Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [180]
“I felt like Cinderella, knowing that when my curfew came, all this magic would end,” she wrote. Then Elvis casually mentioned that maybe she could come back another night. “Though I wanted to more than anything in the world,” she said, “I didn’t really believe it would happen.”
When Currie finally got her home, her parents were up waiting. Fog had delayed them another two hours, she said. But she assured her folks that Elvis was a total gentleman.
The events of so long ago are often blurry in memory. While Priscilla was still there that first night, he walked into the kitchen alone to get a cold drink, Elisabeth would recall, and she could see he was enchanted. He had a glazed-over look, and he had everyone peek through the door at his guest, as if she were some exotic creature. “She looks just like a beautiful little angel, doesn’t she?” he said to the room. Elisabeth agreed. “She reminded me of a painting, because she was flawless.”
From there, the story turns into a wildly diverging narrative, Currie Grant offering a far more candid and realistic rendering of the events than the sketchy details Priscilla recounts in her memoir. As reported in Child Bride, Elvis went back out into the living room, and when Currie and Carol walked out to join them ten minutes later, “He had Priscilla backed up against the wall, kissing her.” By eight-thirty, they were upstairs in his bedroom, according to several people in the house. Priscilla would confirm it many years later to Mike Edwards, a post-Elvis boyfriend, though her own book never mentions such activity on the first night.
“He just took her by the hand, went up the stairs, and said, ‘We’ll be down later,’ ” Currie remembered in Child Bride. “And she just went right with him.”
That’s when Currie began to worry. He’d seen Elvis take many girls upstairs and then lose all track of time. It wasn’t until 1:00 or 1:30 A.M., that they emerged, Elvis holding Priscilla’s hand until she got to the steps. “Bring her back, Currie,” Elvis said, and Currie, hurrying to get her into the car with Carol, called back, “I’ll try.” Then the nervous airman sped off to face Captain Beaulieu.
When Priscilla left, Elvis continued to rave about her, telling Rex he had “been looking for someone like that all of his life.”
Charlie Hodge and Joe Esposito, who both insisted they were there that night, though others dispute it, reported similar statements from Elvis.
“He looked at me and he said, ‘Charlie, did you see the structure of her face? It’s like everything I’ve ever looked for in a woman.’ He was just enraptured, looking at her.”
And to Joe, who agreed that “she was so beautiful, you could not take your eyes off her,” Elvis said, “She’s just unbelievable.” Joe already understood his deeper meaning. Naturally, says Joe, “He was attracted to women who reminded him of his mother, as Priscilla [did] with the dark hair and the beautiful eyes like his mother had when she was young.”
That night, Elvis would transfer all of his symbolic feelings for his mother, his twin, and for Debra Paget onto Priscilla. Later he would tell her he knew at that moment that she was his “twin soul,” his destiny.
“It’s amazing to me the timing of Elvis meeting Priscilla,” says Peter O. Whitmer. “Boom! Gladys dies. Elvis goes to Germany and puts Gladys’s death as far behind him as he can. And then what happens? Bam! He runs into Currie Grant and Priscilla. And the dynamic has everything to do with Gladys’s death.”
In a loose analogy, Whitmer explains, Elvis became Gladys to Priscilla’s Elvis, in an attempt to replicate and work through his trauma. Subconsciously, Elvis would perform a lot of the functions for Priscilla that Gladys had performed for him, allowing him to fall back into a more relaxed state of mind. “He found himself a little Elvis-like sylph, and he became the owner of it, the control of it, the mother, the father, the Holy Ghost. Everything.”
But if it were a cosmic