THE WEEKEND READ:

WHEN PRISCILLA PRESLEY OPENED UP TO ME ABOUT ELVIS

(Above: Priscilla and Elvis Presley. MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY.)

The Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis topped $100 million at the domestic box office on Friday. Worldwide it has made over $170 million. I am not a big Baz Luhrmann fan but I do want to see this. I might wait till it comes to a streaming service. There is even Oscar buzz for the young actor Austin Butler who plays Elvis. I’m glad when anything is a hit that isn’t based on a super hero - although Elvis was a rock’n’roll one, I guess.

As I a kid, I’d grudgingly go to see the latest Elvis movie at the Town Theater in Forest, Mississippi, at its Saturday matinee. I never really liked any of them. Even then I knew those movies were mostly schlock and just an excuse for him to sing some songs and parade around some hot young actress he pretended unconvincingly to romance because in every one of those movies - maybe even in real life - his real romance was with himself. When I interviewed Priscilla Presley for Vanity Fair, I asked her if she thought the latter-Elvis aesthetic with his dyed pompadour and flamboyant outfits and too much stage makeup was his way of not letting her go once she asserted herself and refused to conform any longer to his styling her with a dyed high-rise-like hairdo of her own and too much black eyeliner and flamboyantly feminine dresses. She was only 14 when they started dating and 21 when they wed. Elvis became her Honky-Tonk Svengali. Once she reclaimed her own aesthetic and divorced him after four years of marriage, did he become a warped image of that earlier Priscilla himself? To find out her response read the story below that was published back in another July in 1991. I also wrote the cover story that month on Mickey Rourke, another rather sweet, talented guy whose personal aesthetic in his own latter career is even more troubling than Elvis’s. Demons just shouldn’t be dolled up.

Here is the story.

VIVA PRISCILLA!

Not only did Priscilla Presley, the original rock 'n' roll Lolita, survive a dozen wacko years with Elvis, she became a sort of benign Colonel Parker, building the King’s legend—and the tawdry roadside shrine that was Graceland—into a $50 million empire. KEVIN SESSUMS reports from Beverly Hills

A statue of a naked young girl lolls in the fountain on the grounds of Priscilla Presley’s precisely landscaped Bel-Air home. “Is that you?” I ask as the late-aftemoon light finds the down that softens Priscilla’s face. “I wish it were,” she says. Though forty-six and already a grandmother, she momentarily takes on an adolescent’s dewy glow—which has always been her charm. “I am a child-woman,” she tells me when we settle onto the overstuffed couches in her twenty-three-year-old daughter Lisa’s old bedroom. (Amid the frills and stuffed animals, Priscilla wears a black Matsuda dress.) “When people meet me, they don’t know what to say to me. They really don’t know how to approach me,” she says. “I’m always trying to find that place to fit in.”

Yet she obviously feels comfortable playing the role of the outsider. In Hollywood she is making a name for herself as a non-comedian in comedic films. At Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which was set up to handle Elvis’s estate and which she runs, she is the lone female in a boardroom of businessmen. A military brat, Priscilla was always the new girl at each school, and during the years she spent with Elvis in the Deep South she never cultivated the requisite deep-fried accent. Above all, Priscilla was always treated by Elvis as the innocent child who had to be protected from an adult’s dangerous world.

David Zucker, who directed her in The Naked Gun and its sequel, The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, which opens this month, says Priscilla is nothing like the Bride of Elvistein he was expecting. “Being from the Midwest myself,” he says, “she reminds me of one of those sweet girls who is left back home.”

“Inside that elegant presentation,” observes Leslie Nielsen, her co-star in both Naked Gun films, “is really a child lurking inside who wants to come out and play. Priscilla is like Eloise. And her life is the Plaza.”

“Growing up was a difficult process—for both of us,” Lisa tells me later.

Priscilla: “I am a misfit.”

Priscilla Presley will always be our Rock 'n' Roll Widow. The term Rock ’n’ Roll Survivor seems better suited to Yoko Ono, and the only thing one can imagine Jerry Hall ever mourning would be her placement at the wrong table at a dinner party. It is Priscilla—sweet, sensual, goody-noshoes Priscilla—with whom we’ll always have a neo-Nabokovian fascination. Though she was divorced from Elvis in 1973, nearly four years before he died, people connect to him through Priscilla, as if she were still his Kmart Lolita. “Back then I always thought that I would be in Elvis’s world. It was fast and incredibly intense,” she tells me when I meet her in her trailer on the Paramount lot the last day of shooting Naked Gun 2 1/2. “I always felt worn out because there were such emotional highs and lows. There was never really any time that I let my guard down and relaxed. After I was divorced it was the first time I could shake my head, and go, Who is this person sitting here? What have I contributed?”

