Everything we learnt from Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir

By Luke Goodsell, ABC Entertainment

For years after rock ‘n’ roll titan Elvis Presley died, his daughter Lisa Marie said her father would appear in her dreams – her, curled up in the hamburger-shaped bed she loved as a child, him sitting beside her in astral conversation.

“I don’t really believe they were dreams,” Presley writes in her newly released posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown. “I believe they were visitations.”

When Lisa Marie Presley died at age 54 in January 2023, it was almost as though some dark destiny had been fulfilled – the child of one of pop culture’s greatest icons had finally, tragically been unable to outrun the shadow cast by her father’s legacy.

Photo: Pan Macmillan

At the time of her death, Presley had been recording tapes in preparation to write her memoir. Per her wishes, her eldest daughter Riley Keough has helped finish it, annotating the transcribed tapes with her own reflections.

The resulting collaboration offers the unfiltered thoughts of a cultural figure whose celebrity tended to dwarf the idea that she might be a real person, whose memories feel like they were beginning to offer her something approaching clarity. It’s also a tender act of remembrance from a daughter determined to make her mother whole again.

Like her own mother, Priscilla – whose 1985 memoir Elvis and Me showed a woman still in thrall to her ex, and carefully curating his brand – Lisa Marie spent a lifetime trying to escape the burden of her family name. Unlike Priscilla, the younger Presley never had the chance to make peace with her father’s legacy; her life was a work in progress.

“Something in her heart had never left Graceland, hadn’t emotionally developed past when her father died,” Keough writes.

Here are some of the key revelations from the memoir.

She never recovered from her father’s death

A very happy Elvis Presley prepares to join his wife, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, and four-day-old daughter, Lisa Marie, as they leave Baptist Hospital here.
Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images

Born into rarefied fame as the only child of Elvis and Priscilla, Lisa Marie Presley had what she admits was a spoiled childhood – the kind where a private jet was named in her honour, where she’d tear around Graceland in golf carts and toy with the paparazzi.

Her bond with Elvis was intense, even primal; she believed he was a mercurial force that could influence the weather, for better and for worse. (On one occasion, she recalls, Elvis sang ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ to her – using a basset hound puppet – by way of apologising for a scolding.)

When she witnessed Elvis’ fatal overdose on the bathroom floor in August 1977, Lisa Marie was nine. The experience would forever scar her, his death was a loss from which she would never recover. After the funeral, she sat with her father’s body for hours, disassociating during the public outpouring of grief while, she says, having no access to her own.

“The sadness started at nine when he passed away, and then it never left,” she writes.

Years later, in the wake of her son’s death, Presley would drive 200 miles cross country from Nashville to Graceland – just to lie on her father’s bed, and point out the plot of land where she would one day be buried.

She says she was molested by Priscilla’s boyfriend, and attempted suicide at 16

As Presley entered adolescence, bouncing between boarding schools, a recreational drug habit and a strained relationship with Priscilla, she struggled to find her bearings.

From ages 10 to 13, Presley says her mother’s then-boyfriend, the actor Michael Edwards, would come into her room at night – although the more explicit details have been elided from the book’s Australian edition. According to Keough, the alleged abuse contributed to her mother’s lifelong feelings of shame and self-hatred. Edwards denies the claims.

At 16, after her first boyfriend – who she’d dated when she was 14, and he was 23 – sold private photos of them to the tabloids, Presley says she attempted suicide.

John Travolta introduced Priscilla and Lisa Marie to Scientology

Presley says she found stability of a sort at Scientology’s Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles. Priscilla had been introduced to the religion by John Travolta after she brought him to Lisa Marie’s birthday party back in the ’70s.

The young Presley was all in; she says she “wanted to have superpowers”.

At the Celebrity Centre, she crossed paths with musician Danny Keough and they quickly became an item. But Keough made Presley “harder to control” in the eyes of the family; she says that when she became pregnant, Edwards hired a PI in an attempt to discredit Keough, and tried to have the baby – Riley – aborted.

She thought she could ‘fix’ Michael Jackson

US pop star Michael Jackson and his wife Lisa Marie Presley arrive at Budapest’s airport 6 August, 1994.
Photo: AFP

Though cynics suspected her 1994 marriage to Michael Jackson was a ruse to distract from the child-molestation allegations plaguing the pop superstar, Presley insists they were madly in love – and that she “never saw a goddamn thing” when it came to the rumours of abuse.

“She wanted to fix him,” writes Keough, noting they both grew up in the glare of fame. “She felt he was misunderstood, a feeling that she was very familiar with.”

When they got together, Presley says Jackson told her he was a virgin. He was 34.

“I fell in love with him because he was normal,” recalls Presley. She and Michael would even drop her two kids – who called him “Mimi” – off at school together, albeit with a chimpanzee occasionally in tow.

“I was actually so happy,” she writes. “I’ve never been that happy again.”

But mounting paranoia, drug use and an army of sycophants – just like Elvis – conspired to end their marriage.

Keough remembers her mother’s last conversation with Jackson: “Everybody around me wants to kill me,” he said.

After her son’s suicide, she knew she didn’t have long to live

After a decade of what Keough calls relative tranquillity – which included a brief marriage to Nicolas Cage, who would arrive at the family house each night in a different coloured Lamborghini – Presley’s life took a dark turn about 2008.

She had just become a mother to twin girls but the painkillers she had been given for the C-section birth led to a debilitating 80-pill-per-day opioid addiction – and hospitalisation when her heart stopped.

Then, tragedy: her 27-year-old son, Benjamin Keough took his own life. She penned a devastating op-ed, and worried how long she would survive.

Graceland, Elvis Presley’s house, where the tombstone of Lisa Marie Presley is in the meditation garden.
Photo: AVENET Pascal / Hemis.fr / hemis.fr / Hemis via AFP

In one of the book’s most bracing passages, Presley looks back on her life and sees only an abyss. On 12 January, 2023 – just days after she’d attended her father’s birthday celebrations and an awards ceremony for the musical biopic Elvis – she went into cardiac arrest, dying at a Los Angeles hospital that night.

“I really had no prototype to follow growing up. I had no family life, no home life to be an example, ever. No stability,” she writes at one point.

“I guess I didn’t really have a shot in hell.”

At her memorial service, Presley’s casket was laid across a golf cart. She was home – back in her father’s playground.

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir is out now.

– ABC

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