by Alanna Nash
“Hi,” she said, “I understand you know Elvis.” Currie was deflated. A married man who valued his wife and family more than anything, LaVern Currie Grant was also a sex addict, a fellow, as Finstad quoted him, “just in overdrive when it came to sex . . . I craved it all the time.” He had no compunction about fooling around on his wife, and he had already seen Priscilla at the club and wanted her. He had hoped she wanted him, too.
But he played along, wondering how he could work it to his advantage.
“Sure do,” he said.
“Well, I sure would like to meet him.”
“So would a lot of other girls, but sit down and we’ll talk about it.”
Currie, a part-time manager of the Eagles Club, ran a weekly variety show called “Hit Parade” for the Air Force. He’d gotten to know Elvis through Cliff Gleaves, who Elvis had just brought over to Germany. Cliff, a sometime rockabilly singer, harbored dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian and promised Currie an introduction to Elvis in exchange for work.
Once Cliff moved in with Currie and his wife, Carol, he and Currie often frequented a swimming pool, where Currie, a photographer, liked to take pictures of beautiful women. And there, says Lamar Fike, is where Currie and Cliff both met Priscilla, after she had been in Germany for about a week and a half.
“Currie was taking pictures of her,” Lamar says. “Cliff described her to Elvis, and Elvis told Cliff to have Currie bring her over.”
No matter precisely how Priscilla and Currie first began talking about Elvis, everyone agrees on how she looked the night Currie and Carol picked her up for the drive from Wiesbaden to Bad Nauheim. She had on a blue-and-white sailor outfit—a middy blouse with a wide skirt over a crinoline—and white socks. It was Sunday, September 13, 1959.
Captain Beaulieu, who had met Currie and knew his commanding officer, had given his approval as long as Priscilla would be chaperoned. He reminded the Grants that she had classes the next day at the H. H. Arnold American Military High School, sponsored by the U.S. military, and that Priscilla should be home by midnight.
She was nervous on the drive, but when they arrived at the house in Bad Nauheim, Priscilla drew on all her experience as Queen of Del Valle Junior High and transformed herself into a model of sophistication and mystery.
The Grants passed by the predictable group of fans gathered at the gate and brought Priscilla into the house through the front door. Vernon was there, of course, as was Minnie Mae, and Lamar, and Elisabeth. They ran into Rex in the hall and introduced him to Priscilla.
Elvis was in the living room, wearing a red sweater and tan slacks, sitting leisurely in an armchair, a cigarillo dangling from his lips. Priscilla, who had waited for this moment since she was ten, stood tentatively behind Currie until he reached behind and took her hand. Then he pulled her up beside him. “Elvis,” Currie said, “this is Priscilla—”
Currie had started to say more, but before he got it out, Elvis was on his feet. “If you could have seen his face!” Currie remembered in Child Bride. “He jumped out of that chair like he was sitting on a hot plate. I had never seen him react to any girl like that—and I’d seen him meet at least fifteen beautiful girls. He started bouncing off the walls!”
He asked her name, but out of nervousness—he already knew it. Currie had told him then, and Cliff had told him, and Lamar had even gone to check her out before Currie brought her to the house. “I told Elvis, ‘She’s as cute as she can be. But God Almighty, she’s fourteen years old! We’ll end up in prison for life!’ I watched that from the very beginning with abject fear.”
Gladys had always told Elvis to beware of a blue-eyed girl. But now that he had seen her, there was no turning back. Petite, demure, dark haired, with deep-set eyes, she so matched his ideal fantasy, as Finstad wrote, that it was as if he had designed her himself. Not only did she resemble Debra Paget, his unrequited love, but as with Debra, there was something about her face that matched his childhood memory of his mother when she was slim and vibrant. And, of course, at fourteen, she was almost certainly a virgin, another of Elvis’s aphrodisiacs. “She’s young enough that I can train her any way I want,” he later told Rex, practically bubbling over with enthusiasm.
