by Alanna Nash
“He was really obstreperous, this animal. He would pry your mouth open, looking for gum! And he would belly up to the bar and bang his glass, and they would give him hard liquor and he would drink it. Then when he would get tired of it, he would pour it on the floor. Today, that couldn’t happen. Somebody would turn them in for animal abuse, because they shouldn’t have been getting this chimp drunk. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him. But nobody did anything about it, and this was somebody’s rented house with this chimp loose in it.”
In a little while, Elvis invited Yvonne to his bedroom on the pretense of getting away from Scatter. Soon, “there was kissing and hugging and stuff like that,” but it wasn’t particularly passionate, and “there was no sexual relationship at all.” At twenty-five, Yvonne was two years younger than Elvis, yet she felt protective of him, and already the brunette sensed he liked her because she reminded him of Gladys. And so she launched into what she calls her “Mother Craig” lecture.
“I said, ‘You know, Elvis, it’s fine that you brought me here, but this is a dangerous move for you. You’re just lucky I’m the way I am, because you have no idea. You should be very careful who you bring here, because you’re in Hollywood now, and it’s a terrible trap. If you take a girl alone back here in your quarters she can say anything happened—cry rape, scream, carry on—and the courts will say you did it. There will be horrible publicity, and you’ll be in a lot of trouble. Do you do this often? I’m worried about you.’
“And I’m telling you, he sat there saying, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.’ ”
On the way home, she suddenly became overwhelmed with embarrassment. After all, he’d been in the business for years and knew all the pitfalls. But “it did occur to me that he needed talking to. He had such innocence that I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,’ and he did encourage this sort of motherly interest in him.” Besides, “I had seen some of the women the henchmen had in the house, and I thought, ‘I know where they picked up those girls, and I know what they have on their minds, too.’ ”
However, before she left that night, Yvonne and Elvis found common ground. She mentioned that when she was a teenager, before ballet dancing led to acting, she thought about going to medical school. She’d had her Gray’s Anatomy and Cecil-Loeb since she was sixteen, she said, and to her surprise, “He dragged out medical books and started showing me.”
Scooting close to her, Elvis paged through his Physicians’ Desk Reference.
“Do you have any pills in your house that you can’t identify?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Well, if you do, this book will tell you what every one of them is.”
“I thought he was interested in medicine, but now I think he was interested in what you can take to keep yourself skinny, and what you can take that won’t be contraindicated with another drug and kill you.”
Elvis was, indeed, studying to see what kinds of pills he could take and in what quantity to keep thin, stay up all night, and then rest enough to be bright-eyed on the set. Even so, he made some near-fatal errors.
According to Alan Fortas’s memoir, Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood, one occurred that November 1962 on the drive home in the motor home. Elvis and the guys had gone to Las Vegas when filming wrapped on It Happened at the World’s Fair, staying up day and night to catch the shows, including Johnnie Ray at the Hacienda.
“Gene was wired from all the pills he was taking, plus all the extra that Elvis had given him. In fact, he’d been so wired for three days and two nights on speed that he couldn’t sleep.
“We were in Arizona, and it was freezing outside. Elvis was driving the bus, and he gave Gene 500 milligrams of Demerol, a synthetic opiate. Gene took the little white pill and waited to fall asleep. But forty-five minutes later, when he was still stoked to the skies, Elvis gave him another hit. An hour went by, and Gene was still bouncing off the clouds—trying to fix stuff on the bus, working on things under Elvis’s feet—trying to do everything, he was so out of it.
“Finally, Elvis told him, ‘Look, Gene, go back in my bedroom, man, and get some sleep. Those pills will kick in before long.’ So Gene went back in the bedroom, and after a while, Elvis told Billy to go check on him. In the meantime, Gene had opened the window, and a terrible draft had blown in on him. So when Billy tried to wake Gene up and couldn’t—the stuff had finally hit him—he felt Gene’s face, and it was just ice-cold. Gene’s heartbeat had probably slowed down, and his breathing, too. But mostly he was cold from all that air coming in on him.
