Child Bride (44 page)

Mike’s wife, Fran, gave birth to their second daughter, Lori, on August 4, as Priscilla and Mike were inching closer to consummating their new flirtation. Fran Stone would later write a magazine article called “How Priscilla Presley Stole My Husband,” though Priscilla denied that she was a factor in the Stones’ eventual divorce. “I didn’t break up their marriage. He had already told me that there [were] problems in their marriage.”

Mike would later say that his marriage to Fran was “on the rocks” when he met Priscilla, but Bob Wall, who was close to both the Stones and Priscilla, admitted that “it was a big shock to Fran, because she loved Mike deeply. She’d honor that he was vulnerable to another woman, and I think there was a lot of Mike being caught up in, ‘This is Elvis’s wife. This is Priscilla Presley; she’s been with the King.’ I think there was a lot of that in him initially.” Priscilla, who could seem so demure, had—lest one forget—another side. Bob Wall described her as a “fireball” at karate, “very competitive.” By 1996, more than twenty years and two divorces later, Fran would not discuss the triangle composed of herself, Priscilla, and Mike, saying she didn’t want to “dredge up dirt.”

Priscilla, beginning that summer, conducted her life in secrecy, a recurring pattern for her. Elvis, who was excited by the fight photos she took for him, invited Mike Stone and Chuck Norris up to the house in Beverly Hills a few times to talk about karate, unaware that he was entertaining his wife’s paramour. He also invited Mike and Chuck to Las Vegas to watch him perform. Chuck took his wife, Diane, and Mike went alone. Priscilla, who was in Vegas that night, wandered backstage, recalled Myrna Smith, and told the Sweet Inspirations about the “fine” and “foxy” guy in the audience, “so we were all kind of looking from the stage.”

“I was in the Sweet Inspirations’ dressing room,” said Kathy Westmoreland. “Priscilla had come to see the show and brought Mike Stone with her. One of the girls mentioned how good-looking he was and Priscilla turned around and said, ‘Hands off! That’s mine!’ I was shocked and we were all, ‘Uh-oh! Something is going on.’ ”

Elvis had no idea that “something” was in progress. During the show, he introduced Chuck Norris and Mike Stone to the audience, praising their karate skills and describing Mike as one of his best friends. “If Elvis had had a drinking buddy,” offered Myrna Smith, “that is how warmly he introduced him.” Myrna and Kathy and the rest of the backup singers, who understood exactly what signals Priscilla had been sending to them concerning Mike Stone, could not believe what they were hearing.

The evening grew more curious after the show, when Elvis invited Chuck Norris and Mike Stone to join him and Priscilla and the Presley entourage in his dressing room. Elvis, his aides would recall, suggested to Priscilla that she study karate with Mike, since he was the best. Priscilla would later attribute her drives to Westminster to see Mike to Elvis’s recommendation.

She was, in fact, on a dangerous, albeit carefully plotted, course. Tom Kelly, the ex-marine who was teaching her karate in place of Ed Parker, maintained a strict policy forbidding anyone but black belts to wear a black uniform to class, a rule Priscilla understood and had abided by. At the end of August, however, after she had been training with Tom for a month and a half, “she came in one morning wearing a black uniform,” he remembered. “I told her it was our policy that the only people who wore black were the instructors. She said she wasn’t going to wear white, and I said I was sorry, that was the rule.” Priscilla, Tom recalled, “said, ‘I can get any teacher,’ and she quit.” Ed Parker’s belief, once Priscilla’s affair with Mike Stone became known, was that she deliberately flouted the school’s policy so she would be thrown out, giving her an excuse to switch to Chuck Norris’s karate school, which she did that September. Chuck’s studio was in Sherman Oaks, a quick ten minutes from Priscilla’s house in Beverly Hills; Mike Stone often stopped by the school to train or to go out for pizza after class with Chuck and his partner, Bob Wall.

Once she had enrolled in Chuck’s classes, Priscilla’s secret dalliance with Mike Stone quickly grew more heated. They enlisted the aid of both Chuck Norris and Joan Esposito, who was
having her own marital difficulties with Joe, to go on a “double date” with them to a tropical restaurant called the Islander. “At that point in time,” said Joan, “Chuck was married, I was married, Mike was married, Priscilla was married, and we would go places together before the tourneys and like that … like kids date together.” Priscilla slipped out easily when Elvis was out of town; when he was in L.A., she pretended to go to a dance class, or said she was training at Chuck’s karate school. “We never asked and were never told,” explained Bob Wall of his part in the deception. “From observation, Elvis didn’t spend a lot of time with her. And she was, like, lonely. She had the big house, the cars, the planes, the fame, but …”

