Child Bride (60 page)

Priscilla visited her grandmother Wagner the day after Easter and told her she was thinking of sending Lisa to Switzerland to school, though Lisa did not want to go. More evidence, Cindy Esposito would later point out, of Priscilla’s “pawning off” Lisa. “See,” she said cynically. “Priscilla tried to send Lisa away again.” Priscilla also expressed to her grandmother her disenchantment with Beverly Hills, saying that she did not know one neighbor, and that she would prefer to live somewhere else.

When she returned to L.A., Priscilla stopped by her publicist’s office at Rogers & Cowan. Another client, director Hall Bartlett, who was casting a new movie, took one look at Priscilla and was, said one member of his crew, “enthralled.” He determined, on sight, to cast Priscilla in his next film,
Comeback
, a true adventure story starring Michael Landon. It mattered little to Bartlett
whether or not Priscilla Presley could act. “She went up and read for it a couple of times,” said Mike, “and Hall then called Joel Stevens, who was her manager at the time, and said, ‘She’s not the greatest actress, but I think I can get out of her what I need to for the part.’ ” What Hall Bartlett needed—or, more importantly,
wanted
—was simply beauty. Michael Landon’s other female lead, hand-selected by Hall, was Moira Chen, an exotic black actress from Holland who had appeared in a black version of
Emmanuelle.
Said Mike Vendrell, who worked on the picture: “I kept asking, ‘What are we doing with a black soft-core porn actress from
Emmanuelle?”
The answer was Bartlett. “Hall was into the old kind of filmmaker style,” explained his then assistant, Celia Vendrell. “Glamour and beauty were important to him.” Those qualities Priscilla Presley possessed in abundance, leading to her departure, in May, for Bangkok, to start shooting
Comeback.

Hall had cast her in the part of a diver who assists a photojournalist, played by Michael Landon, in his efforts to rescue his Laotian fiancée. Priscilla, in her inimitable way, had prepared for several months, overcoming a terror of diving by working, first with a UCLA diving coach, then with Mike Edwards, whose diving skills helped temporarily resuscitate their faltering relationship. The shoot, which took place in various locations in Thailand, Florida, and the Bahamas, was so fraught with intrigue—love affairs, feuds, pregnancies, takeovers—that one crew member, a ten-year veteran of filmmaking, described it as a movie within a movie. “You could write, seriously, a book—a comedy—about it.” The prevailing drama was a vicious power struggle between Michael Landon and Hall Bartlett, the larger-than-life, old-style Hollywood director who was a Harvard graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and a professional tennis player. “He was a huge guy,” described a stuntman who worked on the film. “Maybe six-three, 310 pounds. Used to wear those buccaneer shirts that lace up the front [with] big collars and puffy sleeves.… I went to his house for dinner, and he had his name [embossed] on the toilet paper. A big ‘HB’ on his toilet paper. He was Old Hollywood.” Michael Landon, by contrast, was high-tech television. The two mixed dangerously, with Landon attempting to overthrow Bartlett and take over the direction of the film in an almost unheard of cinematic coup that left the cast and crew alternately astonished and amused. Priscilla, by her bad fortune, got caught in the crossfire.

Michael Landon, in his frustration, singled Priscilla out for persecution. “Not really persecution,” said Edward Woodward, another of the stars. “He found it difficult to hold his feelings, and his feelings were that she was an amateur, and just because she has a famous name why do I have to put up with this?” Landon would make sarcastic comments whenever Priscilla brushed her hair, which was often, saying, “It’s
Charlie’s Angels
time.” Worse yet, he “ignored her completely” most of the time, according to Woodward. Priscilla eventually summoned Mike Edwards to Thailand for moral support, and he arrived to find her terrorized. “I remember sitting on the set in Bangkok with Hall Bartlett … and she didn’t know what to do. She was saying, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ ”

Priscilla, Woodward remembered, demonstrated extraordinary pluck and determination. Principal photography took place on the Thai side of the Mekong, a few miles from the river Kwai, the same site used to represent Vietnam in
The Deer Hunter.
Priscilla’s diving sequences were shot later on, in the Bahamas. Woodward said, “I’ll never forget, when we actually got to Nassau, she had to go in the water with sharks. Now, if somebody said to me, ‘We have this wonderful role for you, Edward, marvelous role. You are going to get six or seven million for it. There’s just one difficult thing: You’ve got to go into the water with sharks …’ It would be lovely having the seven million, and it would be great doing the role, but you can stick it up your armpit. I think she, at one point, said, ‘Do I really have to go into the water with the sharks?’ And they said, ‘Of course you do.’ So they had this wonderful British underwater team, and they were thrilled with her. They were bowled over. There she was, swimming around with these lemon sharks, under the water, out of sight, and the guys, with all of the equipment, were ready to go speeding in, should she need help.”

