PRIS-1992McCalls

```````````````````````

"McCalls" Magazine
January 1992

The new Priscilla Presley

Elvis's ex-a new mother, grandmother, successful businesswoman, clothing designer, television and movie star-has finally
found, she says, how to "be true to yourself." It hasn't been easy.
By Hilary de Vries

No matter what you expect from Priscilla Presley, she'd prefer to surprise you. In our collective memory she
remains the King's child bride, a beautiful teenager thrust into cultural iconhood wearing a beehive hairdo and slashing
black eyeliner. But she's too smart to stay stuck in a stereotype.
"People expect Priscilla to have a hard edge because of what she's been through," says David Zucker, director of the
hugely successful Naked Gun films, in which Presley has costarred. "But she is one of the sweetest people I've ever met."
"Everyone's assumption about Priscilla is that she's just this beautiful woman, but guess again," says Jack Soden, longtime
manager of Elvis's former home, Graceland. Under Priscilla's guidance the Presley estate has increased in worth by 1,500
percent. Adds Soden, "Elvis was not a guy destined to die wealthy, and Priscilla had to work through a lot of legal
entanglements. But she had a strong personal vision of what she wanted, and she really hung in there."
"Priscilla's handled herself beautifully," notes syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith. "She has a good sense of humor, a
good viewpoint on herself. When she was with Elvis she was just an immature little girl-the public has forgiven her for those
years. No the public's perception of her is great. Playing such a good sport in the Naked Gun movies was a strong thing in
her favor."
Says Presley herself, "People try to label and categorize you. I like to throw people off. If I feel sexy, I want to be sexy. It's
fun to change your image, change your look."
And career as well. "Although I love comedies, I'd like to do something like a Black Velvet or a sex, lies and
videotape--something no on ewould expect me to do.
"I've learned the hard way," she adds, "that you are your own person. You have to be true to yourself."

"I had some concerns about doing this interview," Presley confides in her soft, kittenish voice. She is leery of being viewed
as any kind of role model. "I don't see myself as a woman who has everything."
She is seated in her office, part of a spacious suite belonging to Elvis Presley Enterprises, high above Los Angeles's
Sunset Boulevard. The office is almost impersonal, with the standard trappings of a corporate to gun: massive desk,
Oriental carpet, breathtaking city view. But Presley--hiding her 5'4 frame in a long crepe dress and wearing black mesh
oxfords, a black beaded bag slung bandolier-style across her chest and a straw bowler--is definitely noncorporate. She
seems, typically, to relish the incongruity of her office and her outfit and mentions that she often enjoys wearing something
whimsical to important business meetngs. "I know I'm serious about what I do, so I don't see why I can't have a little fun with
it."
Clothes, it turns out, have a lot to do with her chameleon image--not surprising for an actress who is also a designer. She
had her own line in the 1970's--Bis & Beau of Beverly Hills--whose customers included the likes of Barbara Streisand and
Cher. Now she has turned her eye to designing children's clothes with a line called Gioco--"which means 'play' in Italian,"
she says, an homage to her son, Navarone, and his father, her companion of six years, Marco Garibaldi, a Brazilian of
Italian heritage whom she met while making Dallas and with whom she now lives.
"It was difficult for a man to feel comfortable with my past or who I am," she says. "I've had some real lonely times, and
sometimes I've wondered if there was a person out there for me." After Elvis she weathered two less-than-happy
relationships: first with Mike Stone, a karate expert; then with Mike Edwards, a model and an actor. Both exploited her:
Stone sold their story to a tabloid, and Edwards wrote a book about their relationship. "Yeah, Mike and Mike," says Presley
with a wry laugh. "Sometimes I look back and I can't believe where my head was at.
"When you're young, your first inclination as a woman is to be everything for the man in your life," she continues. "But for
some reason it just doesn't work. It's like the more you give, the more they withdraw. It's that strange balance. I think a
man really wants a free spirit, a woman who is her own person. When you're trying to please someone else, you're headed
for a setup, for disappointment."
She clicked with Garibaldi, whom she met through friends, partly because as a foreigner he had some distance on the Elvis
mythology (and therefore somewhat immune to what she once called "that [expletive deleted] curiosity factor") but also, she
says, "because we were friends first. Being with Marco was the first time I ever had a relationship that wasn't a sex thing
first. That really made a difference."
As for marriage, Presley attributes her reluctance to Garibaldi's independence--"He's Italian!" she says with a laugh--and
her long fought battle for a separate identity. "Marriage really isn't an issue," she maintains. "But if our son came to us and
said, 'Mom, Dad, I'm really having a problem with this,' then we would get married."
It's because of her son (whom she says, "I'm having a love affair!") that she refrains from coming into this office every day.
She frequently works out of her home, a spacious spread in Bel Air just minutes from daughter Lisa's household, which
includes Lisa's husband and their baby daughter Danielle. (After weathering a few less-than-placid years with Lisa--they
once did a car commercial together to squelch rumors of their feuding--Presley says she is close to her daughter again.)
Still, her business projects seem to mulitply--acting, managing Elvis's estate, developing the clothing line and marketing a
new perfume as well.
