In her posthumously published memoir, Presley’s daughter recalls an unhappy life in the spheres of fame, wealth and celebrity.
Elvis Presley in 1970 with his daughter Lisa Marie.
Frank Carroll / Graceland Archives
Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis Presley’s only child, died of heart failure in January 2023 at the age of 54. A few years earlier, she had begun recording her life story on tape to later publish it in book form. Her daughter, the singer and actress Riley Keough, had promised to help her complete her biography. The result that is now available – “From here into the unknown” – is being celebrated in America as a journalistic event. So Riley appeared for an interview with Oprah Winfrey on the day of publication, October 8th.
Lisa Marie, who distinguished herself as a pop singer, confided in her memoirs many bizarre details about the horrors of monumental fame. Late in life, in a remote area of Florida, she still covers the windows of her house with aluminum foil because she lives in constant fear of the paparazzi that have followed her since birth.
“From here into the unknown” turns out to be, above all, a story about heavy losses that begin with the early death of the father and end with the suicide of the only son Ben in July 2020. After his death, she kept him on ice at home for two months because she couldn’t say goodbye.
The Father, a God
Lisa Marie was little more than a footnote in her mother Priscilla’s 1985 memoir (“Elvis and Me”). A child who came into her life too early, as Priscilla remembered – and who was later found to be a nuisance by her mother, as Lisa Marie now claims in her book, which partly seems like a response to Priscilla’s report.
A quasi-omnipotent key figure in both memoirs is Elvis Presley, of whom the daughter says: “I had the feeling that my father could change the weather. To me he was a god. A chosen one.” She describes him, similar to Priscilla, as charismatic and soulful, but also as fearsome and unpredictable in his occasional outbursts of anger.
A close-knit couple: Lisa Marie with her daughter Riley, taken in a photo booth in Neverland.
PD
He lived in his empire, the Graceland mansion in Memphis, from 1957 along with his extended family clan and his entourage. No one has ever described life in Graceland more vividly than Lisa Marie: a kingdom in miniature in which the laws of the outside world did not seem to apply. The matter-of-factness with which Lisa Marie talks about it only makes it seem even more surreal. She speaks of a father who sleeps in cool rooms during the day and only stays awake at night. And who has his daughter picked up in big, black limousines whenever he wants to see her – even if she is at school.
Elvis Presley is said to have once appeared at a parent-teacher meeting at school with a diamond-studded belt and a cigarillo in his mouth; Otherwise he was dressed normally, as the author specifically notes. It was one of the few moments in which the daughter enjoyed basking in her father’s glory. Most of the time she lived in a kind of captivity because of him: the house was constantly surrounded by fans and photographers. It may have been a golden cage, but it was also a desolate one.
Lisa Marie describes her father’s unconditional love and his tendency to spoil her excessively. But she also mentions all the signs of his physical deterioration caused by drug abuse, which she watched with panicked fear as a child: “So many times I had found him on the ground or unable to control his body.” She constantly lives in fear of losing him, until the day when the then nine-year-old saw him lying lifeless in his large bathroom.
Fatal events
Even before he was declared dead, his entourage had turned the house into a “self-service store”; A number of items had disappeared and later reappeared at auctions. The daughter never recovered from the grief of losing her father. Added to this was the feeling of being at the mercy of her self-centered mother – of being stuck “with this woman” who constantly pushed the child away, to new schools and to the rooms of the Scientology cult.
You realize that your father’s death was just the beginning of a series of traumatic events. Lisa Marie then experienced years of emotional neglect and loneliness. She suffered from conflicts with her mother, she was abused by a man, and finally she became a drug addict.
During this time she also developed a deep distrust of others: the then fourteen-year-old’s first great love ended with her much older lover secretly having photos taken of them, which he sold to the tabloid press.
Lisa Marie has struggled with multiple traumas in her life. (Recording from 2001.)
Martin Philbey / Redferns / Getty
Lisa Marie Presley tells stories that Bret Easton Ellis could have invented: stories of a “poor little rich kid” who doesn’t have the slightest chance of finding himself. She felt understood by Michael Jackson, whom she married for the second time, because he also knew the risky spheres of fame that she inhabited. The marriage to the actor Nicolas Cage is only touched on in the book.
Her children actually provided rays of hope or even moments of redemption in Lisa Marie Presley’s difficult life. She describes herself as an ever-present mother and writes: “It’s a thing: you either do what your own parents did, or the exact opposite of what you experienced yourself. I did the opposite.”
A declaration of love
That didn’t stop her from taking her children out of school whenever she wanted, just as her father had done, to do something more entertaining with them. With the son’s death, which Riley describes in a shocking way, the mother’s happiness also came to a tragic end. After a decade-long hiatus from drug addiction, Lisa Marie relapsed in 2008 when she was prescribed opiates after giving birth to twins via cesarean section.
In Lisa Marie’s family, Riley had always been the one in charge, trying to keep everything under control. So it’s fitting that she now finished writing the mother’s story and is now overseeing its publication. The book reads as a dialogue between a daughter and her dead mother, who, like her brother, could not save her. It is a posthumous declaration of love to both of them. Lisa Marie’s autobiography, with deeply personal interludes from her daughter, is a story of trauma passed down through generations and the devastation that can come from fame and fortune. You’ve read something similar elsewhere, but hardly ever on these dimensions.
Lisa Marie and Riley Keough: From Here to the Great Unknown: Memoirs. Penguin-Verlag, Munich 2024. 240 pages, Fr. 39.90.
