What to count on from Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir? Some sanitised, cagey reminiscences, dutifully studded with anecdotes about her father, Elvis, the king of rock’n’roll, who died aged 42 in 1977? As an alternative, it’s a warts and all jaw-dropper. The marriages (together with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage). The medicine (Lisa Marie spiralled into opioid habit after a caesarean part to ship her twins). And that’s earlier than the revelations about her son Ben Keough’s 2020 suicide (she saved his physique on dry ice in her California dwelling for 2 months). When her actor daughter, Riley Keough (from Daisy Jones & the Six), writes that she needs Lisa Marie to emerge from the pages of the memoir as a “three-dimensional character”, she’s not kidding.
The e book is co-authored by Keough from in-depth taped interviews along with her mom simply earlier than her dying aged 54 in 2023 (from cardiac arrest and a small bowel obstruction attributable to problems from bariatric surgical procedure). Keough’s personal phrases seem all through (in a distinct typeface), particularly often in direction of the tip.
First, although, we’re transported to Presley’s childhood because the overindulged princess of the Memphis, Tennessee mansion Graceland, with a hamburger-shaped mattress and a airplane named after her. A daddy’s lady, even after Elvis’s divorce from her mom, Priscilla, she would journey across the grounds in her personal golf cart and threaten to get employees sacked.
Elvis looms massive in these passages: taking his daughter on a rollercoaster with a gun in a holster; taking pictures snakes within the grounds. He was a long-term prescription drug addict and Lisa Marie would typically discover him handed out on the ground. She watched Elvis carried out of Graceland the day he died: “I noticed his head, I noticed his physique, I noticed his pyjamas, and I noticed his socks on the backside of the gurney.” She was 9 years previous.
What would that do to a toddler? In subsequent years, she responded with the usual teenage cocktail of cynicism and revolt: any medicine, bar heroin (“something I may swallow, snort, eat, sniff”); horrible boyfriends, certainly one of whom orchestrated a paparazzi set-up. She had howling insecurities because the daughter of the “king”. When Presley finally made music, she resisted strain to sound like her father.
Nor did she really feel near her mom. Elvis met Priscilla when she was 14 (“it was a distinct time”, writes Lisa Marie, brusquely noting they didn’t have intercourse till her mom was 18). Priscilla springs from these pages like some southern belle ice queen. After Elvis’s dying: “It was a one-two punch: he’s useless and I’m caught along with her.” Once they each grew to become Scientologists, Lisa Marie felt Priscilla was “dumping” her there. Later there was a truce, however you don’t sense an actual reconciliation: “Individuals suppose I’m a bitch as a result of sadly I’ve my mother’s chilly factor.”
Her healthiest relationship was with Riley and Ben’s father (Danny Keough), and so they remained lifelong associates. Whereas the Cage union is handled comparatively swiftly and politely, the mid-90s marriage to Jackson will get the complete candid therapy. She brushes apart the kid molestation accusations (“I by no means noticed a goddamn factor like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had”). He informed her he was a virgin (“He mentioned Madonna had tried to hook up with him as soon as, too, however nothing occurred”) and was all in favour of her sexually (“He mentioned: ‘I’m not ready!’”). Later, Presley would begin to doubt Jackson, who additionally had drug issues and his personal anaesthetist. She additionally suspected he would dump her if she had his much-wanted youngsters: “He was very controlling and calculating.”
There may be heaps extra occurring too, as she succumbs to opioids, drifting out and in of rehab. Nevertheless it’s the passages about her son’s physique that make you surprise in the event you’re hallucinating (“I feel it might scare the residing fucking piss out of anyone else to have their son there like that. However not me”) – particularly when she reveals a tattooist the tattoo she needs by displaying it on Ben’s useless hand.
Studying this, an uneasy thought happens. Presley might have been blissful to do the tapes, however would she have wished it all printed? We’ll by no means know. Actually, it’s clear that Presley was nothing if not radically sincere. It’s additionally placing how Keough appears to virtually plead with the reader to know and love her mom as a lot as she does. Finally, it is a e book constructed on grief: Lisa Marie Presley’s for her father and son, but additionally a daughter’s for her mom.
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