Priscilla Presley: Surviving Elvis
McCall's, May 1979
By Sheila Weller

The woman Elvis said he would love "for always and ever" talks about the man behind the legend, their sheltered marriage and its inevitable breakup, and the new life she and her young daughter are carving out for themselves

One day seven years ago Elvis Presley glanced across the living room of his Bel Air home at his wife, whom he'd virtually raised from the age of 15, and said to her: "My, you've grown."

"And that," Priscilla Beaulieu Presley recalls now, "is the moment we both knew the marriage was over.

"I don't remember exactly what I was doing when he said it, but I had started to do a lot of things I hadn't done before: take dancing lessons, make restaurant reservations, have friends outside Elvis' group. He suddenly saw that I had to leave the cocoon I was living in with him, that tight security, those years and years and years of the same people" - a coterie of men popularly known as the Memphis Mafia. "Eighty percent of my life with Elvis was good, but I'd begun to realize these was a world out there, outside of his protection. He'd dominated everything I did. He was not only a lover but a father to me, and as long as I stayed with him I could never be anything but his little girl."

On January eighth, 1973, Elvis set Priscilla free from their five-and-a-half-year marriage - and ten-year life together. He gave her ample endowment to start a new life. (Reports put the settlement at $1.7 million, along with a monthly $8,000 in alimony and child support for their daughter, Lisa Marie.) In a moment equal to the most sentimental of his love songs, he kissed his wife good-bye on the steps of the Santa Monica Courthouse - "and," Priscilla reveals now, "he whispered: 'For always and ever.'"

She was straight-faced when she said this - actually, almost pious. For as much as those words sound like an autograph, he wasn't being intentionally fatuous; such was Elvis' idea of earnestness. When people refer to theirs as a "fairy-tale romance," they aren't just spouting facile words. In some ways, Elvis and Priscilla really did live a life shrouded from reality.

As Elvis' wife, she could not leave the house without getting clearance from armed bodyguards, and she was never allowed to drive unaccompanied. Today she travels the world, often alone, and just recently braved the Northern California rapids in a raft - "freezing in my bathing suit for all nine hours, getting a little scared, but loving it."

With Elvis, Priscilla never balanced a checkbook or glanced at a bank statement. After the divorce, she plunged into the world of accountants, lawyers, wholesalers and real-estate agents by financing a business and buying a house.

In Elvis, she had for a husband a man who was already a millionaire and national idol when she was just starting high school. Now, with model and aspiring actor Michael Edwards, she has a mate her own age (33), not yet a "name," much less a superstar.

When she talks of he life with Elvis, she uses words like "worship." When she talks of her life today, she uses words like "growth." And it's the contrast between these two emotional time zones - "the pure fantasy I lived in then, the reality I'm in today" - that Priscilla is exploring as we sit in the living room of the Beverly Hills canyon home she shares with Edwards and 11-year-old Lisa Marie.

Out the window, large palm and orange trees circle a swimming pool; beyond that, there's a private tennis court. Inside, a maid discreetly enters the room - dramatic with its 20-foot-high tropical plants, its large antique oak pieces, its couches and pillows of calico and paisley - and places a pot of coffee before us. A few moments ago, Priscilla and Michael had burst in from a round of errands. The pair of them - he, sleek, tan, modishly thick-haired in a spotless white cable-knit; she, tiny and quick, in blue slacks and sweater, her dark blonde hair flying - could have been an ad for the good, affluent California life. The energy and forthrightness of her movements contradicted the chiseled delicacy of her face. She seemed an animated cameo - '70s style.

Photographs from her years with Elvis revealed a very different sort of cameo: anachronistic, unreal, almost palpably timid under the thick eye makeup and baroquely teased hair. As she talks now - her gaze direct - those pictures fade from memory.

"I'm finally starting an acting career - or hoping to, anyway. I'm going for readings and auditions. I took acting lessons for a while, and I was going to guest-star on a Tony Orlando TV special until it got turned into a one-man show, and then...I kind of backed away from the idea of 'going public.' I thought I'd just try to do commercials, which are safe. I'd be anonymous, just pitching a product. See, it has taken me so long to establish a normal, private life that I didn't want to risk letting it go."

