"No angel"
Wooed by Elvis from the age of 14, Priscilla Presley was subject to the King's every whim when she became his wife. How can she say she still loves him?
Peter Conrad ? The Observer, England Sunday May 22, 2005
Did Elvis ever really leave the building? It is almost 30 years since he died - bloated, drug-befuddled, gun-mad - in the tacky opulence of Graceland, but not since Christ quit the tomb on the third day has any death seemed so provisional. His daughter Lisa Marie, nine at the time, spent the days before the funeral in the room with his body, willing him to reconsider.
Resurrection, as it happened, was more or less immediate. Supermarket tabloids soon reported sightings of an undead Elvis, and imitators in spangled capes lip-synched to his records in Las Vegas.
His body, like Christ's, was available for consumption by true believers: a rumour alleged that Presleyburgers had been made from his minced corpse and distributed like communion wafers to 'New York and West Coast rock aristocracy'. Less favoured acolytes made do with the fetishistic heirlooms they traded.
Locks of his hair, dyed the blue-black of a raven's wing, still sell for thousands of dollars. His ghost, made of sequinned ectoplasm, materialises in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train. In 1979 an underground film exhumed the cadaver (this time unminced) for a farewell concert tour, at the end of which its putrid flesh was sliced off and sold piecemeal.
The Elvis myth exists to deny death, or to console us for its undeniability. Nevertheless, it's likely that whatever is left of him reposes in the meditation garden at Graceland, beneath a bronze plaque doubly emblazoned with a cross and his personal logo - a lightning bolt to signal the electric energy that caused his pelvis to jerk and quake, with the initials TCB as a reminder to Take Care of Business, the motto of his Memphis entourage.
Elvis is gone, but his widow Priscilla remains with us, and she was in London last week to promote a book and a memorial video documentary about him; he may have mouldered, but she still looks exactly like the 14-year-old he began to woo while he was a GI in Germany in 1959.
Myths repudiate death, and cosmetic surgery has its own way of slyly refuting time. 'She looked like a little doll,' cooed Elvis's cousin Patsy when the schoolgirl Priscilla, surrendered by her parents, came to live at Graceland as both his ward and bedmate.
Priscilla, now 60, is still doll-like - dainty, impenetrably painted, with waxen cheeks and a pursed mouth that is under too much duress, after the tightening she has undergone, to blab out secrets. A face not lived in has no way of registering her distress. Her eyes, pinioned open, continue to look at the world with dazed wonder, and her voice is that of a breathy, tentative teenager.
She is, whether she admits it or not, a damaged creature. 'I was someone he created,' she told me when we met. 'I was just a kid, and I was consumed by him. I could never speak my mind; all I desired was not to disappoint him.'
Elvis dictated the colour of her hair, which was dyed as inkily as his own and then teased into gravity-defying cones; he insisted on the mascara that turned her eyes into volcanic craters, and the false lashes that flapped above them like nocturnal birds; he picked out the tarty costumes she wore when she came home from Catholic school, shed her uniform, and began to play what she calls 'his femme fatale'.
He dosed her with uppers to adjust her moods, and deprived her of her favourite food, tuna salad, because he disliked its smell. 'Yes, he was quite critical. What you're seeing,' said Priscilla, pointing to her transfixed face, 'is the product of constant criticism.'
Elvis once caught her frowning as she glanced up from her homework, and gave her a slap on the forehead to warn her that it was wrinkling. 'If I looked up, it had to be with my eyes only, so the skin would stay smooth. See, I'm so well trained that I can't do it now even if I want to!' She illustrated: her brow has indeed been immobilised, ironed flat.
Elvis 'was committed to my purity', as Priscilla puts it. He courted her like one of the pining minstrels in medieval romance, and left her unsullied after she moved in with him. Until their marriage in 1967, they contented themselves with heavy petting. Consummation was adjourned until the wedding night in Las Vegas; the result was immediate impregnation.
The criticism continued. 'Elvis was always talking about women who let themselves go when they were expecting, who used it as an excuse to gain weight. So I actually lost eight pounds when I was carrying! I ate only eggs and apples, I never drank milk. No, I wasn't allowed to see a doctor. Elvis didn't like to have new people around. We were in a cocoon at Graceland.'
The birth of their daughter resulted in a wounding sexual rejection. Elvis felt, according to Priscilla's testimony in the book, that 'he just couldn't have sex with a woman who'd had a child'.
When I asked her about this, she revised the record, although the book reports on the end of 'intimacy'.
