Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Though her Texas classmates regarded Priscilla as an extrovert—“bubbling with personality,” in the words of older boy Bob Ellis—she would look back upon her entire childhood as detached. Priscilla was always discrete. “Even though I had friends,” she would later explain, “there was always that sense of keeping a part of me
distant.
I never gave all. I always reserved a
certain part that I just never shared, and wouldn’t share.” This was the key to Priscilla, and would remain so. “Not that I wasn’t close to my friends, and we had great times and a lot of fun. But there’s just a line. There’s a line there that I wouldn’t go across.”
Her reserve was partly a by-product of her military upbringing, but because of all the secrecy in her family, Priscilla became
secretive.
This quality imbued her with a mystique she would carry into her Elvis years and beyond. There was something sphinxlike about Priscilla, a demureness that people remember as strangely seductive, especially in a child. “Priscilla had a quality about her,” her childhood best friend’s mother, Eddie Rutherford, later tried to explain. “As a child, in my presence, she was such a little lady.” This ultrafeminine mystique in one so beautiful and so young cast a spell on people, bewitched them, intrigued them, fascinated them, compelled them to try to break through.
Priscilla’s aloofness was reinforced by a reserve that could have been misconstrued as shyness. According to her classmate Christine, she “was anything but” shy. Christine considered her the class clown, witty and outgoing, “always the center of attention.” Her excessive daintiness could also create the illusion that Priscilla was extremely modest, even prudish. On the contrary, she could be quite aggressive if she had a goal. “When she wanted something, she went after it,” remarked a Texas beau, Calvert White. Another boyfriend, Chuck Burns, saw her the same way: “She knew what she wanted, and she didn’t … let anything stand in her way. Once she set her mind, she’d go for it.”
If there were two Priscillas—the “good” Priscilla, who was reserved and affectedly modest, and the “naughty” Priscilla, who was aggressive, determined, and overtly sexual—this dichotomy is consistent with her astrological sign. Gemini is, after all, the sign of the twins. One can never be certain with a Gemini, astrologers contend, which of the twins one is going to encounter. Certainly as an adult Priscilla was aware of her duality. She described herself as a “true Gemini,” possessed of two seemingly inconsistent personas “that are both me.” This split personality would be an underlying theme in her life and would make her exceedingly difficult to read.
The hidden Priscilla revealed herself around the time of her
eleventh birthday, in the spring of 1956, when she watched a young Elvis Presley perform on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s
Stage Show
and found herself sexually aroused. Elvis triggered the same emotional responses in her as had Mario Lanza. Like Lanza, Elvis Presley communicated to Priscilla strength, virility, confidence, and a dark sensuality. The difference was that Elvis Presley projected raw sex and a hint of menace, and Priscilla responded. That March, Paul Beaulieu stood on line at the PX to buy his daughter a copy of Elvis’s first album,
Elvis Presley
, which stayed at number one on the
Billboard
chart for ten weeks and featured “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I Got a Woman,” and “Tutti Frutti.”
Elvis was a long way from Mario Lanza, and Priscilla never looked back.
Though it would later become part of the Priscilla Beaulieu myth and legend that she was not an Elvis Presley fan before she met him in Germany, the truth is that Priscilla was fixated on Elvis. A neighbor of the Beaulieus, Eddie Rutherford, whose husband was transferred to Bergstrom Air Force Base in 1956, remembered that after March of that year, “her record player was going
all
the time. She absolutely
loved
his records!”
Eddie Rutherford and Ann Beaulieu arranged that year for their daughters, Pam and Priscilla, to meet. “We immediately hit it off,” Pam recalled. They shared a love of the outdoors, of horses, of fantasy, and of boys. “It seems like there was a horse on the base,” recalled Pam, “and we’d either go ride or pretend like we could ride or wish we could ride. We had all these great schemes and dreams.” “We were always playing horses,” Priscilla remembered. “She was Fury, and I was the Black Stallion. We had a real bond.”
Pam’s dream was to own a horse ranch. “My dreams when I was small,” Priscilla once told a British newspaper, “could be best described by reading
The Black Stallion.”
Priscilla the romantic identified with the mystical children’s books by Walter Farley about a boy named Alec, a loner who saves the life of a mythical black stallion. Once more, Priscilla was drawn to an image of dark strength and power—of savage grace. “The Black,” as the boy calls the wild Arabian, in turn saves Alec’s life and will allow no human to touch him but Alec. The Black Stallion remains an enigma, belonging to no one, except Alec, but worshiped by all who behold his refined black beauty.
