addictions, abuse and an embalmed son

“I realize that the recordings my mother left are a gift,” says Riley Keough in the preface to the memoir that her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, was unable to finish. “This extraordinary book,” says the Plaza & Janés edition that has just been released in Spanish, “is composed of both the voices of Lisa Marie and that of Riley, a mother and daughter communicating even after death to try to heal each other”.

Lisa Marie, only daughter of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Wagner, died suddenly on January 12, 2023. He was 54 years old. His memoirs, titled From here to the unknownare the raw testimony of a life marked by both fame and pain.

Elvis, the King of Rock, also died young: He was only 42 years old when he suffered a fatal heart attack in the bathroom of the Graceland mansion in Memphis on August 16, 1977.. That day, Lisa Marie was returning after midnight from playing racquetball with friends on the residence’s private court when she ran into her father, who was leaving. He asked her to go to bed because it was already late. She hugged him and told him she loved him..

Lisa Marie slept as usual until something caught her attention: an unusual sensation that woke her up with a bang at noon. I was panicking. Someone told him that his father was sick.

“I ran across to the bathroom and there he was. Just as I began to see my father fallen on the ground and was about to run towards him, someone grabbed me and made me back away. There were people next to him, moving around him, trying to tend to him. I was screaming like crazy”. He must have feared that the sky would shatter above his head, once the King had fallen.

There was a time when Lisa Marie believed her father could control the weather: “I thought my father could influence the elements. For me, he was a god. A chosen one. There was something about him that made you see his soul. If he was in a bad mood, the weather was bad outside; If there was a storm, it was because he was about to explode. “Back then, I thought I could cause storms.”

He watched as they took him on a stretcher to the hospital, dressed in pajamas. Nothing would be the same at Graceland. Goodbye to golf cart rides destroying all the grass, to horseback riding outside and inside the house. Goodbye to his father sitting with his rifle under a tree, cursing in Southern and killing a snake.

Elvis returned to the mansion in a coffin. Many followers came to say goodbye and faint from pain. Lisa Marie watched them sitting on the stairs, macerating a useless hatred against the Universe.

“I went down to where he was lying in the coffin, just to be with him, to touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him. I asked him: ‘Why is this happening? Why are you doing this?’ “I knew that very soon he would no longer be there,” he recalls in his memoirs.

He knew right away that life as he knew it had just ended.

He was left with his mother, Priscilla. Her parents had separated when she was four years old, and since then, Lisa Marie preferred to be with Elvis at Graceland. He went with her to California to finish his education, he went to travel through Europe, but he always thought about returning to Memphis. He was able to do it every Christmas, every Easter and every summer.

His aunt, his cousins ​​and his grandfather were left behind. They had also left Sunday nights to watch movies, drink large bottles of Pepsi and eat “biffins and sausages.” And the upper floor of the mansion, where only her father’s room and hers were, where only they and a few chosen ones could reach, where now she could no longer bear to approach.

His life had become a succession of uncomfortable situations, of more or less sad memories.

Lisa Marie had an extraordinary life, but she never thought anyone would be interested in that. “During the years before his death,” says Riley, Elvis’s first granddaughter, “Lisa Marie Presley, my mother, began writing her memoirs. Although she tried different approaches and did several interviews for the book, she couldn’t find a way to write about herself. He didn’t consider himself interesting even though, of course, he was. He didn’t like to talk about her. She didn’t feel safe. “I didn’t know what value she had to the public, other than the fact that she was Elvis’s daughter.”

“Sometimes I would go into my mother’s room,” Riley recalls, “and He found her sitting on the floor, drunk, listening to her father’s songs and crying. But she never talked about it, nor did she listen to his music when she was sober.”

Lisa Marie became a difficult girl, self-absorbed and hurt, angry and distrustful. He took cocaine as anesthesia for the death of his father, for the abuse suffered by his mother’s partner, for the deception of a love (a boy who sold photos of them in the park). “From the age of nine, when my father died, everyone said he looked sad,” says Lisa Marie in the book.

When she met musician Danny Keough, who would become Riley and Benjamin’s father, her life stabilized a bit. But he never stopped living with the persecution and opinions of the media.

The day Lisa Marie went into labor, paparazzi were already camping outside her California home. They had to escape and manage to get to the hospital without journalists.

“Shortly after I was born,” says Riley, “some photographers came into the room to take my picture. They had pressured my mother to publish a photo of me everywhere in order to get the press to stop following us. They paid three hundred thousand dollars for that photo, which in the eighties was an astronomical amountthe equivalent of almost a million dollars today. It appeared on the cover of People magazine with the headline: ‘Elvis’s first granddaughter is here!’”

Lisa Marie and Danny later had Benjamin and were happy for a long time, until the marriage began to break down. She began an increasingly close friendship with Michael Jackson (she had met him when she was six, but only he remembered that).

At some point, the King of Pop confessed to her that he loved her, that the bond of friendship they had had transformed into something else. “We,” Riley says, “called Michael Mimi because my brother couldn’t pronounce his name. He was a legend and he reminded her of her father. He told me that the only one who had managed to come close to being what Elvis was was Michael.”

Lisa and Michael got married. For a while, the marriage was good. But she never wanted to have children with him because she felt something bad, something she had never felt with Danny Keough.

“My mother and Michael always spoke very cheekily to each other. (…) They both had generational addiction problems and, in addition, both of their families had been poor: Vernon (Elvis’ father) had been a sharecropper and carpenter and Joe Jackson, a crane operator. And both Michael and my mother’s father knew very well what it was like to have the fame of a divinity, a fame that seemed to have come overnight.

Lisa Marie divorced Jackson and had children again, twin girls, with guitarist Michael Lockwood. She started taking painkillers after the twins’ cesarean section. His son Benjamin also became addicted to drugs and alcohol. His resemblance to Elvis scared Lisa Marie. She adored him. Riley adored him. Everyone loved him. One night, Benjamin shot himself. He was 27 years old. It was July 12, 2020.

Lisa Marie had her son’s body embalmed and placed in a separate residencewithin the premises of the family home. “I found a very understanding funeral home owner. I told him that it had helped me a lot to have my father home after his death, because I could go with him and talk to him.”

For two months he went regularly to visit him. He took care to keep the environment at 12°C, as he had been instructed.

“There is no law in the state of California that requires you to bury someone right after they die. (…) I think anyone would have their hair stand on end thinking about having their child like that. But not me. The normal process of death is: the person dies, they do an autopsy, a wake, a funeral, a burial and that’s it. Everything is over in a period of four to five days, a week if lucky. You don’t have time to process it. I felt very lucky that there was a way to continue being his mother, to delay everything so I could reconcile myself to the idea of ​​​​laying him to rest forever.”. Ben was buried next to his grandfather Elvis, at Graceland.

Lisa Marie never recovered from either of her two losses. He died three years after his son, of a heart attack.

“Basically, my mother thought I was poorly made,” says Riley, “that I was disgusting and ugly. I had a deep sense of worthlessness and I could never figure out why.. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to find the answer.” Shortly before she died, a frustrated Lisa Marie asked Riley to help her finish her book. He accepted. And a month later his mother died. “I don’t think he fully understood the reasons why his story should be told or how to do it.”

We have a very strong connection to the voices of the people we love, Riley thinks.

“Whenever possible, I have transcribed it exactly as she said it (…) What mattered most to me was feeling that the final result sounded like her, that I could recognize her on the pages, and I can do that.”