'No, no, of course we were having sex! I mean, he was Elvis after all, and I must say he was very creative, very playful.'
Despite this fervour, I was reminded of Lisa Marie's assertion - in a television interview during her brief marriage to Michael Jackson - that she and Jacko were rabbiting away in the nuptial suite at Neverland.
So why did Elvis embargo postpartum intercourse?
'Oh,' said Priscilla a little prissily, 'I guess he had a madonna complex.'
The marriage unravelled, and they were divorced in 1973. 'He was still very lovey with me, but only upstairs, when the guys weren't around to impress. He was a Southern boy, a man's man, and girls were kept out of sight. The other wives and I were only allowed to leave Memphis and go to Vegas at certain times - first nights or last nights.
That left Elvis and his buddies free to be bad boys with the showgirls in between! Not that I was any angel. Eventually I took on someone.' The euphemism is characteristic. Priscilla's maiden name is Beaulieu (pronounced Bewlew) and she is as much of a genteel Southern belle as Tennessee Williams's Blanche du Bois.
When my more mobile brow furrowed in puzzlement, she lisped a shy clarification: 'I took a lover. It was my way out.'
What, I wondered, were the demons that drove Elvis? She thought him vulnerable, and wanted to nurture him; a child herself, she had to replace the mother he lost a year before they met.
'He was criticised when he was growing up for the way he looked, the way he wore his hair - just like he criticised me - and that must have been quite impactful.
People laughed at him because he was very fussy, he'd always carry his own utensils when he went out to eat because he didn't want germs.' I'd read that he was unhappy with his body, even though his fans worshipped it as a phallic totem. Was it true that he disliked his spindly legs? 'I'm not quite agreeing about the legs,' said Priscilla.
'All I would say is that he always wore a T-shirt when we were at the beach or in the ocean. He thought, being Elvis, that he should have a hairier chest. Of course if it were now he'd be waxing off the few hairs he did have!'
Graceland was the court of an absolute monarch, whose nocturnal habits were fuelled by benzedrine. Priscilla has her own cautious way of describing his manic whims:
'Well, Elvis was very spontaneous. It would be, "Now we're all gonna go horse-back riding, or out on our motor bikes. Or we're gonna take the plane to Vegas."
And you couldn't say you didn't want to.'
As at court, the corridors were thick with whispers, and the paranoid king suspected his fawning entourage of treachery.
'He'd call on the intercom every morning to see who was in the kitchen before he went down to have his breakfast. He didn't like it if there was someone in the room who was on the outs.
Often it was a family member wanting money.' After their separation, Priscilla watched as Elvis simultaneously inflated and imploded. His body ballooned, choked with bacon cheeseburgers and pint tubs of ice cream, and he hid it behind jewelled capes or inside cavernous jumpsuits; his act became louder, more hollowly self-parodic.
'He was terribly insecure by the end. People were always saying to him, "You didn't fill up the room today, it wasn't a sell-out." Sometimes they had to curtain off whole areas of seating to make it look less empty. No one could tell him he had a problem, or get him to deal with his addictions. Just think - if he were alive now, he'd be in his early seventies, and remember how good Cary Grant looked when he was that age!'
Despite Priscilla's fond reverie, I find it hard to imagine Elvis as a dapper pensioner, elegant despite arthritis and a toupee. Premature death ensured his immortality, and led almost immediately to a flurry of reincarnations - the claims in the tabloids that his statue had been found on Mars, the plaster statuettes sold like votive icons, the annual competitions in Vegas for Elvis clones.
After his death, Priscilla conferred another kind of immortality on him: she incorporated him. She set up Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. which runs Graceland as a museum and controls commercial rights to his image; her book, the DVD and a new set of CDs are the latest attempts to perpetuate the franchise.
'No, I never did anything out of revenge,' she said when I asked about her motives for taking that lover. But her triumph over the man who divorced her has been sweet and lucrative. 'I loved him, I still love him,' she told me, and her behaviour is wistfully reverential. But demolition is also part of the agenda: Priscilla knocked down the house Elvis occupied in Los Angeles, bronzed the bricks, then shipped them to Graceland for sale as souvenirs.
She speaks now about 'the bigness of Elvis Presley'. What you notice about Priscilla is her littleness - her frailty, and her bemusement at what has happened to her. It would be easy to call the adolescent who beguiled Elvis a nymphet, like Nabokov's Lolita. But she looks to me like one of those nymphs who in classical fables were snatched by a passing god and whipped off to heaven where they were flattered, pleasured and shown the view from on top of the world before, when the fickle deity tired, being dumped back on earth again.
