Lisa Marie Presley didn’t get to finish her memoir, so her daughter Riley Keough carried it over the finish line.
From Here to the Great Unknown, out now, tells the story of the late Lisa Marie’s unique experience growing up as the only daughter of “the King,” Elvis Presley. After her father’s death in 1977, she had a very Hollywood life, including briefly marrying “the King of Pop,” Michael Jackson. She suffered devastating loss — the death of her son, Benjamin Keough, by suicide in 2020 — and struggled with opioid addiction.
Lisa Marie’s last 10 years had been “so brutally hard” that she struggled to write the book, Riley wrote in the memoir.
At her mother’s behest, the Daisy Jones & the Six actress agreed to help her, assuming they’d work together. One month later, in January 2023, Lisa Marie died, leaving Riley to finish the book in tribute, using audio recordings Lisa Marie had made, supplemented with her recollections.
“She was incredibly insecure, and I think there were moments where she kind of was going, ‘Why am I even writing a book about myself?’” Riley told Oprah Winfrey on Tuesday’s An Oprah Special: The Presleys — Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley. “She didn’t like talking about herself particularly.”
Lisa Marie wrote in the book that she was driven “to help other people somehow,” especially others impacted by suicide.
From the biggest revelations on the memoir pages to the CBS special taped at Graceland, here’s what we learned about Lisa Marie’s joys and pain.
Riley was ‘worried’ about Lisa Marie’s health in her final weeks
Lisa Marie was 54 when she died as a result of small bowel obstruction, a complication of bariatric surgery from years earlier.
“The last three weeks that she was alive, I was with her a few times [and] I felt worried,” Riley told Winfrey. “I think there was always sort of an undertone for me because of this feeling that I was on borrowed time with her. But there were a couple interactions with her that she just felt detached in a way, a kind of a resignation.”
Lisa Marie Presley supported Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis, starring Austin Butler, in the days before her death. On Jan. 8, 2023, she attended an event with daughter Riley and Butler. (Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images for Warner Bros.)
The book details how Lisa Marie was plagued with stomach pain and nausea before her death. The day she died, she texted Riley’s dad, Danny Keough, who lived with her off and on after their 1994 split, asking him to bring her antacid.
“Can you please help? My stomach’s hurting worse than ever,” Lisa Marie’s message said, according to the book.
“By the time he had gotten to her with the Tums she’d asked for, the housekeeper had found her on the floor,” Riley wrote.
Lisa Marie was resuscitated but suffered cardiac arrest again in the hospital and died.
Riley said Benjamin’s death was a catastrophic loss for Lisa Marie
Benjamin died in July 2020 at the age of 27.
“The moment my brother died, I was like, ‘This is the end of her,’ because they were so close,” Riley told Winfrey. “They were as close as Elvis was with his mother, and I just couldn’t imagine a world where she would make it without him.”
Lisa Marie wrote in her memoir that Benjamin “was very similar to his grandfather, very, very, very, and in every way. He even looked like him. Ben was so much like him, it scared me. I didn’t want to tell him because I thought it was too much to put on a kid. We were very close. He’d tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship that my father and his mother had. It was a generational f***ing cycle. Gladys loved my dad so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. Ben didn’t stand a f***ing chance.”
Riley wrote that while Benjamin was a “binge drinker” who had been to rehab, she wasn’t worried about him. After his death, she and Lisa Marie looked through his phone and found a text he had written about his own mental health concerns.
Lisa Marie kept Benjamin’s body at home for 2 months after his death
While deciding on Benjamin’s final resting place, Lisa Marie kept his body preserved in a coffin at their home using dry ice in a room set at 55 degrees.
In the book, Lisa Marie wrote that in California, there’s no law that you have to bury a body immediately. She found solace in “caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f***ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me. I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.”
The book noted that following Elvis’s death, there was a public viewing of his body at Graceland. After the mourners cleared out each night, Lisa Marie would go to the casket in the living room and talk to her father.
Riley told Winfrey that an “absurd moment” occurred after Benjamin’s death when she and her mom were getting tattoos that were replicas of ones Benjamin had. Lisa Marie, hoping to get hers perfect, brought the tattoo artist into the room where Benjamin’s body was in the coffin to show him his hand.
“Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son,” Riley wrote. “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
That’s when they knew that Benjamin had to go to his final resting place.
“Even my mom said that she could feel [Benjamin] talking to her, saying ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f***!” Riley wrote.
Benjamin’s memorial was held in Malibu, Calif., and he was buried at Graceland with Elvis — and later Lisa Marie.
Riley said Lisa Marie’s addiction battle was an ‘unbearably dark’ time
Lisa Marie started battling addiction at 40 after the C-section birth of her twins, Harper and Finley Lockwood, with Michael Lockwood in 2008.
“She [pulled me] aside and said, ‘I’ve been taking opiates. And at first, I was taking them for pain. Then I was taking them to sleep at night. Now it’s like I’m taking them for fun,’” Riley told Winfrey.
At her rock bottom, Lisa Marie was taking 80 painkillers a day, she wrote in her memoir. She also used cocaine. She was in and out of rehab, but treatment wasn’t working. She was very ill, spitting up blood.
