrassment of her years in sequestration at Graceland, hidden away like Mr. Rochester’s lunatic wife in
Jane Eyre;
the hard-earned achievement of her childhood goal to marry Elvis; her years of sexual rejection by her husband; and betrayal by three lovers in succession, one of whom lusted after her daughter. The single greatest challenge of her life, Priscilla would say in 1996, was “coming out of the past,” emerging as
Priscilla
, not as an appendage to Elvis. “To survive the bigness and [yet] still be attached to [the Elvis phenomenon] in so many ways. And yet I’ve moved on. I think I’ve proven myself to the world so far, I think I have. I certainly wasn’t what they thought.”
She added another title to her list of credits when she served as executive producer of a television series,
Elvis: The Early
Years
, in 1990, an estate project. She retained “absolute power,” as she put it, over every script. The absence of dominion over her own life during her childhood and the thirteen years she was with Elvis had given Priscilla a near obsession with control.
Her self-containment, the reserve that everyone who met her remarked upon, led her, ironically, to the role that would force her to let loose and forever change the public’s perception of the actress/model persona she had created, with Mike Edwards, back in 1977. Once more, Elvis was responsible for the opportunity. David and Jerry Zucker, the creative team behind
Airplane, had
conceived a zany police comedy called
The Naked Gun
and were casting about for an actress to play their leading lady, opposite Leslie Nielsen and O. J. Simpson. Two things led them to Priscilla: her wooden persona, and her association with Elvis. The Zucker brothers’ gimmick, in the picture, was to hire actors known for their stiffness and place them in outrageous situations. Priscilla fit this criterion like a glove. The Zuckers were also rabid Elvis Presley fans. “These guys have such a good time doing what they do,” said the casting director, Pamela Basker. “Somebody might have mentioned that they would get to meet Elvis’s wife [if they cast her], and they have such a good outlook on life, they have such a slant on it, they just go for the totally bizarre and weird. They wanted to cast O. J., which isn’t something you’d think of, but O. J. was so perfect for the role, and yet O. J. is not really a competent actor. But they made it work.” Their first choice for the female lead, by a coincidence, had been Bo Derek, whose rejection of
Those Amazing Animals
had given Priscilla her first acting break in 1980.
Priscilla was floored by the request. “I guess she was flattered someone would think of her for comedy,” recalled Pamela. The other attraction, according to the casting director, was the “stigma” attached to Priscilla, a sense of the “supernatural” by her association with Elvis. “We were thinking of something that would catch people’s eye, and yet is funny when you just say the name.” David Zucker, one of the rare directors to cast people after a conversation with the actor, rather than a reading, sensed that Priscilla “was kind of puzzled as to why we wanted her.”
She was terrified. Priscilla told
USA Today
she feared, as she started filming, that her career might be over. At the first rehearsal, recalled David Zucker, “she thought she had to be funny, because I think she played the first line kind of quirky, and I said, ‘You know, you really don’t have to do that at all,’
and I think she was very relieved.” Priscilla had missed the point of her casting. “All she had to do was what she was experienced at doing,” explained the director. “With our kind of comedy we don’t need the Jerry Lewises or the Jim Carreys. We only need actors to do what they’ve done before. It was similar to Peter Graves’s reaction the first time we met with him about
Airplane:
‘It’s a funny script, but why me?’ And we said, ‘Peter, trust us, you are going to be funny,’ and it’s precisely
because
these people had never been in a comedy and didn’t have a comedy reputation that they were more valuable to us.”
The continuing surprise with Priscilla was her courage to take on situations that frightened her, to challenge herself, and to do what people would never expect of her. So it was with
The Naked Gun.
The fear of the unknown, of doing a comedy, was possibly, speculated Leslie Nielsen, why Bo Derek passed. Priscilla plunged forward, however, and no one on the set had any idea how panic-stricken she was, for her greatest acting accomplishment, always, was to hide what was really inside her. “I remember when we first met. We were sitting across the soundstage from each other,” said Nielsen. “I glanced over and happened to catch her eye, and made a face and crossed my eyes. And she did it promptly right back to me.” That camaraderie would mark the atmosphere on the set for all three
Naked Gun
movies over the next several years.
Priscilla’s acting gamble was a delirious success.
The Naked Gun
opened at the top of the box office and earned Priscilla a People’s Choice nomination as Favorite Comedy Motion Picture actress, along with Bette Midler and Jamie Lee Curtis. Priscilla didn’t win the award, but she gained the respect of the Hollywood film community. Edward Woodward, who had witnessed her painful struggle through the disastrous
Comeback
with Michael Landon a decade earlier, was happily surprised. By the third
Naked Gun
, he judged her “absolutely superb” with “amazing comedy timing.” Most ex-wives who aspired to acting careers, he observed, were viewed as “a little bit silly, pretentious, possibly. She aimed for something that was ridiculous to aim for, and she … got it. She did it against all odds.” That could be said to be the theme of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s life, starting with her childhood game of “Imagine If … I were Mrs. Elvis Presley.”
