Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Priscilla’s mask included makeup. She was rarely seen, even in private, without the disguise of cosmetics, carefully painting her lips to define her famous cupid’s-bow, as if her life would suddenly crumble if she should ever look less than flawless. Her
vanity—or rather her
insecurity
—was so extreme that when she was nauseated, Mike noticed, she would even try to prevent herself from vomiting, which would not be ladylike. It was, he said, “painful” to witness. On the right occasion, “if she drinks enough,” he observed, Priscilla could let loose. Mike saw that happen only rarely. “We did some drinkin’ and she would just get … wonderful. She didn’t care how she looked or if her face was perfect. The true her no one has ever seen.” He said that once, on a trip to Africa together, he and Priscilla went out and had “a
little
too much to drink. She got up on the bed and she was doing a striptease, and I was going,
‘God!
That’s the woman I fell in love with! Right there.’ ” According to Mike, Priscilla’s wild side sometimes frightened the prudish and proper Priscilla. “She’s
afraid
of it because the other half of the Gemini goes, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that.’ ” This internal conflict between the two Priscillas was illustrated in the myth of the virgin bride versus the true Priscilla, who had sex with Currie Grant so she could meet Elvis Presley, then slept with other boys, and later men, to compensate for Elvis’s lack of interest.
With Mike, Priscilla fulfilled her lifetime longing to travel around the world and explore her adventurous side. “He introduced me to life, really. Eating from coconut shells in Samoa, going to the ocean and catching your own fish, cleaning it, making soup, and eating it out of coconut bowls, and having the natives make your spoons from the trees. He introduced me to a very primitive type of life that was adventurous. Going to the Australian Outback in a jeep. Bathing in rivers. We went to Japan, Australia, Samoa, Saint Bart’s, all the islands in the Caribbean. He introduced me to nature. That was what I was attracted to. I’d never been with anyone so adventurous, who introduced me to such an adventurous lifestyle. And [we did] not stay in fine places. We lived in little tents with mosquito nets. And it was great. And I have that in me. So that’s what I really loved about him. Going into waterfalls and staying on boats for days at a time. It was a bit wild, and he was unlike anyone I had ever met.”
Priscilla’s adventures with Mike were viewed by her detractors—and by some of her friends, who were concerned about Lisa—as hedonistic overindulgence, an extended period of self-gratification. Cindy Esposito—who, along with Dana Rosenfeld, was one of Lisa’s few friends—would receive calls from Lisa, beseeching her to come over, for she was often alone. “We
spent four to six days a week together,” she remembered. Priscilla, Cindy noted disapprovingly, “was never around when Lisa was little, always pawning her off on the housekeeper or her sister or whoever.” Priscilla, by her own admission, was completely absorbed in herself and Mike. “I went out every night at the beginning.… Lisa began saying, ‘I thought you and I were going to be together, Mom!’ ”
Priscilla, with Mike, had lunged into a fast life of sex and drugs and airplanes and alcohol and nonstop partying. She even tried cocaine. Mike at the time was a heavy user, but he was quick to point out that Priscilla “barely dabbled. She was never into drugs. She wasn’t like that. She was into loving her man.” Drugs would never be a temptation for Priscilla, for to get high she would have to lose control, and control was the linchpin of her carefully calibrated existence. She and Mike lived the sexually dangerous lifestyle she had only imagined with Elvis. Priscilla made prank sex calls on the telephone when she was with Mike, calling complete strangers and using sexually suggestive or explicit language.
Priscilla would later contend that she went into her relationships with “the two Mikes,” as she laughingly referred to them, “for the wrong reason”—the reason, she conceded, was sex. Priscilla was also still discovering for herself what falling in love really meant, for she had been sidetracked since fourteen in a father-daughter relationship masquerading as romantic love. “There was a conflict in my mind about the meaning of love,” she remarked later. “I’d had a father figure and a protector, but I also wanted freedom, and very few men will allow that.” Her relationship with Mike Stone had ended in part because of that conflict. She was also drawn to men who were younger, and she deliberately chose partners who were not famous, taking care not to re-create the situation from which she had just escaped. Myrna Smith, who had married Jerry Schilling and spent time with Priscilla and Mike Edwards, said she “always liked Mike. He’s a nice guy, and they seemed … he knew every move to make a woman happy. He did all that stuff and that’s what she needed.” Priscilla had spent too long, in Myrna’s estimation, gratifying Elvis Presley’s ego. It was, she determined,
her
turn to be the star, the center of the universe, the one to whom others bowed. She now had the power, the glory—and the control.
