Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, dies at age 54
Presley just lately attended the Golden Globe Awards to watch Austin Butler, who performed her father within the 2022 Baz Luhrmann biopic “Elvis,” win finest actor in a drama.
Scott L. Hall, USA TODAY
Her coronary heart by no means healed after dropping Elvis. That was at all times evident as Lisa Marie Presley clumsily looked for love and contentment in her abbreviated life.
But in Presley’s uncooked new memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown” (Random House, 281 pp., on sale Tuesday), accomplished by her daughter Riley Keough after Lisa Marie’s loss of life at age 54, the tragedy is amplified and repeated. It’s a compelling however relentlessly miserable learn.
The guide, transcribed from tapes of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s solely little one frankly discussing her life, is written in vignettes that alternate between mom and daughter’s voices. Roughly a 3rd of the guide focuses on Lisa Marie’s childhood years, each with and with out her dad and detailing her fraught relationship along with her mother, and a large part is devoted to Michael Jackson.
There are massive gaps within the timeline – most notably, her marriages to Nicolas Cage and Michael Lockwood – which can be glancingly crammed in by Keough, who additionally gives perception for Lisa Marie’s eventual habit and, later, Ben Keough’s suicide. Though her love of music is evident, surprisingly little is alleged about her profession.
Among the guide’s largest revelations:
How to watch: Oprah interviews Elvis' granddaughter Riley Keough on CBS
Long earlier than Elvis' loss of life, Lisa Marie Presley apprehensive he may die
“I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die,’ “ she remembers. Among many incidents, she describes finding him face down on the floor of his bathroom. He had tried to steady himself on a towel rack, which broke and he collapsed.
The last time she saw Elvis alive, she was coming in from playing racquetball. Her dad gave her a hug and a kiss, they exchanged I love yous, and he told her, “Go to bed.”
She woke to a commotion and Elvis was whisked away on a stretcher. Lisa Marie, 9, went to her bed room, nervously smoked a cigarette and awaited phrase. An hour later, she heard her grandfather Vernon wailing, “He’s gone, he’s gone.”
“My life as I knew it was completely over,” she wrote, realizing later, “He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her,” which means Priscilla.
Adds Riley, “I remember when I was little feeling angry at Elvis for leaving my mother and for causing all this pain.”
Lisa Marie alleges that Priscilla Presley's boyfriend sexually assaulted her for years
When she was 10, Lisa Marie says, her mom's boyfriend Michael Edwards, a mannequin and actor, got here into her room in the midst of the night time. “He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I got older,” she writes. “He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, then he put his hand between my legs and he said they’re going to touch you here.” She remembers him gently kissing her and leaving.
Priscilla was livid when Lisa Marie revealed the incident and referred to as her daughter in so Edwards might apologize. “In Europe that’s how they teach the kids, so that’s what I was doing,” he informed her.
But the abuse didn’t cease. “He would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look” and leaving her with a bruised backside. “I assume he was jerking off,” Lisa Marie wrote. When Priscilla would confront him, “He’d say, ‘Oh, I was drunk’ or ‘She was actually flirting with me.’ ”
“I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” Lisa Marie wrote.
Once, he complained about Lisa Marie leaving her underwear on the dryer and she or he shot again, “It’s not like you’re not enjoying that.” She says he responded by throwing a eating room chair at her, hanging her within the again.
USA TODAY has reached out to Priscilla Presley’s consultant for remark. No contact might be discovered for Edwards.
Priscilla moved teenage Lisa Marie into the Scientology Celebrity Centre
With their relationship deteriorating, Lisa Marie remembers her reduction when Priscilla informed her to pack her luggage in the midst of the night time and dropped her off.
“The first morning I removed the large mirror from the wall, called my coke dealer and invited him and about six or seven other people over,” she writes. “We proceeded to have a four-day bender in that room.”
But for essentially the most half, “Scientology actually helped,” she writes. “The church felt radical in an exciting way − it didn’t feel like an organized religion, really. It attracted cool, unusual, artistic people. It became my tribe.”
Devastated after aborting Danny Keough's child, Lisa Marie obtained pregnant with Riley Keough on goal
She calls her abortion “the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” and shortly after, the couple broke up.
So “I planned and I plotted and I schemed. I pinpointed exactly when I was ovulating” and met up with Danny as his band performed a gig on a cruise ship. Two weeks later, with a constructive being pregnant check in hand, “Danny knew he had to marry me. I trapped him. I didn’t really mean to, but I did.”
Michael Jackson informed Lisa Marie Presley he was a virgin
He’d chastely kissed Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields, and “he said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened,” Lisa Marie wrote.
“I was terrified, because I didn't want to make the wrong move. When he decided to first kiss me, he just did it. He was instigating everything. The physical stuff started happening, which I was shocked at. I had thought that maybe we wouldn’t do anything until we got married, but he said, ‘I’m not waiting!’ “
Lisa Marie recalls their early time together as idyllic: honeymooning in Orlando and going to Disney World every other day. “I was actually so happy,” she writes. “I’ve never been that happy again.”
“There was an energy there, something about him that was truly remarkable, something that I’ve never ever seen or felt in my entire life, other than with my dad. … I fell in love with him because he was normal.”
As for the allegations of child molestation? “I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.”
A grieving Lisa Marie kept her son Ben Keough's dead body at home on dry ice for months
She brought Ben home after his suicide in 2020. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there” in a 55-degree room, she writes.
Lisa Marie and Riley decided to get his name tattooed on their collarbones and hands, just as he had theirs tattooed on him. When the artist asked if they had photos showing the position of the ink, what happened next floored Riley.
“I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” Keough writes. Lisa ushered the artist inside to open Ben’s casket and check out his tattoos firsthand.
“Soon after that, we all kind of got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore,” Riley writes. “ ‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘this is getting weird.’ “
Ben Keough once drove Lisa Marie cross-country during a health crisis so she could do drugs along the way
At the worst of Lisa Marie’s drug addiction, which began after the birth of her twin girls in 2008, she was consuming 80 pills a day.
“My whole life had blown up, it felt like one thing after another, and I could not take any more beatings,” she writes.
She would frequently travel to Graceland to sleep in Elvis’ bed, Riley writes. She was “desperate to feel protected, desperate to connect with her father. … It was the feeling of going to church when all is lost and saying, ‘Please, Jesus, help me.’ “
With her health failing, Ben rented a tour bus in Nashville to drive Lisa Marie and the twins to LA, where her doctors were. “We drove because I wanted to do cocaine the whole time and couldn’t if I was on an airplane,” she wrote. “I didn’t think I could even get through airport security.”
While in rehab, Lisa Marie underwent the weight-loss bariatric surgery that eventually led to her death from a small bowel obstruction.
Two weeks before his suicide, Ben texted Lisa Marie that his mental health was suffering
“I think something is wrong with me mentally or something like that,” Ben told her. “I think I have a mental health issue.”
Numbed by drinking and drugs, he hadn’t recognized the depth of his depression until it was too late, Riley wrote. “He hadn’t gone to therapy, not even once. And he certainly hadn’t attempted suicide before − no overdose, nothing. No cry for help.”
Somehow, Lisa Marie remained sober, though “we all knew my mom was going to die of a broken heart,” Riley writes.
This article discusses suicide and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
If you are a survivor of sexual assault, RAINN offers support through the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE and on-line.rainn.org).