Priscilla was cast in another film spoof,
Ford Fairlane
, opposite Andrew Dice Clay, amid the
Naked Gun
series and longed,
she said, to be considered for the roles Kathleen Turner took. The naughty half of Priscilla expressed a desire to star in another
sex, lies, and videotape
or
Blue Velvet
—something “shocking” and sensational; the demure Priscilla recanted in 1996, saying she would never appear nude. “I have a son to answer to. I couldn’t embarrass him. I don’t care what the role is … I don’t want my son seeing me nude. I don’t know how these mothers do it. I don’t know how Demi Moore does it. I’m sorry—she’s got three kids. I don’t know how Cybill Shepherd does it. I don’t know, it’s just not in me. It just isn’t in me. I’ve got an aunt and my grandchildren. I don’t want to embarrass them.”
Lisa still had not separated herself fully from Priscilla after she married Danny Keough. Her baby, a daughter named Danielle, was the very image of both Priscilla and Lisa as toddlers. A paparazzi’s exclusive baby photograph of Danielle, Elvis Presley’s first grandchild, fetched $450,000 from
People
magazine and the
Star.
According to Myrna Smith, who had been close to Lisa since she was a child, “Lisa had problems with Danny all along. She’s doing to her men what her dad did to his women, which is isolating them and not letting them go out and get a job.” When he married Lisa, Danny Keough was a young twenty-one, a good-looking musician wanna-be who played in the occasional gig with a few other Scientologists and was known to flirt with the ladies. Brett Strong, the artist and family friend, noticed a conflict between Danny and Lisa that was similar to the one that had existed between Priscilla and Elvis: a competition between spouses as to who would be famous and who would stay at home. “It was frustrating to Danny that Lisa was the one who had all of the fame and glory [even though] she hadn’t accomplished anything; she just happened to be born that way, where I think Danny wanted to be this famous musician. And I know for sure that detracted from their relationship, because Lisa was looking for love and attention.” When Danny was on the road performing, Lisa and the baby stayed at the Summit house with Priscilla and Marco and Navarone. Lisa, recalled a close friend, was “leery” of Marco at first, and her relationship with Priscilla was, as it had been for some time, “strained.”
Sometime in 1991, after she had been married three years, Lisa, then twenty-three, telephoned Brett Strong. It was not the first time Lisa had turned to Brett to commiserate about her life. “She used to call me now and then when the relationship with Danny wasn’t working out to the effect that she wanted, love-wise.”
Prior to Danny, Lisa had dated Roberto Domine, the son of a restaurateur, and Kevin Jeffcoat, both of whom she had met through the Scientology Celebrity Centre, her social meeting ground. Brett’s impression was that she was “passionately in love” with one of her earlier boyfriends, but when Priscilla became pregnant with Navarone, Lisa desperately wanted to be married and have a child, like her mother. “Danny was the one who wanted children, and she got into that.”
In 1991, Lisa was restless and unfulfilled. “She wanted to do more with her life than just have her life go by,” Brett said. She and Danny were arguing mildly about his career versus hers, “and now he was going off snowboarding and taking trips all of the time, probably trying to resolve his life.” Lisa was clearly in a struggle to find her identity, which was not surprising considering the surreal nature of her existence. Her life—indeed the entire American culture—was inundated with images, retrospectives, movies, books, and bizarre theories about her dead father. The U.S. Postal Service issued the Elvis Presley stamp that year, after a national vote on whether to use an image of the young Elvis or the older, Vegas Elvis, creating a media blitzkrieg and the largest sale of stamps in U.S. history. Bill Bixby hosted a serious television special that summer called
Is Elvis Alive?
Lisa Marie, as her father called her, had become a celebrity and a multimillionaire simply by virtue of her birth, and the unrelenting media glare was overwhelming. The year before, she had telephoned a young producer’s office by mistake, thinking she was dialing Marco’s production company, and according to the producer’s girlfriend, she opened her soul to a perfect stranger. Lisa apparently confided in the producer her marital woes, discussed the possibility of aborting another child by Danny, and talked about writing a book about her life, as if she had dialed a crisis hot line. The astonished producer would not comment on the bizarre experience later, except to say, “Even to this day I’m sort of at a loss at what exactly happened, so I think it’s best to just let it go. It’s really, you know, a mystery to me, the whole thing.… I’m sure Lisa’s totally got her life together at this stage.”