Authors: Suzanne Finstad
As a child, Rooney sang and acted in skits with her favorite cousin, Margaret, joined a dance club, and discreetly followed the career of actress Priscilla Lane, the most famous of the five Lane sisters and a Warner Brothers contract player from 1937 to 1944 who costarred with Ronald Reagan, Dick Powell, and James Cagney. Like her movie-star role model, Rooney was fair and blue-eyed, with a wholesome girl-next-door prettiness. Her most impressive feature was a thick tumble of shoulder-length blond hair. If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Rooney’s eyes were fixed on the sky. She chafed under the thumb of her rigid policeman-father, waiting until she was out the door to apply forbidden lipstick, using Margaret or her best friend, Fay Heim, as cover for the nighttime adventures of adolescent girls.
Anna Iversen’s turning point came when she sneaked out to attend a USO dance during her freshman year in high school. The dances, organized for the New London-based navy and coast guard fleets, were dangerous territory for any young girl; for Albert Iversen’s daughter, they were taboo. Girls under sixteen were not admitted; Rooney was barely fifteen. There was a slight stigma attached to high school girls who attended USO functions; many of them “got in trouble,” as Fay would remember.
None of this deterred Rooney. She was in single-minded pursuit of romance, the kind depicted in the movies, the kind that promised an escape from her stagnant lower-middle-class existence. One evening at the dawn of World War II, fate smiled on her. She was asked to dance by the handsomest soldier at the USO, a dark-haired dream of a boy named James Wagner—Jimmy to his friends, and he had a million of them, recalled his brother, Gene. Jimmy was a storekeeper third class in the navy, stationed aboard the USS
Beaver
, a submarine tender in the Atlantic Fleet, berthed in New London. “It was certainly love right from the beginning,” according to Rooney’s best friend, Fay.
“He was
gorgeous
,” remembered Anna’s cousin Margaret, swooning. James Wagner was slight—five feet six or seven—with an athlete’s physique and a face that would melt a girl’s heart: model-perfect features, dancing blue-green eyes, movie-star white teeth, and jet-black hair that formed a widow’s peak. “Oh!” his mother once exclaimed. “If you see his picture it’ll take your breath away!” He was a bit of a dandy, always immaculate and stylish, “but he was not conceited,” according to his brother. “Jimmy wasn’t like that. He didn’t act like he knew he was handsome.”
Anna Iversen concealed her romance from her parents, calling on Fay or Margaret to act as her accomplice when she wanted to rendezvous with Jimmy at the USO. “She’d use me as cover,” Fay remarked, “and then she’d sneak into the background.” Albert Iversen would never have permitted his adolescent daughter to date a twenty-year-old navy man; she wasn’t even allowed to wear makeup. Desperate to appear older, Rooney smuggled a pair of her mother’s high heels out of the house to wear at a dance with her soldier boy.
That April, James Wagner’s ship set sail for Bermuda, returning to its berth at New London a few months later. As Americans held their breath, wondering whether the country would be drawn into war, the
Beaver
conducted its operations around Long Island
Sound, docking at New London intermittently. For seven months, from May to December, Rooney continued her trysts with Jimmy. “We used to go up to the site where he was stationed, and we used to meet him on the state pier without her parents knowing it,” Fay remembered. Rooney, her cousin Margaret stated, “was madly in love with Jimmy.”
On December 6, with the scent of war in the air, the
Beaver
left New London under sealed orders to carry supplies to an unknown destination. The families and lovers of the ship’s crew “stood on the dock and cried,” recalled one wife. The next day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Rooney took a part-time job after school at the Boston Candy Company, the local soda fountain, mixing milk shakes and dreaming of Jimmy. He materialized again in 1942, at the end of her sophomore year, for a few days’ training in New London. That fall, the
Beaver
sailed to Roseneath, Scotland, with James Wagner aboard. The two exchanged love letters and became secretly engaged. After half a year, Jimmy wrote with news that he was one of a few men chosen to be trained as navy fighter pilots. A few months earlier, Rooney’s screen idol, Priscilla Lane, had eloped with an army pilot and had revealed a secret first marriage and divorce. Anna Iversen’s own forbidden romance must suddenly have seemed more enticing than ever.
James Wagner was sent back to the States to begin classes in March of 1943, and Rooney, who was then in her junior year, dropped out of high school about the same time. The family could use the extra money she would make working full-time, but more likely, she was angling to marry Jimmy. “She didn’t seem too interested in school,” recalled John Linkletter, a fellow student at Chapman Tech. “So it looked like she would rather get married.”
