Child Bride (38 page)

The stage had been set for a crisis, and it arrived on March 10, the night before filming began on
Clambake.
Elvis, who was still depressed and taking both diet pills and sleeping pills, tripped in the middle of the night in the bathroom at the rented house on Rocca Place, reportedly on a telephone cord, and suffered a concussion. Colonel Parker used this opportunity to sweep into action, seizing control of Elvis’s life. One of his first actions was to direct Larry Geller to “get rid of” his books. A doctor, arranged by the Colonel, confined Elvis to bed for two
weeks. “Colonel never spent more than fifteen minutes with Elvis,” said Larry. “Now for a week he went in every day. No one was allowed to see Elvis; he was heavily medicated. They were shooting him up with who knows what.” At the end of two weeks “the Colonel calls a meeting,” recalled Larry. “Elvis said, ‘Larry, no matter what happens, I love you,’ and I knew something was up. Colonel sat there, Elvis sat there, Priscilla sat there, we all sat there. I never saw Elvis like this. Elvis sat like a docile little kitten. He wouldn’t look at me. The Colonel said, ‘There’s going to be some changes around here.’ And everyone knew the whole meeting was directed at me. ‘Anyone who thinks that Elvis is gonna put on robes and walk down the street to save people, they’ve got another think coming.’ And he went on and on: ‘This is a business. People are getting too personal here.’ And it was all [directed at] me; everyone knew it. I knew what was happening. My heart was breaking. Elvis docile? Priscilla was there, backing the whole thing up, taking her position.”

Larry left Elvis’s employ shortly after that meeting, convinced that Priscilla and the Colonel had conspired to remove him and questioning Elvis’s mysterious fall. “I think [Priscilla] thought Larry Geller was filling Elvis’s mind with a lot of things that could never be answered,” reasoned Joe. “Larry was trying to control Elvis to a certain point. To get Elvis to depend on Larry. And I feel that way myself, because he occupied so much of Elvis’s time he lost his creativity. Instead of thinking about his career and doing something about that, it was all this mystery stuff—Eastern philosophies and stuff that took him away from what he was supposed to do: be an entertainer, perform. Priscilla wasn’t too thrilled with Larry.” Most of the entourage wasn’t, for they had no understanding of Elvis’s spiritual bent, and they felt that it distracted him from taking care of business—and them.

Elvis formed a new long-term agreement with Colonel Parker that was grossly advantageous to his manager, and within a month the Colonel was orchestrating Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding. Larry saw this as further evidence that Priscilla and the Colonel were in complicity to remove him and that, in exchange, Priscilla would have her wedding. “ ‘We’ll get rid of the guru,’ ” was Larry’s interpretation of the turn of events, “ ‘and you’re stepping in. You’ll be the wife of Elvis Presley.’ That’s what happened. I know it.”

There was no argument about the fact that, beginning that
April, Colonel Parker took over every detail of Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding. The new date was set for May 1, just a few weeks away, though Priscilla claimed she and Elvis had selected that day when the March plans fell through. Once Elvis’s manager stepped into the scene, the twice-postponed, often discussed, but never realized nuptials surged ahead like a bullet train. Las Vegas—Colonel Parker’s base of operations—was chosen as the location. “It was the Colonel who got the rings, the room, the judge,” said Priscilla. “We didn’t do any of that. It was all through his connections. We wanted it to be
fast
, effortless.” Becky Yancey typed up a short guest list, the Colonel made arrangements for the newlyweds to fly out of Vegas on his friend Frank Sinatra’s Learjet. The Colonel’s wife even took Priscilla shopping for a wedding dress in Palm Springs, where the Parkers had a house.

The entire operation had all the poetry of a corporate takeover. It was also veiled in secrecy, more of the Colonel’s doing, for he wanted to control and exploit the wedding for maximum publicity value, down to a prearranged press conference at the Aladdin in Vegas after the ceremony, during which he would surprise reporters with the news that Elvis Presley was married. Priscilla found herself in her familiar role as guardian of the secrets, even as she shopped for her own wedding gown. “I went with Colonel Parker’s wife in total disguise. I went as Mrs. Hodge, and I had a blond wig on, trying to be very, very careful.” She eventually found a dress at a bridal shop in Westwood, near UCLA, again posing as Charlie Hodge’s future wife, accompanied this time by Charlie. “It was just a very, very simple long dress with beaded sleeves. I didn’t have time to just stay there forever and look for dresses. I had one fitting for this dress and that was it, I was out of there.” Alan Fortas wrote later that Elvis, meanwhile, “was desperately trying to find some way out.”

