Elvis and Me

by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley

Every minute I wasn’t with him, I thought of him. My life was now dominated by him and yet there were times when I would be disappointed by him. One evening he told me he would call and didn’t. When I finally heard from him the next day, he said, “Hi, Baby. Do you think you can come over tonight?” “What happened last night? You were supposed to call.” “I was? Oh shit.” He had been concentrating on his karate lesson and had forgotten. I had to learn not to take his words to heart. It was disappointing, but it was just his way.

That evening, when we were alone in his room, Elvis asked me if anything was wrong. My voice was trembling. I could hardly get the words out. When I finally did tell him, Elvis went berserk. “I’m going to kill him,” he shouted. He paced the floor, cursing Kurt. I was his little girl, Elvis said, and he had never gone all the way with me. Now this other guy, this so-called friend of his, had tried to rape me. I listened as he shouted, secretly relieved at his response. How could I ever have doubted Elvis?

Always a center of activity at the house was Elvis’s grandmother, whom he nicknamed Dodger. Elvis had come up with the name when he was a small boy of five and, during a temper tantrum, had thrown a baseball, missing her head by inches. Elvis jokingly said, “She dodged out of the way so fast.” He started calling her Dodger from that moment.

Gladys’s constant effort to protect Elvis, I learned, was the result of her anguish over the death of Elvis’s twin brother Jesse Garon.

Nights when his mood was calm and peaceful, he would describe his ideal woman and tell me how perfectly I fit this image. He liked soft-spoken brunettes with blue eyes. He wanted to mold me to his opinions and preferences. Despite his reputation for being a rebel, he held the traditional view of relationships. A woman had her place, and it was the man who took the initiative. Fidelity was very important to him, especially on the woman’s part. He constantly reminded me that his girl had to be completely constant.

Elvis honestly thought he was doing me a favor by giving me the pills, and I’m sure the thought never entered his mind that they could be harmful to him or me. I didn’t take the pills. I put them in a small box with various items I had started to collect, such as cigar holders and little personal notes he had given me, and hid the box in a drawer. Later I learned that the pills were Dexedrine, which Elvis had first discovered in the Army. A sergeant had given several men pills to help them stay awake while on guard duty. Elvis, who was accustomed to living the life of an entertainer and who despised rising at dawn, began taking the pills to get him through the long dreary hours of Army life.

He dreaded insomnia and feared sleepwalking, which had plagued him periodically since childhood. In fact, as a boy, he’d once sleepwalked straight out of his apartment, dressed only in his underwear. A neighbor woke him, and, embarrassed, he ran back into the house. Another time, he nearly fell out of a window. Consequently, to avoid accidents, he slept with his parents until he was grown, and he feared his sleepwalking habit for the rest of his life. It was one of the reasons he usually had someone sleeping with him. Years later, I learned that someone had been employed in Germany to watch over him throughout the night.

Holding me close, he said, “I’m torn with the feelings I have for you. I don’t know what to do. Maybe being away will help me understand what I really feel.” That night our lovemaking took on a new urgency. Would I ever see him again, be in his arms the way I had been nearly every night for the past six months? I missed him already. I could not bear the thought of the night ending and our saying goodbye for what I thought would be the last time. I wept and wept until my body ached with pain. For the last time I begged him to consummate our love. It would have been so easy for him. I was young, vulnerable, desperately in love, and he could have taken complete advantage of me. But he quietly said, “No. Someday we will, Priscilla, but not now. You’re just too young.”

Back at our suite, Elvis said, “I’m hungry. Joe, order me a steak, but make sure you tell them well done. What do you want, Honey?” “Hell, E,” Joe said, “I always tell them well done.” “Well, tell them again,” Elvis shot back. “I’ll be goddamned if it doesn’t always come back half raw.” To Elvis, raw was slightly pink. Everyone specified “burnt” when ordering for him.

While we waited for dinner, Elvis put one of his records on the stereo and sat next to me, singing along with his own voice on the record.

