Child Bride (39 page)

“Priscilla was never a bride,” Dee Presley reflected. “She was a child. She missed being the bride. She never got to be the wife, you know, and the bride that normally you go through.”

Elvis as husband and father-to-be was his usual paradoxical self, fawning over Priscilla, whom he affectionately called Belly, spending more time with her than he ever had, while at the same time flirting with and dry-humping Nancy Sinatra on the set of
Speedway
, to Priscilla’s anxiety. Nancy had a well-known crush on Elvis, and expressed disappointment, after his death, that she had
not
slept with him, her only hesitation being a personal code forbidding her from having sex with a married man. Rather fascinatingly, Elvis asked Nancy, who barely knew Priscilla, if she would give his wife a baby shower, presumably to reassure Priscilla that he and his costar were not having an affair, and Nancy and her mother, abetted by Joan Esposito, complied. Priscilla thus found her impending delivery celebrated by her rival as she opened baby gifts from people she scarcely knew. One of the guests was Patricia Crowley, the actress who starred in the television series
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
, who was then married to Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s lawyer. “It was such a peculiar
thing,” she said. “It was such a tiny little group. It was a very darling, simple, old-fashioned kind of shower.”

Elvis reconnected with Ann-Margret, the girl he might have married, that June, backstage during one of her first performances in Vegas, where he confessed, Ann would write in her memoir, that his feelings for her had never changed. He also ran into Anita Wood, who had married former Cleveland Brown star Johnny Brewer. Elvis expressed regret, Anita said, over what might have been, an emotion that seemed to sweep over him at the time.

Priscilla contented herself with exerting her hard-earned authority as Elvis’s wife. One of her first acts, said Joe, was to burn the religious books Larry Geller had given him. She then set about imposing some domestic order at Graceland, particularly where the entourage was concerned. “Now they knew that they had to contend with
me
—not that I threw my weight around, but it was a
home
now. And I wanted it to be a home. The guys were used to going into the kitchen, and the woman I hired was like a short-order cook! You know, ‘I want a steak, I want ham, I want chicken, I want this.…’ I
stopped
it. I said, ‘There’s no way it’s going to be like this. This is what we’re having for dinner.… If you would like to join us, you are welcome.’ And I didn’t do it in a nasty way. It was just ‘This is the way it’s going to be from now on.’ So I gradually started making changes in the home. And actually,
he
liked it.
Someone
needed to take charge. No one was doing it; they had the run of the place. Total run of the place. And some of these guys weren’t married, and they’d have girlfriends up there. It’s like Graceland was a
breeding
ground or something. And then I started to feel that I
did
have some power, and he did give me that power.” Priscilla’s tastes, as Madame Presley, were modest; most of the furnishings she purchased, recalled Becky Yancey, came from Sears.

She
decreed
that she would not gain weight during her pregnancy. “I was just
not
going to use [pregnancy] as an excuse. I was
not
going to get fat, I was not going to be puffy, I was not going to have big breasts.” Elvis had told her that those things happened to pregnant women, she said, and “I was just doing
everything
to prove him wrong, that not
all
women did this.” Priscilla’s vanity and iron will fueled her determination; she, in effect, starved herself during her pregnancy, eating only one meal a day, snacking on an apple or a hard-boiled egg, slathering her stomach with cocoa butter to avoid stretch marks. She lost ten
pounds when she first conceived, and gained only nine back; when she gave birth, Priscilla weighed 109 pounds and never needed to wear a maternity dress. Elvis “couldn’t believe it: Oh, I was amazing! I was Wonder Woman! I was unbelievable! ‘She’s still sexy,’ he’d say.”