Priscilla’s determination, as usual, was boundless. She had once again proved she was willing to do whatever it took to achieve her goal—in this case, stardom. She and Edward Woodward and his girlfriend, now his wife, would have long conversations over dinner about acting. Edward, a gifted Shakespearean actor from Great Britain, thought stardom was what Priscilla aspired to—not necessarily to be an
actress.
“I’m being cynical here, actually. If you are born and bred in and around Hollywood, and born and bred to that kind of stardom, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what I think she was going for … but
on the way, she began to realize you’ve got to put some time in to learn the trade.” Her greatest weakness, he felt, was that she did not
listen
to whomever she was acting opposite in a scene. “Because she hadn’t done it. The mind wanders.” Edward, who got to know Priscilla quite well over the course of the shoot, for they had dinner together nearly every night, found her to be “the most on-guard person I ever met … and she couldn’t really drop it.” His analysis was that she was “split down the middle about what she wanted to be and do.” Primarily, he felt, she wanted to prove that Priscilla Presley was a name “to be reckoned with on her own.”

The irony of that desire became dramatically, albeit humorously, evident during the shoot. On each night that Edward Woodward and his girlfriend accompanied Priscilla to dinner, at any given restaurant in Thailand, she would be recognized. “And every single time, even when there were only Thai musicians, there would be this astonishing rendition of ‘Hound Dog’ or some other Elvis number. And if you could hear ‘Hound Dog’ on Thai instruments! Quite bizarre.” Priscilla, he said, “would nod. She looked a bit like the Queen Mum.”

Priscilla’s film debut was notable for another reason: It brought Lisa into contact with her first real boyfriend, a nephew of Hall Bartlett’s named Scott Rollins, a nineteen-year-old production assistant. Lisa was instantly smitten by Scott, a charming, smooth-talking film student whom Priscilla would later compare, unflatteringly, to Eddie Haskell. Lisa, who was a pudgy, inexperienced fourteen, fell hard for Scott, whom Priscilla, at first, considered adorable.

Lisa and Priscilla’s relationship was already strained, according to Cindy Esposito and Edward Woodward, who was around mother-and-daughter when Lisa visited the Bahamian set. Lisa had graduated from the Apple School, which went through eighth grade. Priscilla enrolled her in another Scientology school, called Happy Valley, this one a boarding school located in Ojai, just south of Santa Barbara. She chose it to remove Lisa from the influence of drugs. Priscilla would later describe this period, when Lisa turned fourteen, as her “karma” for creating such tumult herself at fourteen over dating Elvis. Lisa, as she put it, began to “test life a bit. And it was very troubling. She started to dabble a bit into drugs.”

Priscilla described the next several years with Lisa as “hell,” much of which she blamed on Scott Rollins, Lisa’s older infatuation.
Priscilla’s original affection for Scott began to diminish when Lisa began bordering on anorexia to keep him interested. She also cut classes at Happy Valley to spend time with him. “I kept warning Lisa about him. I just didn’t trust him. I felt that he was a con artist and was a liar. Which he was. He knew all the right things to say—just too perfect. And he was a bit flirtatious with
me.
And that didn’t set well with me. That was already a red flag—something is wrong here. And, you know, Lisa was a kid. She was in love. She felt he was God’s greatest gift to woman.… I was not in favor of him at all, and I tried to tell her that, but of course … Then she started dressing entirely different, you know, very sexy—bare midriff, low-cut tops. I mean, this just wasn’t Lisa. This was not my daughter. Believe me, she was not like this. So I could already see some changes in her. And then drugs started entering the picture. [Scott] started introducing her to the drug scene.” Lisa saw herself as replicating her mother at fourteen, going out with an older man, leading a fast-paced life. She was rebelling.

Priscilla’s schedule was cluttered with career. She shot a
Fall Guy
episode with Lee Majors, nervous about her first on-screen kiss, but relieved, afterward, to experience normalcy on a set after the
Comeback
debacle. Both came out in the first part of 1983, though
Comeback
had been downgraded from a theatrical film to an ABC movie, retitled
Love Is Forever.
She met Richard Gere while table-hopping at Morton’s restaurant in West Hollywood one night with her manager, and woke up in bed with him the next morning at the home of legendary Hollywood womanizer Robert Evans. It was possibly Priscilla’s only experience as a one-night stand, for Gere never phoned her and did not respond to the indignant note she sent him a few days later. They were, said the cuckolded Mike, “two people who had too much to drink. They wouldn’t remember anything. I thought that was intriguing because I always liked him.”

