Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [190]
She caught him just as he was coming in the door, flanked by M.P.s. It was “like they were taking him to the gallows,” she thought. “He stepped through and I said, ‘Hi, hon,’ and he turned around and his jaw fell. He said, ‘Marion, you’re in Germany and an officer!’ I knew he didn’t know. He said, ‘Do I kiss you or salute you?’ I said, ‘In that order.’ There I was in my uniform and he was in his uniform, and I just flung myself on him.”
But the only girl he was really thinking of was Priscilla. The countdown to his departure had been hell for both of them, and they clung to each other on that final day, first at the house, and then on the ride to the air base.
The night before, he told her for the first time that he loved her. “We swore undying fidelity,” she says. But underneath, she was a mass of insecurity. “What was I to think? What was I to believe? He was going back to America where he was [the] biggest star. He was going back to making music and making movies. He was going to appear on the Frank Sinatra [special]. Where did all this leave me?”
She tried not to worry too much. Hadn’t he given her his combat jacket and his sergeant’s stripes? “Little One,” he said softly, “these prove you belong to me.” Then he got out of the car, waved cheerfully to the crowd, and boarded the plane.
“He was in love with Priscilla, no two ways about it,” says Joe.
And it showed. The photographers figured out who she was and snapped her picture as he waved directly to her. Priscilla offered a lonely wave in return, and even in her sorrow, with a scarf wrapped around her head to keep the March wind at bay, her face rivaled that of a Hollywood starlet. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t cry, either. She kept her famous family reserve. And then he was gone.
But there was a postscript to the story, and it involved Currie Grant and how Suzanne Finstad knew that he was telling the truth in the he said/she said account.
After Currie had attacked her in the car the second time, Priscilla told Finstad, her parents banned Currie from ever coming anywhere near her. Elvis, too, declared he was no longer part of the group, according to Priscilla. But Currie argued that Priscilla was wrong, that he was still very much a part of the inner circle. Finstad arranged to interview them together, face-to-face, and to record the conversation with their permission, Currie said he brought Priscilla to the air base the day that Elvis flew back to the States. He and Carol had picked her up at her house.
“You think my father would let you pick me up at the house?” Priscilla countered angrily, as Finstad reported in Child Bride.
“He was glad to let me pick you up that day,” Currie mocked. “A Life cameraman took all the pictures around my car. I’m standing outside, holding the door. Priscilla, you don’t remember that, huh? You’ve got something up there that’s really blocking your memory.”
Priscilla soon left, insisting Currie was “in a dream world.”
Finstad had a scientist, Ray Gunther, put the tape of their conversation through a personality stress evaluator, or PSE, a computerized voice stress test considered more accurate than a polygraph, and used by police departments all over the Unites States. In evaluating twenty-eight points in Currie and Priscilla’s dispute, Gunther concluded that Currie was telling the truth 100 percent of the time, and that Priscilla was deceptive in all but one of her statements, an innocuous one about how Currie originally introduced himself.
Finstad also discovered that Currie had an almost photographic memory for details. He had even remembered the make, model, and license plate number of the car that he was driving at the time.
In the course of her research, Finstad found a German magazine, Film Journal, from 1960. The publication chronicled Elvis’s last day in the country in a minute-by-minute account, replete with a little clock in each photograph. There in the magazine was a picture of Currie, opening the