Her biggest responsibility is to Lisa Marie. Despite the frenetic attention heaped on the child - "At Elvis' concerts, fans would scream for her to pose for pictures, even ask for her autograph" - and the pressures of living in a town in which some children her age carry Gucci handbags, Lisa lives quite a wholesome life. She has slumber parties and cooks herself canned spaghetti and wants to be a teacher when she grows up. Jeans and parkas and T-shirts painted with "GREASE" and HEY STUPID hang in her closet. Linda Ronstadt records blare from the phonograph in her room as soon as she's finished her daily hour of homework. She does have her own horse, but she gets an ordinary allowance, and she was as thrilled and abashed as any young girl when, on her last birthday, she had her picture taken with her heart throb, John Travolta.

"I've really worked to attain this life for Lisa," Priscilla says. The mother-daughter bond is paramount to both of them. Lisa has nicknamed Priscilla "Bestor" ("It progressed to that from 'Best' and 'Bestest'"), and every night, before Lisa goes to sleep, Priscilla asks: "Are there any problems we have to discuss?" Frequently, Lisa will beat her to it. "When I seem upset, she runs up to me and asks what's the matter. She's very sensitive; you can't hide a mood from her. And she loves to give comfort and advice. She is very protective."

That protectiveness - touchingly - extends to herself. Lisa walks in the door now in her private-school shirt-and-shorts uniform, knee socks and running shoes, a cardigan tied at her waist. But your attention goes right to her face. The doleful sloe eyes, the high forehead - she looks stunningly like her father. She nods a hello that tells you she probably knows what you're thinking; put on finger to her sealed lips, points, with another, to the "enemy" tape recorder. When the machine is turned off, she fingers her silky blond hair shyly as she talks to her mother about an upcoming meeting with her schoolteacher. "Am I supposed to be there?" she asks, in a high voice. Priscilla says no. She lets out a long "Phewww," smiles, and goes off to her room.

The values and survival skills that Priscilla passed on to Lisa come from her own childhood. The oldest of six children of Air Force Colonel Joseph Beaulieu and his wife, Ann, she learned responsibility by helping raise her younger brothers and sisters, and adaptability from demands of peripatetic military life. By the time she moved with her family to Wiesbaden, Germany, after a childhood scattered all over the States, she was poised and mature beyond her 14 years.

She was also strikingly beautiful. When a young Air Force man approached her at a local cafe and asked her if she'd like to meet Elvis Presley, she said, "Of course; who wouldn't?", fully convinced he was kidding. He wasn't; Presley had seen her and, nervous about approaching her himself, had asked a friend to do it for him. The young man took her to a house near the base. "I walked in the door and there - sitting across the room in a red sweater - was Elvis. I went over in my little sailor dress and said hello. I felt so...young."

But despite her youth - or, quite likely, because of it - Elvis was charmed. "Why me, out of all the women he could have had?" she asks herself. "He always liked petite girls with blue eyes and dark hair." That first evening they were surrounded by Elvis' cohorts - as they would be throughout most of their life together. Elvis played country songs on the piano. Alone with Priscilla, he seemed "polite, shy, insecure." He told her he was afraid he'd lose his popularity when he got out of the army and returned to the States.

After several months' courtship in Germany, Elvis returned to America. Priscilla doubted she'd ever see him again. But he called - once, twice, three times - and invited her to visit him in L.A. Her parents reluctantly consented. "They were afraid I'd be hurt," she remembered. "So was I. I didn't know if the trip was a test - or a trial - or what." After the long trans-atlantic flight, a Presley aide picked up the nervous 15-year-old at the airport and drove her to a six-bedroom Spanish mansion in Bel Air. "A maid answered the door and led me down to the game room. There was Elvis, with a pool cue in his hand and a captain's hat on. He rushed over and hugged me - and I knew everything would be all right."