Though she didn’t realize it at the time, Priscilla was reading a version of her future. Elvis Presley was the human embodiment of the Black Stallion, with his beautiful features and mythic status—admired by everyone and owned by no one, except, to a degree, Priscilla Beaulieu.
Priscilla was still living in a fantasy world, and Pam was her partner in illusion. “We talked so much,” said Pam. “Make-believe and wishes.” In the fifth grade, Priscilla and Pam began playing a new fantasy game called Let’s Pretend, or Imagine If. The two girls would lie side by side on the bed in Priscilla’s room for hours, telling each other about their fantasies. “Priscilla always pretended that she was gonna marry Elvis,” Pam recalled. “And I was gonna marry Ricky Nelson. We’d pretend what their romance would be like and what mine would be like. We’d play Elvis records and make believe all kinds of glamorous things.” The game varied only as to specific events. “Sometimes we played ‘Imagine if you
met
Elvis,’ ” explained Pam. Other days it was Priscilla and Elvis’s fantasy wedding, their romantic honeymoon, or their life together. “We didn’t have a clue!” Pam laughed later. “Ride around in limousines, I guess. Wear shiny clothes.”
The games of Let’s Pretend were part of the glue that cemented the friendship between Priscilla and Pam. “We used to play Imagine If a lot. And she was always with Elvis and I was always with Ricky.” It was the first, and probably the last, time Priscilla Beaulieu allowed another woman access to her fantasies.
That same year or early the next, Priscilla joined an Elvis Presley fan club, receiving Elvis buttons and black-and-white glossies in the mail. When her dream lover played Austin during the summer before she started the sixth grade, he was close to Priscilla yet far, far away.
P
riscilla reached her golden pinnacle in Austin the fall of the sixth grade, when she was eleven-going-on-twelve. For the first time in her life she had a best girlfriend, an experience that was heightened when the Beaulieus moved across the street from the Rutherfords.
“Pam-and-Priscilla were one word,” as Mrs. Rutherford put it. “They’d call every morning to see what the other girl was going to wear that day.” They were the stars of the sixth grade, the two prettiest, most popular girls at Popham Elementary. It was a matter of debate who was prettier. Pam’s supporters extolled her coltish figure and wavy blond hair. No one seemed
not
to like Pam Rutherford.
Priscilla, at nearly twelve, still had some baby fat, which gave her a lush, “Pretty Baby” look, set off by shoulder-length brown hair, which she wore curled under and fluffy about her face. Dora Keen, whose son Willie was a grade ahead, remembered a cameo moment of Priscilla at one of the Popham dances that year. “They were in the school auditorium, sitting on this long bench, a bunch of the kids. And she wouldn’t know this, of course, she was just a child—but everybody’s eyes would just sort of follow Priscilla.”
Priscilla was beginning to explore her sexuality. She was part
of a group of self-described “risqué” sixth-grade girls and older boys who met regularly by a trailer in classmate Linda Williams’s side yard for spin-the-bottle sessions. “And we felt like we were getting away with murder,” Linda recalled. At home, Priscilla “fantasized endlessly” about French-kissing. “Sometimes,” confided Calvert White, a Popham beau of Priscilla’s, “we would be on the school bus, and the kids used to hide down behind the seats and kiss her.” When Paul Beaulieu would not allow her to wear tight skirts to school, Priscilla joined the Girl Scouts so she could wear the body-hugging uniform—a typical Priscilla maneuver. “She was like a little … well, I would say she was just a little ol’ sexpot,” remarked Drue Foradory, a sixth-grade football player Priscilla had a crush on.
She came of age in the fifties, an innocent era, when Popham girls, Priscilla among them, wore poodle skirts, bobby socks, and saddle oxfords, joining their secret crushes at sock hops, the “tween” club, and base dances, where entertainment was provided by a jukebox.
Puppy love was expressed by the exchange of signet rings. Priscilla wore sixth-grader Mike Hodnett’s ring for a day, Pam wore Cal White’s, and Patricia Heins wore Chuck Burns’s; then they traded boys and rings in a round-robin that recurred throughout the sixth grade. By spring, however, Priscilla had caught the eye of an older boy, Jack Edwinson, who snatched glimpses of her in the yard between Del Valle Junior High and Popham. “I was kind of struck by how pretty she was even at that age,” he recalled. “Sixth-grade girls are pretty gawky-looking, but she stood out.” By summer, Priscilla and Jack were dating. “You know how things are at that age. You might think that it’s something serious, and it’s not. Of course, going on official dates with transportation, we didn’t have the means. We were both too young.”
