Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [181]
Many years later, she would see that their attraction was based on fantasy, each looking to the other to replace someone they had lost. It wasn’t really Priscilla he was in love with, but an idealized manifestation of his yearning. And Priscilla may have only been fourteen, but she, too, had a giant void to fill. Only one year earlier, she had made a shattering discovery, as Finstad wrote in Child Bride, that threw her into an identity crisis she hardly knew how to handle.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 24, 1945, Priscilla arrived in the world as a cross between Brooke Shields and JonBenet Ramsey, an arresting and exquisitely beautiful child who seemed older than her years. Pampered by her mother, who entered her in baby contests and children’s beauty pageants, she was soon an ultrafeminine, prissy child, “the sort of little girl who would be in ruffles and lace, and would lift the corner of her skirt to curtsy” says Suzanne Finstad, who interviewed her subject at length for her biography Child Bride, first published in 1997. “Priscilla was the perfect name for her.”
She was also a born coquette, Finstad wrote, projecting a sexual quality by six or seven that was disturbing for one so young and beyond her ability to even understand what she conveyed. Her mother, Ann, a former photographer’s model, fostered and reinforced her behavior, buying her showy cowgirl outfits and fancy dresses with coordinated purses, shoes, and hats. In the family’s home movies, she waved to the camera and, tilting her head like a movie star, looked akin to a modern Shirley Temple.
From the beginning, she was a relentless flirt with boys several grades ahead of her, but by twelve and a half, she was also attracting grown men, especially soldiers on the base. She worked at getting their attention, too. “She was kinda like a little honeypot,” said her Texas neighbor, Mary Clements, in Child Bride. She obsessed on her looks—opening her compact more than her schoolbooks—and manipulated situations with boys and men. She’d sit out on the lawn, for example, watching the older boys playing football—and watch them watching her.
However, Priscilla’s loveliness, and the way she used it to create an effect on others, was only the first of four interrelated molders of her personality. The second was the air force itself. In dictating that families were always on the move, military life created a lack of emotional security for children, who felt no sense of roots or permanence other than their ties to their parents and siblings. It was as if they were in the foxhole together.
Growing up in a military family, Priscilla learned early to close ranks, to never get too close to outsiders. Since the military is always on the move—either her family would be moving, or her friends’ families—it would just be easier not to make attachments outside of the clan. Young Priscilla understood not to trust anyone outside of the service, either, as the military runs on secrets. The family’s unwritten rule dictated that it was better to suppress emotions, then, especially since the military despises weakness and prizes control, and giving in to emotional displays and feelings could lead to a loss of that control.
Priscilla had the very model of control right in her own home in the form of her authoritarian military stepfather, Paul Beaulieu. The third integral influence on Priscilla’s personality, Captain Beaulieu maintained a brutal, Draconian presence in the household (a family member describes him as “one tough dude”), ruling the house with an iron fist and inspiring occasional terror in both his wife and his children.
“My father was very strict,