Mike Edwards remembered that Mike Stone came by the house on Summit Drive sometime during that first year of their
relationship. He had a movie script he wanted Priscilla to read. “She wouldn’t let him in the house,” Mike Edwards said. “She just walked out to the gate and talked to him out there for a moment.” As he observed the scene, Mike Edwards had a fleeting premonition. “I remember sitting there thinking, God! Is this where I’m gonna be? I’m just gonna be knocking on the gate one day, out by the trash?”
P
riscilla’s other fascination with Michael Edwards, beyond the sexual, was his status and expertise in the modeling profession, the goal to which Priscilla had rededicated herself, once she was past the chaos and confusion surrounding Elvis’s death. She had a new focus, equally as strong as her earlier determination to marry Elvis Presley. “Priscilla is very goal-oriented,” Bob Wall pointed out. “She’s very achievement-oriented and had a deep need … to prove she was more than just a trinket on Elvis’s arms and she was more than just Elvis Presley’s wife.”
She began, as she had in her quest to become Mrs. Elvis Presley, by inventing a new persona. This time it was Priscilla Presley the actress/model. “And that is who she created,” said Mike Edwards. “A lot of stars … create this persona, and that’s not who they are. And Priscilla did the same thing. She created
‘Priscilla Presley.’
” Mike traced this change in her to the moment in his apartment when he was snorting coke, hoping to have sex, and Priscilla was describing her secret ambition to model. “The persona began at that point.… I said, ‘I’ll call Nina Blanchard tomorrow and take you down there.’ And that’s when the persona really took off. I … could open those doors for her. I was the catalyst … because she couldn’t do it on her own. She’s gotta have a man.”
Nina saw Priscilla the next day, with Mike, and told her she had “perfect features” but was too short to model. Her future, advised Nina, was in commercials. Mike arranged for a photographer friend of his to take Priscilla’s first commercial photos. Before the photo session, Mike had a serious conversation with her. “Do you really
want
this?” he asked Priscilla. “You’re a sweet little girl now. You lived with Elvis, but somehow you still maintained that sweetness about you. You don’t know what [fame is] like. It’s gonna
get
you, Priscilla. It’ll grab you and you
will
change.… And she said, ‘No, I won’t. How can you tell me this, Michael? I’ve been around Elvis all my life.’ ” Mike continued. “No. That spotlight was never on you. Once that light’s on you, and you start doing things, you’ll change. And I knew what I was saying because I’ve been in it and seen what it did to
me.”
Mike’s friend took shots of Priscilla that day, and they were gorgeous. When she looked at them, Mike perceived, Priscilla felt she was bringing to fruition the promise of the baby beauty contestant, the carnival queen, the prettiest girl in school. “I could kind of see this woman, this dynamo who had been sitting in there from childhood. I think our fate begins when we have our first sense of awareness of something that we have. It’s like her, with her eyes and her lips and cute little figure. I think that begins way back when you’re three years old, five, seven, ten, or whatever, when you first look in the mirror and you see that. And I think she sensed that it began back there.” Priscilla Ann, named by her mother after herself and actress Priscilla Lane, was fulfilling her next destiny.
Priscilla made the decision, with those first publicity stills, to use the professional name Priscilla Beaulieu
Presley
, more cognizant than ever, after Elvis’s death, of the value of his name. “When I establish myself in the business, I’ll drop that,” she told Michael.
The Elvis mania that began on August 16, 1977, reached a crescendo in 1978, as the first anniversary of his death arrived. Priscilla agreed to do a short radio interview, as Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, for an ABC broadcast entitled
Elvis Memories
, heavily publicized as her “first time ever” to talk about Elvis. Joe Moscheo was still scouting for a syndicate to broadcast their proposed special featuring Priscilla in a two-part interview discussing her life with Elvis, and she was “starting to put a team together” to represent her. John O’Grady arranged an introduction
to Burt Sugarman, a well-known talent agent, to conceptualize how to market Priscilla’s new persona.
