Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [305]
During big arguments such as that, Joe saw that “he played the tough part: ‘Hey, you don’t like it? Here’s the door.’ A couple of times, he got in fights with her and some of the later girls and said, ‘You can take your clothes and leave.’ Elvis was very good about being on the defensive whenever he got in trouble, and he was great when it came to screaming and yelling. It frightened them to the point that they wouldn’t say any more. He had a real bad temper.”
Priscilla’s way of dealing with it all was just to continue building her own life in California with Lisa Marie. She had a new set of friends, and she was taking karate now from Ed Parker. When she was in Memphis, she’d keep up her technique with Kang Rhee at his studio on Poplar Avenue, where Elvis studied tae kwon do. Priscilla also continued her dance sessions while in Memphis, frequently at Sally O’Brien’s studio behind the Davis YMCA in Whitehaven. Pat West, Red’s wife, went with her, Priscilla driving and taking Lisa Marie to play with Sally’s daughter, Paige, who was Lisa’s same age.
Sally considered Priscilla to be “a lovely dancer, and missed few classes. . . . I found her to be a very warm and kind person. I think she just needed to have some normal time and conversation away from the spotlight.”
It was normalcy that Priscilla craved the most. Some of her favorite moments with Elvis were the “nights when he’d come into Lisa’s bedroom—he always called her ‘Yeesa’—and read her nursery rhymes on the bed.”
But those times grew fewer and fewer. One night in California, Elvis looked across the living room and realized Priscilla could do quite well without him.
“My,” he said. “You’ve grown.”
And that, Priscilla says, “is the moment we both knew the marriage was over.”
For a while, she remained the token wife, tucked away at home while Elvis indulged himself with a plethora of girlfriends. Finally she did what she felt she had to do. “I took a lover. It was my way out.” He was, of course, Mike Stone, the karate champ she and Elvis had seen in Hawaii.
The guys knew about her affair before Elvis did. Henrietta, the maid at the Holmby Hills house, told Red that Mike was spending a lot of time there. Then three-year-old Lisa Marie inadvertently ratted them out. Mike had taken them camping, she told new entourage member James Caughley, and “I saw Mommy and Mike wrestling in their sleeping bag on the beach. They wrestled all night.” Finally, Sonny caught them in the shower together on Monovale.
Nobody really blamed her, especially not Joe. “She wanted some real love that she wasn’t getting from her husband. She was at home going out with the girls, and then started to take karate with Mike, and boom, it all changed.”
But Priscilla would wait for the right time to tell her husband that she had chosen another man over him.
He was already acting like a man who knew, but even if he didn’t, he began moving farther out on the edge, taking bigger chances and demonstrating increasingly reckless regard for his own life. But there were still glimmers that he held out hope. In May he renewed contact with Daya Mata at the Self-Realization Center, and soon he would invite Larry Geller back into the fold. For a short period, he looked into Scientology, the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard.
While he ultimately dismissed Scientology as cultish and money grubbing (“He stayed away from Scientology like it was a cobra,” says Lamar),