Mike and Priscilla played their cat-and-mouse games for several months before the relationship turned seriously sexual. Priscilla, who was paranoid about being recognized, planned an outing to Catalina Island for their first encounter, hoping she would be anonymous there. She and Mike arranged to meet at the port in San Pedro, between Beverly Hills and Westminster, to catch the ferry for the island. “And she had to make that drive down there by herself,” said Mike. “It was the first trip she ever made by herself on the freeway, and she was just absolutely horrified.” Her effort illustrated the ferocity of Priscilla’s sex drive. She boarded the boat shrouded in scarves and sunglasses and took a seat a few rows apart from Mike, only to have a few karate fans recognize
him
rather than her, to her obvious disappointment. Priscilla and Mike made out on the beach in Catalina during the day and rented a motel room that night back in Bel Air, where they had sex for the first time. Mike, who was briefly insecure about making love to Elvis Presley’s wife, was shocked to learn, once they were in bed, that Priscilla had not had intercourse with Elvis in a year.

Priscilla’s affair with Mike over the coming months was reminiscent of her high school romance with Tom Stewart, for it was intense, sexual, and carried out in secrecy. The distinction, with Mike, was that
Elvis
was the father figure from whom Priscilla was disguising her romance. She and Mike carried on like teenage lovers, meeting to make love on the beach, in cars, at drive-ins. The karate wives—Diane Norris and Bob Wall’s spouse—who knew about the affair and were friends of Fran Stone’s, resented Priscilla and regarded her as a “home wrecker.” “They were pretty sore at Priscilla,” said Bob, “for her breaking up [Mike’s] marriage.”

Priscilla saw herself as a survivor, a theme that had, and would continue to, run through her life. Elvis’s lifestyle, to her, “was not reality; it was not the real world. It was kind of—you get stuck in an aberration.” She wanted out, to be what she considered normal again, and she demonstrated a certain ruthlessness—another trait that would define Priscilla—to attain that goal. Late in 1971, Priscilla and Mike took a small beach apartment in Belmont Shore, a seaside community near his karate studio, Golden West. Neither of their spouses knew of Priscilla and Mike’s love nest, as it would come to be called. With Elvis in Vegas or touring, Priscilla had nothing but time, and she passed it with Mike, decorating their hideaway as she perceived her new boyfriend—in “somewhat primitive Hawaiian,” by his description. She was entranced by his native customs and called him Mickey, short for Mikiala, Mike’s given Hawaiian name. Priscilla, Mike recalled, was thrilled by the simplest pleasures—going to a drive-in movie or taking her shoes off, Hawaiian style, before entering their apartment. “She was just tickled to death. To her it was a big growing situation [an opportunity for personal growth], to get out and do these things.” Priscilla was like an eighteen-year-old who had just left her parents’ home and gotten her first apartment, her first adult boyfriend, and her first whiff of freedom—which, in truth, she had. The person she really was, so long veiled beneath the submissive personality she had affected in her effort to marry Elvis, began to reemerge. “I found Priscilla,” she later said. She had her own life again. “I’m getting out and realizing that I’ve been missing a little bit here. I’ve lived in a bubble, I’ve been sheltered, I’ve been protected, and to a fault. I never really exerted any of my own talents or personalities. [Now] I was creating a life for myself. And [Elvis’s] world now became more bizarre to me, because he only lived within his world. You did what he wanted to do. No one else had a life. You lived and breathed him.”

Priscilla had also rediscovered her dormant sexuality. The key to her relationship with Mike—the key to Priscilla, really—was, in a word, sex. As Rona Barrett, who had heard through the Hollywood grapevine about Elvis’s aversion to sex with a mother, remarked, “That was the frustration, I believe, with Priscilla, and that’s how she ended up with Mike Stone. She was a young woman in search of her own sexual need and identity, and she was with the man considered the sexiest man alive, the biggest star in the world, and he couldn’t perform.” Priscilla
once told a reporter that she and Elvis made love less than fifty times in their marriage. That estimate was probably high. A different sort of woman, with a less powerful sex drive and a shared understanding of Elvis’s spiritual odyssey, might have been contented as his wife, but that woman was not Priscilla Presley. Priscilla was, and always had been, about
sex.
That was what had drawn her to the Elvis Presley persona in the first place. Her sexuality had shaped her self-image as a child beauty contestant, as the sixth-grade carnival queen, and as the fourteen-year-old girlfriend of a movie star/rock star. She could not survive without sex; and survival was at the core of Priscilla’s being.