Other trips followed, including a Christmas visit to Graceland, Elvis' Memphis estate. "The morning I was supposed to go home, I was sitting with him in his upstairs office. He told me he loved me, that he couldn't let me go." Several phone calls to Priscilla's father in Germany finally convinced Colonel Beaulieu to let his daughter enter into an unusual arrangement. She would live at Graceland, chaperoned by Elvis' father, Vernon, and his new wife, Dee; she would finish 12th grade at a local Catholic girls' school; she'd be well provided for.

That last promise turned out to be an understatement. And only her sensible childhood kept Priscilla clear-headed while limousines took her to and from school and she received her own Convair...and Chevrolet, and Toronado, and Eldorado, and Mercedes. When they went to a fair together, Elvis rented the whole fairgrounds. When they went to a movie, he rented the theater. "It was life in a bubble," she says.

On Christmas Eve of 1966, Elvis walked into Priscilla's ornate bathroom while she was brushing her hair, bent down on his knee, and presented her with a ring of 21 diamonds. They were married, on May first of the next year, at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas; a band played "Love Me Tender" as they took their vows. Nine months later Lisa Marie was born.

But the fairy tale had its dark side. A man who could brook no intrusions, Elvis allowed only his tight circle of friends in their home. "There was no newness, no outside of world at all." Priscilla decorated their Bel Air home with exactly the masculine furniture Elvis wanted, dressed herself to his wishes. "If he said, 'That's a terrible color on you,' I'd change my clothes immediately. For years I was self-conscious that my neck was too long because Elvis always told me to wear my shirt collars up. Now I realize..." She squints, as if focusing on a revelation. "You know all those pictures where he had his collar up? He was the one who was self-conscious about his neck."

Her husband was a sensitive man who cried during old movies and whenever he talked about his mother, Gladys, who died some years before, and agonized over the way his music was being tampered with and the string of beach-party movies he was contracted to crank out. "Most of the time, though," Priscilla said, "he held all that tremendous vulnerability in." I mentioned a theory, posited by one writer, that Elvis died the victim of insulation: overweight, over-drugged, overguarded by his henchmen, in a room where even the ceilings were carpeted. "Yes," she said, softly. "And he insulated himself from his own feelings, too. Whenever he was scared, or doubtful, or guilty, he'd say: 'I can't feel that way.'

"My happiest memories of Elvis are the times - there were few of them - when he dropped that wall, when he became the person he might have been without all the pressures. Nights when he'd come into Lisa's bedroom - he always called her 'Yeesa' - and read her nursery rhymes on the bed. And the day he bought horses for everyone at Graceland. I can still see him out there in the dirt, in his jeans and heavy coat and cowboy hat, going around, writing everybody's name on the stalls with a red marking pen - watering the horses, blanketing them. He looked so satisfied, so...simple."

Priscilla has always been protective of Elvis. She will not comment on the stories about his gunplay, his drug talking, his indiscretions. When asked if she wants to talk about Mike Stone, the karate instructor she was reportedly in love with even before she left Elvis, she says a firm, quiet "No." But she will remark on the fact that three men in her life since Elvis (Stone, hairdresser Elie Erazer and now Michael Edwards) have had unspectacular careers as yet. "That's what I want now - peers, equality, a relationship where I can grow, side by side, with a man."

Her own growth - one cannot escape the work with her - began with the divorce. Gone were the maids, chauffeurs, bodyguards - all the accouterments of her bird-in-a-gilded-cage life. "I remember standing in the living room of the little apartment I took before I bought this house, watching the movers set down the cartons, thinking: My God, can I do this alone?" As if that weren't enough of a challenge, she opened a boutique with dress designer Olivia Bis (she has since sold her share of the now-thriving business) and recalls "sitting in a fabric showroom for the first time - swamped by rolls and rolls of yardage, having to figure out costs and quantity and being floored by all the new responsibility." At five o'clock every day, she drove home, through bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic, "worrying that I'd be too tired to fix dinner for myself and Lisa."

