Girl who must not be alone

Press, 29 October 1977, Page 17

Girl who must not be alone

JOANNE WILLS

reports from Los Angeles

Five armed bodyguards keep a 24-hour watch on the girl who, by the age of 25, could

be worth an astounding SIOOM.

Two dark-windowed Cadillacs sped into downtown Los Angeles on a recent Saturday morning and. with special police permission, pulled up in a no-waiting zone outside Dacres, the city’s biggest toyshop. Amid a posse of broadshouldered guards, a nineyea r-old girl with s h o u 1 d e r-length, light brown hair was hustled into the store’s doll department, where she was welcomed by the manager and the company president. . . _ Ten minutes later, clutching a large parcel, she was in the leading Cadillac speeding out of town. , Lisa Presley, one of the richest children in the world, had come briefly out of gun-guarded seclusion to buy a new doll. . . • ic Lisa will inherit in lb years at the age of 25, a fortune that is at present worh SSOM, and which could double in value before she gets it. The majority of the fantastic fortune left by the king of rock and roll, Elvis Presley, on his death

in August at the age of 42, is already earning huge amounts of interest in an investment fund administered by Presley’s father, Vernon, and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. But all this means little to the nine-year-old who was actually in the ornate Gracelands mansion in Memphis on the night her father died. Her pocket money remains at $lO a week — the amount stipulated by Elvis — but no longer can she walk to the corner store to spend it, accompanied only by one discreet bodyguard. Today, as kidnap and extortion threats pour in by every post, her mother, Mrs Priscilla Presley, has accepted that Lisa must become a prisoner of her wealth. She has been taken away from the Roman Catholic school she formerly attended, and now studies under a tutor, An electric fence surrounds the house’s twoacre grounds, and only half-a-dozen carefully vetted friends are encouraged to call.

Not surprisingly, the girl who was once described as “a bouncing tomboy, full of fun” is now a lonely, introverted child who has already had several sessions with a children’s psychiatrist, and sits for long periods in moody silence, despite at-

tempts to cheer her up. She was devoted to Elvis, and he to her. As a close friend said: “Elvis could be violent and mean, but to Lisa he showed a completely different side of his nature. “She had her own suite at Gracelands, and he encouraged her to come whenever she wanted to. She spent most of the school holidays at Memphis.” Lisa was fiercely loyal to Elvis, and he frequently visited her at her mother’s million-dollar Beverly Hills home, bought from the proceeds of her divorce settlement — despite the presence of Mike Stone, Mrs Presley’s boyfriend.

On one of the last visits, she told him: “Mum wants me to call Mike ‘Pa’ but I told hei I wouldn’t. I’ve only got one dad and that’s you.” According to witnesses, Elvis wept. Lisa still talks constantly about the night her father died. It was she

who broke the news in a poignant phone call to Linda Thompson, Elvis’s former girl-friend. "This is Lisa. My daddy is dead,” she said in a call to Linda in Nashville shortly after the tragedy “No baby, he’s not dead,” said Miss Thompson w’ho was unaware of what had happened. “Yes, he’s dead," Lisa persisted, and Linda’s brother, Sam, who was Elvis’s chief bodyguard, came to the phone to confirm it.

Lisa was born to Priscilla and Elvis Presley in 1968, the year after their marriage, and was only three when her parents split up. Although Presley will-

ingly granted custody of Lisa to her mother when he sued for divorce, she remained an unbreakable link between her parents. “He was a good father,” said a family friend. “He would ring Lisa up every day from wherever he happened to be and al-

though he lashed out presents to people he hardly knew, he never spoiled his daughter. “He knew that being his main beneficiary would change her life, but he couldn’t see any way around it. He always wanted her to have most of his money.” But perhaps not even Elvis could have envisaged just how’ profound the effect would be on the child they are now calling the “poor little rich girl,” and who can never be alone.

Five full-time guards now maintain 24-hour survieHance on the house and grounds. An armed guard sleeps in a room adjoining Lisa’s bedroom, all

calls are monitored, and all mail checked. In the first week after Elvis’s death Lisa received more than 2000 letters, ranging from threats to pleas for money, but all were dealt with by her mother’s secretary. Lisa did not see any of them.

At least six would-be intruders have been apprehended trying to get into the grounds — including a 14-year-old boy who said he was in love with Lisa and intended to marry her “when I leave school and get a job.” The question of how long her daughter will have to live under what ,is virtually a state of siege is, not surprisingly, deeply worrying to Mrs Presley. Already, she had considered the question of moving to the east coast and of even changing Lisa’s name and sending her to an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Vermont. But such plans were soon abandoned. Priscilla Presley know’s, from 10 years of bitter experience, that the price paid for the riches and glamour which go with the Presley name is a heavy one indeed.