If Priscilla could look up (which she knows it's unwise to do) she would probably be scrutinising the sky and asking it the same questions she heard Elvis repeating during his sessions with the gurus he consulted: 'Why me? Why was I chosen?'
And if she had a single request, it would probably be the one she made when Lisa Marie phoned her in Los Angeles to tell her that Elvis had died: 'Send the plane for me.'
P.S.I am not allow to post on Elvis news,so I'll post it here because I keep ready everything I find on or about Elvis and I just don't get it.The only thing that I know is that I LOVE ELVIS WITH ALL MY HEART.He did changed us all.That's all I know.
MLY
Last edited by GirlHappy19; 08-14-2007 at 05:24 PM.
so now I know why Priscillas face is so smooth. Its because Elvis used to slap her and there I was thinking it had something to do with plastic surgery, silly me.
She says she wasn`t allowed to see a doctor when she was pregnant but in Elvis and me she talked about going to the doctors and him advising her not to lose weight.
She is now saying she did continue to have sex with him after the birth of Lisa-Marie again contradicting her previous comments.
What a liar.
Last edited by joanne; 08-23-2006 at 03:38 AM.
Sounds to me like "cilla" is hitting the hard stuff again.
Elvis was no angel... he was a human and he is not here to defend himself so we have to hear yet another one of her sick stories.
Have you read "Child Bride" if not read it ..and you will know why she tells all the lies that she does.Like Mother like Daughter!
She was a wild girl who had many guys before Elvis and many after..but I guess that is another one of her secrets. She was no virgin when Elvis married her or before he had her!!!!!
How sweet of cilla to lay in bed with Lance Robbins making wild love to him (with Elvis was on the phone) to lay the receiver on the pillow between them and let him (Elvis) listen. woohoo... she sure is a nice lady and god sent huh??? Wake Up
Anybody that believes the garbage she tells sure is not a Elvis Fan in my book and I have to wonder why you would call yourself one.
Dovey
To me this article tops them all! I don't think I've ever read such trash in my life. The woman is about as stable as a quaking aspen and can't remember one time from the next what she's said previously. There is no way anyone can take anything she says as truth.
I wasn?t going to post but i saw Dovey and couldn?t resist to do it LOL.
I just hope people is aware this story happened more or less 40 years ago when men had another mentality in the whole world and things have changed a lot since then for women. If elvis was 30 years now he sure would think different because he would have been raised on another age.
The problem is she keeps telling the same story as if it happened today and it sure sounds as if Elvis was the evil but he was not so different from a lot of people from his age. She speaks as if her life with him was a total nightmare and how she has suffered in life , I mean ... if she wants me to feel pitty for her she can wait untill the end of time. After all the only problem she had was their marriage didn?t work like millions in the world and after all she should show gratitude towards him because she is able to have that luxury life only thanks to Elvis. As far as i know he never spoke about her faults and lovers in public, instead he blamed himself and hid the fact that she cheated on him too.... not being the first to cheat don?t make you more innocent.
I think she has a lot to learn from him but after watching how her brain works she would need at least two more lifes to achieve it.
*yawns*
_________________
Yes, Donut it is boring rubbish, I agree
Did you ever see that commercial on TV.... This is your brain on Drugs?????
Have a great day... dovey
Bye the way... this first article says "His Widow" Did elvis have a Widow??? Opps, just another lie huh??? Don't tell anybody and we won't know that they got divorced many
years ago ... Yipes... what a liar!!!!!
Last edited by Dovey; 08-23-2006 at 11:40 AM.
I have read Child Bride and it was quite an eye-opener to say the least!Originally Posted by Dovey
Sounds to me like "cilla" is hitting the hard stuff again.
Elvis was no angel... he was a human and he is not here to defend himself so we have to hear yet another one of her sick stories.
Have you read "Child Bride" if not read it ..and you will know why she tells all the lies that she does.
She was a wild girl who had many guys before Elvis and many after..but I guess that is another one of her secrets. She was no virgin when Elvis married her or before he had her!!!!!
How sweet of cilla to lay in bed with Lance Robbins making wild love to him (with Elvis was on the phone) to lay the receiver on the pillow between them and let him (Elvis) listen. woohoo... she sure is a nice lady and god sent huh??? Wake Up
Anybody that believes the garbage she tells sure is not a Elvis Fan in my book and I have to wonder why you would call yourself one.
Dovey
I don`t recall the incident that you have mentioned above though but it is quite a while since I read it.
