With all the recent debates about royalty and primogeniture, there is perhaps no better example of their dangers than Lisa Marie Presley.
As the only child of Elvis, the King of Rock n’ Roll, Lisa Marie felt like she belonged to all of us, and how terribly unfair. She was the little girl who had everything: her father spoiled her silly and gave her a tiny, tailored fur coat and real jewels. He has one of his private planes named after her, a plane that you can tour at Graceland for an additional fee. He would send an unannounced car to pick her up from school, and that was the sign that she was going out on the street with her daddy. He once flew her to Utah just so she could see snow.
She was with her father when he died in his bathroom at Graceland. She saw him lying on the floor, rolled out of his own vomit, people working to revive him while her grandfather Vernon wailed, ‘Oh God son, please don’t go, please don’t die.’
Lisa was nine years old. ‘What’s wrong with my daddy?’ She asked. “Something’s wrong with my daddy and I’m going to find out.”
She was back at Graceland just four days before her own death at the age of 54 from cardiac arrest. She gave a speech; it was January 8th, her father’s birthday. Graceland has always been a cursed place for her.
“Graceland’s backyard is basically a graveyard,” she told Playboy in 2003. “How many people have a family plot in their backyard? How many people are reminded of their fate, of their mortality, every damn day? All the graves are lined up and there is a place waiting for me, right next to my grandmother.”
According to her own statements, a dark cloud followed her. The Presley bloodline is rough, riddled with depression, mental illness, heart problems and addiction. Her father was a “twinless twin” – his twin brother Jesse was stillborn, a loss his mother Gladys never got over. Elvis himself suffered from an existential loneliness that grew in direct proportion to his fame. During his last stay in Las Vegas in December 1976, he wrote a note which read in part:
“I feel so alone sometimes. . . God help me.’
As the only child of Elvis, the King of Rock n’ Roll, Lisa Marie felt like she belonged to all of us, and how terribly unfair.
“Graceland’s backyard is basically a graveyard,” she told Playboy in 2003.
Lisa Marie said she has a lot of her father in her. “I know it’s a DNA situation,” she said. Like Elvis, she masked her more complicated emotions — insecurity, fear, sadness, anger — with drugs and alcohol. She got the good and the bad from him, she said.
“I hear it all the time from my family,” she said. “You are just like him. My god, you’re just like your daddy.”
And she looked just like him: that oval face, the veiled eyes, the pouty lips. It couldn’t have been easy being the sole heir to the Presley legacy and looking and sounding so much like one of the most unique personalities of the 20th century.
Despite this, she was proud of her father and her lineage. “I would never take back any part of who I am or where I came from,” she said. “I would never want to be part of anything else.”
Despite her tormented relationship with fame, Lisa Marie lived a great life: Married young, she divorced her first husband, who married Michael Jackson of all people — at the height of his child abuse scandal, no less. They became one freak show: the kiss at the MTV Video Music Awards — “It looked weird because I wanted out of my skin,” she later said — the joint television interview in which Diane Sawyer flat-out asked her if she actually did Sex, the music video in which a half-naked Lisa appeared with Michael as if to prove he was just a normal straight adult male.
“I started waking up and asking a lot of questions,” she said of that time. The relationship with Jacko “went downhill pretty quickly.”
She married Nicolas Cage, another Elvis super fan. That, too, was wild in the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton way, breakups and reconciliations culminating in Cage tossing Lisa Marie’s $65,000 ring over the side of a yacht.
Unfortunately, the diver assigned to recover it found nothing. Two days later, Cage replaced it with a ten-carat yellow diamond. They, too, soon divorced.
She was trying to find her own path, carving her own identity, but seemed to have surrendered to her fate: as Elvis’ only daughter, what should she do as a singer? And she did and released three albums, her latest, Storm & Grace, being very well reviewed. But she always seemed uncomfortable performing, uncomfortable with her brand of fame bestowed upon her at birth.
They became a freak show: the kiss at the MTV Video Music Awards – “It looked weird because I wanted out of my skin,” she later said.
She married Nicolas Cage, another Elvis super fan. That, too, was wild in the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton way, breakups and reconciliations culminating in Cage tossing Lisa Marie’s $65,000 ring over the side of a yacht.
She never really had a chance. Her father’s death was a lifelong trauma. Her mother’s boyfriend at the time confessed to having had sexual feelings for Lisa as a child and said he tried to get into her room at night. She got into drugs and her mother had Scientologists try to calm her down. She ended up in and out of the cult.
She married young, at 20, and had two children: her daughter, Riley, and her son, Benjamin. Her then-husband, musician Danny Keough, never sold her. The family they built together was Lisa Marie at her most stable.
More recently, there was a fourth marriage to Michael Lockwood, twin daughters, a horrible divorce that saw Lisa Marie falsely claim Lockwood possessed child pornography – a claim that was investigated and denied by police.
Benjamin committed suicide in 2020. Looking at Lisa Marie afterwards was seeing a light go out forever.
Usually quite private, she wrote an essay about her unrelenting grief over the loss of Benjamin. First published in August 2022, it read in part:
“Obviously no parent chooses that path, and thank God not all parents have to be victims of it — and I’m talking about VICTING.” I used to hate that word. now i know why I have been dealing with death, grief and loss since I was 9 years old. I’ve had more of them than anyone in my life and somehow I’ve made it this far. But this one, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible being I’ve ever met, who made me feel so honored to be his mother every day? Who was so like their grandfather on so many levels that they actually scared me? Which made me worry about him even more than I naturally would have? No, just no . . . No no no no . . .’
Lisa Marie Presley, Just Like Her Father: An American Original. Rest in peace.
(Above) The Presley family Riley Keough, Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley and Benjamin Keough greet fans during celebrations for Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday in Memphis, Tennessee January 8, 2010
In her final year, Lisa Marie poetically collaborated with Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler to cement her father’s legacy as she saw fit. The Elvis we see on screen is almost always pure joy, sex and devotion, his pain glossed over, his life a triumph.
Like her father, Lisa Marie died at home. She was living with her first husband, Danny Keough, who attempted to resuscitate her. She knew her fate should be buried at Graceland, but in her own way she made fun of it.
“I’m sure that’s where I’ll end up,” she said in 2003. “Or I’ll shrink my head and put it in a glass box in the living room. That way I’ll bring more tourists to Graceland.”
Lisa Marie Presley, Just Like Her Father: An American Original. Rest in peace.