The daughter of an Air Force captain, Presley takes a somewhat populist attitude toward both her clothing line and her
perfume, Moments, which debuted in the United States two years ago and was released in Europe recently. True to form,
she refused to grant her name to the fragrance--"I believed it should stand on its own; women have their own
identities"--but insisted on being "in total control" of everything else, from the mixing of the perfume to its marketing. "I don't
want to just lend my name to something," she says firmly. "Now I am devoted to it." This year that devotion means making
appearances at such department stores as J.C. Penney. Moments is not, Presley stresses, "a designer fragrance."
Of Gioco, she says, "A lot of times we dress kids for our eyes and not for themselves. And my son was unhappy with a lot
of what was available for baby boys. He didn't like anything confining. So Gioco is very, very soft, with a lot of flannel and
denim." Eventually Presley would like to extend a bigger helping hand to mothers and newborns and "put some tips for
mothers in with the clothes. People think women are born mothers, but there are so many more things we need to know
today."
But by far Presley's biggest business interest, and her most startling business success, is managing the Elvis Presley
estate--Elvis Presley Enterprises--of which she is the executor. (Lisa will officially be named executor when she turns 25
next year, but she has extended her mother's duties for another five years.) Presley first demonstrated her business
acumen with Graceland, the Memphis spread that Elvis bought for $100,000 in 1957 and that served as the couple's home
for ten years. When Elvis's father, Vernon, died in 1979 and Priscilla became executor, the net worth of the estate's
holdings--due in part to the infamous and controversial dealings of Elvis's longtime business manager, Colonel Tom
Parker--had dropped to $5 million. Her goal: to maintain both the value of Lisa's inheritance and whatever integrity was left
of Elvis's image.
"Graceland is a home, and I wanted it to remain a home as if he were alive," says Presley, who visited several museums
and estates before she decided on her preservationist approach. She also didn't hesitate to remove the tacky souvenir
shops that lined the mansion's grounds. Today the entire Presley holdings, including revenues generated by music
publishing, licensing and Graceland--which attracts more than 600,000 visitors annually--are worth $75 million.
Ask Presley to define her most important accomplishment and she doesn't hesitate. "Taking on challenges," she says
firmly. "I'm willing to try a lot of things. Our society is not kind to failure. But making mistakes is how you learn."
She learned the hard way, young and under public scrutiny. She rocketed into prominence at age 14, when, living on a
U.S. Air Force base in West Germany with her parents and siblings, Priscilla Beaulieu first encountered Elvis Presley, by
then the nation's most famous draftee. It was 1959, and within two years Priscilla, with her parents' blessing, was living at
Graceland -- an arrangement regarded as fascinatingly bizarre by a country still in the grip of a 1950's morality. In
Memphis she attended a Catholic school and spent six years as the official bride-in-waiting. Her life was not exactly that of
a typical teen. "While my classmates were deciding which colleges to apply to," she wrote in her 1985 book, Elvis and Me,
"I was deciding which gun to wear with what sequined dress."
When she was almost 22, she married Elvis in Las Vegas, honeymooning in Palm Springs. Then came the strange married
years -- garish makeup and getups that Elvis insisted Priscilla wear, the drug-induced fights, the days spent sleeping in
darkened rooms, the nights carousing with the good-old boy entourage, the forays into spiritual ideologies, the phobias -- a
life she later chronicled in painstaking detail in her book.
Today that chapter of her life is closed -- so firmly that she refuses to discuss virtually any part of it. That does not mean,
however, that she disowns her colorful, if turbulent, past. The old Elvis days are, she says with a laugh, "definitely a part of
me, believe it or not. I don't know if I want to let go of that side of me that's adventurous and not afraid to take chances. I
have a different hairstyle now, but I know what went on in my mind then, and I wouldn't change it. It was fun, it was a great
time."
(The other aspect of her life that Presley is reluctant to discuss is her relationship -- either spiritual or monetary -- with
Scientology, the controversial religion founded by the late L. Ron Hubbard that has attracted a large Hollywood following,
including, reportedly, actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta. Presley and Lisa remain quietly but actively involved. "It's just
a philosophy that has helped me ... make changes," Presley says circumspectly.)
As comfortable as Presley seems to be with her many identities, she retains a certain wariness about her own celebrity. "I
don't try to control my image. I just hope my character comes through, that the public can read through everything and see
that I've worked on the priorities in my life. But you can spend your life trying to be the best person yo can and learning
from your mistakes --- and then all of a sudden the tabloids can destroy you in one day. I'm trying to do the best that I can
as a person, a mother, a career woman, a homemaker, but I have these critics out there. I don't think anyone deserves
that." She adds, "A lot of times I want to stop myself for fear of failure. But if we don't keep repeating them, mistakes are
great lessons. And what's a mistake to you may not be a mistake to me, and what's perfect for you may not be perfect for
me. But I prefer to make my mistakes privately."
Ask Presley if she feels she has somehow been granted a second life, a second chance, and she smiles. "Maybe more
than a second life. It's more stable -- we're a family, and I hadn't had that in a long time. You can go on trying to change
everything, but I've pretty much learned when to be content."