Facts
Priscilla Presley's biological father, James
Wagner, was a United States pilot who was killed in a
plane crash when Priscilla was just an infant.
Her mother, Norwegian-American Anna Lillian Iversen,
remarried to Paul Beaulieu, a United States Air Force officer
and they called her Priscilla Ann.
The Beaulieus were stationed in
West Germany at the same time
Elvis was there
during his stint in the United States Army.
Priscilla was 14 years old when they met.
Elvis managed to talk the extremely
reluctant Beaulieus
into allowing Priscilla to live with his
father (Vernon Presley) and step-mother at a home
Elvis purchased on Heritage Drive in Memphis.
The seventeen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu
"worked" on her mother to get her support
but before finally agreeing, her still reluctant and
protective step-father flew with her
to Los Angeles where Presley
was filming
Fun in Acapulco.
After discussing the "rules," she and her father flew
to Memphis where they met with
Vernon Presley, made arrangements for Priscilla's
enrollment in the Immaculate Conception school and her
step-father confirmed her living
arrangements at Vernon Presley's house.
Once living in Memphis in 1962, Priscilla Beaulieu
says she moved into Graceland bit by bit,
at first spending occasional nights with Presley,
later moving in and sleeping together
every night. In her 1985 autobiography, Elvis and Me,
she describes Presley as a very passionate
man who was not overtly sexual towards her.
Although he would spend hours alone with
her in her bedroom, Priscilla wrote that Elvis
never made any advances towards her. This may be interpreted
as his generation's double standard that
cheered men for their sexual prowess with women,
insisting a girl should remain a virgin until
married and if she did not, she would be labeled a "slut."
According to her account (p. 130), Elvis
told her that they had to wait until they
were married before having intercourse.
He said, "I'm not saying we can't do other things.
It's just the actual encounter. I
want to save it." Priscilla adds, "Fearful of not pleasing
him-of destroying my image as his little girl-I resigned
myself to the long wait. Instead of consummating our love
in the usual way, he began teaching me other means of
pleasing him. We had a strong connection, much of it sexual.
The two of us created some exciting and wild times."
A completely different view of Priscilla's life,
painting her in a rather negative light
and describing her as a "wild child"
and "sexpot", can be found in Suzanne Finstad's
book, Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu
Presley (1997), which is based on accounts of
several people who knew Elvis and Priscilla
well, among them many friends from Priscilla's
childhood and adolescence, Elvis's
stepbrother Rick Stanley, Mike Edwards, Elvis's
ex-girlfriends and the wives of the Memphis Mafia
men. The author writes that Priscilla
promised sexual favors in exchange for meeting Elvis
with Currie Grant, a married, 27-year-old
man who knew the singer, that she and Elvis
slept together on their second date and that
she wasn't a virgin on her wedding night.
The book also claims that her marriage was part of a
mastermind for fame hatched by Priscilla
and her mother and that she never loved Elvis. Finstad
takes many quotes that Priscilla
has made and calls them a web of lies that she has spun.
It should be noted, however, that Priscilla
launched a lawsuit against Currie Grant for his claims in the book.
In Elvis and Me, Beaulieu recounted how
Elvis would stay up all night and sleep most of the day.
If he wanted to go out, he would rent out the
venue and invite friends, family and fans,
or arrange with store owners to shop
after hours when the store was closed.
She also talked about the prescription
sleeping pills that were present from
the very first night she spent with him
and how their usage and variety escalated dramatically during the years they were together.
She and Presley were married on May 1, 1967,
and daughter Lisa Marie
was born nine months later on February 1, 1968.
They separated in February of 1972 and were divorced in
October of 1973. Their divorce provided for mutual
custody of Lisa Marie, who lived with Priscilla in Los Angeles and with her father at Graceland.
Priscilla Presley made her television debut in
1980 as a co-host of the ABC
series Those Amazing Animals. She went on to
portray Jenna Wade on the soap opera Dallas
from 1983 to 1988 and starred opposite Leslie Nielsen
in The Naked Gun gag movie trilogy.
She has lived with Brazilian writer-director Marco Garibaldi
since 1984; their son, Navarone, was born on March 1, 1987.
She is a Scientologist.