Priscilla’s life was almost completely controlled by Elvis when she was with him. They had met in 1959, when she was fourteen years old and he was stationed as a soldier in Germany, where her father was also stationed. Two years later her parents allowed her to move with Elvis to Memphis, where she attended a Catholic girls’ school. In her book, Elvis and Me, Priscilla writes, “While my classmates were deciding which colleges to apply to, I was deciding which gun to wear with what sequined dress.”

It is said that southern men want their women to be ladies in the parlor and whores in the bedroom, but Priscilla was a child in both. In fact, her sex life with Elvis consisted of years of foreplay, since he refused to consummate their relationship until their wedding night. Was he insecure sexually? “I always heard Marilyn Monroe was insecure because of the image. Look at people who are in that position—look at the expectations. If a woman was with Elvis, she might say, ‘I was with him and it was nothing.’ He was great at teasing. Maybe he didn’t want to disappoint me.”

The two finally married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas in 1967, then borrowed Frank Sinatra’s private plane and flew to Palm Springs for their honeymoon. Elvis took Priscilla, a complete innocent, and transformed her into his own frightening vision of femininity—the infamous architectural wonder of a hairdo, the abundant black eyeliner, the flamboyant dresses. When Priscilla finally began to assert herself and appear as the beauty she is today, Elvis himself started to dress more flamboyantly with his own pile of raven hair, stage makeup, and bejeweled capes. Elvis Presley became his own warped image of the Priscilla he had created and loved.

“You noticed that, huh,” she says when I test the theory on her. “It’s true. It was a flamboyance that he didn’t have to do. It was a cry, I think.. . From that point on he began to self-destruct.”

Self-destruction is something Priscilla will never have to worry about. “I’m not tough,” she admits. “But I can act tough.” She had to in order to survive the increasingly bizarre years she spent with Elvis: the pharmaceutically induced fights, the days spent sleeping in rooms with blackened windows and the nights spent carousing with his entourage of good-ol’-boy disciples, the visits to gaze at bodies at the Memphis morgue, the spiritual experiments, the phobias.

When one opens her book about her life with Elvis it reads like a primer for life within a cult. Indeed, one aspect of Priscilla’s new life that she leaves out of the book is her devotion to the teachings of Scientology, the philosophy founded by the late science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Priscilla even removed Lisa from the elite Lycee Francais in Los Angeles, and enrolled her in the Scientology-inspired Apple School. Later, during a rough adolescent period, she placed Lisa in the church’s main facility in L.A., the Celebrity Centre International, a sort of detox center.

An important part of Scientology’s doctrine—apart from its devout anti-drug stance—is a system of counseling called “auditing.” A member is hooked up to a lie-detector-like machine which registers electrical changes in the body as he or she is asked questions. The results are then analyzed to enable the member to cleanse the body and mind of “engrams,” which Scientologists equate with negative thoughts. It is an expensive procedure. Because a follower must invest so much money to be able to practice the philosophy, many people are skeptical of its religious aspects and accuse it of being a cult. When I was with her, Priscilla talked openly about her involvement, admitting that there were certain facets of its bureaucracy that troubled her, but called me several days later worried about “jeopardizing her position” with the group.

Lisa, on the other hand, is unapologetic about her involvement. “For me it has been a great help,” she says. “It gives me spiritual guidance. . .It’s a self-help philosophy, yet it’s not evaluative. It doesn’t tell you what your problems are—but helps you figure it out for yourself.” A fear is that Scientology will somehow become the beneficiary of the money in Elvis’s estate, as Lisa will inherit most of it when she turns thirty. Priscilla laughs at the charge. “I can assure you that Lisa’s not going to be giving away her money.”

Priscilla should know—it is money that she has worked hard to accumulate. An instinctive businesswoman (she produced the critically acclaimed Elvis series on ABC last year, has developed her own successful perfume, Moments, and most recently started a children’s-clothing design firm), she became executor of Elvis’s estate upon the death of his father, Vernon. When she took over, the bank account had dwindled to around $500,000; she immediately opened Graceland to the paying public and formed Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., so she could vigorously litigate to get all franchising and merchandising rights to the Elvis Presley name.