Priscilla’s delicate relationship with Elvis’s fans, which grew more strained after she married him, reached its seriocomic nadir while they were in L.A., during either the
Speedway
or
Double Trouble
shoot. Priscilla drove up to the Bel Air house on Rocca one night, followed by two sisters from Long Beach named Marian and Mary, die-hard Elvis fans and enemies of Priscilla who showed up regularly at the gate. They were accompanied in their car by a female friend named Susan. Priscilla and Susan would offer differing accounts of who provoked whom, but both versions ended in a fistfight between Priscilla and Marian, a twenty-something who weighed over two hundred pounds. By everyone’s version, Priscilla was annoyed at being followed and parked her car to block Marian, who was driving the fans’ car, from leaving. Priscilla then got out of her car and confronted Marian, who was now standing on the street, demanding to know why she was being followed. By Priscilla’s later account, “she called me a whore and jumped out at me.” Susan’s recollection was that names were exchanged before Marian called Priscilla a whore. All agreed on what happened next: Priscilla struck Marian with an uppercut to the face, knocking the teenage fan to the ground. A melee ensued near the Rocca driveway as Priscilla and Marian kicked, screamed, and pulled hair in a
Dynasty
-style catfight while Mary and Susan watched from inside their car. Priscilla, realizing she was outweighed by a hundred pounds, rang the security buzzer for help, “and then Elvis came
raging
out,” in her rendition. Marian ran to her car and locked the doors. “He busted the windows of her car,” Priscilla recalled. “His fists were going into the windows trying to get to her, and the guys backed him off.” Susan confirmed Elvis’s white-hot anger, but was not certain whether it was directed at Marian, Priscilla, or all of them. Within several months, Mary, Marian, and Susan were back at the gates, and Elvis was talking to them as if nothing had happened.

The incident underscored Priscilla’s lack of popularity among the Elvis faithful, who for the most part disapproved of her as the wrong woman for Elvis. Elvis’s fans had an innate skepticism about Priscilla, and questioned whether she really loved him, a
misgiving that appeared to go beyond petty jealousy and in fact had some basis in truth.

Priscilla cited the famous fistfight with Marian as the catalyst for her purchase, with Elvis, of a new house. “That’s when we decided to move,” she said, “and I started searching for another home,” ostensibly because of the design of the Rocca Place driveway. But in truth, Priscilla, now that she was married to Elvis, wanted a house that would be
theirs
, not his, and the timing of the fan fight did not jibe. “I was now thinking, ‘We’re having a baby, and now we’re really settling down, and where was I going to have her? Was it going to be in Memphis or was it gonna be L.A.?’ I was more consumed with those thoughts than really having a lot of time with him.” They decided on Los Angeles, Priscilla’s choice, and she began house-hunting in earnest that summer.

The story would later surface, from more than one source, that Elvis collapsed into melancholy immediately after his marriage to Priscilla, bemoaning the fact that he had made a mistake. This bit of folklore was given credence by a strange contretemps between him and Priscilla sometime in the fall, as Elvis was choosing songs for a new album. He came to Priscilla one day—she was then nearly seven months pregnant—and told her he wanted to separate. “I had just come back from a trip,” Priscilla said years later, “and he had found out that you could have a
trial
separation, that you didn’t really have to have a divorce.… He told me, ‘It’s not a divorce. I just want to make it plain, there’s not gonna be a divorce, and we’ll just be separated.’ ” Priscilla was “devastated” and started crying. “I said, ‘How … 
why
?’ ” Elvis’s doubts and misgivings came tumbling out in a conversation in their bedroom. “He got scared,” Priscilla later reported. “He became
so
insecure. I was seven months pregnant, he was going to be a father, there was nothing else going
on.
He just had this commitment to do an album. He hadn’t really sorted out how the fans would adjust to the fact that he was going to be a father, not just a husband. What was going to happen? He had to put this new album out. He was under pressure. Was that going to be it? Now the fans were going to see him as a family man; they were going to desert him. I think pressure was building in his head. He approached me [and said], ‘Maybe we should have a trial separation. Then I can
think
better. I’ll be able to know what I’m doing and where I’m going, and where all this is leading to, and who I
am
, and am I going to be … is this gonna be
the end for me and my career? Am I going to provide for you and the baby?’ ”

Elvis was then immediately filled with remorse. “It was almost like after he said it, he then made up to me!” Priscilla recalled. “He was adoring. He brought me a
gift!
He went to the jeweler’s and bought me a ring. He felt bad.” Priscilla spent an anxious few days wondering what the separation would mean, “because … he was very unpredictable. I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

