Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Vera found her Moulin Rouge evening unpleasant for another reason. While Red and Lamar always understood that part of their role was to protect Elvis in all ways, Vera resented how they cautioned him to reel in his behavior. They tossed a comb across the table at him and told him to straighten his hair, she said, and when he got up to sing with the band, Red reminded him that the Colonel had prohibited public performances. Even a glass of champagne was off limits, Lamar insisted, and embarrassed him, Vera thought, by suggesting he drink tomato juice instead. Yet ironically, Elvis enjoyed more freedom in Germany than he did at any other time in his life.

  There are conflicting stories about how Elvis and Vera felt about each other, and why they never saw each other after March. Thomas Beyl, a family friend, reported that Ada Tschechowa found Elvis and Vera together upstairs in Vera’s bedroom and kicked him out. And Elvis was quoted in the press as saying, “Sure, I’ve got a new girlfriend . . . I’ve been to visit her family in Munich . . . but it’s just good fun.”

  Yet Vera steadfastly denied that anything romantic occurred between them (“I’ve got tired of all the fantastic stuff they write about Elvis and me—it seems hard to get through with the truth”), and suggested that she was interested only in the publicity value of being photographed with an American rock star. She insisted that her mother asked him to leave because he had “bothered our animals, canaries, dogs, and cats long enough.”

  Besides, he was more interested in one of the Moulin Rouge striptease girls than he was in her, Vera said. And, indeed, according to Andreas Roth, author of The Ultimate Elvis in Munich Book, Elvis had an affair with a Moulin Rouge dancer named Angie Zehetbauer, and took the blonde to a hotel, though probably on a subsequent visit. On their one night together at the Moulin Rouge, Vera apparently left early with Walter Brandin, the songwriter, who acted as her chaperone. Elvis, she said, turned up for breakfast the next morning with “bits of tinsel everywhere, in his hair and his eyebrows.” She asked him where he had been, and he said only, “I stayed there.” He would go back the next night, too.

  When Elvis returned from Munich, he made a number of lengthy phone calls to Anita Wood. But it was clear to Red and Lamar that he was outgrowing her. He also seemed less considerate of Elisabeth Stefaniak, who did everything she could to please him, even improving on his favorite snack—mashed-banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches—by frying them in a skillet like a grilled cheese.

  In late March, Vernon and Elisabeth were hurt in a car crash on the autobahn, returning from a shopping trip at the PX in Frankfurt. Vernon, driving the big Mercedes, attempted to pass another car, when a vehicle pulled out in front of them. He slammed on the brakes, but the Mercedes fishtailed and spun out of control, rolling several times before slamming into a tree and landing on its roof. The car was a total loss. Elisabeth suffered head wounds from broken glass, and at first she couldn’t move, fearing her back was broken. She arrived home on a stretcher.

  It was a terrifying ordeal, and both Elisabeth and Vernon might have been killed. But Elvis’s reaction shook her up almost as much as the wreck. He raced out to the accident scene in his BMW, but later he took her aside. “Foghorn,” he said. “Be straight with me. Were you and my daddy messing around with each other while he was driving the car?”

  Vernon had no romantic interest in Elisabeth, but his relationship with Dee Stanley had escalated from a fling to a full-fledged affair. At first Elvis and Vernon fought about it, and then Elvis realized that his father was lonely and needed company. “Bring her over to the house,” he said.

  But when Vernon did arrive with Dee, they almost always disappeared into his bedroom, right off the living room. Elvis confessed to Anita Wood that he had once peeped through the keyhole. “I have hated Dee ever since then,” he told Anita. Not only did the affair come too soon after Gladys’s death, Elvis thought, but his father also embarrassed him with their antics.

  When Dee was in the throes of sexual pleasure, Lamar reports, she was not a quiet woman. “When they started banging, Dee would start screaming. God, Almighty, she’d scream so loud you could hear her all over the house. Elvis would turn sixteen shades of red. We’d be in the living room, and he would look at me and say, ‘I can’t stand this. It’s driving me crazy!’ Sometimes he’d just go upstairs. Or Vernon would come out of the room about twenty minutes later, and he’d be real cocky, and he’d sit there.

