Child Bride (18 page)

That afternoon the Beaulieus’ phone would not stop ringing. Paul Beaulieu, who had no idea Elvis had released Priscilla’s name in a press conference, did his best to support the star’s fabricated account, maintaining to reporters that his daughter’s friendship with Elvis was “nothing serious.” His only concern, he said later, was that he “not embarrass Elvis.” Priscilla posed for pictures by a framed photo of Elvis and told journalists she was “very fond” of him. The press, according to May Mann, who often wrote about Elvis in American movie magazines, did not take the story seriously.

Priscilla was riding a rocket, holding on for dear life. She spent Elvis’s last night in Germany in his bedroom, where they had spent most of their evenings together. It was, by her description, a desperate, passionate night, with Priscilla—a confused teenager saying good-bye to her boyfriend—making frenzied love to Elvis, pleading with him for intercourse. As they lay in bed, she later wrote in her memoir, he told her for the first time that he loved her.

Currie and Carol Grant were at the house that evening for the big farewell, and Elvis asked them to bring Priscilla to Bad Nauheim the next morning to say good-bye. This was another point in contention between Currie and Priscilla when they met in the spring of 1996:

Priscilla left after this exchange, claiming Currie was “in a dream world.” That night, Joe Esposito phoned me at Priscilla’s request to cast doubt on Currie’s story and to reinforce Priscilla’s claim that Currie did not drive her to Elvis’s house the day Elvis left Germany.

This conflict could be independently corroborated. An obscure German magazine, in the early 1960s, published a photo account of Elvis’s last day in Germany. One of the photos showed Currie Grant opening the door of his 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, just as he described, for Priscilla Beaulieu and Elvis Presley to go to the base.

Currie’s veracity on this point did not prove conclusively that Priscilla was lying—or in denial—about all of their points of disagreement, but it went a long way toward establishing his legitimacy—and her desperation.

Ray Gunther, a scientist and expert witness with ten years’ experience evaluating truthfulness by measuring the stress level of a person’s voice via a special computer called a Personality Stress Evaluator, or PSE, analyzed the tape recording of Currie and Priscilla’s May 1996 face-to-face confrontation. Of twenty-eight points in dispute between Currie and Priscilla, Gunther found Currie to be telling the truth 100
percent of the time.
He determined that Priscilla was “deceptive” in
all but one
of her statements: that she believed Currie introduced himself, jokingly, as Johnny Appleseed. Currie, however, was deemed truthful in saying he did not
remember
using the name Johnny Appleseed.

Gunther found Currie to be telling the truth:

• when he said Priscilla approached
  him
  in the snack bar and asked for an introduction to Elvis
  
• that he never told Priscilla he knew Elvis
  
• that
  he
  suggested he meet her parents first
  
• that it was
  Priscilla’s
  idea they use the ruse of going to the movies to be alone
  
• that he and Priscilla
  did
  meet in the hills and make out on four different occasions prior to her meeting Elvis
  
• that he and Priscilla
  did
  have intercourse their last time in the hills before he took her to meet Elvis
  
• that he did
  not
  attempt to rape Priscilla
  
• that he
  did
  pick her up at her house on Elvis’s last day in Germany
  
• that there
  were
  pictures taken of Elvis and Priscilla and him outside his car
  

The scientific evidence established that Priscilla was “deceptive,” or lying, when she said:

• that she had no interest in meeting Elvis
  
• that it was
  her
  idea to have Currie meet her parents
  
• that Currie approached
  her
  and asked her if she wanted to meet Elvis
  
• that she did not know that Currie was a friend of Elvis’s
  
• that she and Currie did not drive up to the hills to make out
  
• that Currie tried to rape her on their way home from Elvis’s
  
• that she blew the horn
  
• that he pulled the car over onto a dirt road
  
• that Currie took her by the Rhine River and tried to rape her a second time
  
• that she told her parents and Elvis that Currie had tried to rape her
  
• that Currie did not pick her up to drive her to see Elvis on his last day in Germany
  

The computerized voice stress test is considered more accurate than a polygraph in determining whether a person is telling the truth—92 percent as opposed to 75 percent—and is used in nine hundred police departments in the United States. After conducting a voice analysis on Currie and Priscilla, Gunther concluded the two “definitely” had intercourse in the hills. Currie’s 100 percent truthfulness in the test and Priscilla’s deceptiveness were so conclusive, Gunther stated, that he would testify to the results in court.

Beyond the objective analysis provided by the PSE that Currie was telling the truth and Priscilla was lying about their history, the pictorial evidence that Currie picked up Priscilla at her parents’ home to say good-bye to Elvis the day he left Germany demonstrated unequivocally that Elvis did not banish Currie, nor did the Beaulieus—
nor did Priscilla.
In fact, Elvis specifically requested that Currie be Priscilla’s driver on his last day in Germany. This would have been a bizarre request if he had been told Currie tried to rape her.

Carol Grant remembered that last morning clearly. “They [Elvis and Priscilla] sat in the back, and I sat in the front with Currie. She was wearing a scarf. Elvis, I remember, had put all this Tanfastic all over himself so he looked like he had a tan.” Priscilla never mentioned, to either Currie or Carol, that she had spoken to reporters the afternoon before, nor did she tell her principal why she wanted to be excused from class, saying merely that she was seeing a “friend” off at the airport. She was ever the secret-keeper, a sphinx, her mother’s daughter. Alone in the car with Currie and Carol that morning, however, she prattled like the teenager she was—until they drove up to Elvis’s house, when the demure Priscilla stepped out of the car. “It was amazing,” Currie marveled later, “to watch this transformation.”

