Growing Up in the Shadow of a Legend
Let me tell you something about Lisa Marie Presley. She wasn’t just the daughter of Elvis Presley; she was a person who carried a heavy burden of legacy and loss. Her daughter Riley Keough shared in her memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, that Lisa Marie often listened to her father’s music in private moments. It wasn’t something she shared openly, but rather a deeply personal experience. As Riley recalls, “Sometimes I’d walk into my mom’s bedroom and find her sitting on the floor alone, drunk, listening to her father’s music, crying.”
A Childhood Marked by Tragedy
From the moment Lisa Marie was born in 1968, her life was anything but easy. She was the only child of the King of Rock and Roll, and with that came immense pressure. Despite the unconditional love she received from Elvis, there was always a sense of foreboding. She even wrote a poem in her diary expressing her fear: “I hope my daddy doesn’t die.” Tragically, her worst fears came true when Elvis suffered a fatal heart attack in 1977. Lisa Marie was only nine years old at the time, and she vividly remembered the moment she saw her father being wheeled into an ambulance. “My life as I knew it was completely over,” she wrote.
But the challenges didn’t stop there. At the tender age of 11, Lisa Marie endured abuse from one of her mother Priscilla Presley’s boyfriends. This trauma would shape her life in profound ways, influencing her relationships and decisions as she grew older.
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A Complex Web of Relationships
Lisa Marie’s personal life was a tapestry of highs and lows. At 20, she married Danny Keough, with whom she had two children, Riley and Benjamin. However, the marriage didn’t last, and she found herself drawn to the unexpected when she married Michael Jackson. Surprisingly, Jackson was a virgin when they met, and Lisa Marie described their union as one of the happiest times in her life. “I was actually so happy,” she wrote. “I’ve never been that happy again.”
Her journey through love and loss continued as she married and divorced twice more. But it was the birth of her twin daughters, Harper and Finley, in 2008 that led her down a darker path. Struggling with chronic pain, Lisa Marie became addicted to painkillers. “It escalated to 80 pills a day,” she admitted in her writings.
Grieving Beyond Measure
Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the heart-wrenching loss of her son Benjamin in 2020. His death by suicide left Lisa Marie in a state of unimaginable grief. In her own words, she described how she kept Benjamin’s body on dry ice for two months. “I think it would scare the living [expletive] out of anybody else…But not me,” she wrote. “I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.”
A Final Resting Place
When Lisa Marie passed away unexpectedly in 2023 from a bowel obstruction, she was laid to rest beside her beloved son Benjamin and near her father, Elvis, in the memorial garden at Graceland. It was a fitting end, surrounded by the people she loved most, in a place that held so much meaning for her.
