Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [223]
“I was enormously resistant to the idea of Cilla going to live in Memphis,” Paul Beaulieu has gone on the record to say. “As far as I was concerned, it just was not going to happen.”
But once more, Priscilla’s mother was the key. “You hear about people with magnetic personalities,” Ann Beaulieu has said. “No matter how strongly you might oppose his position, he would charm you over to his side. He did it by being persistent, and also, to a large degree, by being sweet.”
And so little by little, Paul Beaulieu began to think seriously about Elvis’s offer. “Elvis pledged to care for her with absolute devotion. The intimation was that one day they’d marry.”
In March, Captain Beaulieu and Priscilla flew to Los Angeles, where Elvis was still working on Fun in Acapulco. They stayed at the Bel Air Sands motel, and Elvis picked them up every day in his Rolls-Royce or the far more ostentatious “solid gold” Cadillac and took them sightseeing, driving from one end of Los Angeles to another—the Hollywood Hills, Sunset Boulevard, and the Pacific Coast Highway. Captain Beaulieu was impressed, and in between the touring and the studio visits, the two men continued to discuss Priscilla’s education and living quarters if she were to move to Memphis.
Paul Beaulieu was a military man, but he was also a businessman—he had earned a degree in business administration in Texas—and he had pointed questions about precisely how Elvis saw the financial arrangements. But Elvis had all the answers, and before the captain got on a plane back to Germany, he took Priscilla to Memphis, where he delivered her over to Vernon’s care.
“I kissed my father good-bye and thanked him for trusting me and Elvis,” Priscilla wrote. “It was now out of my hands. My new life had begun.”
At the time—only five years after Jerry Lee Lewis had created a scandal by marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin—the arrangement was so unorthodox and threatening to Elvis’s career that he would lie about it to the local press. That spring, he told a reporter from the Commercial Appeal who spotted Elvis and Priscilla together in Chenault’s parking lot that she was the daughter of a military officer who “sent her ahead because she wanted to graduate on time.” He also implied that her family was not far behind.
Yet Priscilla’s stepfather seemed completely nonchalant about discussing the arrangement with others. Phillip Barber, who had gotten to know Elvis on Audubon Drive in 1956 during Natalie Wood’s visit, was in the air force by 1965 and had a staff officer’s job in Operations Plans at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento, California. One day, he was in casual conversation with a newly minted major named Joseph Paul Beaulieu (“My boss called him Joe”), whom he saw and talked with almost daily. Major Beaulieu reviewed war plans for active duty units engaged in flying missions in and out of Southeast Asia, as well as contingency plans posed by the intelligence community.
The major noted Phillip’s southern accent. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“Well, I came into the air force from Memphis, Tennessee.”
“Oh,” Major Beaulieu said. “My daughter lives there.”
“Really, what does she do there?”
“She just got out of school.”
“Memphis State?” Phillip asked.
“No, Immaculate Conception.”
Phillip recognized the Catholic girls school.
“Do you have relatives there?”
“No, she lives with Elvis Presley.”
At first Phillip didn’t know what to say. “Oh!” he finally managed. “She lived with him in high school?”
“Yes, um hum.”
“Well, are they going to get married?”
“Oh, yes, that’s been arranged for several years now.”
But was a perceived promise of marriage really all that it took to get Priscilla to Memphis? Many people think no, that in essence, Elvis “bought” Priscilla, or that her parents “sold” her into