Who is Lance Robbins tell me more.
Hi Joanne, If you still have the book Child Bride.. you can read about Lance Robbins and our darning cilla on page 322... I don't think I would wish her on my worst enemy.
Poor Elvis paid a big price for the mistake of bring her back here from Germany and making a deal with her parents... most people seem to think there was a large amound of money involved.
What a pity.... Elvis should of been thinking with this
Hey Dove, I don`t have the book anymore as although I am a ferocious reader I tend to get rid of them when I`ve read them a few times and although I remember a great deal of it I just don`t recall this Lance Robbins, please tell me more.Hi Joanne, If you still have the book Child Bride.. you can read about Lance Robbins and our darning cilla on page 322... I don't think I would wish her on my worst enemy.
Poor Elvis paid a big price for the mistake of bring her back here from Germany and making a deal with her parents... most people seem to think there was a large amound of money involved.
What a pity.... Elvis should of been thinking with this
Joanne, it really does not tell much about him or the other guys that she was .... shall we say going with... I do not know who he was either .... just a guy... sorry I couldn't be more help ... but I will look it up again and see if it tells more about him but I honestly don't think that it does... she went with many men after she and Mike Stone broke up... dovey
Ok here we to Joanne,
Terry O'Neill dropped cilla after two months to return to England.. one of the few men who had rejected her... and she was not pleased. Looking for a replacement, she settled for Robert Kardashian, the Las Angeles lawyer who would later be made infamous as OJ Simpson's best friend. He was convenient boyfriend for cilla at the time.
Lance Robbins was a friend of Kardashian's and he told him about Elvis calling her in the middle of the night and the phone deal.
As I said Joanne she had many men and wanted Elvis to be jealous... seemed to really enjoy it...
At the time this was going on... many believe Elvis was already a dying man (said Kathy Westmoreland who sang backup for Elvis and many other agreeded with her.)
That is about it for Lance Robbins... wasn't cilla every man's deam?
Dovey
As you know Joanne, I dislike her and really do not even like to read about her but I had heard so much about the book I decided to read it to see if maybe I was wong about my feeling for her.... guess not!!!!
Thanks Dovey.
She`s cheated on every man she`s ever been with according to what I`ve heard.
We all know she cheated on Elvis with her dance instructor and also her karate instructor.
If there had been a baked bean instructor I`m sure she`d of shagged him too!
I heard she had a thing with Little John the singer and Elvis was told about this and thats the only ones we know of.
I think its fair to say she kept herself occupied while Elvis was touring and certainly wasn`t the hard done by wife that she likes to make out.
Terry O` Neill says he slept with her and that was at the time she was with Mike Stone.
She then cheated on her live-in lover Mike Edwards with the actor Richard Gere who she had a one-night stand with. Then she was having it off with the singer Julio Inglesias.
There you have three long relationships that she had where she lived with each man Elvis, Mike Stone and Mike Edwards and she cheated on all three and when she got what she wanted she moved on.
To think that Elvis would have probably blamed himself so much for her having an affair with another man when in truth she has done it to every man and I wonder what excuse she came up with for the others.
Every time I log in to this site nowadays, there are more and more 'I hate Priscilla' threads than ever.....
Priscilla cheated on Elvis....we all know that...it's fact. And before anyone once again tells me that I am on the wrong site, and I should go to the PP site....let me say this.....I am not a fan of Priscilla's or Lisa's for that matter...BUT if it wasn't for both of them, we wouldn't have Graceland to visit....and if Priscilla cheated...she had a bloody good teacher.
Carolyn
"Walk A Block In My Socks"
Everythibg I ever read or heard about this woman is contradition.We all know that she's very ill or on cocaine or something.But I have read some funny stuff responding to this add.I tell you boy
It's been pretty obvious to most of us that Priscilla knew how to cheat long before she met Elvis and I'm certain that it wasn't Priscilla who decided to open Graceland to the public but people around her that advised her to do so because the property was in financial trouble and get in touch with those who could help her do that. The woman is just not that bright on her own - really watch and listen to her! Priscilla and Lisa are literally figureheads and aren't the ones doing the real work.
Where is is 'pretty obvious' that Priscilla knew how to cheat before she met Elvis? I think Priscilla was a normal teenage girl who was given a chance that most of us would have jumped at...she was in the right place at the right time. She was being actively pursued by Elvis, and personally I think the whole thing blew up in his face. The fact that things had to be kept as secret as they were, probably because of a) her age and b) tom parker didn't want his boy making the same mistake as Jerry Lee Lewis had. Priscilla has made it perfectly clear that she did everything she could to persuade her family to let her go to Graceland......have you not been 16? and used some sort of emotional blackmail on your parents....'If you don't let me do this I'll just die'.......