Around that time, in 2016, Lisa Marie left Lockwood and it was a messy split. Her assets were frozen, and they had a bitter custody battle that required Lisa Marie to attend court-mandated rehab and undergo drug testing. Lisa Marie needed a court-certified monitor to see the twins, so Riley took on that role. Her mother and younger sisters moved in with her — as well as her father and brother to help.
“It seemed like it could have been good to have everyone together. But it felt like the end of things,” Riley wrote. “We’d had this amazing, colorful, beautiful, abundant, fun, joyful life — but in that house, it took a turn and got unbearably dark for all of us.”
Riley wrote in the book that she was proud of Lisa Marie for not relapsing after Benjamin’s death.
Lisa Marie details marriage to Michael Jackson — including that he claimed to be a virgin when they got together
Lisa Marie was still married to Danny when the King of Pop started to pursue her romantically in 1994. Things were friendly at first, and then he invited her to Las Vegas, where he swept her off her feet.
“Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children,’” Lisa Marie wrote. “I didn’t say anything immediately, but then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too.”
Lisa Marie wrote that Jackson “told me 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. I was terrified because I didn’t want to make the wrong move.”
Lisa Marie said she truly fell for Michael Jackson. (Kim Kulish/Sygma via Getty Images)
She wrote that Jackson “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!’”
They married in the Dominican Republic on May 26, 1994 — less than three weeks after her divorce to Danny Keough was finalized. On their honeymoon she was “so happy,” she wrote, noting, “I’ve never been that happy again.”
She wrote that she genuinely loved him. She felt he had an “energy” that “I’ve never ever seen or felt in my entire life, other than with my dad.”
They were together when the child molestation allegations against Jackson surfaced. She said she urged him to settle the lawsuit or it would haunt him.
“I never saw a goddamn thing like that,” she wrote of the alleged abuse. “I personally would’ve killed him if I had.”
After Jackson went off script at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards and kissed Lisa Marie, she wondered if he did it “for press,” she wrote, and started not to trust him. She also worried that if she had Jackson’s child, which he kept pushing for, he would take the child away and not let her raise it.
His drug addiction was the final straw. While visiting him in the hospital, Lisa Marie recalled a “red flag” when she discovered that he had “his own anesthesiologist.” She said she started to ask too many questions — about which drugs he was being administered — and Jackson sent her home from the hospital and started to shut her out.
She filed for divorce in 1996, but they didn’t split right away. Riley wrote that “for years” they continued to visit Jackson at his Neverland Ranch — even after Jackson married Debbie Rowe — before her mom ended the “toxic” relationship.
Lisa Marie was also briefly married to Nicolas Cage for three months in 2002.
Lisa Marie’s relationship with Priscilla was complicated
In the wake of Lisa Marie’s death, there was a battle over Graceland. Riley became the sole owner and her grandmother Priscilla Presley received a $1 million settlement.
Winfrey asked Riley if her grandmother would be buried at Graceland, and she replied that she would if she wanted to be.
Lisa Marie’s reflections on her mom in the book are harsh. She was a self-proclaimed daddy’s girl who felt closer to her father, who she believed was like a “god.”
Lisa Marie wrote that she thought Priscilla “didn’t want me.” She claimed her mother told her that she thought about trying to “fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage.” Lisa Marie wrote that Priscilla — who started dating Elvis when she was 14 and he was 24 — worried about losing her body and looks because so many women were after the singer.
Priscilla and Elvis’s marriage ended when Lisa Marie was 4 and Priscilla moved to Los Angeles. Lisa Marie, who had to split her time between her parents, resented being taken away from Graceland, where she was happiest rambling about the property in her golf cart.
After Elvis’s death, Lisa Marie was in her mom’s care full-time. In the book, she wrote that she felt her mom viewed her as a “trophy” and that she wished she had gotten a “different daughter.” Lisa Marie wrote that she was sent away a lot — to camps or schools — or had nannies caring for her while Priscilla traveled. As a rebellious teen, she viewed her mother as a “chronic stop sign.”
Lisa Marie alleged that one of her mother’s boyfriends sexually abused her for years as a child.
Lisa Marie also wrote about Priscilla joining Scientology after meeting John Travolta, one of the organization’s most famous members, in the late 1970s. Lisa Marie was 10 and was enrolled in a Scientology school. She wrote that she later lived in the Scientology Celebrity Centre in L.A. Lisa Marie left the church sometime between 2012 and 2014.
Lisa Marie with her mother, Priscilla Presley, and daughters Harper Lockwood, Riley Keough and Finley Lockwood in 2022. (Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)
The memoir notes that Lisa Marie and Priscilla grew closer when they both had babies. In 1987, Priscilla had son Navarone Garibaldi, and Lisa Marie had Riley in 1989.
Riley wrote in the book, “My mom wanted to forgive her. And she wanted to own her part in their difficult relationship.”
Following Lisa Marie’s death, Priscilla filed a petition questioning the “authenticity” of a 2016 amendment Lisa Marie had made to her living trust. The change removed Priscilla and Lisa Marie’s former business manager Barry Siegel as co-trustees and gave control of the trust — the Graceland mansion and a 15% stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, which together reportedly brought in a combined $110 million in 2022 — to her children Riley and Benjamin.
Riley and Priscilla reached a resolution in the legal matter last year and have been cordial publicly since.
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