Child Bride (11 page)

Not only was Priscilla Beaulieu not a virgin on her wedding night, as she would later claim, but she was not a virgin when she
met
Elvis Presley, according to Currie Grant. She had entered into a Faustian pact to meet Elvis, and sex with Currie—the loss of her virginity—was the price he exacted.

According to Currie, Priscilla did not bleed during penetration, raising the question of whether she had already “gone all the way,” perhaps with one of the faster older boys she associated with when she was in eighth grade. Currie doubted it, since she seemed so “green,” but it might explain her willingness to have intercourse to further the Elvis dream, since she wouldn’t have been a virgin anyway.

Priscilla vehemently denied Currie’s account in May of 1996: “May God strike me dead if that ever happened to me. I am telling you on the life of my son and my daughter, that never happened. This man is a liar!” Priscilla maintained she did not go out with Currie even once on the guise of going to a movie.

Informed of Priscilla’s denial, Currie stood his ground. “Her story was for her family and her good name. She wants to try to keep it clean. She knows about that, after being with Elvis all those years and through all the publicity people she’s been around. She wants to control the things around her life. And Scientology. She can’t do that with me. Did I have intercourse with Priscilla? Yes, I had intercourse with Priscilla. I had intercourse with Priscilla
more than once
that last night. But not after she started going with Elvis.”

Priscilla and Currie fought over this point in their face-to-face encounter at my home on May 14, 1996:

No one but Priscilla and Currie could know what happened between them. Currie did not tell anyone he was trysting with Priscilla that summer (she
was
fourteen); just as predictably, Priscilla’s parents denied that she left the house with Currie four times to see a movie. “Unfortunately, it’s going to be her and her parents’ word against mine, regarding the four times that I went to pick her up.”

As before, with the who-asked-whom-to-meet-Elvis debate, there are gaps and inconsistencies in Priscilla’s version. She generally claims that she was introduced to Elvis as soon as she got to Germany—“within two weeks,” according to a 1996 interview. Yet more recently she said that Currie watched her for three weeks before he invited her to meet Elvis. In a third version, in her book, she recounted that Currie watched her for
several days
, invited her to meet Elvis, and then spent several weeks with her
parents
before the meeting occurred. All of these versions cannot be true, proving that Priscilla was either seriously confused or covering up the truth.

Perhaps Priscilla insisted that Currie took her to meet Elvis as soon as she got to Wiesbaden because she didn’t want anyone to know she was fooling around with him for several weeks to persuade him to introduce her. According to two of her own versions of the story, there was unaccounted-for time. What were she and Currie doing during those undefined several weeks between their meeting and the introduction to Elvis?

There is, once again, convincing corroboration of Currie’s account. Priscilla later discussed Currie Grant with Mike Edwards, her lover of seven years. She told Mike that she and Currie created a ruse for her parents of going to the movies, but instead drove into the Wiesbaden hills. “Currie met her, and he was kind of like pursuing her himself,” Mike recalled Priscilla telling him. “And then that didn’t go anywhere, and they had a little
altercation in the backseat of his car, I think. And he said, ‘Well, all right, I want to introduce you to somebody,’ and that’s what took her to Elvis.”

By Priscilla’s own account to Mike, she and Currie
did
sneak to the hills and engage in some kind of sexual activity, which led to an introduction to Elvis. The aspect that did not make sense to Mike was that Priscilla depicted herself as unwilling. “I’m a man and she’s a woman,” Mike said. “I know her, I know me, I know the
situation.… I
sensed—just circumstances—that it was, something wasn’t—there was denial.” Mike also thought that Priscilla did have intercourse with Currie. “I always believed it, and she always denied it. But the story that she laid out to me doesn’t add up. Doesn’t add up.”

The other question begging to be asked is why Currie Grant would
lie
about having intercourse at twenty-seven with a minor of fourteen—an act that was against the law. As Mike Edwards noted, “I don’t think he would
say
it—I don’t think he would be so foolish as to say something like that—if it wasn’t true.”

In retrospect, Currie was not proud of his behavior. “I can’t believe I risked my marriage and my career in the air force to fool around with a fourteen-year-old girl. It was crazy! My wife and my family were the most important things in the world to me. I was just in overdrive when it came to sex. I was crazy about it in those days; I craved it all the time. I was a sex addict. Anyway, that’s the way it was.”

T
he exact date of Priscilla Beaulieu’s historic meeting with Elvis Presley is mired in mystery, mostly of her own making. Since she obscured the sequence of events leading to the introduction, it is impossible to pinpoint the date by her accounts. In any event, she claimed not to know, or remember, the date on which she met Elvis Presley, a circumstance that seems odd in itself. What teenage girl would
not
record the day she met the most famous rock star in the world? Unless Priscilla did not
want
the date revealed—because it might refute her version of the story.

Priscilla asserted that she met Elvis a few weeks after she got to Germany, but sources other than Currie Grant claimed that the meeting was much later. “That’s not what I recall,” stated classmate Helen Delahunt, who remembered Priscilla dating a friend of Helen’s brother before she met Elvis Presley. Another classmate, who lived down the street from Priscilla that fall, also remembered her dating a boy from school
before
she met Elvis. Since the first day of school was September 10, 1959, and Priscilla met Currie when the Beaulieus arrived in Germany in mid-August or so, she
had
to have been dallying with Currie for at least several weeks prior to the famous introduction.