Spin the bottle and car-less dates could not compete with Priscilla’s growing fantasies of Elvis, though. She and Pam continued to play Imagine If all through the sixth grade; on Pam’s twelfth birthday in October, Priscilla gave her two Elvis 45s: “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog.” She set her cap for the self-described tough guy of the sixth grade, Drue Foradory, a boxer with dark, slightly dangerous looks. To his surprise, Priscilla boldly walked up to him one day, told him he looked like Elvis Presley, and asked him on a date. “She was outspoken and flirty,” Foradory said, recalling the encounter. “If she liked you,
she’d just come up and
tell
you.” It was clear why Priscilla pursued him. “She was just nuts about Elvis,” said Foradory. “She began liking me in the sixth grade ’cause she always used to say I looked like Elvis. We all wore our hair greased back, and I had dark hair, and when I was young, I had … features like Elvis.” Priscilla gave Drue signed pictures of herself, “and we held hands and kissed a few times and what have you in the movie theater.” According to Drue, Priscilla was “most
definitely”
the aggressor. Mike Hodnett, another of Priscilla’s sixth-grade beaux, also remembered Priscilla as “determined.”
She came by her perseverance naturally. Ann Beaulieu was blossoming into a tamer version of the mother in Gypsy, promoting Priscilla at every turn. “When we’d spend the night,” recalled Carol Ann, a friend of Priscilla and Pam’s, “her mother would talk about Priscilla. She entered her in lots of baby contests, beauty contests, as a small child and baby, and made albums of Priscilla in these contests. And I remember, when I was over there, her mother would just love to go through the albums and look at pictures and just dwell on it. She seemed to be obsessed. At the time I probably didn’t know what ‘vicariously’ meant, but I always felt that her mother had a plan for her. Her mother was really pushing her. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all, but she was that type of mother.”
“I remember the scrapbooks,” Christine Laws agrees. Ann entered Priscilla in a “variety of things. At that particular time, officers’ wives’ clubs at various bases would have contests like this. And community photographers would have ‘Pretty Baby’ contests. Or newspapers would. Or maybe a civic organization. And you’ve got to realize that some of this may have come from being in the military. Her father was an officer, but he was not a
high-ranking
officer. There’s a world of difference between a captain’s family and a colonel’s family.”
Priscilla never boasted about the pageants or how she looked, according to her friends. Ann was the promoter. “There wasn’t any question in my mind that she was always preparing Priscilla for an
event
,” asserted Carol Ann. “It was just a matter of time. Priscilla was just one of the gang—we didn’t feel she was any more special than anybody else. But her mom did.” According to Pam, Ann Beaulieu “wanted Priscilla to be ‘the one.’ Whatever was going on, Priscilla was … the center of attention.”
These dynamics began to foster competition between Priscilla and Pam. “We were best friends and rivals at the same time,”
Pam explained. “We were either very close or fighting.” The instigator, according to members of the clique and Pam herself, was Priscilla’s mother. “I think there never would have been a bit of rivalry between us if it hadn’t been brought to the front by Ann,” Pam once said.
Ann’s competitive streak reached its height shortly after Pam’s twelfth birthday in October, when the PTA sponsored a fundraising contest for king and queen of the Popham Halloween Carnival, the big school event of the fall season. The nominees were chosen from the sixth-grade class, with the winners determined by which candidate accumulated the most votes, at a penny a vote, to be collected in a jar kept in the principal’s office. After the contest, the money was to be put in a school fund.
The contest evolved into a cutthroat race between Pam and Priscilla. The rivalry agitated by Ann intensified during the campaign, with classmates drawing battle lines. The mothers worked for weeks on costumes for the Queen’s Royal Reception, sewing elaborate floor-length satin robes with characters from Story Book Land stitched onto the fabric to promote National Book Week. The big event was to be held on October 29, when the queen and king were to be announced at the Halloween Carnival party in the school cafetorium. By the end of the campaign, the girls’ friendship was severely strained. By their own recollection and that of friends, neither girl seemed driven to win; it was Priscilla’s parents who had the emotional investment. “I considered quitting,” Priscilla would later write, “but I felt I couldn’t let my parents or supporters down.” Priscilla’s classmates, however, drew the line at that. “She wouldn’t have quit on a bet!” claimed Christine.