According to her memoir, Priscilla’s account of that evening differs greatly from Currie’s recollection. After Currie introduced them, the airman stepped away, leaving them alone, and she and Elvis sat down to get acquainted. He asked her if she went to school, and when she said yes, he said, “What are you, about a junior or senior in high school?” She blushed, she wrote, and said nothing, not wanting to reveal how young she really was.
“Well?” he persisted.
“Ninth.”
Elvis looked baffled. “Ninth what?”
“Grade,” she whispered.
“Ninth grade,” he said and started laughing. “Why, you’re just a baby.”
She was miffed, and he could see it. “Well,” he said, “seems the little girl has spunk.” Then he gave her “that charming smile of his,” she wrote, “and all my resentment just melted away.”
They made small talk a little longer, and then he walked to the piano, playing “Rags to Riches,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and “End of the Rainbow,” before launching into a hard-pounding Jerry Lee Lewis impersonation.
She didn’t applaud, she wrote, because she had noticed a life-size poster of a half-nude Brigitte Bardot on the wall, and “she was the last person I wanted to see, with her fulsome body, pouting lips, and wild mane of tousled hair.” It made her feel young and out of place.
But quickly, she noticed that Elvis vied for her attention, that the more disinterested she appeared, the harder he tried to impress her. He soon took her into the kitchen, where Grandma was frying up a pound of bacon, and Elvis devoured five bacon sandwiches, all slathered with mustard.
As he ate—Priscilla was too on edge to think about food—he pumped her for information about who the kids were listening to back home. “You,” she said, because she could see “he was nervous about losing his popularity.” They talked about Fabian and Ricky Nelson for a while, and then he asked her about herself.
“What kind of music do you like listening to?” he asked.
“I love Mario Lanza.”
“You’re kidding!” he said, both because he loved opera, and because Lanza was the uncle of Dolores Hart. “How do you know about Mario Lanza?”
Priscilla told him she adored his album The Student Prince.
“That’s my favorite,” Elvis told her, and they just seemed to click.
“He thought I had the taste of someone older than fourteen,” she says.
She could tell he missed his mother, missed Memphis, and was looking for a tie back to his fans in the States. And he seemed younger in his G.I. haircut.
“I found him extremely vulnerable and sweet. He had beautiful manners and an open heart. There was nothing false about him.”
All too soon, Currie came in and pointed to his watch. Couldn’t she stay a little while longer? Elvis asked. Priscilla didn’t take it as a sexual come-on, she said later, but rather a “request of someone eager for companionship.” But Currie said no, that he had made a promise to Captain Beaulieu.
“I felt like Cinderella, knowing that when my curfew came, all this magic would end,” she wrote. Then Elvis casually mentioned that maybe she could come back another night. “Though I wanted to more than anything in the world,” she said, “I didn’t really believe it would happen.”
When Currie finally got her home, her parents were up waiting. Fog had delayed them another two hours, she said. But she assured her folks that Elvis was a total gentleman.
The events of so long ago are often blurry in memory. While Priscilla was still there that first night, he walked into the kitchen alone to get a cold drink, Elisabeth would recall, and she could see he was enchanted. He had a glazed-over look, and he had everyone peek through the door at his guest, as if she were some exotic creature. “She looks just
like a beautiful little angel, doesn’t she?” he said to the room. Elisabeth agreed. “She reminded me of a painting, because she was flawless.”
From there, the story turns into a wildly diverging narrative, Currie Grant offering a far more candid and realistic rendering of the events than the sketchy details Priscilla recounts in her memoir. As reported in Child Bride, Elvis went back out into the living room, and when Currie and Carol walked out to join them ten minutes later, “He had Priscilla backed up against the wall, kissing her.” By eight-thirty, they were upstairs in his bedroom, according to several people in the house. Priscilla would confirm it many years later to Mike Edwards, a post-Elvis boyfriend, though her own book never mentions such activity on the first night.
“He just took her by the hand, went up the stairs, and said, ‘We’ll be down later,’ ” Currie remembered in Child Bride. “And she just went right with him.”