Priscilla’s companion goal, established during her European phase with Elie and reinforced by her relationship with Michael Edwards, was to acquire sophistication and the patina of class. “The most change was with Michael,” commented Myrna, who, she said, “groomed” Priscilla. “She stopped wearing all of those tassels and things.” Priscilla met Joan Quinn, the social and socially connected wife of a Beverly Hills attorney, then the West Coast editor of Andy Warhol’s hip
Interview
magazine, at Kim Lee’s gym, a meeting place for the Beverly Hills ladies-who-lunch, and she and Mike began spending time with Joan and her husband. Joan had the same dismal perception of Priscilla’s sense of style upon meeting her as Terry O’Neill, and attributed it largely to Priscilla’s family background. Priscilla looked to Joan as her social mentor and followed her about like Eve Harrington did Margo Channing in
All About Eve
, studying her every gesture and replicating Joan’s style and sensibilities, hoping to become a Beverly Hills socialite. Like Eve Harrington, she was the classic arriviste. “She’d never been anywhere,” said Joan. “She knew nothing.” Joan saw Priscilla’s aura of innocence, the seemingly angelic naïveté that fooled so many, as a pose. “I don’t think she was demure. I think she was intimidated by anybody who was socially adequate. She was socially
in
adequate to the point of pain, of just shutting up. But she’s a very smart girl—street-smart. She could sit with you and be afraid to say anything, but … she’ll ask you where you got the shoes, she’ll ask you where you got the pen.…”
Priscilla’s mystique—that sphinxlike aura of mystery and innocence she conveyed—was, to Joan, another pose, a cover-up, in her opinion, for silent calculation. “And that can then give you an attitude of being aloof—very, very private. No matter how immature, how unstable—she’s private. She won’t tell you anything. She’s always sponging from you. She took [your advice and example] and used it to better herself.” Priscilla’s “act,” as Joan called it, was also a disguise for a vapid personality, a “style of presenting herself as just a way of covering that she was nothing. I don’t think she was educated, that she could read or spell.”
Joan met Ann Beaulieu through Priscilla and saw her intermittently at the manicurist’s. Joan considered Ann an even greater poseur than Priscilla, “in her own mind, the grand dame.
She was always [acting] like she was better than anybody there. Spoke to me but never to anyone else.” Ann, like Priscilla, “would never go out without makeup. Her mother never went to the manicurist without being totally made-up. She would always wear a blazer and slacks and tinted glasses. And her hands were just like Priscilla’s, these long hands and fingernails. She would look around and she smoked a lot.” Ann Beaulieu, the former riveter, was now discussing couturiers with Joan, but “she didn’t have any idea what labels were—Jimmy Galanos, Zandra Rhodes was just coming in.” Priscilla bought her parents a house in Brentwood, at 666 Waltham—paid for with part of her divorce settlement, Phylliss Mann understood—and hired Phylliss to help decorate it. Phylliss, like Joan, perceived Ann Beaulieu as an uneducated woman who “put on airs.” “Terrible airs,” said Joan. “And grand airs.” They all derived, noted Joan, from Priscilla. “[Ann] had a daughter who married Elvis. Or she
pushed
a daughter to marry Elvis.”
Lisa was the unintentional victim of Priscilla’s sybaritic lifestyle with Mike Edwards. She was a lonely girl, at ten and eleven. Her only friends, Cindy Esposito and Dana Rosenfeld, were aspiring gymnasts, and the three girls created dance programs in the backyard. “We played together … and had sleep overs all the time. We were pretty inseparable for a long time,” said Dana. “But it was difficult. There were no kids in Beverly Hills, no small kids, and the only other neighbor we played with was Sammy Davis Jr., and he was really good to us. He would invite us over, and his wife, Altavise, was just the sweetest woman.”
Dana’s traditional parents disapproved of Priscilla’s lifestyle, “because she had a series of lovers who lived with her, about fifteen feet down the hall from Lisa’s room. But it was never done irresponsibly, or without concern, without making sure that Lisa really knew the person before they became a part of her life for a couple of years. There were problems and things that people could look down their noses at—how Priscilla lived her life and her own experimentation—but she was so young.” Priscilla later admitted that she wasn’t certain how to handle dating, or men spending the night, around Lisa.
Lisa had other problems, most of them centering on her identity as Elvis Presley’s only child. Cindy Esposito remembered her as a rather morose girl who seldom smiled. She used the name Lisa Beaulieu, and “wasn’t real happy because she didn’t
know whether her friends were her friends because of her or for who she was.” In the assessment of Bob Wall, Lisa “was a great, closed-in child, probably because she had so much experience with her dad. She knew she was a princess. When she was around Priscilla, she wasn’t. When she was around us, she wasn’t. I’ve needled her her whole life because she was very closed in. It was like needle, needle, needle, needle. I teased the shit out of her. She used to get real angry. But that was the only way to let her know, ‘I don’t need you, you are just a friend!’ ” Mike Edwards remembered Lisa, at ten or eleven, as often in her room alone, behind blackout curtains, listening to Pat Benatar records, aloof with her mother, disenchanted with Beverly Hills.