Child Bride (57 page)

Bob Colacello had sensed that Priscilla and Mike were very much in love; but there were problems beneath the surface appearance of two gorgeous people leading glamorous lives. Priscilla’s career was advancing just as Mike’s was on the wane, and
his ego could not tolerate the disparity in their fortunes, or Priscilla’s offers to fund their lifestyle. “The timing wasn’t right,” he said. “The way I was raised, I couldn’t live under that. I like to be the breadwinner.” Mike still had a problem with alcohol, “and I think when he would get drunk he would be embarrassing,” said Myrna Smith. He tried to discuss their difficulties with Priscilla, but he could not get past the mask. “I’d say, ‘Priscilla, you and me, we are a problem.’ And she said, ‘No, I’ve
dealt
with it.’ And I’m saying, ‘No! You can’t say
I’ve
dealt with it. It takes a
we.
And that’s what her philosophy is: ‘I’ve dealt with it. It’s taken care of and it’s in the past and it’s out of my head.’ And it still continues. She still puts the veil up and makes up her face, does the little thing with her lipstick: ‘I’m not gonna see the world.’ ” Joan Quinn noticed this same denial, as if Priscilla was protecting some forbidden secret—Currie, maybe? The truth, not the myth, of her relationship with Elvis? Her real identity? Her unhappy childhood? Her stepfather’s possible abuse? “Even with Mike,” noted Joan, “she wouldn’t unlock the door. She wouldn’t tell you everything; there was always something that was locked. I wondered if Scientology unlocked her door.”

Priscilla became pregnant by Mike in the midst of their difficulties and decided, after Mike’s silence on the issue, to have an abortion. “When she asked, I didn’t say, ‘Yes, let’s [have the baby], I was just going, ‘God!’ I can’t say it was the biggest mistake, but it’s a real—I wasn’t ready. I was still running wild, and I was thinking, ‘I don’t want to be living under this roof that much longer.’ That would be unfair, just to [have a child] to be connected to the Presley name.… We’d toss and turn until all hours of the night, talking about it. And by not saying no and by not saying yes, I think she just kind of realized, Well, he doesn’t really want [a child].” Priscilla later said emphatically that she would never have married Mike Edwards, a contention Mike disputed and that she contradicted herself in a contemporaneous interview in the
Los Angeles Times.
“She wanted to get married,” said Mike. “She would have changed her name. It was a lot of responsibility for me, though, and I just wasn’t ready to make that commitment.… It didn’t happen.”

The abortion symbolized the end of Priscilla and Mike’s love affair, though it would continue in gasps for another couple of years. Priscilla’s concentration, moreover, was on her career and on making money. Mike Stone sold a tell-all about their love affair to the tabloids in 1980, and Priscilla talked to the reporter,
Al Coombes, for nearly a month about collaborating on her autobiography. According to Coombes, she was looking for a way to make money, and she wanted $250,000, which was more than he could offer, for the book. Her plans to market her memoir or a TV interview special through Joe Moscheo “lost steam,” Moscheo said. Mike Edwards was asked to pose for a
Cosmopolitan
piece called “Love in the Afternoon” in February and persuaded the editors to hire Priscilla to model with him, her first legitimate commercial work apart from the Wella endorsement. She was, suddenly, attracting attention. “They were like all
over
her,” Mike said of the
Cosmo
editors, “and she was kind of nervous, because she’d never really done that. And the pictures came out and she was
gorgeous.
So, so beautiful.”

Priscilla made her first career breakthrough that spring, when Merrill Grant, who produced the popular
That’s Incredible!
television series, asked her to audition for the part of cohost for a new television series called
Those Amazing Animals.
The three producers of the show—Grant, Alan Landsburg, and Woody Frasier—were putting together a trio of hosts for an animal variety show similar to
That’s Incredible!
and hoped to appeal to a wide range of viewers. They had selected country-western singer Jim Stafford for folksiness and Burgess Meredith as the authority, and they wanted a female cohost who was a “Cathy Lee Crosby type,” as Frasier phrased it. “Pretty but straight-ahead.” Their first choice was Bo Derek, flush from her success in
10
, but “she wanted too much money,” recalled Frasier. “She was pretty hot then.” Someone—Alan Landsburg had “no memory of who” it was—suggested Priscilla Presley, whom several of the staff had seen on
The Mike Douglas Show
and
Donahue
when she was promoting her boutique, and the producers “jumped right on it,” said Frasier. They sold Priscilla to the network “based on the Presley name,” per Frasier, something that irked her, recalled Mike. “Her thing was that she wanted to get out from the shadow. She’d say, ‘Everywhere I go, every casting I go on, whether it’s
Charlie’s Angels
or Wella Balsam or whatever, it’s all leading into Elvis.’ And this is Priscilla
Presley.
And
that
is who she
created.
”

