Elvis Presley with wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie in 1968. Photo / Getty Images
A gun-crazy Graceland childhood; marriage to Michael Jackson; a very frosty mother… All the revelations from From Here to the Great Unknown.
Lisa Marie Presley’s life was a very American tragedy.
The only child of rock ‘n’ roll’s King, she seemed predestined to spend her days overshadowed by her origins.
Born in 1968, her own journey through life included a stab at rock stardom, marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage, struggles with drug addiction and the suicide of her beloved son Ben in 2020.
It all ended with her own death in January 2023, aged 54, from a heart attack, following bariatric surgery she had undergone an attempt to lose weight.
Presley had been recording tapes for a planned autobiography, which has been posthumously completed by her daughter, the actress Riley Keough.
From Here to the Great Unknown is published today; as befits the daughter of Elvis, it’s quite the ride. Here are some of the highlights.
In August 1977, when Lisa Marie was nine years old, Elvis hired Libertyland amusement park in Memphis in its entirety, so that he could take her on the rides.
“I remember sitting next to him on the roller coaster that day – the Zippin Pippin – keeping one eye ahead on the ride and the other on the gun in his holster, which was on my side,” Lisa Marie recalls in the memoir.
“Unless you know or understood him, that sounds terrible, I know. You might think he was crazy, carrying a piece with his daughter sitting next to him, but he was just from the South. It was really funny. So we rode and rode.”
A week later, Lisa Marie was in the upstairs bathroom of Graceland, watching her father die from a drug-related heart attack.
“They were standing over him, moving him around, trying to work on him. I was screaming bloody murder.”
She is still haunted by the sound of her grandfather Vernon wailing in the living room, “He’s gone, he’s gone!”
But, as she observes with tangible disgust, “that afternoon turned into a free-for-all. Everybody went to town. Everything was swiped, wiped clean – jewellery, artefacts, personal items – before he was even pronounced dead.”
Elvis, she writes, “was a God to me.” It’s a statement indicative of the lack of perspective that runs through this crazy tale. “You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible. If it was bad, watch the f*** out. Whatever it was going to be, it was going to be a 1000 per cent. When he got angry, everybody would run, duck and take cover.”
She depicts him in a hotel penthouse suite in Tahoe, strung out and upset at not being able to get the drugs he wanted, throwing objects off the balcony by the armful, “really angry, cursing and screaming”, while his Memphis Mafia cronies cowered behind sofas.
Lisa Marie grew up at Elvis’s Memphis mansion, Graceland, which she describes as being “like its own city, its own jurisdiction. My dad was the chief of police, and everybody was ranked. There were a few laws and rules, but mostly not”.
Lisa Marie lived life like a feral princess, running wild with cousins and the staff children, threatening to have people fired if they did not do her bidding.
Elvis let her ride her pony through the house, where it stopped and defecated right outside her snuff-pipe-smoking great-grandmother’s bedroom.
The depiction of Graceland is insane, like the Beverly Hillbillies with drugs and guns.
Elderly women in the family pull knives on each other; everyone rides recklessly around in golf carts, a “full-on demolition derby all day long”.
The Memphis Mafia congregate in a downstairs pool room that Lisa Marie describes as “a vortex”, full of “never ending cigarettes, dirty magazines, dirty cards, dirty books… One time my dad threw a stink bomb down the steps into that room and then locked the doors so no one could get out.”
There was a shed full of weapons and fireworks.
“Dad and his friends would take firecrackers and shoot them at each other” until an incident when “they all exploded at the same time. The whole shed went up in flames”. Fondly recalling the mayhem, she says: “Sometimes I can’t believe no one was killed up there.”
One person who isn’t going to enjoy this book is Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla Presley, still alive and now 79.
“She met my dad at 14, and her parents allowed it. It was a different time,” Lisa Marie notes. (Elvis was 24.) Priscilla is described as having “a chilly disposition” and lacking in “maternal instincts”.
After Elvis’s death, Lisa Marie realises: “I’m stuck with this woman. It was a one-two punch: he’s dead and now I’m stuck with her.”
Life with Priscilla was much more strict but also curiously hands-off.
Priscilla was frequently absent on film sets and modelling shoots, while Lisa Marie relied on support from the Church of Scientology, to which she’d been recruited by John Travolta.
“Scientology kind of raised me for her.”
She claims an abusive adult would come to her room at night to spank her.
“There was a lot of violence in that house.”
But when she showed her mother her bruises, Priscilla would respond: “Well, what did you do to cause that?”.
Later in life, when Priscilla had another child, there was a degree of rapprochement between daughter and mother, but the memoir doesn’t suggest genuine closeness.
“She was never a friend, someone I could talk to,” she says. “I felt like I was her trophy.”
Lisa Marie’s own love life was always something of a mess.
She lost her virginity aged 14 to a 23-year-old actor, who sold pictures of them together to the press. She claims that Priscilla wreaked revenge by setting him up for a drug bust.