“Well, Billy just freaked out. It hadn’t been that long since he’d found Junior dead in his bed, and he thought it had happened again. Billy came running back up to the front of the bus, yelling, ‘Elvis! Elvis! I think Gene’s dead! I shouted in his ear and he didn’t move a muscle, and he’s cold to the touch!’ Elvis pulled over to the side of the road real quick, and he had his seat belt on, and he jumped up so fast the seat belt almost cut his damn legs off.
“Of course, we all ran back there, but Gene wasn’t dead. He was just cold from the window being open. He wasn’t coming around, though, that was true, so we got him out and dragged him along the side of the highway. He was okay. He’d just been up for three days, and he had two big hits of Demerol in him. It scared the shit out of Elvis, though. He said, ‘Goddamn, Gene, I ought to kill your ass!’ ”
Two months earlier, while on the film set, Elvis gave an interview to Lloyd Shearer of Parade magazine, in which he mentioned that he often read medical texts and would have liked to become a doctor. He also talked about how males seemed to dislike him when he started out, but that his stint in the army changed that, along with “the fact that there’s never anything about my thinking that I’m a lover or a ladies’ man. I’ve never looked at, or thought of myself, as being a lady-killer or anything like that. And I’ve never shown it, that I know of.” Finally, he talked about friends, saying, it was “important to surround yourself with people who can give you a little happiness.”
Elvis thought he’d found more than that with Priscilla, who was coming for Christmas after all, even though the Beaulieus had never been apart for the holidays.
“At first, I said no,” Ann Beaulieu remembers. “But when I saw how much it meant to her, I finally convinced my husband. It wasn’t easy.”
Vernon and Dee, who now had a home of their own near Graceland, flew to New York’s Idlewild Airport to meet the passenger flying under the name of “Priscilla Fisher.” They accompanied her to Memphis, and then Elvis asked her to wait at his father’s house on Hermitage Road.
“I want to drive her through the gates,” he said. “I want to see her face when she sees Graceland for the first time.”
He had decorated the grounds with a life-size nativity scene and Santa’s prancing reindeer, edging the walkways in blue lights for his song “Blue Christmas.”
“When we drove through those gates and I saw the Christmas lights and glittering decorations on those long white columns,” Priscilla later said, “I thought I was living inside a dream. Except the dream had come true. I had come home with Elvis.”
Elvis and Ann-Margret’s love affair on Viva Las Vegas, in the summer of 1963, carried over into real life. “It was a very strong relationship, very intense,” she has said. He gave her a round bed. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nungin, Thumper, and Bug
“The first time I saw Priscilla,” remembered Elvis’s cousin Patsy Presley, “she looked like a little doll. She was exquisite. She was standing in the stairwell and Elvis came out of my grandmother’s room. He was so proud of Priscilla. His eyes were filled with love.”
He had just told Vernon’s mother she was there.
“Come on,” Elvis said to Priscilla, taking her hand. “Someone’s waiting to see you.” Then he led her in to Minnie Mae, who sat in a chair, a yellow crocheted throw on her lap. She wore dark glasses to keep out the
light.
Priscilla hadn’t seen her since Germany, and the old lady hugged her and asked her to sit down and chat. She had a lot to talk about, especially Elvis’s dislike of Dee Presley. The more she talked, the more she dipped her snuff, and pretty soon, she was telling Priscilla to call her “Dodger,” as Elvis did. “I feel like I can confide in you,” Priscilla said. “You can, young’un,” Grandma soothed. “You’re family now.”
The teenager had brought along little gifts for everyone that Christmas, especially Elvis, to whom she gave an ornate three-tiered wooden box for his cigarillos. In return, Elvis gave her a diamond ring and a puppy, which she named Honey. But he also gave her something else: two 500-milligram Placidyls, since she was jet-lagged from her trip across the ocean, and hadn’t slept, trying to keep up with Elvis. “These pills will relax you,” he told her.
Two days later, she was still out. “It scared the hell out of Vernon and Grandma,” remembered Billy Smith, who thought Elvis would have learned his lesson from Gene’s episode in the motor home. “They wanted to get a doctor in there, but Elvis said no, he’d just walk her around. But that didn’t do any good, either. She finally woke up on her own.”
