Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [183]
Her mother hadn’t told her before, she continued to Finstad, because Paul didn’t want anyone to think Priscilla wasn’t his natural daughter. He, himself, had almost come to believe that she was, so the lie had to be perpetuated. In fact, Finstad learned, the Beaulieus had cut Priscilla’s paternal grandparents out of their life. It was as if Jimmy Wagner had never existed.
Priscilla would remember it as a terrible moment, a life-changing moment, asserts Finstad, that completely unsettled Priscilla in every way. Her only anchors—the things she took for granted as her sense of constancy and identity—were suddenly demolished. She wasn’t who she thought she was. “That’s an incredible kind of displacement,” says biographer Finstad.
Psychologists say that concealing information about a child’s biological parents is one of the most damaging family secrets, rating just below incest. Priscilla, predictably, was highly upset to learn that her mother, the person she trusted most in the world to protect her, had lied to her. And now she was being asked to be a coconspirator in that lie, protecting her stepfather and shutting herself off from a set of loving, grieving grandparents who wanted nothing so much as to know the child who so resembled their son.
At first she told no one about the secret, but it was too much of a responsibility for a girl of her age, no matter how mature. Her only way to deal with it at the time, coming only months before the family’s move to Europe, was to shut down emotionally, even as she was filled with rage and the need for attention.
However, that did not mean that Priscilla did not act out. Her friends told Finstad they noticed a personality shift, mainly in her attraction to older boys, especially the hoody kids, the tough promiscuous crowd, boys who already had cars and drank beer and spit in the face of authority. By eighth grade, she had a reputation for hanging with the wrong crowd.
Once she got to Germany, she repeated her pattern, flirting with the black-leather-jacket boys and making poor grades. But more than before, as Finstad relates, Priscilla demonstrated two personalities, the good Priscilla and the naughty Priscilla; the latter was confident and assertive, especially where sex and seduction were concerned.
In Currie’s telling in Child Bride, when Priscilla approached him and told him she wanted to meet Elvis, she agreed to a Faustian pact. Currie had once taken another girl to Elvis’s house, and she wanted nothing else to do with him once Elvis invited her to his bedroom. Currie was not about to have that happen again. And so the twenty-seven-year-old married man wanted to make sure he was alone with Priscilla before he would take her to meet Elvis.
According to Currie, at first, it was just kissing. He took her up into the hills around Weisbaden—she concocted a story about going to the movies—and it was obvious she didn’t want to do it. “It was like kissing a table,” Currie said in the Finstad book, and all she wanted to do was talk about Elvis. But eventually he wore her down and she got into it a bit, and then he took her home.
By their second visit to the hills that late August or early September 1959, she was more eager with him, though they held their activities to kissing and a little touching. On the third trip, she was more effusive. But on the fourth rendezvous, Priscilla succumbed to the married airman.
“It actually started getting better on the third,” he said in Child Bride, “but she did everything humanly possible to please me on that fourth time.” It was then that Currie agreed to take her to meet Elvis, and by that time, he contends, “she became a little aggressive herself.” On the way back to her parents’ house, Currie wanted her again and pulled his car over to a dark area near the Wiesbaden Museum. Her skirt was up and her blouse was open when a German police car pulled in behind