Priscilla Presley of Those amazing Animals
TV Guide, Sept 20, 1980
By Elizabeth Kaye

As a cohost of 'Those Amazing Animals', Priscilla Presley is struggling to launch a career of her own

Photographs of her, as she used to be, are pressed with care into scrapbooks that are kept on special shelves and tables in rooms all over the world. The woman in these pictures has thick, lacquered black hair and there are heavy black lines around her eyes, but she is nontheless beautiful and famous mostly for the amazingly famous face that is, in the most of these pictures, right next to hers.

The era of such pictures, the black hair and the man with the famous face ended one day in January of 1973. Seven years later she's still beautiful; more so, in fact, with hair soft and blonded and the most delicate pastel shadings above her enormous blue eyes. Now she no longer looks like someone's idea of how she should be, but like herself.

Had Elvis Presley lived, stories that they would someday be reconciled would have kept magazines selling endlessly from grocery-store racks. But things worked out another way, and her deep and complex connection with him was relegated to the past, though she retains their daughter, a settlement of money, her carefully guarded memories of him, and his name.

Priscilla Beaulieu Presley has always seemed a kind of fairy-tale figure, a persona created for her in the years of her marriage, when she was kept at home in a mansion in Memphis and was the Rapunzel of rock and roll. Her birthplace, however, is utterly prosaic: Brooklyn, N.Y. she didn't live there long, however, because her father was an Army colonel subject to such constant transfers that in one year she attended four different schools. "It makes you grow up with a very insecure feeling," she says. "You begin to wonder who your friends are--and what are friends."

Her defense against this world was a fantasy life that had the advantage of being portable, and that turned her loneliness into self-sufficiency. "My dreams when I was small could best be described by seeing 'The Black Stallion'." She smiles, for then as now she not only loved animals but found it easier to obtain a rapport with them than with most people. "Animals have no ulterior motives," she says. "and once they love you, they're always there." Another fantasy involved singer Mario Lanza. "From the time I was 9, I had an affinity with him. I loved his music and I had been told that he was very lonely and I identified with that. I used to play his records and talk to him and try to make him feel better."

Five yrs later, she had become an unusually adult 14-year-old, and she met another lonely man with a remarkable voice who was 10 years older than she was, and also intrigued by Lanza, thought that was something she did not learn about Elvis Presley until much later. They had met in Germany, where both Private Presley and her father were stationed. After Presley's release from the Army and return to Memphis, he called Colonel Beaulieu to request that Priscilla be permitted to live with him in what was to be fully chaperoned situation. Priscilla Beaulieu moved to the Memphis estate known as Graceland when she was 16, thus leaving the unreal world of the Army for another unreal life.

She completed her high-school education at a girls' school in Memphis. After graduation, her life seems to have been dictated by that of her future husband, and her time was spent at Graceland, in California when he was making movies, and in Palm Springs. When she was 21, they were married. Their daughter was born the next year. "I was totally devoted to my life style at that time, to being a wife and mother. I had no ambitions then. It was a totally other life."

Her husband's world in Memphis was a place of rolling green lawns and thoroughbred horses, yet it seems to have increasingly become a blighted Eden, one that could have debilitated a young woman who had entered it as young as she did. "I think I've always had my feet on the ground and that's why I've been able to survive. I've always, deep inside, known that happiness is really peace of mind. I stress that to my daughter all the time. When I say I want to give her the best, I don't mean the best things, but the best in understanding and communication, and in hearing what she has to say. It's not that I put down having things. It can be wonderful, it gives you freedom. I just feel that unless you have peace of mind to go along with it, it means nothing."

She was married to Elvis for five and a half years. Her reasons for leaving him have remained her own, though she says, "I didn't leave to do a career. My God, it was so much more complicated than that." She and her daughter moved to Los Angeles, and to the degree that that city can be called "the real world," she was in the real world for the first time. "Even thought I've always been sheltered myself," she says, "I also have to know about life, to be aware, to know what's going on. I've never wanted to be around only people who are locked into a prestigious life style because that's not real. I want to be in there with people who are struggling to do what they care about." Then, clearly, some level of struggle appeals to her? "Definitely. I like to struggle. And I have."

Since becoming a single woman, Priscilla Presley has received countless letters from women who are in what they assume to be her previous situation. These are women with lovely homes and children, women who feel they should be happy with them and with their husbands and are not. "They aren't doing what they really want to do," Priscilla Presley believes. "So many women don't because they're scared to. And they don't do what they meant to do: flourish."

She set aside some of her own fears in 1973 when she opened a clothing boutique in Beverly Hills. "It was mostly something to do after my divorce," she says, "but I was there every day, and it was work."

She sold her interest in the store in 1977 and did some traveling. "But I wasn't fulfilled. I felt something was missing." In 1978 she took steps toward becoming an actress and model, and in so doing got a taste of that special fear that comes with doing what one really wants to. "I didn't want to look back some day and wish I had tried for that career while I had the chance."

Being a Presley in show business is like being a Kennedy in politics: because of your name, doors are opened for you, and behind those doors wait extremely cynical people. "The first six months of going out on interviews and to different companies, I met a lot of people and I saw the negativity that was there. I could feel the vibes. I could feel people thinking: what does she want?, or who does she think she is?, or she's just cashing in on this or cashing in on that. That wasn't the case at all. I wanted to work."

When she began her show-business career she already had the particular by-products of celebrity: she was already rich and famous, and already something of a star, even if that designation was the result of seeming rather than being. So hard work and the self-regard that accompanies it were what she had to gain from the entertainment world, and to get them she had to risk what could be a public and embarrassing failure. "Even more than that," she says, "there are all those negative comments. But I've got to do what I've got to do for myself. I'm at a time when I value my life and the products I produce from it. And I want to attain a goal, so I can't get into that."

Her first big job, in 1979, was a commercial for a hair-product company. "People think I was just offered it," she smiles. "I wish it were that easy."

In 1978 she had begun taking acting lessons. For a year and a half she auditioned for some parts she did not get, and was offered some parts she did not want, including, she has said, a part as one of Charlie's Angels. "A lot of television," she believes, "is a shallow look at what it's not like. I wanted to do something that was good, rewarding, beneficial, educational--and something that meant growth for me." In May 1980 she found a show that seemed to her to fill all those requirements.

Those Amazing Animals, produced by the same company that produces That's Incredible!, follows similar lines, except the stories concern animals instead of people. She will serve as host of the show with Burgess Meredith and Jim Stafford, and her responsibilities include introducing animals, from tarantulas to pythons, and interviewing guests. As it happens, this is a job that did just come to her.

Executive producer Merrill Grant had seen her on talk shows and knew of her interest in animals, a requisite for all three hosts. He never considered anyone else for the assignment. "While her last name is not a marquee liability," he says, "it's not enough to get her signed for a prime-time television show. In this town she's considered to be an attractive, intelligent personality who can handle herself in show-business terms. We wanted her for all those things, and that's true. That's true"

The show went on the air in August. Eventually, she hopes to find work in feature films, but for now the television series is the focus of her attention. "I don't care about being a superstar," she says, "but I feel I have something to give and to share, and if I can do that and maintain my values...well, I can."

So now the woman from the make-believe worlds is planted firmly in that part of the real world where competition is toughest. "When I was little," she says, "I knew that whatever I did--and I didn't know what it would be--but I knew that whatever it was, I would give everything to it. I think a lot of kids feel that way. You just want to be the best at whatever you do. I've been through a lot of conflict. There's been tragedy to cope with. There's been a fight for survival. Now I feel certain of myself. I can say: this is me, this is who I am. and I accept that."