That’s when Currie began to worry. He’d seen Elvis take many girls upstairs and then lose all track of time. It wasn’t until 1:00 or 1:30 A.M., that they emerged, Elvis holding Priscilla’s hand until she got to the steps. “Bring her back, Currie,” Elvis said, and Currie, hurrying to get her into the car with Carol, called back, “I’ll try.” Then the nervous airman sped off to face Captain Beaulieu.
When Priscilla left, Elvis continued to rave about her, telling Rex he had “been looking for someone like that all of his life.”
Charlie Hodge and Joe Esposito, who both insisted they were there that night, though others dispute it, reported similar statements from Elvis.
“He looked at me and he said, ‘Charlie, did you see the structure of her face? It’s like everything I’ve ever looked for in a woman.’ He was just enraptured, looking at her.”
And to Joe, who agreed that “she was so beautiful, you could not take your eyes off her,” Elvis said, “She’s just unbelievable.” Joe already understood his deeper meaning. Naturally, says Joe, “He was attracted to women who reminded him of his mother, as Priscilla [did] with the dark hair and the beautiful eyes like his mother had when she was young.”
That night, Elvis would transfer all of his symbolic feelings for his mother, his twin, and for Debra Paget onto Priscilla. Later he would tell her he knew at that moment that she was his “twin soul,” his destiny.
“It’s amazing to me the timing of Elvis meeting Priscilla,” says Peter O. Whitmer. “Boom! Gladys dies. Elvis goes to Germany and puts Gladys’s death as far behind him as he can. And then what happens? Bam! He runs into Currie Grant and Priscilla. And the dynamic has everything to do with Gladys’s death.”
In a loose analogy, Whitmer explains, Elvis became Gladys to Priscilla’s Elvis, in an attempt to replicate and work through his trauma. Subconsciously, Elvis would perform a lot of the functions for Priscilla that Gladys had performed for him, allowing him to fall back into a more relaxed state of mind. “He found himself a little Elvis-like sylph, and he became the owner of it, the control of it, the mother, the father, the Holy Ghost. Everything.”
But if it were a cosmic moment for Elvis, strangely it was not the same for Priscilla. She did find him even more handsome in person than he appeared in his photographs and in the movies. However, she did not share Elvis’s feelings of love at first sight, or that their meeting was the answer to a prayer. “No,” she admitted later to Suzanne Finstad. “There was definitely a pull there—the energy was very electric—but not in the sense that this is it.”
Many years later, she would see that their attraction was based on fantasy, each looking to the other to replace someone they had lost. It wasn’t really Priscilla he was in love with, but an idealized manifestation of his yearning. And Priscilla may have only been fourteen, but she, too, had a giant void to fill. Only one year earlier, she had made a shattering discovery, as Finstad wrote in Child Bride, that threw her into an identity crisis she hardly knew how to handle.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 24, 1945, Priscilla arrived in the world as a cross between Brooke Shields and JonBenet Ramsey, an arresting and exquisitely beautiful child who seemed older than her years. Pampered by her mother, who entered her in baby contests and children’s beauty pageants, she was soon an ultrafeminine, prissy child, “the sort of little girl who would be in ruffles and lace, and would lift the corner of her skirt to curtsy” says Suzanne Finstad, who interviewed her subject at length for her biography Child Bride, first published in 1997. “Priscilla was the perfect name for her.”
She was also a born coquette, Finstad wrote, projecting a sexual quality by six or seven that was disturbing for one so young and beyond her ability to even understand what she conveyed. Her mother, Ann, a former photographer’s model, fostered and reinforced her behavior, buying her showy cowgirl outfits and fancy dresses with coordinated purses, shoes, and hats. In the family’s home movies, she waved to the camera and, tilting her head like a movie star, looked akin to a modern Shirley Temple.