She bought the real estate along both sides of Graceland on Elvis Presley Boulevard and opened stores and restaurants and a theater over which she can exercise “quality control.” She also has plans to open a hotel for the fans who make the pilgrimage to Graceland, and recently purchased from Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker (now retired and living in Vegas), his vast collection of memorabilia in order to open a museum in Memphis. Since she took control of the operations, the estate has grown in value to more than $50 million, a 10,000 percent increase.

“People always ask me how this gorgeous China doll can be the hard-charging backbone behind this business,” says Jack Soden, the executive director of E.P.E., Inc. “Believe me, she is. Priscilla has a remarkable interior gyroscope which keeps her on course. She’s really worked at it. She relies on me and several others to do the day-to-day work, but we rely on her instincts once we lay out the pros and cons of a situation for her. She’s uncanny.”

Originally the estate’s executorship was to be turned over to Lisa on her twenty-fifth birthday, but she decided to extend her mother’s duties for another five years. “As it has grown, she has grown with it,” says Lisa. “That’s the interesting part to me. I expanded her executorship over the estate because there was a rumor that when I took it over I was going to sell it off. I never intended to do that, but investors were getting nervous, so I decided to signal them that I was satisfied by extending her duties as executor. I trust her instinctively. I have never ever seen her betray anyone. She is very loyal. But if you betray her, then watch out!”

The two men who entered Priscilla’s life after Elvis did betray her. Mike Stone, the karate instructor with whom she had an affair while still married to Elvis, sold his story to a tabloid. Mike Edwards, the model with whom she lived for the next six years, wrote an expose of their time together, Priscilla, Elvis, and Me.

Whatever pain she had over the failed affairs has been eased by the new man in her life, thirty-six-year-old Marco Garibaldi, a Brazilian of Italian heritage whom she met through a costumer on Dallas during her time on the prime-time soap. Marco and Priscilla have lived together for the past five years and have a four-year-old son, Navarone.

Lisa is the proud mother of her own child, two-year-old Danielle, whose father—the young Scientologist musician Danny Keough—Lisa married after she found out that she was pregnant. “Our children growing up together is the most touching experience either my daughter or I have had. Both of us have been through quite a lot together, and this has even brought us closer.”

Photographs of Marco and Navarone and Lisa are everywhere in Priscilla’s BelAir house, yet there is not one photo or memento of her Elvis years. “I couldn’t do that to Marco,” she says. “Most men don’t realize the bigness of it all until they’re in it with me. Then there’s no relief. Marco is the first person who is his own man...He’s not interested in my past. He never brought Elvis up. But, you know, I don’t want my son confused right now. I don’t think he can handle it. Lisa is the same way. She doesn’t have constant reminders of the past.”

The only real reminder of the past is Marco’s dark, brooding good looks. “There is a certain strength I feel with dark men,” she says. “They’re very virile.” Was Julio Iglesias? “We had a fling, but we never consummated it... This was during Dallas. He requested I come down to Chile and appear on a TV show. . . Then I flew to Japan on business and I started getting flowers from Julio every day. He was sending me I-love-you notes. . .I love you this, I love you that.”

On a business trip to Florida, she visited Julio at one of his homes there. Before they arrived at the house, however, he took her to a recording session. “I just went back to a certain period in my life and I thought, This is not what I want,” Priscilla says, and picks up a portrait of Marco and Navarone taken at Disneyland.

She gently rubs some dust from the frame. “So we went to Julio’s house and he showed me his room. I said, ‘This is great. Where are you going to sleep?’ It just hit me: I began to feel I was living in the past and I didn’t want any part of it... Poor guy—I made him sleep that night in a room he was building for his daughter that wasn’t even completed. I woke up about four in the morning and knocked on his door and said, ‘Can we get me a driver?’ And he said, ‘What eez the matter weeth my leetle girl? What eez the matter weeth my preencess?’ I said, I just really want to go home.’ ”

It is all Priscilla Presley has ever wanted. She laughs at yet another memory and picks up a larger photo of the new men in her life. Marco and Navarone, perched atop a Harley-Davidson, are smiling. “This is my favorite,” she whispers, and places the portrait next to one of Lisa.