I don't think Elvis wanted to marry Priscilla......I don't think Elvis should have married anyone, but he wanted a child, so marriage was the only choice.
Any marriage Elvis had was doomed.....he couldn't stay faithful, it was not in his nature to be faithful.......and I defy any woman to stay with a man that was as unfaithful as Elvis was......Yes, Priscilla should have left him before she herself was unfaithful....if you don't like your marriage, you get out of it first, then you go looking...and yes, I agree, she has no right to call herself Elvis' widow.....
Priscilla could have sold Graceland when the money ran out of the estate, but she chose not to do that....and I will be forever grateful. She was smart enough to hire people to run the Estate, and they are smart enough to keep Lisa and Priscilla as much at the forefront of the business as they can.
Carolyn
"Walk A Block In My Socks"
Carolyn, I agree that any normal teenager would have wanted to meet Elvis but a 14 year old should not have been allowed to go visit a big star in his home in the evening unchaperoned. The blame falls mainly on her parents for allowing it no matter how much she kicked and screamed.
No one is going to contradict the fact that we're all happy that Graceland was saved and opened to the public but had Vernon named somebody else to safeguard it for Lisa, odds are the same thing probably would have happened.
The main reason we are so down on her is that we are "Elvis" fans and don't like how she wrote about very personal things in their marriage (after he died) and then she changes what she said and goes back and forth and never does she admit to her own faults. If she hadn't written that book and agreed to some many interviews no one would have thought anything about her one way or the other. She brought it upon herself. No one would have gone digging to see if what she was saying was the truth and she would have kept the respect everyone had for her before she showed herself to be other than what everyone had believed. I don't like to think badly of anyone either unless I feel they've harmed someone with malicious intent and I do feel she did that.....then, I have no mercy!
We are Elvis fans and try to protect him because he's not here to do it himself and he probably wouldn't if he was. He took all the blame on himself and you know darn well it takes two to make or break a marriage or a relationship.
To each his or her own opinion..........
I have read Priscilla's book only once....I think I still have it in the cupboard somewhere, so I might get around to reading it again....there are just more appealing things to read out there....and I will admit that I haven't read 'Child Bride'....I don't think I really want to, so I can't possibly have an opinion on that one.
One thing I do know is that Priscilla wrote 'Elvis and Me' to try and counteract the revolting 'piece' that the scum of the earth goldman wrote. She could have left out certain things in her book....the 'rape' and so forth, but goldman had done so much damage to Elvis' reputation that she probably felt she had to do something.
Diane, I can see exactly what you are saying about Priscilla's parents...they should never have allowed her to go in the first place, but I think after that initial visit, they too were under Elvis' spell......I'm not saying that was a good thing....but every person you talk to who was close to Elvis say the same thing....you just couldn't say "no" to him......
We can all have opinions on what happened and what didn't happen, and unfortunately that's all they are...opinions......We are constantly striving to bring the enormous talent Elvis had to the forefront, and put the negative aspects of his career...which were few and far between....to the background.
Carolyn
"Walk A Block In My Socks"
Let's face it Carolyn the entertainment business whether it be the film or the music industry is hard on anyone's emotions and their marriages. Elvis had a double dose. He couldn't get away from conflicts with the MM and the colonel even in his personal life. That and not being able to live a normal life and grow naturally was more than enough to bring out the worse in anyone. All in all I'm sure others in his situation would have been much more difficult (Johnny Cash for example - his temper was ferocious). Elvis at least found time in all that strife to do kind things for a lot of people and all have said he was too big hearted and sensitive.
As for Priscilla her parents saw an opportunity and in effect sold their daughter to a big rock star. She apparently felt this was the way to be as she has gone after everything in the same way ever since and has never fully grown up either. Her book was utterly tasteless and in it she showed her lack of moral fiber. The Beaulieus are people users and will do anything it takes to get what they want regardless of the pain they cause anyone else and that is something I cannot personally accept in anyone. It may be accepted more today as someone showing "initiative" but to me it's just common cold-hearted low-life thinking.
In comparison, I'd take someone with Elvis' temper tantrums and lack of self control any day. At least he had a heart.
I agree with you 100% Diane and am done with this thread!!!
This site is an Elvis site and why people love to bring up all the ugly things that his "X" says is beyond me.
Dovey
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