Child Bride by Suzanne Finstad

Author:Suzanne Finstad [Finstad, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79051-4
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

24

A Marriage of Inconvenience

Elvis and Priscilla never had a honeymoon to speak of. Their hastily put together wedding was not even scheduled to occur after Elvis completed the calamitous Clambake. He and Priscilla spent their first few nights of marriage at the weekend house in Palm Springs so he could return to L.A. for reshoots. Rona Barrett’s report and the Colonel’s press conference alerted the public that the King had finally tied the knot, and a gaggle of Elvis fans clustered about the Ladera Circle house to congratulate him. Priscilla had the surreal experience of being observed by strangers as her new husband carried her over the threshold singing “The Hawaiian Wedding Song.” As she said later, “With Elvis, it was always sort of strange.”

In her book and in other public forums, Priscilla, perpetuating the myth, would say that her first night of marriage in the upstairs master bedroom of the Palm Springs house was the moment when she lost her virginity—conveniently overlooking her previous sexual relationships with Currie Grant, Tom Stewart, Peter Von Wechmar, Jamie Lindberg, and possibly Ron Tapp, not to mention Currie’s claim that she confessed to having had intercourse with Elvis during their first few months in Germany. Priscilla’s tale of being a virgin bride until her wedding night, after having lived with Elvis for over four years, was given a patina of credibility by the birth of Lisa Marie, uncannily, nine months later. “I had to have conceived somewhere around then, because she was born nine months to the day” after the wedding, she later proclaimed.

Elvis and Priscilla talked idly of honeymooning in Europe, a plan that was blocked, rumor had it, by the Colonel, who reportedly kept Elvis from touring outside the United States because the promoter had disguised his status as a Dutch citizen and had no passport. Colonel Parker had nothing to do with this decision, according to Priscilla: “Elvis didn’t really want to go to Europe.” Discussions of a trip to Hawaii likewise evanesced. Priscilla and Elvis, possibly the most glamorous couple in the world, spent most of their honeymoon in a trailer. The setting was the Circle G. “He finished the movie, and then we decided to stay there, and we didn’t really do anything,” admitted Priscilla, who had resigned herself to the limitations of life with a superstar. “It would not have been a honeymoon anyway. It would have been fanfare. It would have been like always. Everywhere we went—if it was Hawaii, they would find out, and they would be all around the gate—so we decided just go to Memphis and just stay there and, you know, have it quiet. We always had to choose things that we thought would work. It was more like convenience than how it would be for us emotionally.”

Priscilla did not even have her new husband to herself. Elvis, who thrived in the companionship of his male buddies, kept them around during his honeymoon. “He had his guys and she had her girlfriends,” noted Dee, “but that’s the way it was.

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