Rooney took a job—most likely as a riveter—for Electric Boat, a dockside company that built submarines. Jimmy, meanwhile, progressed through a series of navy flight schools beginning in New Orleans and continuing in Natchitoches, Louisiana; Dallas, Texas; Athens, Georgia; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Pensacola, Florida.
While they were apart, a photographer took a few head shots of Anna, probably for Jimmy, though she told his brother, Gene, that she was “modeling, or at least had posed for something.” The portraits are high glamour; in one, Rooney’s hair is swept off her face in a partial pompadour and her head is tilted dreamily
to one side. Her cupid’s-bow lips are accentuated with deep scarlet, and her eyebrows are fashionably plucked. It is the image of a woman who cared greatly about beauty and allure and illusion.
The next chapter in Rooney’s saga, like several that would follow, is slightly mysterious. On August 10, 1944, she and Jimmy Wagner eloped. She was several months past her eighteenth birthday; he was twenty-three. The wedding was in Pensacola, Florida, where Jimmy was completing advanced flight training. No one, including Jimmy’s mother, with whom he was very close, seemed to anticipate this event. “It came as a shock right out of the blue!” Kathryn Wagner recalled. “We knew that he was going with the girl, and he seemed to think an awful lot of her, and she of him.” Kathryn Wagner and her husband, Harold, were informed of the wedding by telegram. She remembered Jimmy saying, “Wish me luck. I just got married.”
Jimmy had been back in the States for nearly a year and a half but had not seen Rooney Iversen in a long time. So why the sudden marriage in August of 1944?
This much is known: Rooney and her mother drove to Pensacola that August to visit friends and, one supposes, to see Jimmy. “When she went down there, they got married,” Jim’s mother recalled. “And then that was it!” Aside from the bride and groom, the only people present were Rooney’s mother, Lorraine; a few navy pilots; a classmate of Jimmy’s, Ralph Fielding; and Ralph’s wife, Lorene, who acted as best man and maid of honor, respectively. According to the local paper, Rooney wore “a street-length dress in luggage brown and gold with forest green accessories.”
Was Anna pregnant? That, of course, was the obvious speculation. “I know that she had a baby nine months later,” said her friend Fay. But, she added, “I think it was something that happened on their honeymoon. I don’t think they had to get married.” If Rooney wasn’t pregnant, why the sudden wedding after so long an engagement? Anna knew, but never told anyone, not even her best friend, Fay. “I feel that Rooney has probably kept some things private,” Fay said years later, “and I think it should stay that way.”
The air of mystery may have emanated from the Iversens’ disapproval of James Wagner, though both of Rooney’s brothers had joined the coast guard and her father was now in the merchant marines; they could hardly find fault with a serviceman.
The age concern was less acute; Anna was eighteen when she eloped. Character was also not an issue; everyone who knew Jimmy Wagner adored him to the point of hero worship. What, then? Fay suggested that Rooney’s parents might have been happier with someone more “social” than Jimmy. She also pointed out that “they didn’t know anything about him or his background.” Cousin Margaret laid the blame on Rooney’s father, a “self-centered” man with high aspirations for his only daughter. “He probably wanted her to marry a millionaire!” she offered, half in jest. There is perhaps more to the story—missing subplots buried with those who have died, kept secret still by Ann.
Whatever objections her parents may have had, the new—and newly pregnant—Mrs. James Wagner was gloriously happy. Anna was radiant during her first visit back to New London after the wedding. Jimmy, recalled his mother, “seemed to be walking on cloud nine.” Less than a month after the wedding, he got his wings at a ceremony in Pensacola; the next day he was promoted to ensign.
Jimmy and Anna spent their first Christmas together as husband and wife with the Wagners in Titusville, the small, Norman Rockwellesque town in western Pennsylvania where oil was first discovered. Jimmy’s parents and his sixteen-year-old brother, Gene, embraced his bride. Gene found Anna “very neat, very pretty, and very nice. A lovely girl. Lovely, lovely, lovely.” To Kathryn Wagner, the sort of small-town housewife who baked peach pies and left them on the front porch to cool, her daughter-in-law “was the picture of Ann Sheridan,” the “Oomph Girl” of the forties, a comparison Rooney would have relished. Privately, Kathryn Wagner fretted slightly—worrying, with a mother’s intuition, “that we might not be good enough for Ann,” recalled Gene Wagner. “She was concerned that Ann was from the city. We were farmers.”