Priscilla opened her eyes to see Grandma standing over her, her craggy features bent into a frown. Then Minnie Mae breathed a sigh of relief and chastised her grandson for overmedicating his guest.
“How long have I been asleep?” Priscilla asked.
Elvis told her.
“Two days! I’ve missed Christmas!”
“Naw,” he said, “you haven’t missed anything. The fun’s just starting!”
“More and more,” Priscilla says, “I was getting used to Elvis’s notion of fun.” On New Year’s Eve, he watched her drink four double screwdrivers through a straw and never cautioned her that she would be sick in the ladies’ room afterward.
Most nights, he merely scared her silly, taking her on all his usual thrill-seeking activities, including the killer roller derby parties, which Priscilla found unnerving. Back at Lauderdale Courts, he had climbed the tall sign outside Billie Wardlaw’s window to get her attention, and now he showed off for Priscilla at the Fairgrounds. He played a trick on her on the roller coaster, getting out at the top when it teetered for a minute, making her think he’d fallen to his death. He just wanted to see her face when the car returned without him. Then he broke into a big laugh and grabbed her and held her.
Patsy could tell right off that Elvis acted differently with Priscilla than he did with his other girlfriends. He was less intense and more relaxed. “You got the idea she was his one true love.”
Other of his relatives also saw it. Billy Smith remembers Elvis would say, “Here she comes. Isn’t she beautiful?” And Ricky Stanley, Elvis’s stepbrother, saw how excited Elvis was that she was coming to visit, that he was “like a fifteen-year-old kid with his first crush. It was like prom night.”
Marty Lacker, who had temporarily left the group to work for WHBQ Radio, got another impression when he stopped by the house soon after Priscilla’s arrival. Elvis was sitting out on the front steps, which was unusual for him, and he was up early, which was also out of character.
“We sat and talked for about an hour, and then I said, ‘Well, I’ll see you later. I’ve got to go.’ And Elvis said, ‘No, no, wait a minute. I want to show you something.’ We talked on a while, and then the front door opened, and out came this girl, all primped up. She had her hair dyed black and in a beehive, and she was made up like a painted doll, with all this mascara and bright eye shadow.
“Elvis said, ‘This is Priscilla, from Germany.’ I looked at him and smiled, and gave him a nod, like, ‘Yeah, she’s really pretty.’ He showed her off like he was showing off a new car. She was his trophy, his new toy.”
Barbara Little, George Klein’s girlfriend, remembers how nervous Priscilla looked that Christmas, sitting in the kitchen in bobbie socks, a kick-pleat skirt, and cardigan sweater. She was filing her nails and trying to mix with a group of adults she didn’t know.
And, in fact, Priscilla wasn’t sure where she fit into Elvis’s life. She only knew she was hurt that he flirted with other girls in front of her on their nightly outings. But in a pattern that would continue through their relationship, he always turned it around on her: “He’d accuse me; he’d say that I was just jealous; I was inventing things; I was confusing friendliness with flirting. His accusations were made with such skill that I’d wind up apologizing to him.”
She was ambivalent about his lifestyle, too. All these people were always around, and except for the time they spent in the bedroom, it seemed like Elvis preferred the company of the guys to her. On her last trip over, she’d gotten so bored watching him play touch football that she took off in his limousine and drove around the field just to amuse herself.
In truth, the relationship was mind-boggling for both of them, and Elvis wrestled with all kinds of conflicting emotions. Deep down, he yearned for lasting love and respected the institution of marriage, but at the same time, he didn’t want to be tied down to one girl. There was also the matter of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood approaching his twenty-eighth birthday with an underage girl in his bed. He knew, consciously or not, that he was emotionally still a child, and so the fact that he was involved with a minor didn’t feel wrong at all. In fact, it felt right. But then that got confusing, too. In his schizophrenic choice of gifts that Christmas, as Suzanne Finstad noted in Child Bride, he defined the relationship as both older lover–Lolita (the diamond ring), and father–daughter (the puppy).
All he knew for sure was how right Priscilla looked at Graceland, and how his mother would have claimed her as her own, the way Dodger did. In fact, he thought of his mother all the time he was around Priscilla. He patted her all the time, called her Nungin (young’un in baby talk), and sometimes also Satnin’.