  “One time Elvis said, ‘Daddy, you need to take her in a car or take her out somewhere. Don’t do it in here. Everybody in the house is hearing this.’ But it got worse and worse. One time, they spent over an hour in there, and Elvis had about fifteen people in the house. When Dee started to holler, Elvis got up and started playing the piano so damn loud it made Liberace sound like a paraplegic. He beat that piano to death, man.”

  But the son had learned from the father. When Freddy Bienstock arrived in Bad Nauheim a few months later to help Elvis pick songs for his first postarmy movie, G.I. Blues, he found himself in the middle of a southern gothic novel—he could hear both Elvis and his father having sex in the house.

  In June, after Dee had gone home to Virginia with her three sons, leaving her husband in Germany, Vernon followed her to persuade her to seek a divorce. The relationship had grown so serious that on this same trip, he drove her to Louisville to meet his father, Jessie. Then he returned to Germany and told Elvis they’d decided to marry.

  Red, too, left the country, going home about the same time for good. He had come to Germany with Elvis fresh out of the marines, where he’d spent two years in Spain, and he was tired of military life. But he also complained that Elvis treated him like a “Chinese coolie.” Vernon, with whom Red was constantly at loggerheads over his temper and his habit of getting in fights at Beck’s Bar, gave Red and Lamar only a pittance in spending money—a couple of marks at best, barely enough for a beer—and Elvis refused to do anything about it. Around the time of his departure, Elvis was hospitalized with what was reported to be tonsillitis, though the inside story had it that he suffered carbon monoxide poisoning from a jerry-rigged heater in his jeep.

  In Red’s absence, Elvis got antsy for another of his pals from home, and instructed Lamar to “call Cliff and tell him to get the hell over here.”

  Cliff, being Cliff, accepted Elvis’s plane ticket but took his time getting to Bad Nauheim, flying first to Paris to visit friends and then going on to Munich and staying several weeks. “Where is the son of a bitch?” Elvis asked. Cliff finally showed up in Bad Nauheim and then took off in Elvis’s Volkswagen. He was gone for a month. Eventually he came back and announced, “I’m not going to stay around and shine some fuckin’ shoes.” He took Elvis’s Mercedes 220 and moved in with Currie Grant, a clerk for Air Force Intelligence at Schierstein, near Wiesbaden, for three months.

  Soon Currie and Cliff would be regular fixtures at the parties at the house, along with a smart Chicago street kid named Joe Esposito, part of the Twenty-seventh Artillery. Joe, whose parents had immigrated to America from Calabria, Italy, was friends with the family of Tony Accardo, Chicago’s last great mob boss. He was also a decent touch football player in Elvis’s weekend games, and the man to see for a bit of loan sharking.

  That June, Elvis took off on a fifteen-day furlough that mixed a bit of business and sightseeing with a large sampling of sex. He first returned to Munich, where he checked into the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, and spent his nights at the Moulin Rouge, making time with his favorite dancers, including one named Marianne, who demonstrated a strip routine wearing nothing but an Elvis record. Then along with Rex, Lamar, and Charlie, he took the train from Frankfurt to Paris. There, Freddy Bienstock and his cousin, Jean Aberbach, another of Elvis’s music publishers in Hill & Range, met them at the station. Bienstock and Aberbach, Austrian émigrés, knew Paris well, and gave Elvis and his friends a tour of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. After that, they settled down to discussions of music for his upcoming films—Elvis, now influenced by European songs, wanted a larg
er, more operatic sound—and Elvis gave a press conference in the lounge of the Hotel Prince de Galles. A room service waiter told the press that during Elvis’s stay in a top-floor suite overlooking the Champs-Elysées, young women were seen “going in and out of Monsieur Presley’s suite, in and out, like a door revolving.”

  In the day, Elvis was mobbed on the streets, which boosted his ego and eased his fears about being forgotten. At night, he enjoyed himself at the famous Parisian burlesque houses and nightclubs—Le Bantu, the Folies-Bergère, Carousel, the original Moulin Rouge, Le Café de Paris, and the Lido, with its famous seminude revue featuring the high-kicking, London-based Bluebell Girls, who performed the cancan in “glittering clouds of sequins, ostrich feathers, voluminous headgear, and not a great deal else,” as the New York Times once noted.

