Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [177]
Chapter Nineteen
Priscilla
On August 15, 1959, fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu arrived in Wiesbaden, Germany, where her stepfather, Air Force Captain Joseph Paul Beaulieu, was about to begin the next phase of his military career with the 1405 Support Squadron. A veteran of World War II, in which he’d served with the marines in Okinawa, Captain Beaulieu had seen much of the world and nearly all of the United States. The family’s last posting was Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, where Priscilla and her younger brother, Don, welcomed another two siblings, first Michelle and then Jeff. (Twins Tim and Tom would be born later.)
An especially beautiful young child, with china doll features and a turned-up nose, the blue-eyed brunette had been quite the popular girl in her junior high in Del Valle, Texas. A cheerleader, she knew all the latest dance crazes and was crowned queen of the whole school. More important, she had made real friends for the first time in the family’s frequent moves. By the time she was ten, she had gone to six schools, from Connecticut to New Mexico, Texas to Maine, and back. “I knew this would be difficult for her,” Captain Beaulieu said of the transfer, “but we had no choice.”
“I was crushed,” Priscilla confirmed. “The last thing I wanted was to leave my friends and go off to some frozen foreign country.”
When Priscilla’s stepfather brought home Elvis’s first LP in March 1956, she liked the music, she said. She loved “Blue Suede Shoes,” but as she would later say, she “didn’t want to be part of the Elvis mania. In fact, I refused to join the Elvis fan club—admission twenty-five cents—when I learned that one member had asked Elvis to autograph her breast. In my preteen mind, that was too risqué. On the other hand, I liked Elvis enough to want to watch him on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Just before she left Texas, one of her schoolmates said, “Elvis is in the army over there. Maybe you’ll run into him.”
“Oh, sure,” Priscilla replied.
As she predicted, she was miserable in Germany and missed Austin terribly. She had no one to spend time with, she didn’t really know the language, and her mother was occupied with a new baby. But two blocks away, at Paulinenstrasse 7, she found an oasis at the Eagles Club, a pre–World War II mansion converted to an air force community hangout. There she wiled away the hours, listening to the jukebox and writing long letters to her friends back home.
And then something extraordinary happened, she would later say.
“One afternoon I was there with my little sister and brother when a serviceman happened to strike up a conversation with me. He was an especially nice guy who sensed that I was homesick.
“ ‘Would you like to meet Elvis Presley?’ he asked. ‘Who wouldn’t like to meet Elvis,’ I answered. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. His name was Currie Grant, and he said he and his wife often visited Elvis, who lived forty-five minutes away in the town of Bad Nauheim.”
The meeting and courtship of twenty-four-year-old Elvis Aaron Presley and fourteen-year-old Priscilla Ann Beaulieu is a beloved part of American cultural mythology: the handsome rock king, grieving for his mother in a faraway land, the beautiful young princess, wise beyond her years, waving forlornly at his departure, only to become the virgin bride, conceiving on her honeymoon and bearing the great man’s only child, a daughter, who at her father’s untimely demise, inherits the kingdom of Graceland.
Such is the fairy-tale romance of Elvis and Priscilla, as related by the woman so often mistaken for his widow. But as with the Camelot years of Jackie and John Kennedy, another couple who defines a generation, the truth has been rewritten and altered so many times that even many of the participants are not precisely sure what happened, or when. Especially Priscilla.
In her own book, Elvis and Me, Priscilla writes that when she saw Elvis on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s Stage Show, before even The Ed Sullivan Show, she was sexually attracted to him. She also says