But she proved she could do it all. "I became confident, in control of my life, secure: all the things I couldn't be before." Elvis watched it all - and held out hope that they'd reunite. "I'd take Lisa over to his house and he'd say, "Cilla, go do what you have to do now. Go see the world. But when you're forty and I'm fifty, we'll be back together. You'll see.'" She pauses. "Could it have happened?" Her expression is conertedly skeptical; yet she admits: "I guess I have never thought it was out of the question. We were both such romatics. Sometimes I think if I knew then what I know now - that only when you're a person in your own right can you help another person be happy - I could have made our marriage work. But there was no way I could have become my own person inside that marriage."

Elvis eventually came to the same realization. "We had the most beautiful talks, the closest moments, at the very end. He'd say, 'Cilla, you were right. I should have given you more freedom. I should have listened when you said you needed to have your own friends over to the house. I know why I didn't let you; it was my own insecurity.'" She looked gratified, wistful. "See? He had grown, too."

During their last talk - late in the summer of '77 - the differences in their lives was acute. Priscilla was preparing to go off on a safari in New Guinea; Elvis, in bad health, was pondering his future less optimistically. "He told me he was thinking of changing fields - becoming a movie or record producer. I don't know if he really would have done it - he was always such a fantasizer - but he was grasping for something. He knew, by then, that he wouldn't become the great actor he wanted to be. He was really more upset than most people know that he couldn't do A Star Is Born (opposite Barbara Streisand). The decision not to do it was made for him; it was one of the big disappointments of his life - that and the book that had just come out (Elvis, What Happened?) where the men he thought were his friends turned around and attacked him."

One day shortly after that talk - on August 16th - Priscilla was picked up at the beauty parlor by her sister. They were supposed to go to lunch. "But the minute I got in the car, I knew something was wrong. My sister turned off the motor and said: 'I have something to tell you. A call came in from Memphis.' This big shock went through me. Lisa was in Memphis, so I was sure something had happened to her. But she said: 'It's Elvis. They have him in the hospital.'

"We rushed home, I could hear the phone ringing from the front step; I couldn't get my key in the door fast enough. I picked up the phone. It was Joe Esposito, Elvis's closest friend, telling me he had just died."

Priscilla cancelled her New Guinea plans; a private plane was immediately dispatched to take her to Memphis. She held Lisa's hand tightly throughout the funeral and, right afterward, decided to protect her child from the hysterical public mourning by sending her to summer camp.

The innuendo and gossip by Elvis exploiters clearly affects Priscilla. "It wasn't our divorce that made him so unhappy at the end," she volunteers anxiously. "It was a lot of different things. And there was never any bad feeling between Mr. Presley" - as she's always called Vernon - "and myself. And I was a good wife." The strenuousness of her self-defense is moving. The words seem unnecessary - until one considers the legions of Elvis fans against whole well-meaning but sometimes brutal loyalty she will probably always have to shield her life.

Still, she has done quite well with that life. When Michael Edwards met her at the disco party she gave at this house to a year ago, it was, he says now, "her vitality, her liveliness that attracted me. She seemed so up. And, no, I wasn't intimidated by who she used to be married to." He thinks about it a minute. "Well, maybe if I had met him, it would have been different. I might have been in awe. I mean, I copied that duck tail in high school, I wore tight jeans. But-"

"Michael," Priscilla cuts in proudly, "is his own man." She looks at him with admiration. Then, swooning facetiously, she says: "We had one dance that night at my party... and I haven't been out of his arms since." She laughs - mocking the very solemn romanticism that was once so much a part of her life.

Lisa likes Michael a lot also. She writes pen-pal letters to his 10-year-old daughter in Florida. She submits to his monitoring of her homework. "When it comes to avoiding homework," Michael said wryly, "Lisa has her father's strong will."

Priscilla smiles at the offhand ease - even the presumption - of that last remark. There, for one second, it could have been any old father that Michael was talking about.