  When Elvis took the guys backstage after the first show, Rex was astonished to see girls roaming around naked “without batting an eyelash. I just about fainted at the sight,” he said. Later he learned that Elvis and Lamar had put the girls up to having a little fun with him.

  The Bluebell Girls, considered the most glamorous chorus line in Paris, inspired Elvis to indulge his friends in a smorgasbord of sex.

  “We went through the whole Lido chorus line,” says Lamar. “Same thing at the 4 O’Clock Club. We’d have as many as thirty or thirty-five girls there. You’d get up in the morning and just step over bodies. There were wall-to-wall women everywhere.”

  One late afternoon the stage manager of the Lido called the hotel three times. Lamar answered, half-asleep.

  “We’re ready to begin the first show,” the stage manager said.

  “Go ahead and start,” Lamar told him, and then hung up.

  Shortly after, the phone rang again.

  “We need to start the show!”

  Lamar hung up.

  A third call, frantic now: “The show is starting!”

  “Well, start the damned show!” Lamar said.

  “But you don’t understand, monsieur! You have all our Bluebell Girls!”

  Lamar looked around and realized he was right. Not only were all the Bluebell Girls in the suite, but they were also still asleep. Now, like a determined den mother, Lamar rounded up the guests and called downstairs for four limousines. Suddenly the girls were a whirlwind of high heels and ostrich feathers, hopping down the hallway with one shoe on and trying to zip up their costumes.

  While in Paris, Elvis became especially enamored of dancer Jane Clarke, a Brit, and Nancy Parker, a red-haired American ice skater at the Lido whom he would later see in Las Vegas. But his one disappointment was never meeting Brigitte Bardot. According to Rex Mansfield, he managed to get her phone number and left several messages. But she never called back—she was out of the country making a movie. “Nevertheless, Elvis felt snubbed, as though she should have been there for him,” Rex wrote in his memoir. “ ‘To hell with that bitch!’ he said in frustration.”

  The sheer volume of women with whom Elvis had some kind of relationship, whether sexual or emotional, now bordered on the pathological.

  Waiting for him at home in Bad Nauheim, for example, was twenty-three-year-old Ingrid Sauer, a blond telephone operator who came to his parties and brought her friends. She also posed for tabloid photographers in only a towel and gave interviews as Elvis’s girlfriend. (“His hobby is to see how many times he can get a pellet from an air pistol through the center hole of a gramophone record at five or ten yards,” she reported.)

  But though Ingrid was only a year younger than the twenty-four-year-old Elvis, she was too old for his tastes at the time. “In Germany, Elvis was fascinated with the idea of real young teenage girls, which scared the crap out of all of us,” Lamar says. One was fifteen-year-old Heli Priemel, a dancer Elvis nicknamed “Legs.”

  And perhaps another was fifteen-year-old Siegrid Schutz, an English-speaking German fan who spent practically every day of her three-week summer vacation outside Elvis’s house. Though he had hung a sign out front that read AUTOGRAPHS 7:30–8 P.M., she frequently rang the doorbell and asked to see him.

  Some of the gate watchers, including USO hostess Sue Anderson, got invited in for more than an autograph. Siegrid, however, sometimes got a scolding, since she and a friend would sit waiting in one of Elvis’s cars. Eventually he took the zealous fan and her girlfriend to a party at the house of soldier Rex Harrison.

  After that, Siegrid saw Elvis often. She went with him and the gang to play football and was photographed with him more than any other German girl, both that summer and again in January 1960. She has been described as one of Elvis’s secret loves, perhaps because she kept her dozens of photographs private for more than thirty years.

  However, none of the pictures was taken inside the house, which suggests she was not as intimate with him as some people think. And in the pictures of them together, Elvis looks mostly put upon, as if she has worried him to death.

  Elvis showed considerably more interest in another teenage girl he would meet that September.

  Sergeant Presley helps fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu into Currie Grant’s car, March 2, 1960, as he leaves his rented home for the air base to return to the States. Life magazine would write about their involvement, calling her “The Girl He Left Behind.” Of her childhood, Priscilla has said, “I always knew something extraordinary was going to happen to me.” (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Nineteen

  Priscilla

  On August 15, 1959, fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu arrived in Wiesbaden, Germany, where her stepfather, Air Force Captain Joseph Paul Beaulieu, was about to begin the next phase of his military career with the 1405 Support Squadron. A veteran of World War II, in which he’d served with the marines in Okinawa, Captain Beaulieu had seen much of the world and nearly all of the United States. The family’s last posting was Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, where Priscilla and her younger brother, Don, welcomed another two siblings, first Michelle and then Jeff. (Twins Tim and Tom would be born later.)