Ironically, Anna Wagner spent the ensuing months in much the same fashion as did Priscilla Lane. She and the actress were both newly married to pilots and were following their husbands from base to base while awaiting the birth of their first child. Anna passed part of her pregnancy with her parents in Niantic, Connecticut; Jimmy flew up to see her “every opportunity he got,” recalled his brother. “They were very much in love, very happy.” The newlyweds also visited the Wagners “many times.”
On May 24, 1945, Jimmy arrived in Titusville on leave. Rooney
was spending the last days of her pregnancy at Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, where her brother was stationed. Jimmy’s plan was to spend a quick night with his family and friends en route to New York for their child’s birth later that week. Shortly after midnight the Wagners returned home to a frantically ringing phone. “Jimmy got the call,” remembered his mother, “and turned to us and said, ‘Well, Grandma and Grandpa! We have a baby girl!’ ” Rooney gave birth to an eight-pound baby at 10:40 that night. Jimmy and Gene raced to the hospital in Brooklyn, driving all night. “Jim went right up to see Ann, and I went to see the baby,” recalled Gene. “I said, ‘I saw your daughter before you did!’ ”
Anna Wagner chose the name Priscilla Ann for her love child. The choice was a revealing testament to her dreams and aspirations.
This was the first secret of the little girl who would marry Elvis Presley. She was not, as the world believed for so long, Priscilla Beaulieu. Her real name was Priscilla Ann Wagner.
P
riscilla Wagner spent her first days shuttling between Niantic, Connecticut, where she and her mother stayed with her maternal grandparents, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where her father was taking his final pilot’s course. The Wagners got their first glimpse of their only grandchild when she was less than a month old, during one of Jimmy and Anna’s stopovers in Titusville. Even Jimmy’s teenage brother, Gene, couldn’t get over how
happy
his little niece was.
Jimmy and Ann (she had dropped “Anna”) chose the Wagners’ church, Saint Paul’s Reformed, situated at the top of a hill up the street from the Titusville Library, for Priscilla’s baptism in August. After the Sunday service, the family drove back to the Wagner place, an old-fashioned farmhouse, to gather on the front lawn for pictures. Gene did the honors, capturing his older brother and Ann standing side by side, holding Priscilla between them. Ann is smiling blissfully at Jimmy while he beams at the camera. There is a single, poignant photo of Jimmy, posing before a sprawling oak tree, tenderly cradling his infant daughter. He is dressed in full uniform, standing military-straight, flashing his matinee-idol smile as Priscilla bobs her head out of a white christening blanket.
Within weeks Jimmy received orders to report to the Fighting
Seventy-fifth aboard the aircraft-carrier USS
Roosevelt
, stationed in Chincoteague, Virginia. He and Ann and Priscilla were reunited with the Wagners once more in Titusville circa September of 1945. Before he left his parents’ home for Chincoteague, Jimmy pulled his parents aside. “Now, if anything should happen to me,” he instructed, “I want Rooney to have my car.” Kathryn Wagner didn’t give it a second thought. The war was over; her darkest fears about her son’s safety had not materialized. These were Jimmy’s glory days.
Ann and Priscilla whiled away the autumn in New London with the Iversens while Jimmy stood by near Norfolk, waiting to report for duty aboard the
Roosevelt.
When his orders arrived in early November, he persuaded one of the other pilots to accompany him in a single-engine two-seater for a training flight to Groton. He wanted to spend a farewell weekend with Ann and Priscilla before shipping out for the South American coast near Rio, where he would make his first official flight as a navy fighter pilot. His copilot’s reward was to be a blind date with Ann’s friend Fay.
Ann expected Jimmy at her parents’ house by ten that Saturday morning; he had not arrived by the time Fay knocked on the Iversens’ door, dressed up and excited about her date. Excitement gave way to worry, then fear, finally panic, as the late afternoon wore into nighttime. “I think both of us … we really didn’t say too much,” recalled Fay. “Didn’t talk about it.” Around eight o’clock, Ann rang the Wagners, deeply worried, wondering if they had received any word about Jimmy. Her mother-in-law said no and reassured her that Jimmy would arrive any minute. “Rooney and I waited and waited until I don’t know what time,” said Fay. “We waited until it was obvious that they weren’t going to be there. And I finally went home.”