Priscilla’s big break occurred that spring when her aggressive manager launched an all-out campaign to win her the role of Jenna Wade, Bobby Ewing’s first, and long-suffering, love, in
Dallas.
The role became available just as Mike was named the new Kent man, the image of the cigarette. Joel Stevens sent Priscilla’s relatively paltry reel to the producers, and then hounded them, relentlessly, until Phil Capice capitulated, casting Priscilla as Jenna—for her beauty and her last name. “I had not been known as an actress,” she said defensively. “I really hadn’t
done anything. And then
The Fall Guy
came along—thank God that came along when it did. So Joel said, ‘Okay, we’ll put a clip together of
The Fall Guy
and
Comeback
and send it right over to
Dallas.’
And they liked it.”

On Priscilla’s first day in her first series, Patrick Duffy and Steve Kanaly, who portrayed Ray Krebbs, Jenna Wade’s eventual husband on
Dallas
, initiated her into the cast with what they considered a practical joke. Jenna’s character was being reintroduced, at a country-western club called Billy Bob’s, where the cast was doing location work. After the morning’s shoot, during a scorching 110-degree July day in Fort Worth, recalled Kanaly, “Lunch is coming up, and we’re all bored with catered food, and there is a place [nearby], and I said, ‘Hey, let’s run. I have my car here and let’s jump in the car.’ So we go over.… We get into a two-seat Mercedes, three of us—Priscilla and Patrick and me. And it’s really tight and it really is 110. It’s like a sauna, and I can’t get this air-conditioning to do anything. And it’s only four or five blocks, but by the time we get to [the restaurant] we are drenched.… We had lunch and a couple of margaritas. And Patrick and I got Priscilla off on the right foot, in a kind of a loose, fun way.” They returned to the set late, soaked with sweat, and pleasantly buzzed.

This was one of the rare moments when Priscilla let down her guard. Suzy Kalter, a journalist who spent twelve months on the set with the cast and crew, researching a book called
The Complete Book of Dallas
, remembered Priscilla as “truly scared of everyone. She would not talk in front of a journalist.” Her inhibitions carried over into her work, where she was still, Mike noticed, “so locked in. I’d just pray that some director would come along and see what was locked inside of her and open that up, and then people would go, ‘My God! That’s who she is! She’s a red-blooded, hot, fiery woman inside there.’ ” Shortly after she started on
Dallas
, Priscilla began working with Elizabeth Sabine, a voice coach. “The director said, ‘Speak up! We can’t hear you,’ ” recalled Elizabeth. “She must have heard from someone that I was a voice strengthening specialist.” The lessons improved Priscilla’s delivery, said the instructor. “She listened very intently to everything I did, [and she] liked the exercises.”

She was remembered fondly by cast members, who found her to be extremely professional and cooperative—the same adjectives that had followed her through school. Priscilla, however, remained an enigma, even to them. She was asked to return after
her one-year contract expired, and she played the continuing role of Jenna for five years. “I don’t believe she was terribly close to any of the other actors,” said Kanaly. As she had at Immaculate Conception, “she came to work,” he said, “and went home.”

Lisa had become a serious concern by her sixteenth birthday, in 1984. Her drug use had escalated to cocaine. Priscilla had tried grounding her, enforcing 10:00
P.M.
curfews with Scott, but nothing worked. She dropped out of the Happy Valley School, where she had never been happy, and Priscilla enrolled her in yet another new school affiliated with Scientology. This one was located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles and was also an Apple School. Lisa’s personal crisis was the discovery, in the summer, that Scott, the boyfriend she blindly adored, had—she and Priscilla said—sold photographs of Lisa and him in the park to the
Globe
for $10,000. Scott, in 1996, denied any involvement, blaming Priscilla for meddling in his relationship with Lisa, and ultimately “blocking” it. As for Priscilla, he commented, “I don’t even want to open that can of worms. She has a lot of power and a lot of strength.” He had “nothing nice to say about her.” The feeling was decidedly mutual, though Lisa, for a time, “still didn’t want to believe” he’d sold the photos, said Priscilla, until Priscilla’s assistant persuaded the police to search Scott’s house, where they found the negatives.