Child Bride (58 page)

Colonel Parker and the executors of Elvis’s estate eventually made a private settlement, which Jerry Schilling, who had remained close to the Colonel after Elvis’s death, stated to be $2 million but which Judge Evans recalled as $50,000. Jerry, who was sympathetic to the Colonel, said Parker had no choice but to settle, since “he was up against the wall—no communication with Priscilla or anybody, no contact.” The fee conflict ruptured Priscilla’s relationship with the Colonel, whom Arthur Toll perceived to be “very disappointed in her.” “It created more, believe it or not,
hurt
on the Colonel’s part,” said Jerry, who eventually reconciled the two to a polite friendship. (Though when Parker died in January of 1997, neither Priscilla nor Lisa attended his funeral.) “He’s lucky he got what I approved,” reflected Judge Evans.

No sooner had the smoke begun to clear from the exposé of the Colonel than Priscilla was thrust into another scandal of sorts. The instigator was her old nemesis, Currie Grant. He had been researching a book about her and Elvis for several years and, in the spring of 1978, had stumbled upon Priscilla’s lost grandmother in Pennsylvania. Currie already knew that Paul Beaulieu was not Priscilla’s blood father, for she had told him during their intimate encounters in Germany, before he took her to meet Elvis.
Kathryn Wagner had revealed to Currie the Wagner family’s heartbreak over Ann’s 1949 disappearance with Priscilla, Jimmy Wagner’s only child. Currie developed a strong attachment to Mrs. Wagner, and she to him, in the course of their conversations and meetings. Moved to tears by her grief at losing contact with Priscilla, he determined to do what he could to reunite her with the granddaughter she had not seen since Priscilla was three. Kathryn Wagner had long since intuited, correctly, that Paul Beaulieu was at the root of Ann’s estrangement from them and her decision not to respond to Mrs. Wagner’s long letter to Germany in 1960—if Paul Beaulieu had ever given it to her. What Mrs. Wagner never understood was
why.

Currie had not spoken to Priscilla since their strained conversation in 1964, when he had telephoned Graceland hoping to find out, for the piece in
Photoplay
, whether she had married Elvis. His only contact with her since then had been the day Elvis died, when he went to her mansion on Summit and stood by the gate to pay his respects—and she drove past him as if he did not exist. Currie decided to take drastic action to induce Priscilla to contact her grandmother Wagner, for he believed she would not respond if he merely telephoned her with the suggestion. On January 8, 1981, what would have been Elvis’s forty-sixth birthday, Currie placed an ad in the Hollywood trade papers,
Daily Variety
, and the
Hollywood Reporter:

The ad ended with a phone number for Priscilla to call. Currie’s intention was to embarrass or shame Priscilla into action, and his plan worked. Ruth Batchelor, the Hollywood correspondent for
Good Morning America
, saw the ad in
Variety
and ran a segment on Priscilla Presley’s abandoned grandmother on
GMA
a week later, on January 15. Batchelor concluded her television piece by saying, “When I contacted Madame Presley’s agent, I got a curt
‘No comment.’ So will the star of
Those Amazing Animals
reunite with her alleged grandmother? Stay tuned for further reports.” By the next day, Priscilla was on a private plane en route to Titusville to see the grandmother whose existence had been kept from her for thirty-two years.

Mike Edwards, who at that time was with Priscilla in New York, where she was doing a promotion for Wella Balsam, remembered her as “furious” over Currie’s ad in the trades. “She wouldn’t deal with it,” he said. Mike himself was horrified to discover that Priscilla had a grandmother the Beaulieus had hidden from her since she was three. “I always thought that was a
horrendous
thing to do.… There were little things like that along the way that happened, and I thought, ‘You can’t
do
that.’ ” Priscilla flew through a snowstorm to Erie, and took a limousine from there to Titusville to see her grandmother. Mrs. Wagner, at Priscilla’s request, had not told a soul Priscilla was coming when she received a phone call from a Presley representative the day before to schedule Priscilla’s visit. She was not aware that Currie had placed an ad in the trades, for he wanted to surprise her with a visit from Priscilla. When the call came, Kathryn Wagner “almost burst,” she said later. “The night before, I didn’t ever close my eyes!” She welcomed Priscilla into her house shortly after noon on January 16, 1981, as if no time had passed since the last time Priscilla was there, on her third birthday in 1948. “I just feel,” she said later, “that I have been with her all my life.”