Priscilla and Mike began plotting how they could be together permanently, and—more trickily—how to broach the subject with Elvis-slash-Dad, for the parallels to a daughter leaving home were inescapable. “Even during the earliest stages that we were seeing each other regularly, there [were] always discussions between us—what was our next step?” recalled Mike. “And I believe at one point that we were both seriously in love with each other … we often talked about the consequences of approaching Elvis with this situation, knowing his temper and his mentality about something like this.”

As they had during Priscilla’s affair with the dancer several years earlier, the entourage surrounding Elvis became suspicious of her relationship with Mike Stone by the latter part of 1971. One of the first to question it was Judy West, Sonny West’s new wife. Elvis and Priscilla had moved into the completed Monovale house, and the Wests, in true Elvis communal style, had their own upstairs bedroom. “Apparently Mike picked Priscilla up one time at the house, and Judy West could see the driveway from where they were living, and [she saw] Mike picking Priscilla up really late at night,” said Joe Esposito, whose family was by then living in a house nearby that was a gift from Elvis. “So she was telling Sonny, ‘There’s something going on.’ So [Sonny] and Red would talk.” Sonny saw the affair for himself, according to a female martial artist who had acquired the nickname “Karate Pat” from Elvis. Elvis, recalled Pat, forgot his spiritual books during one of his engagements in Las Vegas and sent Sonny back for them. “And Sonny showed up there at the house, 144 Monovale, and Priscilla and Mike were coming out of the house. At the time, Elvis had an Excalibur, and they were getting in the car just as Sonny was pulling up in the driveway.” Priscilla, according to Pat, said,” ‘Sonny, don’t tell Elvis,’ and he was
like, ‘Oh, man, why do you put me in this position?’ and he said to Mike, ‘Man, if Elvis knew you were driving this car, he’d have you shot.’ ” Joe Esposito—whose wife, Joan, was going on double dates with Priscilla and Mike Stone—was so convinced that the Priscilla he thought he knew would never have an affair, he bet Red West a hundred dollars that Sonny was wrong about Mike Stone—despite his awareness of Priscilla’s dancer-lover back in 1968. “I said, ‘No, Priscilla would never do that. Impossible.’ ”

There were rumors that Lisa told one of the maids she saw Mommy kissing Mickey and that the maid then circulated the story. Columnist Rona Barrett claimed that Hollywood insiders knew about Priscilla’s affair with Mike Stone before Elvis did: “We knew something was going on. Everybody knew how unhappy she was.” Mike later admitted that he and Priscilla became “more careless about being seen in public,” arriving separately at karate tournaments but then sitting together. “[The affair] became common knowledge in the martial arts world.”

Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s Los Angeles lawyer, took it upon himself, sometime around that late fall, to use his private investigator, John O’Grady, to confirm or put to rest the rumors about Priscilla and Mike. Elvis’s friends, he said, “had gotten rather rambunctious, and I wanted to find out who the instigators were … and we came up with a lot of interesting things.” The only one Hookstratten would name, later, was Priscilla’s affair with Mike Stone. Elvis was not in L.A. when Ed confirmed Priscilla’s infidelity, so he called Joe, who was with the singer, to break the news. “I wanted Joe to get him alone and be with him. So someone was with him when he was told this, rather than for me to cold-call him.”

Joe was aghast. “I couldn’t believe it. I was completely in shock that this little girl I’d known all these years—I was devastated.” It was, perhaps, a lesson in Priscilla’s ability to deceive, despite her aura of innocence; her secret affair with Mike also demonstrated the strength of her will and her sexuality—factors that lent credence to Currie’s claims in his dispute with Priscilla over whether or not they had intercourse before he took her to meet Elvis. Despite proof positive that Priscilla had had sex with Mike Stone, Joe remained incredulous. “I warned Elvis, but I wanted to deny it,” he said. Elvis, according to Joe, “couldn’t believe it … that that was going on. Completely wanted to deny it.”

There followed the Christmas of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s discontent. If Elvis had any doubt as to Priscilla’s dissatisfaction with her life, her behavior that December at Graceland clarified it. Two of the Stanley brothers remembered her being as “cold as ice.” Elvis’s Christmas gift to her was a car. Priscilla refused to accept it, recalled David and Billy Stanley, so Elvis threw ten one-thousand-dollar bills at her instead. On New Year’s Eve, she brazenly handed Becky Yancey a manila envelope, told her it contained a picture of herself for Mike Stone, asked Becky to mail it, and told her how “manly” Mike was and how
he
had time for her. The envelope was addressed to “Mike Young” from “Beau,” short for “Beaulieu,” Mike Stone’s nickname for Priscilla. Elvis celebrated the New Year dressed, portentously, all in black; Priscilla wore white boots and made a toast to herself, hailing 1972 as “the year little Priscilla finally came out!” This was, figuratively, true, for Priscilla—the
real
Priscilla—had been submerged since 1959.