The producers and the network had their own concerns. They were not particularly worried about Priscilla’s lack of experience—the format “could cover for an amateur,” as Landsburg put it. As a cohost, Priscilla merely had to introduce clips of interesting animal stories and recite a few scripted live spots in
front of a studio audience, supported by Meredith and Stafford. Their anxiety, Frasier recounted, “was could she read? Would she have the energy level?” Priscilla, commented Landsburg, did not have a “magnetic” personality. “In the beginning, we had our problems,” Frasier admitted, of Priscilla’s performance. “We had to go through many takes. The network was very nervous after the first taping. I remember we got lots of notes back.” But Priscilla, true to form, proved “a very determined woman,” according to Frasier. She persevered. The show debuted on August 24, 1980, in the 8:00
P.M.
Sunday slot and received good ratings, which assuaged the networks. Priscilla, they discovered, had a “curiosity factor” that motivated people to tune in, eager, as Priscilla had discovered with Bis & Beau, to gawk at Elvis Presley’s child bride.
Daily Variety
found Priscilla “rigid,” but it made little difference, for as Kay Hoffman, Alan Landsburg’s head of production, who reviewed the video after each taping, discovered as she was freeze-framing to edit, “she did not have a bad camera angle. Her face was
perfect.”

Priscilla marketed herself as the commodity she was becoming, doing a
TV Guide
cover, meeting the local press in various cities to promote the show. The reporter who interviewed her for the
Washington Star
found her, as Bob Colacello had, exceedingly nervous and quick to defer to her “handlers.” Priscilla embarrassed herself a few times, once referring to calves as “veal” in a discussion of animals, but no lasting damage was done. Alan Landsburg assessed her, quite astutely, as a woman with a sensible attitude who “knew her own limits.” Priscilla, he perceived, would not be auditioning for Lady Macbeth.

She was, however, trolling for a “dramatic” role, now that
Animals
had, in her view, provided her with a comfort level in front of a camera. She commissioned her ambitious manager, Joel Stevens, to comb the possibilities, for
Animals
was a formatted variety show, and Priscilla wanted to act. Priscilla Presley had become a bona fide Hollywood personality, flitting from audition to audition, leaving Lisa in the primary care of Mike Edwards, who had become a househusband of sorts. Lisa, Dee Presley said critically, “didn’t have the mother she needed. She needed her mother when her mother was out pursuing a career.” The task of ferrying Lisa back and forth from her Scientology school, and of entertaining her, fell to Mike, who was, said Dana Rosenfeld, “an absolute doll. We had so much fun with him, he was great. He was the ultimate friend, a very positive spirit to
be around all the time.” Unbeknownst to Lisa or Priscilla, Mike found himself increasingly attracted to Lisa, then a preadolescent, though she considered herself, he would later say, “funny-looking.” This marked the beginning of a mother-daughter competition that would carry through Lisa and Priscilla’s relationship. It was difficult for Lisa, as Mike observed, to be the daughter of Elvis Presley, a popular icon, and a mother who was “always a picture of perfection.” While Lisa as a child was cute, she did not begin to possess the rare beauty of Priscilla, who had already captivated a rock star by the time she was fourteen through the sheer power of her face. Lisa went through a phase of copying Priscilla, recalled Mike. “She was always like, ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful, Mommy.’ They had their quiet, wonderful moments in Priscilla’s bathroom. They just kind of sat there and talked and shared a lot of things.” Lisa, remembered Dana Rosenfeld, “would sit on the floor when her mom would get ready to go out, and just look at her mommy and sit and talk with her while she was putting her makeup on, setting her hair. She knew her mommy was beautiful. She would look at her and say, ‘My mommy’s so pretty.’ ” Lisa went to Dana’s house one day carrying a hairbrush of Priscilla’s, saying, “My mommy paid twenty-five dollars for this hairbrush because her hair is so beautiful.”