After she’d been there a few days, Elvis thought he had to have her there all the time. In early January 1963, on the morning she was supposed to go home, he told her he loved her, that he didn’t want to let her go. They were sitting in his upstairs office.
“You’ll finish your senior year in Memphis,” he said.
“My parents will never agree to that.”
“I’ll talk them into it.”
“You can’t.”
And he couldn’t. At least not yet.
So Priscilla flew on back to Frankfurt. The two moaned together on the phone, and he redoubled his efforts to persuade the Beaulieus to let her move to Memphis.
Priscilla, too, worked on her parents, especially on her stepfather. On January 5, she wrote to Elvis to say, “I’ve been talking with my dad and a decision hasn’t yet been made. But still, he hasn’t said no, so at least I know there’s a chance. Like you said, his main concern is [my] living in a strange place and where I will stay.”
In mid-January, before he left for Hollywood to start his next film, Fun in Acapulco, Elvis phoned the captain for an extended talk. He understood Priscilla’s grades hadn’t been that good—she had failed algebra and German, and barely passed English and history, altering her report card to make a D minus look like a B minus—when Elvis was stationed in Germany. Now she was failing English, too. But if she came to live in Memphis, he would see to it that she got a first-class education at an all-girls Catholic institution, Immaculate Conception High School, where she would wear a uniform like everyone else. And she would live with his father and his new wife at their house, not at Graceland, so she would be properly chaperoned.
“I was enormously resistant to the idea of Cilla going to live in Memphis,” Paul Beaulieu has gone on the record to say. “As far as I was concerned, it just was not going to happen.”
But once more, Priscilla’s mother was the key. “You hear about people with magnetic personalities,” Ann Beaulieu has said. “No matter how strongly you might oppose his position, he would charm you over to his side. He did it by being persistent, and also, to a large degree, by being sweet.”
And so little by little, Paul Beaulieu began to think seriously about Elvis’s offer. “Elvis pledged to care for her with absolute devotion. The intimation was that one day they’d marry.”
In March, Captain Beaulieu and Priscilla flew to Los Angeles, where Elvis was still working on Fun in Acapulco. They stayed at the Bel Air Sands motel, and Elvis picked them up every day in his Rolls-Royce or the far more ostentatious “solid gold” Cadillac and took them sightseeing, driving from one end of Los Angeles to another—the Hollywood Hills, Sunset Boulevard, and the Pacific Coast Highway. Captain Beaulieu was impressed, and in between the touring and the studio visits, the two men continued to discuss Priscilla’s education and living quarters if she were to move to Memphis.
Paul Beaulieu was a military man, but he was also a businessman—he had earned a degree in business administration in Texas—and he had pointed questions about precisely how Elvis saw the financial arrangements. But Elvis had all the answers, and before the captain got on a plane back to Germany, he took Priscilla to Memphis, where he delivered her over to Vernon’s care.
“I kissed my father good-bye and thanked him for trusting me and Elvis,” Priscilla wrote. “It was now out of my hands. My new life had begun.”
At the time—only five years after Jerry Lee Lewis had created a scandal by marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin—the arrangement was so unorthodox and threatening to Elvis’s career that he would lie about it to the local press. That spring, he told a reporter from the Commercial Appeal who spotted Elvis and Priscilla together in Chenault’s parking lot that she was the daughter of a military officer who “sent her ahead because she wanted to graduate on time.” He also implied that her family was not far behind.
Yet Priscilla’s stepfather seemed completely nonchalant about discussing the arrangement with others. Phillip Barber, who had gotten to know Elvis on Audubon Drive in 1956 during Natalie Wood’s visit, was in the air force by 1965 and had a staff officer’s job in Operations Plans at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento, California. One day, he was in casual conversation with a newly minted major named Joseph Paul Beaulieu (“My boss called him Joe”), whom he saw and talked with almost daily. Major Beaulieu reviewed war plans for active duty units engaged in flying missions in and out of Southeast Asia, as well as contingency plans posed by the intelligence community.