At the age of 21, Lisa Marie became pregnant by, and married musician Danny Keough, father of the memoir’s co-author Riley.
He is – perhaps not coincidentally – the only man in Lisa Marie’s life who comes across in this book as honourable and caring. But she left him for pop superstar Michael Jackson in 1994, even as Jackson was facing child-molestation accusations.
Lisa Marie protests that she “never saw a goddamn thing like that. I would have killed him if I had”, yet there are sinister undercurrents between the lines of a relationship she claims was the happiest of her life.
“I fell in love with him because he was normal,” she insists, even as she describes a life of wildly inflated luxury, driving the children to school with his pet chimpanzee, and keeping a private anaesthesiologist on hand for reasons he refuses to explain to her.
Jackson was 34 when they got together, but told her “he was still a virgin. I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss. He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once too, but nothing happened”.
Despite Lisa Marie’s insistence that she did not believe the paedophile allegations, she admits she didn’t want to have children with Jackson because, she says, “I knew he ultimately wanted to be the only caretaker of the children. Michael wanted to control things. He didn’t want a mother influence, or any other influence, for that matter.
“I figured Michael would have me have the children and then dump me, get me out of the picture. I could read him like a clock. I knew his nature, and he was very controlling and calculating.”
Conflict over her refusal to have more children and his increasing drug dependency led to the couple splitting less than two years into their marriage, after which Jackson cut off all contact with her.
“I can get really mean and really angry and I freak people out when I get like that,” admits Lisa Marie. “It comes from trying to protect myself from pain. I know people can hurt me, so I’ll shut them out. I learned from the best: Michael Jackson. He did it really well.”
Lisa Marie was married and divorced four times, the briefest being 108 days in 2022 with the actor Nicolas Cage, a known Elvis obsessive. From Here to the Great Unknown doesn’t shed much light on this relationship, but Riley Keough fills in some gaps, recalling her own memories of it as having been a “ton of fun”.
The couple dressed up as horror-film characters, and Cage turned up every day in a different Lamborghini to shower Lisa Marie in diamonds. During one yacht trip, things became rowdy, and she threw a $65,000 engagement ring into the Pacific Ocean.
“Nic bought her another one,” we’re told, “even more expensive than the first.” All Lisa Marie has to say is this: “We were so dramatic, the two of us, that we couldn’t stay contained”.
After Elvis died in 1977, his body laid in state for visiting crowds at Graceland.
Lisa Marie would sit and watch as they filed past his coffin, “fainting and screaming and grieving so hard”.
She doesn’t know if anyone noticed her there, watching.
Later, when the crowds were gone, she went down to his casket, “to touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him. It’ll hit me still, on and off it comes. There have been nights as an adult when I would just get drunk and listen to his music and sit there and cry. The grief still comes. It’s still just there”.
I met Lisa Marie in 2012, in a record-company office in London. She was promoting her third and finest album, Storm & Grace, and she cut a striking figure, heavily made up, dressed (as usual) all in black.
It was impossible not to note the family resemblances. She had Elvis’s eyes and heavy jaw, a slight curl to the top lip, although there was just as much of her mother in her angular beauty.
Her body language was stiff and cautious; she took a long time to warm to the interview. She didn’t speak expansively or give out more information than needed.
When I asked whether she was a suspicious person, she replied: “I should be more suspicious. I was born into this, I saw things way too young. You have to constantly keep your eye open. Something happens to people around fame and power and money. It’s a monster you have to tame”.
At 40, following the birth of twins by Caesarian section, she became addicted to painkillers. Soon she would be popping “80 pills a day” and it was a decade-long struggle to recover.
In the memoir, most of this is told from the perspective of Riley Keough, although Lisa Marie’s comments lend sad insights, equating her belated drug dependency with a loss of focus and meaning in her life.
In 2014, she left the Church of Scientology, long having harboured doubts. She seemed to be getting her life back on track.
Then in 2022, her son Ben killed himself with a shot to the head. In a morbid echo of Elvis’ lying-in-state, Lisa Marie kept his body in a bedroom at her home for two months, with the temperature maintained at 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius).
“I think it would scare the living piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” she admits. “But not me… I felt so fortunate that there was a way I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could process his death.”
The latter passages of From Here to the Great Unknown evoke a constant struggle to live with grief. Ultimately, Riley Keough believes that her mother died of a broken heart.
“I saw a picture of myself with my parents yesterday,” says Lisa Marie on tapes recorded just months before she died.
“I was five or six. I’m standing between the two of them, and they’ve each got my hand. After my father died, people always described me as sad. It was like a permanent imprint on my face after that, in my eyes.
“But that sadness was not in this photograph. That forlorn little princess bulls*** hadn’t reared its ugly head yet.
“The sadness started at nine when he passed away, and then it never left. Now it’s even worse – my eyes are downcast permanently in this grief. The view is pretty limited. I always thought – why does everybody always say I look sad. And now I get it.”
From Here to the Great Unknown is out now.
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