Child Bride The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley

Chapter 1 1 Ann's Story In March of 1963, Priscilla Ann Beaulieu was at the crossroads of her life. Though just seventeen, a senior in high school, she was faced with a decision that she knew, with a child's wisdom, would forever alter the course of her destiny, and she had a strange foreboding. She was desperately in love, as only a teenager can bea forbidden lovelocked in conict with her parents, especially her mother, Ann Beaulieu. Elvis Presleythe twenty-eight-year-old rock-and-roll idol and movie star, the most famous sex symbol in the worldheld the seventeen-year-old in thrall and wanted her to move into his compound in Memphis as his girlfriend-in-waiting while she nished high school and came of age. But Elvis was not the object of Priscilla Beaulieu's teenage fancy that fateful spring. She was breathless over the handsome eighteen-year-old star of her high school football team. She did not want to leave her life in Germany for a dubious future with a rock star. It was Ann Beaulieu, her mother, who was obsessed with the idea of Priscilla moving to Graceland to become Elvis Presley's de facto child bride. Both mother and daughter feared that Priscilla might be making the greatest mistake of her life: Priscilla, if she went to Graceland; Ann, if she stayed. In the end, Priscilla deferred to her mother, as she habitually did. She packed her bags for Graceland with barely a good-bye to the boy she left behind. As this tale implies, it would be dif cult to tell Priscilla's story without beginning with her mother's, for their lives and their destinies would always be linked in mysterious ways, ways understood only by Priscilla and Ann. They were bound together by secrets, secrets only Ann fully understood. Ann, as would her famous daughter, began life with a different name: Anna. Anna Lillian Iversen. As a child, she was called Rooney, short for Annie Rooney. Where that nickname came frompossibly a 1920s cartoon characterthe Iversens would not reveal to outsiders. They were Norwegians who considered the most trivial family detail ''personal and private.'' Ann's family history, they still maintain, is nobody else's business. Outside the family, and even to Ann, it is a forbidden topic. There was nothing of portent in her early life. Anna Iversen was the youngest of three children, all of whom were born in March, each two years apart: Albert Junior in 1922, James in 1924, Anna in 1926. Their father, Albert Iversen, was Nordic-handsome big, strapping, and blond; their mother, Lorraine, was a petite mix of Scotch-Irish and English, ''a pretty little peanut,'' in the words of Anna's maternal cousin Margaret. The year before Anna was born, Albert and Lorraine Iversen set up permanent residence in New London, Connecticut, a picturesque working-class town on the eastern seaboard known chiey as a base for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Albert, in keeping with his potent physical presence and ego, joined the police force. As a child, Rooney sang and acted in skits with her favorite cousin, Margaret, joined a dance club, and discreetly followed the career of actress Priscilla Lane, the most famous of the ve Lane sisters and a Warner Brothers contract player from 1937 to 1944 who costarred with Ronald Reagan, Dick Powell, and James Cagney. Like her movie-star role model, Rooney was fair and blue-eyed, with a wholesome girl-next-door prettiness. Her most impressive feature was a thick tumble of shoulder-length blond hair. If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, ''We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,'' Rooney's eyes were xed on tFinstad, Suzanne is the author of 'Child Bride The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307336958 and ISBN 0307336956.