Kathryn Wagner and her now famous granddaughter drank coffee, looked at family pictures, including photos of the years that had been “missing” from Priscilla’s childhood, and they went through mementos in an old trunk. Those were the happiest two hours of Mrs. Wagner’s last thirty years. She and Priscilla talked, Kathryn Wagner would say, “mostly about Jimmy. She wanted to know everything I could remember about her father.” Priscilla asked for copies of several photographs of Jimmy, including one where he was in his navy uniform, smiling his famous smile, a replica of Priscilla’s. Before Priscilla left, her grandmother gave her keepsakes that had belonged to her dead father: James Wagner’s wings, a gold ring, and some trinkets he had picked up in Scotland while stationed aboard the USS
Beaver
and exchanging love letters with Anna Iversen. The father Priscilla had imagined since she was a child began to take human form. “My grandmother told me things about my father,” she
said later. “She has a trunk for me, in fact, filled with things. And she has letters for me that were his. I think he wrote her so many letters—letters and letters. He was talking about me in many of them. She has all that for me too.” Priscilla expressed regret, later, at what her grandmother had gone through during all those years of wondering where Priscilla was, whether she might be dead, before Mrs. Wagner finally discovered that she had been deliberately cast aside. “It
is
sad,” Priscilla acknowledged. “It saddens me, because she was a very sweet lady.”

One of the first persons Kathryn Wagner spoke to after Priscilla left was Currie Grant, her knight in shining armor. “I’m on cloud nine!” she said breathlessly. “You won’t believe it. Priscilla was here yesterday! Oh! It was
wonderful.
Currie, I have you to thank to my dying day. It couldn’t have been nicer. It was just perfect … it was—I can’t describe it! My feet aren’t touching the ground. I am just the most happiest woman in this whole wide world. And oh! I thank you. You’re the one that has brought this all about. You’ve made my whole
life
over.” Currie was so pleased that Priscilla had mended her grandmother’s broken heart by visiting her that he placed a second ad in
Daily Variety
, on January 21, thanking her:

Priscilla was decidedly
not
the “most happiest woman in the whole wide world” that January. She was angry with Currie for
humiliating her, for exposing a family secret in a public newspaper. He had, she would say later, “bad intentions.” Mike was with Priscilla just before she left for Titusville and as soon as she got back. “And I said, ‘So how was it?’ ” With Priscilla, he observed, “sometimes this stuff has to be shaken up.” Mike “wondered why she didn’t connect [with her grandmother more meaningfully] or stay [longer]. But I recall her saying, ‘Oh, it was a
wonderful
talk,’ and ‘Oh, it was
so
nice, and we
hugged
and everything like that.” Priscilla seemed, to Mike, touched by the reunion. “At the moment. But as soon as it’s gone, then it’s back to fantasyland, being ‘Priscilla Presley.’ ”

Mike could see, from Priscilla’s reaction to finding her grandmother, that she was still dominated by fear—“fear of opening up, of being honest.” It was the family affliction. Currie’s ad in the trade papers, Priscilla said later, was the first time her brothers found out she had a different father. The subject would never be spoken of in the Beaulieu family. “Even to this day,” Priscilla said in 1996, “it’s not talked about. It is
not talked
about. My brothers have
never
mentioned any of this to me.” Priscilla herself would never intimate to Paul Beaulieu that she knew he was not her father. “And that’s why I find it so ironical that she is so connected to Scientology,” Mike commented later. “That’s what it’s all about. Confronting.” This was quite possibly the same form of denial that led to Priscilla’s refusal, in 1996, to acknowledge her 1959 affair with Currie, for it too would have revealed a secret she preferred to remain undisclosed, for it would shatter the powerful myth of the virgin bride.