  An especially beautiful young child, with china doll features and a turned-up nose, the blue-eyed brunette had been quite the popular girl in her junior high in Del Valle, Texas. A cheerleader, she knew all the latest dance crazes and was crowned queen of the whole school. More important, she had made real friends for the first time in the family’s frequent moves. By the time she was ten, she had gone to six schools, from Connecticut to New Mexico, Texas to Maine, and back. “I knew this would be difficult for her,” Captain Beaulieu said of the transfer, “but we had no choice.”

  “I was crushed,” Priscilla confirmed. “The last thing I wanted was to leave my friends and go off to some frozen foreign country.”

  When Priscilla’s stepfather brought home Elvis’s first LP in March 1956, she liked the music, she said. She loved “Blue Suede Shoes,” but as she would later say, she “didn’t want to be part of the Elvis mania. In fact, I refused to join the Elvis fan club—admission twenty-five cents—when I learned that one member had asked Elvis to autograph her breast. In my preteen mind, that was too risqué. On the other hand, I liked Elvis enough to want to watch him on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

  Just before she left Texas, one of her schoolmates said, “Elvis is in the army over there. Maybe you’ll run into him.”

  “Oh, sure,” Priscilla replied.

  As she predicted, she was miserable in Germany and missed Austin terribly. She had no one to spend time with, she didn’t really know the language, and her mother was occupied with a new baby. But two blocks away, at Paulinenstrasse 7, she found an oasis at the Eagles Club, a pre–World War II mansion converted to an air force community hangout. There she wiled away the hours, listening to the jukebox and writing long letters to her friends back home.

  And then something extraordinary happened, she would later say.

  “One afternoon I was there with my little sister and brother when a serviceman happened to strike up a conversation with me. He was an especially
nice guy who sensed that I was homesick.

  “ ‘Would you like to meet Elvis Presley?’ he asked. ‘Who wouldn’t like to meet Elvis,’ I answered. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. His name was Currie Grant, and he said he and his wife often visited Elvis, who lived forty-five minutes away in the town of Bad Nauheim.”

  The meeting and courtship of twenty-four-year-old Elvis Aaron Presley and fourteen-year-old Priscilla Ann Beaulieu is a beloved part of American cultural mythology: the handsome rock king, grieving for his mother in a faraway land, the beautiful young princess, wise beyond her years, waving forlornly at his departure, only to become the virgin bride, conceiving on her honeymoon and bearing the great man’s only child, a daughter, who at her father’s untimely demise, inherits the kingdom of Graceland.

  Such is the fairy-tale romance of Elvis and Priscilla, as related by the woman so often mistaken for his widow. But as with the Camelot years of Jackie and John Kennedy, another couple who defines a generation, the truth has been rewritten and altered so many times that even many of the participants are not precisely sure what happened, or when. Especially Priscilla.

  In her own book, Elvis and Me, Priscilla writes that when she saw Elvis on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s Stage Show, before even The Ed Sullivan Show, she was sexually attracted to him. She also says that when her friend, Angela, looked at a map and found that Bad Nauheim was close to Weisbaden, Priscilla declared, “I’m going over there to meet Elvis.”

  She was a girl on a mission, then. Photographs show that she had taken it to such extremes, in fact, that after she read that Elvis was smitten with Debra Paget, who everybody said she favored, she began wearing her hair in the exact style of Paget’s in Love Me Tender, replete with long ringlet.

  It wasn’t that Priscilla happened into a situation whereby she was invited to meet Elvis, then, but according to Currie, an Airman First Class assigned to the 497th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron, she approached him at the Eagles Club. As he related in Suzanne Finstad’s biography, Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, it was about five o’clock, and he’d gotten a hamburger at the snack bar and taken it to the last table in the farthest corner so no one would bother him. Then he saw the door open and Priscilla enter. He’d barely gotten a bite down when she began walking toward him.