Priscilla and Elvis rode to the base that afternoon through a cold mist that was emblematic of their mood. As they approached Friedberg, Elvis gave her his army jacket, like a school football
hero handing over his letter sweater, “to show you belong to me,” he whispered romantically, adding, “I want you to promise me you’ll stay the way you are—untouched, just as I left you.”

Priscilla later said she felt a chill at Elvis’s parting words, “Because he told me
he would know.
Scared the
daylights
out of me.” Elvis kissed her and got out of the car to board a bus that would take him to his plane. Priscilla headed for the airport, “numb,” as she later described herself, confused by her conflicting feelings for an adult celebrity whose bed she had been sharing for almost five unreal months, and whom she believed she would never see again.

A gaggle of Elvis’s friends had gathered to watch his plane take off. Among them were the Grants and Cliff Gleaves. It was there that Currie first learned, from Cliff, that Priscilla had tried to “freeze him out” of Bad Nauheim the previous November. Cliff had waited to break this news until Elvis was en route home to avoid upsetting Currie. “Cliff told me that Priscilla told E. P. that I was asking too many questions,” Currie recalled. “And E. P. just laughed about it. He wasn’t going to ban Carol and me.” Currie was irritated by Cliff’s revelation. “We were flabbergasted. Carol and I were sitting in a booth at the airport, and we couldn’t believe what we’d just heard. She had tried to slice us out. Cliff said, ‘Currie, it’s a common thing. Once somebody gets in with Elvis, that person tries to get the other person out.’ In her childish way, she tried to get us barred from coming out there.”

Priscilla, meanwhile, was in the midst of a mob scene of fans and mostly paparazzi on the tarmac, straining to see Elvis board the plane. She was dressed that day in a suede jacket and a poodle skirt, a demure scarf wrapped round her head with a halo of dark curls peeking through, looking far older than her fourteen years and heartbreakingly beautiful. When Currie heard Cliff’s news, he raced to the airstrip, pulled aside the head of the press corps, and pointed out Priscilla as Elvis’s teenage girlfriend. Elvis may have revealed Priscilla’s name two days earlier, but Currie had let the genie out of the bottle. Within seconds, a cordon of paparazzi had formed about her and flashbulbs ignited. An enterprising photographer, looking for a dramatic shot, directed her to run toward the plane, and Priscilla, dazed and confused, dutifully complied.

The classic photograph of Priscilla Beaulieu, waving a wistful farewell to Elvis, was staged, as were several of the other airport
shots of her that day. They all had a poignant, faraway quality—haunting, really—as if Priscilla could see into her future and was in a state of trepidation about what she saw. She described the experience, later, as “traumatic,” saying, “I don’t ever want to go through that again in my life.”

Only two people present that day did not shed a tear as Elvis really left Germany a short time later: Cliff Gleaves and Priscilla Beaulieu. Priscilla had inherited, or acquired, the icy Iversen reserve; her later beau, Mike Edwards, was not certain that in their seven years together he ever saw her truly cry.

Carol Ann Heine, the oldest and wisest member of the Priscilla-Pam-Carol triumvirate, saw the mystical photo of Priscilla bidding good-bye to Elvis in the
Austin-American Statesman
the next day and was not surprised. “I always felt her mother had a plan for her. So it was like her mother got her wish.”

In Titusville, Pennsylvania, someone else saw the photo of Priscilla, which was reprinted in
Life
that week. Kathryn Wagner, flipping through the Elvis-in-Germany pictorial, entitled “Farewell to Priscilla, Hello to U.S.A.,” stopped when she came upon the portrait of Priscilla Beaulieu frozen in a half-wave. The age was wrong—the magazine said she was sixteen—and the surname was not her granddaughter’s, but Kathryn Wagner recognized the face in the photo, for it was the same, she was certain, as her dead son, Jimmy.

K
athryn Wagner had been waiting eleven years for a sign, some glimmer of her granddaughter’s whereabouts; her wildest dreams could not have foretold it would come through Elvis Presley.

The
Titusville Herald
picked up on the story a few days after
Life
hit the stands. “I’m almost positive it is my granddaughter,” Mrs. Wagner told the local paper. “I want proof.” By an odd twist of fate, the Wagners’ surviving son, Gene, was the principal of an American school for children of U.S. Army personnel in Munich; Mrs. Wagner sent him the clipping from
Life
with a letter asking him to look up the Beaulieus in Wiesbaden to see if Elvis’s girlfriend was their Priscilla. Then she did as she had for eleven years. She waited.

Waiting was also to be Priscilla’s calling where Elvis was concerned for the next six years of her life, though she didn’t know it yet. She would later write in her autobiography that she spent the two days after the pop star left locked in her bedroom, refusing to sleep or eat—high drama that seems unlikely. Though Priscilla, like Elvis, occasionally lived in a state of surreal romanticism, she was possessed of a more practical bent. For all her scheming, Priscilla perceived her romance with Elvis as a beautiful, impossible dream. She conceded, years later, that she
was sure, as she stood on the tarmac and watched him fly off, that she would never see Elvis Presley again.

The picture Priscilla painted of herself in her memoir as devastated in the days following Elvis’s departure was deeply romantic, but it did not comport with her actual behavior. When the press descended on her at school after Elvis left and asked about their relationship, “she herself laughed about it,” recalled a teacher friend, Güdrun Von Heister, “because she said that she was not old enough.” Nor did her acquaintances at H. H. Arnold observe that Priscilla seemed depressed or even despondent.