That night in bed Elvis held me very close for a long time. I felt that he was doing more than just comforting me. He was telling me how deeply he cared. And more than that: His deep belief in consummating our love affair only in marriage gave me hope for the future. Later, our lovemaking had more feeling and intensity than ever before. Elvis wasn’t going to let me go home without my taking a little of him with me. He didn’t enter me; he didn’t have to. He fulfilled my every desire. “I want you back the way you are now,” he whispered just before dawn. “And remember, I’ll always know.” I smiled and nodded. I couldn’t conceive of wanting anyone but him.

“Dodger,” he called out. “Look who’s here. It’s little Cilla. She’s come a long way, Dodger, to be with little us.” Using endearing terms like “little us” was his way of being affectionate. His mother had raised him on this sweet talk and Elvis spoke it with those he cherished. Feet, for instance, were “sooties”; milk, “butch”; teeth, “toophies”; love, “yuv”; little, “yittle.” In moments of intimacy he would switch to third-person address: Him yuvs you and her yuvs him.

Once I reproached him about the attention he was lavishing on the girlfriend of one of the regulars. She was very attractive, about my height, with black hair and a nice figure. She had come into the kitchen, where several of us were sitting, and Elvis, who was wearing dark sunglasses, began making comments like, “Boy, it’s getting warm in here. Anybody else warm?” I was so upset I left the room. I waited for him to go upstairs, then followed shortly behind him. “Elvis, I have to talk to you,” I said. “Sure, Honey, what is it?” “I saw the way you were eyeing that girl. It upset me.” “Look, woman,” he said, losing his temper. “No one tells me who I can look at and who I can’t. Besides, your imagination’s getting carried away. I’ve seen her ass around here long before today.”

“Goddamn Captain Beaulieu,” he shouted. “We just called to see if Cilla could stay a few more days and he comes off with this cocky attitude and refuses with his jargon about making agreements.” “Now calm down, Son. It ain’t that bad. He was probably just concerned about her being home in time for school.” “School, what the hell do I care about school?” Elvis snapped, ignoring Vernon’s efforts to soothe him. “Put her into school here, that’ll solve everything. She doesn’t need school. Hell, they don’t teach you anything nowadays anyway.”

I began to reveal to my mother that Elvis and I loved each other and longed to be together. Finally one day I summoned the courage to tell her that Elvis wanted me to finish school in Memphis. Her response: an unqualified no. She felt it could wait until my father’s tour of duty was over. That would be the end of summer, she said, and there was no need for me to return to Elvis sooner. “But Mother,” I pleaded, “you don’t understand. He wants me there with him.” “Why you?” she asked, her voice thick with emotion. “Why can’t he find someone his own age? You’re only sixteen. What is this man doing to our family?” She buried her face in her hands and began crying.

Most of all, he knew he could depend on me. I wasn’t interested in a career, in Hollywood, or in anything else that would draw my attention away from him. I also had all of the physical attributes that Elvis liked, the fundamentals he could use in turning me into his ideal woman. In short, I had everything that Elvis had been looking for in a woman: youth and innocence, total devotion, and no problems of my own. And I was hard to get.

“Hi, Baby. How’s my girl?” he asked, his voice bright and full of energy. Happy to hear from him, I said, “I’m fine, Elvis.” I tried to mention how lonely I was, but he cut in. “It won’t be long, Baby. Just a few more weeks, and we’ll be wrapping up.” “I’m glad. I’ll be so happy to see you.” “Well, then, let me hear some enthusiasm.” He began describing a silly incident that had taken place on the set that day, trying to make me laugh. I wanted to say, “Elvis, talk to me, help me get through these new experiences.” But I realized that he didn’t want to hear about my problems. He felt he had enough of his own. When he asked me how I was doing, I became very animated and said, “Just great, Elvis. Everything is wonderful.” But when we hung up, I still felt an emptiness. I began counting the days until he came home.