Priscilla told her grandmother, as she was leaving her house in Titusville, that the next time she came to see her, she would “try to get her mother to come with her.” Kathryn Wagner died nearly fifteen years later, on October 19, 1995, at the age of ninety-four. Ann Beaulieu never wrote her, never telephoned, never visited. (Priscilla kept up the relationship with her grandmother, mostly by phone and flowers, though she never took Lisa or her second child, Navarone, to meet Mrs. Wagner. Nor did Priscilla attend her grandmother’s funeral in the fall of 1995. Kathryn Wagner remained, to the end, free of any bitterness toward Ann and grateful beyond words for the restored contact with her sole grandchild.)

Priscilla’s life, at the time of her reunion with her long-lost grandmother, was in turbulence. She and Mike were both having affairs. Priscilla later claimed she was “trying to figure out how
to get out of the relationship.” One of her concerns, said Priscilla, was Mike’s bisexuality. “I did ask him [about it], and he did tell me that he did have some encounters.” It bothered Priscilla, she said later,
“very
much.” But, she added, “it was very difficult getting out of that relationship.” She distracted herself, in the summer of 1981, with a dalliance with Julio Iglesias, whom she met while attending a music festival in Viña del Mar, Chile, at Iglesias’s invitation. Julio, like many of Priscilla’s suitors, had been enthralled with Elvis Presley and viewed a romance with Priscilla as his chance to be sprinkled with “Elvis dust,” as Priscilla would sometimes refer to it. When she left Chile for Japan, “I started getting flowers from Julio every day. He was sending me I-love-you notes—I love you this, I love you that.” Priscilla soon reconnected with Julio at his mansion in Florida, where she contemplated the possibility of dating him, until he took her to a recording session. “I just went back to a certain period in my life and I thought, This is not what I want.” She panicked when they went to his bedroom that night, insisting they sleep in separate rooms. The déjà vu was horrifying. “I woke up about four in the morning and knocked on his door and said, ‘Can we get me a driver?’ ”

The ghost of Elvis was ever around her, in the management of his estate, which was tottering precariously. With the money from the Colonel’s buyout agreement, the Presley estate was reappraised at $22.5 million, up from $4.5 million. The difference would have to be covered by estate taxes. Priscilla wrestled, throughout 1981, with the dilemma of whether or not to sell Graceland, a decision facing the executors, who were confronted with a diminishing estate. Gary Hovey, who was dating Priscilla’s sister, Michelle, and later married her, remembered Priscilla as “torn about this decision. She would come over and talk to us about it at night.… There were advisers saying, ‘You should sell everything.’ ”

When
Those Amazing Animals
was canceled in the spring of 1981 (the last episode aired on August 23), Priscilla had more time to devote to the Presley estate, and she swung into high gear, assisted, at first, by the Tolls. “She talked to other people and talked to us,” said Arthur Toll. “We felt that there should be people operating the estate who were maximizing the potential. And we looked around and found some people.” Priscilla had been in serious conversation with Morgan Maxfield, her “business mentor,” as Mike called him, about how to resolve
the Graceland conundrum when she received word by phone, one night, that he had been killed. His private plane had exploded as he was taking off from the Kansas City airport for Mount Rushmore, a few days before he was scheduled to meet with Priscilla for further discussion of the fate of Graceland. Morgan, according to Bob Wall and others, had suggested to Priscilla that she open the house to the public. Mike, who was with her when she got the call that Morgan had been killed, was slightly disturbed by her reaction, which he considered very revealing. “I was sitting on the bed,
sobbing
over Morgan, whom I didn’t know as well as she did—and I didn’t see any tears. And those are the little things that I
require
in a relationship with someone else. To know that, hey, you’re vulnerable, you’re real, you’re not so totally strong. I didn’t see that. I saw too much strength, too much
un
emotion, too much coldness.” In the seven years he and Priscilla were together off and on, Mike had seen Priscilla cry, “but it was more of just maybe a tear.”