Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [185]
Priscilla was only too eager to please Elvis, and she complied. At first she just listened while he talked. To a background of sad music on the radio, Elvis shared his heart, telling her of his insecurities about keeping his fan base, talking again of his grief over losing his mother, and confessing how disappointed he was that his father was involved with another woman so soon after his mother’s death. He seemed not only to trust Priscilla, but also to speak to her as if she were his age.
That night, they forged an integral psychological bond. If Priscilla became a projection of everything Elvis wanted and couldn’t have, as Finstad wrote in her biography, he would become a stand-in for the lost and romanticized Jimmy Wagner. Elvis also offered her an escape from her complicated relationship with her stepfather, even as Elvis would quickly replicate the captain’s control. Eventually she would tell Elvis the family secret.
“I felt more comfortable with him and had more trust in him,” she would say about that second night. “I felt that he was a trustworthy person that I could depend on.”
And perhaps that was part of the reason why Elvis was able to get as far as he did on Priscilla’s second visit to his bedroom. Priscilla didn’t want to tell Currie about it when he asked for a running report of their activities. But he controlled her fate with Elvis—she was dependent on him to take her back to the house. Plus, she needed someone to talk with about her situation—she was fourteen years old and playing adult games with an international film and music star. According to Currie, Finstad wrote, when he demanded the details (“Don’t play coy with me!”), she told him everything—how Elvis had her blouse and bra off, how his hands were going everywhere, and how he started to get under her dress.
As her nights with Elvis continued, Currie would insist on hearing about the intimacies on the very night they occurred. But Priscilla would want to know what he knew, too, particularly about the other girls. Not only would Elisabeth Stefaniak crawl into Elvis’s bed after Priscilla left (“not necessarily for sex,” Joe Esposito offers), but sometimes fifteen-year-old Heli Priemel would be leaving Elvis’s bedroom when Priscilla arrived. And one night, she had sneaked a peek at Anita Wood’s letters and knew that Elvis was heavily invested at home. Her competition was keen, and she needed Currie to both quell her anxiety and help her level the playing field.
However on one of their drives back to Weisbaden, Currie told Finstad he became excited at Priscilla’s recounting and pulled off the autobahn for a quick assignation. He tried to kiss her, and she resisted, and then he fondled her breast, and she wriggled away. Finally, he quit. It was the old syndrome—she’d been up in the bedroom with Elvis, and so she didn’t need him.
Priscilla would describe the event to Finstad as more of an attempted rape. “I was terrified. I did everything in my power to keep him off me. There was a house there . . . [and] I was going for that. I kicked doors open and blew horns.” When the lights came on in the house, it scared Currie, she said, and he stopped. She told no one, “because I thought I wouldn’t see Elvis anymore.”
And she had to see Elvis again. But she later said to Finstad that when Currie tried to rape her a second time, taking her by the Rhine River, she told her parents and Elvis what had happened.
Her parents had become concerned about her friendship with