Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [224]
Whatever the arrangement, once Priscilla’s parents and Elvis came to some understanding, it was as if Priscilla herself had no say in it. She was infatuated with him, yes, but just before she came to Graceland to live with him, she had major misgivings about the move.
“My feelings were mixed—grateful and glad that Elvis had pulled off this coup, hopeful and determined that our relationship would last,” she has written. But her friends back in Germany have a different view. When it came right down to it, they say, she didn’t want to go. She preferred staying in Germany with her boyfriend Jamie Lindberg, with whom she was intimately involved. In fact, her mother was afraid Priscilla would throw Elvis over for Jamie, and his own impression, he told Suzanne Finstad for Child Bride, supports that: “Her mom more or less said, ‘You are going.’ ”
“It was a terribly difficult position for her to be in,” sympathizes biographer Finstad. “She was conflicted because she had her own relationships that were deceptive to Elvis, so she was just in a quagmire.”
But throughout her childhood, Priscilla had always been compliant and dutiful in terms of her parents’ requests of her. And since she was extremely tied to her mother, the only thing for her to do was to go through with it. If it didn’t work out, she could always come home.
When her friends in Germany found out, they were aghast—not only that her parents permitted it, but also that she had simply disappeared that March without telling anybody good-bye. The timing of it had been odd, too. Captain Beaulieu had to get special military leave to come to the States, and Elvis was making a movie that March and couldn’t go home to Memphis. Why hadn’t Priscilla just finished out her school year and moved after turning eighteen that May?
Colonel Eugene Desaulniers, Paul Beaulieu’s friend, neighbor, and fellow officer at Travis Air Force Base, explains the story as he heard it. “In that era, it was a very strange thing that somebody would allow that. But it was a situation where she was going to hightail it out of there one way or the other. And from a family point of view, he wanted to make it [look like], ‘All right, if that’s really what you want to do, then we will support you. I’ll take you there.’ So he went and made the deal with the Presleys to finish her education, and he and Priscilla made their own deal between them, and away they went. If they had announced that she was leaving, the whole place would have been in an uproar with all the publicity. He just snuck her out and took her, and it was all done before anybody really knew.”
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Elvis resumed his old way of life. He had moved back into the house on Perugia Way—the Bellagio Road house was a little too fancy for him, said Alan Fortas—and his nightly parties went on as before. He intended to give up nothing to keep Priscilla. She was merely an add-on.
One of his frequent guests on Perugia Way was singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon. The pretty blonde was then still a teenager but already teetering on the edge of fame as both an artist and a writer (“Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” “Needles and Pins”) and soon she would become an important figure in the evolution of folk-rock. She often came to Perugia Way with her friend Sharon Sheeley, her sometime collaborator, who had been showing up at Elvis’s parties with her sister, Mary Jo, since the Knickerbocker days.
They sat with Elvis and listened to records, sometimes jamming with their guitars and singing. Jackie and Elvis became good friends—he loved her soulful singing and her laid-back southern personality (she was born in Kentucky), and he appreciated her talent and saw that she was going places. Sometimes he offered her career advice, and in some ways, he considered himself a mentor to her.
Before she first went up to the house, Elvis told her he was going to send one of the guys to pick her up. She was living at home then, and she realized that wasn’t going to work. “I come from a background where no matter who you are, you come to