Currie and Carol Grant placed the meeting sometime in September,
probably on a Sunday, possibly the 13th; a few members of the entourage at Elvis’s house in Bad Nauheim thought it might have been as late as October. These recollections fitted the surrounding circumstances.

Priscilla, true to her covert nature, did not tell a soul apart from her family that she was meeting Elvis Presley, the fantasy she had nurtured since she was ten years old. Then again, she had few friends to tell. Like Elvis, she was a loner, and lonely, in emotional exile in Germany; he, missing his mother who had just died, she mourning the father she had just discovered.

Carol and Currie Grant picked Priscilla up at the Beaulieu home around 7:00
P.M.
The fourteen-year-old was chewing bubble gum, Carol remembered, and wearing an old-fashioned middy blouse and a wide skirt over a crinoline. Currie’s distinct recollection was that school had begun, for Paul Beaulieu made a point of mentioning that it was a school night. Like Cinderella, Priscilla had a twelve o’clock curfew. That was the only admonition given.

With that, the odd ménage à trois—Currie, Carol, and Priscilla—took off on the autobahn for the hour’s drive from Wiesbaden to Bad Nauheim, where Private Presley had taken a house. Priscilla, Currie recalled, was delirious, “chattering like a little magpie: ‘Do you think he’ll like me? Does my hair look okay? Is my outfit all right?’ Carol and I both told her she shouldn’t talk like a little schoolgirl—he’s not going to like it, and we’ll be out of there in an hour. We both worked on her all the way up there.”

When, around eight o’clock, they pulled up in front of 14 Goethestrasse, the ordinary-looking two-story German house Elvis was occupying, a miraculous transformation occurred. Priscilla stepped out of the car, removed her bubble gum, and became a different person. Carol Grant was mystified by her sudden composure. “My God, if it was James Dean and
I
was fourteen, I don’t know how I would have handled it, but she was quite sure about it.”

Priscilla was performing her first and most important acting role. She had successfully imitated the Debra Paget hairdo from
Love Me Tender
and taken direction from Currie; these she blended with learned behavior from her stage mother, Ann, and her own instinctive skill at manipulation. To a degree, Elvis Presley was set up for this legendary encounter, though no one dreamed anything serious would materialize.

“I was still a little leery of Elvis meeting her,” Currie confessed. “And I didn’t think anything would come of it. I thought maybe a one-shot meeting. He would say, ‘Nice little kid, cute face,’ and that would be it. Boy, was I wrong!
We
were wrong. My wife and I both thought nothing was going to come of it.”

Priscilla and the Grants strode past the crowd of fans clustered outside the house and entered through the front door. A smaller than usual crowd was gathered inside: Elvis’s grandmother; his father, Vernon; Elisabeth Stefaniak, his pretty blond German secretary and occasional girlfriend; another secretary, Vee Harris and her husband, Rod; Lamar Fike, Elvis’s portly Memphis sidekick, who was a cutup; and an army buddy named Rex Mansfield. True to the
Rashomon
quality of this historic evening, two other people—Joe Esposito and Charlie Hodge, army mates of Elvis’s—would claim to have been present, but Currie Grant swears unequivocally that they were nowhere around. “I just remember thinking, What am I gonna say?” Priscilla later remarked. “It was like a dream. What
does
one say to Elvis Presley? Or to a famous movie star?”

Currie introduced Priscilla to Rex in the hallway and walked toward the living room, where the object of all of Priscilla’s childhood fantasies—Elvis Presley himself—was sprawled in an armchair, dressed in a red sweater. Priscilla was partly hidden behind Currie, who took her by the hand and pulled her up next to him so his famous host could see his guest. Priscilla, true to her nature and upbringing, was preoccupied with her appearance, “wondering, Do I look okay?”

“Elvis, this is Priscilla—” Currie started to say, fulfilling his half of the Faustian bargain and releasing his moral obligation to the Beaulieus. In that split second, before Currie could even complete his introduction, the lives of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu were forever changed and pop history was made. “If you could have seen his face!” Currie recollected. “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!”

Priscilla’s first impression was how
“extremely
good-looking” Elvis was, “I mean, he was even better looking than in
Love Me Tender.”
As she stood in the doorway to the living room, anxiously taking in the scene before her, Elvis got up and walked the few steps toward her. He smiled and shook her hand, his leg twitching, as it did when he was nervous. According to both
Carol and Currie, who were standing right beside them, he stuttered, “H-hi! I-I-I-I’m Elvis Pretzel.”

“He was kind of a joker, Elvis,” Carol said.

“I don’t know if he was doing it as a joke or it just slipped out like that,” asserted Currie, who had heard Elvis stutter before when he was under stress or felt awkward. “He said ‘Pretzel.’ Then he grinned and said, ‘What’s your name?’ He knew what her name was, but he got nervous. Carol and I looked at each other as he mumbled and stumbled there for about a minute, and said to each other, ‘What in the hell is going on here?’ ” As one of Priscilla’s schoolmates, Mary Ann Barks, would later say: “It was like this cosmic force. It was beyond everybody. A meteor lands and poof! I mean, the whole thing was just, like magical.”

The moment would be remembered later by all who were present—and by some who were not—as they sought a clue, some hidden insight, into the profound impact of Priscilla’s meeting with Elvis Presley. Priscilla’s turn-of-the-century porcelain daintiness was powerfully erotic to Elvis Presley, an old-fashioned southern boy for whom innocence, purity, and beauty were the ultimate aphrodisiacs. Priscilla Beaulieu seemed to possess them all.