Priscilla enrolled with Mike in an acting class taught by Milton Katselis, a respected L.A. drama teacher who was also a Scientologist. Although she tried determinedly to perform the exercises in class, Priscilla could not break free from her inhibitions, to Mike’s continuing frustration. “I directed her in a scene in class,” he said, “and I remember the scene. I said, ‘Just rip that apart. Don’t be afraid to let your face slide off.’ ” Priscilla could not do it. She and Mike attended a costume ball at one of the L.A. art museums that year, where they met a genial young British artist named Brett Livingstone Strong, and they became close friends with Brett and his wife. The setting was appropriate for Priscilla, for as Brett recalled, they were all wearing masks.

Brett Strong was a great connector of people and had a number of friends in the music industry. He introduced Priscilla and Mike to Russell Hitchcock of the rock group Air Supply. Priscilla became close to both Russell and his wife, Paula. Through Brett, Priscilla also met and befriended Graham Russell, another member of Air Supply. “I’m the one who introduced everybody to everybody!” Brett would later joke.

Priscilla’s acting career and social life were put on hold that
December, when the Presley estate became embroiled in a headline-making controversy over Colonel Parker’s commission arrangement with the executors. Earlier that year the probate judge presiding over the Presley estate, Joseph Evans, appointed a young, feisty Memphis lawyer named Blanchard Tual as Lisa’s guardian ad litem, a standard procedure in a case involving a minor. Tual, representing Lisa’s interests as sole heir, took it upon himself to conduct an exhaustive investigation of Elvis’s estate and was appalled to discover an earlier agreement between the Colonel and Elvis that gave Elvis’s manager a 50 percent commission on everything the singer earned—in an industry where 10 percent was the standard agent’s fee. Tual was even more disturbed to find that Vernon Presley had carried the Colonel’s arrangement over to the estate, contracting to pay Parker 50 percent of any earnings Elvis generated after his death. Shortly after Tual was appointed, in May of 1980, the coexecutors—Joseph Hanks, the Bank of Commerce, and Priscilla—along with the attorney for the estate, Beecher Smith, submitted a management plan to the court for approval. In it they requested that Judge Evans approve the continuation of the Colonel’s 50 percent split.

A scandal erupted in December when Blanchard Tual presented, in open court, a report he had compiled outlining what he considered the near-extortion Colonel Parker had committed upon Elvis and, by extension, his estate. The hearing erupted into a near brawl, with Tual accusing Beecher Smith and the executors—with the exception of Priscilla, whom he considered not personally involved with the management of the estate—of “sandbagging” him, declaring them “incompetent” and “yes-men” for the Colonel because they had ratified his exorbitant fee arrangement. Beecher Smith still smarted over the incident, and Tual’s criticism of his decision to approve the Colonel’s contract with the estate, sixteen years later. “I felt like I had somebody looking over my shoulder and prejudging the work that was done before me and by me. And there was a time when I took umbrage at it.” Judge Evans, however, agreed with Tual’s assessment of the Colonel’s arrangement, which he said later “seemed a little strange to me. I figured it was too much, too much, excessive.… I was saying he’d received too darn much all those years. No telling how much more he received that there’s no record of.”

Tual had opened a Pandora’s box. After the explosive hearing,
which even made its way into the pages of
People
magazine, where the Colonel’s “exploitation” of Elvis was reported, everyone’s eyes were on the Presley executors. Priscilla, who had been somewhat lackadaisical about the estate, turned her attention to the fee arrangement with Colonel Parker and to her two co-executor’s decision to approve it. The following weeks, as the executors, in accordance with Judge Evans’s order, began to renegotiate with the Colonel, were awkward for Priscilla, who found herself at odds not only with Colonel Parker, the intimidating figure whom she had met as a little girl and to whom even Elvis deferred, but potentially with her fellow executors as well. Bob Wall recalled her being “in a lot of agony over it,” continually outvoted two-to-one by the other executors. “I know it was an aggravating, upsetting period for her.” Priscilla’s legal adviser, Arthur Toll, decried the Colonel’s fifty-fifty arrangement with the estate as excessive and “felt something should be done about that agreement. I remember that we had a meeting in the Colonel’s office on Sunset trying to resolve things. And I think we went a long way toward getting an agreement with the Colonel at that time.”