The “separation” was evidently all in Elvis’s mind, or perhaps he was moved by Priscilla’s tears, for “he never discussed it again.” Elvis left for Arizona to begin a western,
Stay Away, Joe
, with no further talk of separating. “It was unspoken,” declared Priscilla. “I mean, I knew him well enough that he sometimes would say things on the spur of the moment and never mean them. How I survived that one, I justified it: ‘He’s just saying something he feels
at
the
moment,’
which he was known to do all the time. He was just like a little kid sometimes, he really was. He would just blurt out something. He was like this little boy, and he didn’t know what to do with his feelings, and he would just come out with them, and then he’d feel really bad after it, and then he would do
everything
to make up for it. I mean, you had a love-hate relationship with him. It’s unbelievable. He could be as charming and little-boyish, and then he could be—you’d be speaking with the devil.” Elvis’s pattern of fighting with Priscilla and making up later with gifts continued throughout their relationship. “I have a safe full of stuff I don’t even know what I’m gonna do with! He was very generous. Very generous with me. Beautiful, beautiful jewelry.”

Elvis was clearly wrestling with his decision to stay with Priscilla, though after he dropped his request for a separation, they settled into a happy domestic interlude awaiting the birth of their baby. “I even went to Sedona, Arizona, when he was doing
Stay Away, Joe
,” remembered Priscilla. “He was bragging about me and showing me off and patting my tummy.” Priscilla spent her time on location scouting real estate ads in the trade papers, and found a French Regency mansion for $425,000 on Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills as their marital home. At Christmastime, with her due date approaching, she and Elvis discussed baby names. They decided on John Baron for a boy, because Priscilla, with her fascination for machismo, wanted a “strong” name; Lisa Marie was selected for a girl. The speculation, later, was that
this was in honor of the Colonel’s wife, Marie, which Priscilla denied. She told the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, after Elvis’s death, that she and Elvis liked the name “because it was feminine.” What Priscilla did not know was that Elvis had actually chosen the name Lisa Marie when he and Anita Wood were discussing marriage, because Anita’s middle name was Marie and Elvis wanted to name a daughter after her. “He picked that name out,” recalled Anita. Elvis wanted two children with Anita—“a girl and a boy, of course”; the boy was to be named Elvis Aaron Jr. When Priscilla gave birth to a girl and she was called Lisa Marie, Anita “thought it was a little unusual,” since the name had been chosen to honor her.

Priscilla carried on throughout her pregnancy as if she were not carrying a child at all—to keep Elvis from “complaining that pregnancy stopped me,” she later explained, though it seemed more willful than that, almost destructive, just as her disregard of her obstetrician’s warnings about fasting suggested an almost subconscious desire to self-abort. Elvis’s grandmother, according to the family cook, Mary Jenkins, and one of the maids, Nancy Rooks, became upset with Priscilla for riding Domino while she was pregnant, and Elvis was also concerned about her daredevil antics. Priscilla would later remark that “he was really a doting father-to-be, always making sure I was doing the things—I mean,
I
was the wild one. I was riding horses until it was almost time to deliver!” Priscilla fell off Domino riding bareback in her ninth month of pregnancy. “Luckily,” Joe said, underplaying the scene, “she fell on her side and didn’t fall on her stomach [and] everything was fine.” Sheila Ryan Caan, who dated Elvis after the divorce, said he was still bitter that Priscilla had endangered their child by riding bareback. In Sheila’s opinion, based on what Elvis had told her, “It was a vindictive thing.”

Priscilla nonetheless gave birth without incident on February 1, 1968, though she almost didn’t make it to the hospital. Graceland cook Mary Jenkins recalled Elvis being so nervous when Priscilla’s water broke early that morning that he nearly drove off without her. Once she was in the car, Jerry Schilling, the designated driver, headed for the wrong hospital, confusing a plan Elvis and the guys had set up to send a decoy car to a different hospital to distract the media. Lisa Marie Presley made her debut at Baptist Memorial in Memphis at 5:01
P.M.
to an ebullient superstar father passing out cigars to press from around the world and calling himself the “happy pappy.” Lisa Marie’s
mother was in a standard-issue hospital gown, and two pairs of false eyelashes, by special arrangement with the hospital, which had assigned a police guard to protect the room. “I think Elvis wanted to buy [Lisa] a mink coat the day she was born,” a Mafia member would later note wryly. It would set the pattern for Lisa Presley’s surreal life to come.