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For all the recent talk about royalty and birthrights, there may not be a better example of its dangers than Lisa Marie Presley.
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 girl who had it all: her father foolishly coddled her, giving her a tiny, custom-made fur coat and real jewelry. She named one of her private planes after her, a plane that you can tour at Graceland for an additional fee. He would send a car, without notifying her, to pick her up at school, and that was the signal that she was on the road with her dad. He once flew her to Utah just so she could see the snow.
He was with his father when he died in his bathroom at Graceland. He saw him on the ground, coming out of his own vomit, people working to resuscitate him as his grandpa Vernon wailed, ‘Oh, God, son, please don’t go, please don’t die.’
Lisa was nine years old. ‘What’s wrong with my dad?’ she asked. ‘Something’s wrong with my dad, and I’m going to find out.’
He returned to Graceland just four days before his own death, aged 54, from cardiac arrest. She gave a speech; it was January 8, her father’s birthday. Graceland was always a haunted place for her.
“Graceland’s backyard is basically a graveyard,” he told Playboy in 2003. “How many people have a family grave in their backyard? How many people are reminded of their fate, their mortality, every damn day? All the graves are lined up and there is a place there, waiting for me, right next to my grandmother.
There was, by her own admission, a dark cloud following her. Presley’s lineage is tough, rife with depression, mental illness, heart problems, and addiction. His father was a ‘twin without twins’: 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 that read, in part:
‘I feel so alone sometimes. . . Help me, sir.’
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,” he told Playboy in 2003.
Lisa Marie said that she had a lot of her father in her. “I know it’s a DNA situation,” she said. Like Elvis, she masked her more complicated feelings (insecurity, fear, sadness, anger) with drugs and alcohol. She got the good and the bad from him, she said.
“I hear it non-stop from my family,” he said. You are like him. My gosh, you’re just like your dad right now.
And she looked exactly like him: That oval face, the drooping eyes, the pout. It couldn’t have been easy, with her being the sole heir to the Presley legacy, looking and sounding just as much like one of the most unique figures of the 20th century.
However, 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 a part of anything else.”
Despite her tortuous relationship with fame, Lisa Marie lived a great life: married young, divorcing her first husband to marry, of all people, Michael Jackson, at the height of his child sex abuse scandal, nothing less. They became a freak show: the kiss at the MTV Video Music Awards—”It seemed awkward because I wanted to get out of my skin,” he later said—the joint TV interview in which Diane Sawyer asked them, bluntly, if they really they had sex, the music video featuring Lisa half-naked with Michael, as if to prove he was just a normal adult heterosexual male.
“I started waking up and asking a lot of questions,” he said of the time. Her relationship with Jacko “went downhill pretty quickly.”
She then married Nicolas Cage, another Elvis superfan. That, too, was wild in a Liz Taylor-Richard Burton way, breakups and reconciliations that culminated in Cage throwing Lisa Marie’s $65,000 ring over the side of a yacht.
Unfortunately, the diver hired to recover it found nothing. Two days later, Cage replaced it with a ten-carat yellow diamond. They too soon divorced.
She tried to forge her own path, carve out her own identity, but she seemed resigned to her fate: As Elvis’s only daughter, what should she do but become a singer? And she did, releasing three albums, her latest, ‘Storm & Grace’, highly reviewed. But she always seemed uncomfortable acting, uncomfortable with the kind of fame of hers, the one that she’s given by being born to her.
They Became A Freak Show: The MTV Video Music Awards Kiss: “It seemed awkward because I wanted to get out of my skin,” she later said.
She then married Nicolas Cage, another Elvis superfan. That, too, was wild in a Liz Taylor-Richard Burton way, breakups and reconciliations that culminated in Cage throwing Lisa Marie’s $65,000 ring over the side of a yacht.
She never really had a chance. The death of her father was a lifelong trauma. Her mother’s boyfriend at the time confessed to having sexual feelings for Lisa when she was a child and, according to her account, tried to enter her bedroom at night. She got into drugs and her mother had Scientologists try to straighten her out. She ended up going in and out of the cult.
He married young, at age 20, and had two children: daughter Riley and son Benjamin. Her then-husband, musician Danny Keough, never sold it. The family they built together was Lisa Marie in her most stable moment.
There was, most recently, a fourth marriage to Michael Lockwood, twin daughters, a horrendous divorce, with Lisa Marie falsely claiming that Lockwood possessed child pornography, a claim investigated and dismissed by police.
Benjamin committed suicide in 2020. Looking at Lisa Marie after that was like a light going out forever.
Normally 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 this path, and thankfully not all parents will have to become a victim of it, and I mean VICTIMS here. He used to hate that word. Now I know why. I have dealt with death, grief, and loss since I was 9 years old. I’ve had more than anyone in my life and somehow, I’ve made it this far. But this, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest, most amazing being I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, who made me feel so honored every day to be his mother? Who was so like his grandpa on so many levels that he actually scared me? What made me care about him even more than I naturally would have? Not just not. . . no no no no . . .’
Lisa Marie Presley, like her father: American original. Rest in peace.
(Top) The Presley family Riley Keough, Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley and Benjamin Keough welcome fans during Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday celebration in Memphis, Tennessee on January 8, 2010.
In what would be the last year of her life, Lisa Marie poetically worked 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 abandonment, his pain is overlooked, his life is a triumph.
Lisa Marie died just like her father did, at home. She had been living with her first husband, Danny Keough, who tried to revive her. She knew that it was her destiny to be buried in Graceland, but in her own way, she scoffed at it.
‘I’m sure I’ll end up there,’ she said in 2003. ‘Or I’ll shrink my head and put it in a glass box in the living room. I’ll get more tourists to Graceland that way.
Lisa Marie Presley, like her father: American original. Rest in peace.