Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [182]
Colonel Eugene Desaulniers, who served with Captain Beaulieu when he returned to the States in the 1960s, presents a different picture. In fact, the captain seems almost a different person in the eyes of his fellow officers. Known as Joe in the military and Paul at home, he was “a great guy, a fun guy,” says his friend. “He was a very hard worker, and committed to doing his job. But he was also very sociable and had a good personality. We used to have a lot of laughs at work.”
Captain Beaulieu, who would eventually retire as a Lieutenant Colonel, was a typical family man, according to Colonel Desaulniers. “I think he was a little strict with his kids, but I wouldn’t call him rigid. When you have children in the military and you are constantly moving them, it becomes even more important that you set some path for them to follow. Career military people work hard to keep their families together. It isn’t like you live in the same neighborhood for thirty years, so you make your home life much more cohesive. I don’t think he was a heavy disciplinarian, but he made his kids tow the line. We all did.”
Priscilla grew up always wanting to please him, both to earn his praise and to mute her own fear, for Paul Beaulieu was said to be a heavy drinker, a fact he struggled to conceal from the world. Colonel Desaulniers questions that, too, saying his friend was “a very good social drinker, but I wouldn’t ever characterize him as a hard drinker. In those days, we were all classified as hard drinkers.” But when he did drink, the captain’s attention sometimes made Priscilla uncomfortable, she told Elvis. “He said Priscilla said her father gave her the creeps staring at her,” Marty Lacker remembers.
That would be enough of a psychological trauma for any young girl, but at age thirteen, Priscilla stumbled upon a family secret, which she discussed with Finstad in Child Bride. She was babysitting one night for her siblings while her parents were at a party. Once the children were asleep, she got bored and began snooping around, rummaging through things. In the back of her parents’ closet, she found an old trunk and felt compelled to explore it.
As she opened it, Priscilla told Finstad, “I had this unbelievable feeling.” The first thing she saw was an American flag, folded in the shape to present to widows of servicemen. It was a sacred thing, almost, not to be disturbed, like a grave, and Priscilla kept thinking, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” She knew the trunk was private, that she shouldn’t go any farther. But she did, of course, and under the flag she found a cache of yellowed love letters. She quickly flipped through them, fearing her parents would burst through the door any minute and catch her, and saw that they were between Rooney, her mother’s nickname in her youth, and a boy named Jimmy.
Her pulse raced, and as she dug inside the trunk for more, she found a stash of photographs of herself as an infant. She’d never seen them before. In some, she was alone. In others, she was with her mother. But in the most puzzling ones of all, her mother, holding baby Priscilla in her arms, stood next to a handsome, dark-haired stranger. Who was this man? The teenager turned the photo over, and there she read the words that nearly stopped her heart: “Mommy, Daddy, Priscilla.”
Suddenly, as Finstad wrote, her whole life, a different life, one she had not known about, lay before her in the trunk: a birth certificate, baptism records, all with the last name of Wagner. It weighed on her so much that she called her mother at the party, and Ann Beaulieu rushed home to find her daughter hysterical, angry, and confused.
Yes, she told her. She had been married to a navy pilot named James Wagner. He was handsome and kind and loved Priscilla like nothing in