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.
On Elvis
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.”