Colonel Parker’s carefully laid plans went forward with just one hitch: Gossip columnist Rona Barrett, who had a weekend house in Palm Springs a stone’s throw from the cul-de-sac where Elvis had taken a rental that spring, noticed “signals” that “something was up.” “The Memphis Mafia started to arrive in L.A.,” she recalled, and sources at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel confirmed reservations. Rona reasoned that plans were afoot for Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding, and concluded that “if he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it from Palm Springs.” It was, she admitted, “intuition, pure intuition.” Rona’s finely honed gossip
instincts were right on target, for the Colonel had made plans for Elvis and Priscilla to leave Palm Springs for Vegas by private plane at four-thirty in the morning on the day of the wedding, and return on Sinatra’s Learjet to spend their first night as husband and wife at Elvis’s Palm Springs house on Ladera Circle, literally and figuratively under Rona Barrett’s nose. Within hours of Elvis and Priscilla’s arrival in Las Vegas on May 1, before the ceremony had even begun, Rona was reporting their wedding. Priscilla, thirty years later, had no idea how she scooped the Colonel.

“I began calling all the florists,” the columnist explained, “and I went down to Palm Springs and started looking around, and I knew there was something going on.… And then somebody gave me a tip about the kind of shirts that needed to be ordered that afternoon.… There was a sense of mystery surrounding all of this, and intrigue. I kept an eye on the house and the florist and checking the private airlines and the private jets. I was unaware that [the wedding] was going to take place in Las Vegas, but I knew something was going on at the house. Then I found out about the Colonel and the private plane, and that’s how we got it confirmed.”

The wedding itself took place at 9:41 that morning in the Aladdin Hotel suite of Milton Prell, a friend of Colonel Parker’s who owned the hotel. Elvis and Priscilla were married by a judge named David Zenoff, another of the Colonel’s connections, in a traditional ceremony notable only for the absence of the word “obey” from Priscilla’s vows, an apparent oversight that would prove prophetic. Fewer than twenty people attended the ceremony, a dictate of Colonel Parker’s that caused bruised feelings among Elvis’s entourage and friends forever after. Among the guests were Priscilla’s parents, her sister Michelle (the maid of honor), the Colonel and his wife, Vernon and Dee, Joe Esposito and Marty Lacker (Elvis’s two best men), Joan Esposito, and George Klein.

Priscilla’s long-awaited wedding resembled nothing so much as a staged photo opportunity, which in fact it was. Elvis’s manager hustled the groom and bride out of Milton Prell’s suite directly into a press conference, where the new Mr. and Mrs. Elvis Presley spent their first moments of married life posing for publicity pictures and answering questions from a startled press corps. Elvis was dressed in a satin tuxedo that resembled something he might have worn on stage; both he and Priscilla wore
manic, slightly dazed, expressions throughout the combination press conference and reception. Priscilla’s hair and makeup fixation, combined with the Jean Shrimpton—Carnaby look of the sixties, reached its pinnacle that morning; her hair was nearly waist-length and coal black, teased into a bouffant style, framing her Dresden-doll face, which was made up to perfection with dewy pink lip gloss, six pairs of false eyelashes, and heavy eyeliner. Though they would later be mocked for going to extremes, Elvis and Priscilla looked more than beautiful that morning of their wedding; they were
mesmerizing
, two perfect-looking creatures who seemed to belong to another world than mere mortals.

Despite its lack of sentiment or genuine emotion, Priscilla’s wedding day was, for her, the consummate moment of personal triumph, for she had at last achieved her goal. No longer would she have to endure descriptions such as “the freak child-lover of Elvis Presley, Hollywood’s best-kept secret” (on the
Today
show), or “the girl Elvis is rumored to have hidden at Graceland” (in
Movie Mirror).
No longer was she seen as Elvis Presley’s Lolita. Becoming Mrs. Elvis Presley was, she acknowledged three decades later, “
very’
satisfying.

Getting married, ironically, doomed Elvis and Priscilla’s already strained relationship. Some of the reasons were plain to anyone who understood her psyche or had observed the dynamics between them. Other reasons, deeply imbedded in Elvis Presley’s complicated subconscious, were soon to reveal themselves.

As dramatic as were the elements of seeming predestination that had drawn them together, Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu’s marriage was a tragic misalliance of two strikingly incompatible people. They wed because they were both bound by dreams they had outgrown—he to an obligation undertaken on impulse four years earlier, she to the fantasies of a ten-year-old girl.