From the beginning, she was a relentless flirt with boys several grades ahead of her, but by twelve and a half, she was also attracting grown men, especially soldiers on the base. She worked at getting their attention, too. “She was kinda like a little honeypot,” said her Texas neighbor, Mary Clements, in Child Bride. She obsessed on her looks—opening her compact more than her schoolbooks—and manipulated situations with boys and men. She’d sit out on the lawn, for example, watching the older boys playing football—and watch them watching her.
However, Priscilla’s loveliness, and the way she used it to create an effect on others, was only the first of four interrelated molders of her personality. The second was the air force itself. In dictating that families were always on the move, military life created a lack of emotional security for children, who felt no sense of roots or permanence other than their ties to their parents and siblings. It was as if they were in the foxhole together.
Growing up in a military family, Priscilla learned early to close ranks, to never get too close to outsiders. Since the military is always on the move—either her family would be moving, or her friends’ families—it would just be easier not to make attachments outside of the clan. Young Priscilla understood not to trust anyone outside of the service, either, as the military runs on secrets. The family’s unwritten rule dictated that it was better to suppress emotions, then, especially since the military despises weakness and prizes control, and giving in to emotional displays and feelings could lead to a loss of that control.
Priscilla had the very model of control right in her own home in the form of her authoritarian military stepfather, Paul Beaulieu. The third integral influence on Priscilla’s personality, Captain Beaulieu maintained a brutal, Draconian presence in the household (a family member describes him as “one tough dude”), ruling the house with an iron fist and inspiring occasional terror in both his wife and his children.
“My father was very strict,” Priscilla told an Amsterdam television interviewer in 1992. “I’m hoping today we have a better [way of] bringing up our children. He was doing the best he could. He was very military. A disciplinarian. We were to be seen and not heard. We were to do as he said. It was kind of the old way, I think.”
Colonel Eugene Desaulniers, who served with Captain Beaulieu when he returned to the States in the 1960s, presents a different picture. In fact, the captain seems almost a different person in the eyes of his fellow officers. Known as Joe in the military and Paul at home, he was “a great guy, a fun guy,” says his friend. “He was a very hard worker, and committed to doing his job. But he was also very sociable and had a good personality. We used to have a lot of laughs at work.”
Captain Beaulieu, who would eventually retire as a Lieutenant Colonel, was a typical family man, according to Colonel Desaulniers. “I think he was a little strict with his kids, but I wouldn’t call him rigid. When you have children in the military and you are constantly moving them, it becomes even more important that you set some path for them to follow. Career military people work hard to keep
their families together. It isn’t like you live in the same neighborhood for thirty years, so you make your home life much more cohesive. I don’t think he was a heavy disciplinarian, but he made his kids tow the line. We all did.”
Priscilla grew up always wanting to please him, both to earn his praise and to mute her own fear, for Paul Beaulieu was said to be a heavy drinker, a fact he struggled to conceal from the world. Colonel Desaulniers questions that, too, saying his friend was “a very good social drinker, but I wouldn’t ever characterize him as a hard drinker. In those days, we were all classified as hard drinkers.” But when he did drink, the captain’s attention sometimes made Priscilla uncomfortable, she told Elvis. “He said Priscilla said her father gave her the creeps staring at her,” Marty Lacker remembers.
That would be enough of a psychological trauma for any young girl, but at age thirteen, Priscilla stumbled upon a family secret, which she discussed with Finstad in Child Bride. She was babysitting one night for her siblings while her parents were at a party. Once the children were asleep, she got bored and began snooping around, rummaging through things. In the back of her parents’ closet, she found an old trunk and felt compelled to explore it.
As she opened it, Priscilla told Finstad, “I had this unbelievable feeling.” The first thing she saw was an American flag, folded in the shape to present to widows of servicemen. It was a sacred thing, almost, not to be disturbed, like a grave, and Priscilla kept thinking, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” She knew the trunk was private, that she shouldn’t go any farther. But she did, of course, and under the flag she found a cache of yellowed love letters. She quickly flipped through them, fearing her parents would burst through the door any minute and catch her, and saw that they were between Rooney, her mother’s nickname in her youth, and a boy named Jimmy.