Everyone who knew Elvis was aware that it took him at least two to three hours to wake up fully. Asking him to make a decision, even a simple one such as what movie he wanted to see that night, was ill-advised. He was just too groggy and irritable from the sleeping pills, which were causing him to sleep as many as fourteen hours a day. It seemed only natural for him to take some Dexedrine to wake up. I was always concerned about his intake of sleeping pills. His horror of insomnia, compounded with a family history of compulsive worrying, caused him to down three or four Placidyls, Seconals, Quaaludes, or Tuinals almost every night—and often it was a combination of all four. When I expressed my concern, he just picked up the medical dictionary, always near at hand on his night table.

Sobbing, I started to pack as he turned and strode out of the room. Moments later I heard him yelling for Joe to make a reservation. “Get her on the next flight out. She’s going back to her parents.” There was a finality in his voice that I had never heard before. Hysterical, I began folding my clothes as he continued yelling in the other room. I packed slowly, stunned by the blowup. When he came back into the room, I felt humiliated. I continued folding clothes, sobbing uncontrollably. “You’re too goddamn demanding,” he said, staring at me in silence. “Hurry up. It’s time to go.” I got up slowly and started toward the door. Just as I reached it, I felt his hand on my shoulder, turning me around, and then, miraculously, I was in his arms, and he was holding me tight. “Now do you understand?” As he spoke, I was sobbing against his shoulder. “Do you see that you need this? You need someone to take you right to this point and put you in your place.” I was relieved and happy to be back in his arms. Anything he’d have said would’ve made sense to me in that moment. What I didn’t realize until later was that this was Elvis’s technique of keeping me under control.

I didn’t understand his difficulty in revealing his weaknesses to me. Only later did I realize how important it was to Elvis to always appear in control in front of me. Whenever I stated my own opinions too strongly, especially if they differed from his, he’d remind me that his was the stronger sex, and as a woman, I had my place. He liked to say that it was intended for woman to be on the left side of man, close to his heart, where she gives him strength through her support.

To my horror, a chair came hurtling toward me. I moved out of the way just in time, but there were stacks of records piled on it and one flew off and hit me in the face. Within seconds he had me in his arms, apologizing frantically. It was said that he inherited his temper from his parents.

Sometimes he lashed out just to drive home a point. If he thought it would teach us a lesson, he’d blow some minor grievance out of all proportion, and even as he was yelling he might wink at someone nearby. Then, ten minutes later, he’d be fine, leaving us bewildered and emotionally depleted. There were also times he would leave us emotionally uplifted. He was truly a master at manipulating people.

The spiritual side of Elvis was a dominant part of his nature. As a small boy growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, he and his family attended church regularly at the First Assembly of God. He was raised on hellfire-and-brimstone preaching that put the fear of God in you and music that led to the Pearly Gates. Elvis, Vernon, and Gladys would join in with the congregation and choir, and it was then that music first rocked Elvis’s soul. He was capable of spiritual healing; one touch of his hands to my temples and the most painful headaches disappeared.

Elvis had his own theory about assassinations, based on the murders of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. He felt that the assassins gloated over their “accomplishments,” and told his bodyguards that if any attempt were made on his life, they should get the killer—even before the police. He didn’t want anyone bragging to the media that they’d killed Elvis Presley.

Bored and restless, he increased his dependence on chemicals. He thought speed helped him escape from destructive thinking, when in reality it gave him false confidence and unnatural aggressiveness. He started losing perspective on himself and others. To me he became increasingly unreachable.

Elvis must have perceived my new restlessness. A couple of months later in Las Vegas, Joanie, Nora Fike, Red’s wife Pat, and I were having dinner in the Italian restaurant at the Hilton between Elvis’s shows. The maître d’ came to the table with a message that Elvis wanted to see me upstairs in the suite. I remember thinking how unusual this was. Elvis rarely went to the suite between shows. I went upstairs, filled with curiosity, and when I arrived in the suite I found Elvis lying in bed, obviously waiting for me. He grabbed me and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he’d ever made love to me before, and he explained, “This is how a real man makes love to his woman.” This was not the gentle, understanding man that I grew to love. He was under the influence, and with my personal growth and new realities he had become a stranger to me. I wept in silence as Elvis got up to dress for the show.