E
lvis and Priscilla never had a honeymoon to speak of. Their hastily put together wedding was not even scheduled to occur
after
Elvis completed the calamitous
Clambake.
He and Priscilla spent their first few nights of marriage at the weekend house in Palm Springs so he could return to L.A. for reshoots. Rona Barrett’s report and the Colonel’s press conference alerted the public that the King had finally tied the knot, and a gaggle of Elvis fans clustered about the Ladera Circle house to congratulate him. Priscilla had the surreal experience of being observed by strangers as her new husband carried her over the threshold singing “The Hawaiian Wedding Song.” As she said later, “With Elvis, it was always sort of strange.”

In her book and in other public forums, Priscilla, perpetuating the myth, would say that her first night of marriage in the upstairs master bedroom of the Palm Springs house was the moment when she lost her virginity—conveniently overlooking her previous sexual relationships with Currie Grant, Tom Stewart, Peter Von Wechmar, Jamie Lindberg, and possibly Ron Tapp, not to mention Currie’s claim that she confessed to having had intercourse with Elvis during their first few months in Germany. Priscilla’s tale of being a virgin bride until her wedding night, after having lived with Elvis for over four years, was given a
patina of credibility by the birth of Lisa Marie, uncannily, nine months later. “I
had
to have conceived somewhere around then, because she was born nine months to the
day”
after the wedding, she later proclaimed.

Elvis and Priscilla talked idly of honeymooning in Europe, a plan that was blocked, rumor had it, by the Colonel, who reportedly kept Elvis from touring outside the United States because the promoter had disguised his status as a Dutch citizen and had no passport. Colonel Parker had nothing to do with this decision, according to Priscilla: “Elvis didn’t really
want
to go to Europe.” Discussions of a trip to Hawaii likewise evanesced. Priscilla and Elvis, possibly the most glamorous couple in the world, spent most of their honeymoon in a trailer. The setting was the Circle G. “He finished the movie, and then we decided to stay there, and we didn’t really
do
anything,” admitted Priscilla, who had resigned herself to the limitations of life with a superstar. “It would not have been a honeymoon anyway. It would have been fanfare. It would have been like always. Everywhere we went—if it was Hawaii, they would find out, and they would be all around the gate—so we decided just go to Memphis and just stay there and, you know, have it quiet. We always had to choose things that we thought would work. It was more like convenience than how it would be for us emotionally.”

Priscilla did not even have her new husband to herself. Elvis, who thrived in the companionship of his male buddies, kept them around during his honeymoon. “He had his guys and she had her girlfriends,” noted Dee, “but that’s the way it was. There was no honeymoon or nothin’.
Everybody
was on the honeymoon.” To make peace with the entourage and their overlooked friends, Elvis and Priscilla held a second reception at Graceland in tuxedo and gown.

A few months after the wedding, Priscilla took off her diamond engagement ring to go riding with Elvis at the ranch. She put the end of a bandanna through the ring and tied the scarf around her head. “She was pregnant with Lisa at the time,” recalled Charlie Hodge, who was there that day, “riding bareback. She fell off the horse, she got up, got back on the horse and went, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’ve lost my ring.’ And we looked around, but we figured somewhere between the hill and the barn it came off.” Around the same time, according to Mike McGregor, who tended the horses, Elvis lost
his
wedding ring on the ranch. “We were out there on our hands and knees, there
was like five or six of us, Elvis was in the bunch, and we’re crawling around in the grass. He didn’t even know really where he lost it.” Neither Elvis nor Priscilla ever found his or her ring; it was, perhaps, an augury.

Even her wedding night conception did not bring Priscilla immediate joy. She wanted to take birth control pills but Elvis was against it, she said, because he thought they might be harmful; she used no other form of contraception because “it was a hassle.” Priscilla was dismayed that she became so quickly pregnant, for now that she had emerged from the shadows and acquired the so long-sought-after title of Mrs. Presley, she wanted the world to see her at her glamorous best. “Instead,” she later wrote, “my debut as Elvis’s bride was going to be spoiled by a fat stomach, puffy face, and swollen feet.” Priscilla was also eager to travel the world with Elvis; a baby would tie her down. Elvis, by contrast, was “ecstatic,” in Priscilla’s word. Her own ambivalence about having a baby was so deep-seated that she contemplated having an abortion early that June as the entourage rode in Elvis’s customized bus for him to start filming
Speedway
with Nancy Sinatra. She decided against it; Elvis, she said, gave her the freedom of choice.