This Tuesday, October 8, in addition to those of Melania Trump, the memoirs of another unique saga, royalty of the country, are published in the United States: the posthumous ones of Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis Presley’s only daughter died on January 12, 2023 in Los Angeles, at only 54 years old, due to a blockage in the small intestine caused by previous bariatric surgery. A year after her death, her eldest daughter, actress Riley Keough, announced that she was preparing a biography about her mother with some of the material she had left recorded on tape and also with her own memories. The result has come to be called From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir (From here to the great unknown, a memoir), and her revelations—precisely the opposite of those of the former first lady—have indeed caused headlines. Additionally, on Tuesday afternoon Keough will sit down for an exclusive television interview with Oprah Winfrey to continue talking about the volume.
Lisa Marie Presley had four children, Riley Keough, now 35, being the oldest and most famous of them all. The book is co-written by Keough, and both parts are differentiated by font. In the preface, Keough explains that Presley began writing the autobiography in the years before her death, but never managed to do it alone: “She didn’t find herself interesting, although, of course, she was. She didn’t like to talk about herself. It was insecure. She wasn’t sure her value to the public was anything other than being Elvis Presley’s daughter. She was so tormented by self-criticism that working on the book became extremely difficult for her.” The first chapter, Stairs to Gracelandtalks about his childhood and his famous father, Elvis Presley. “I believed that my father could change the weather,” the book begins. “He was a god to me. A chosen human being.” The entire book is dotted with photographs, many of them unpublished and familiar.
Then the memoirs go on to talk about his life, which is intertwined with Keough’s; The young woman explains, for example, how she grew up in Graceland, which she considers her home, with her brother Benjamin, born in 1992 from Lisa Marie’s marriage to Danny Keough, to whom she was married between 1988 and 1994. Lisa Marie later had two more daughters, Finley and Harper, along with her then husband Michael Lockwood, who turned 16 one day before the book’s publication. In July 2020, at the age of 27, Benjamin shot himself to death in his home in Calabasas, north of Los Angeles, something that devastated Lisa Marie. As the book now reveals, he was not able to say goodbye to his son, whom he affectionately called Ben Benso he decided to preserve his body for two months on ice in his own home.
“No California law says you have to bury someone immediately,” writes Lisa Marie Presley, who kept Benjamin’s body in a refrigerated room below 13 degrees Celsius, in the book. For her part, Keough notes that for her mother it was “very important to have ample time to say goodbye to him, just like she did with her father,” Elvis, who died in August 1977, when Lisa Marie was just nine years old. “Having my father home after he died was incredibly helpful, because I could go spend time with him and talk to him,” says Lisa Marie. For many weeks of doubt, she wondered whether to bury him at Graceland or in Hawaii. “That was, in part, why it took me so long. I got used to him, to taking care of him and having him there. I think anyone else would be scared to death to have their child there like that. But not to me,” he says. “I felt very lucky that there was a way that I could still take care of him as a mother, delay everything a little bit, and be okay with the idea of burying him.”
Later, mother and daughter decided to get the young man’s name tattooed. He was wearing his own: Riley’s on his collarbone and Lisa Marie’s on his hand, and they decided to do the same. To do this, Lisa Marie called a tattoo artist to her house to see Benjamin’s body and appreciate the tattoos up close. “I have had an extremely absurd life, but that moment is in the top “five,” says Keough today, four years later. Shortly after, everyone began to realize that the presence of the body in the house was not correct: “Even my mother began to notice that she could feel him saying to her: ‘It’s crazy, mom, what the fuck are you doing?’ Finally, they held a funeral in Malibu, south of Los Angeles, and buried him at Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee.
Another of the episodes that the book touches on is the media romance between Elvis Presley’s daughter and the biggest world music star in the nineties, Michael Jackson. They met when they were young but Lisa Marie was still married to Danny Keough when they had a revelation. “Michael told me, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. “I want us to get married and for you to have my children,” says Presley. “I didn’t say anything right away, but then I said, ‘I’m so flattered I can’t even speak.’ By then, I felt like I was in love with him too.” There, she decided to divorce Keough and start dating Jackson.
The daughter of the king of rock was 25 years old. The king of pop, 35. “He told me he was a virgin,” he explains. “I think he had kissed [la actriz] Tatum O’Neal and that he had had something with [la modelo] Brooke Shields, nothing physical beyond a kiss. He told me that Madonna had tried to make out with him once, but nothing happened. I was terrified because I didn’t want to take a wrong step,” she says. They married in May 1994. Their marriage lasted just two years, but it went down in the annals of global pop culture.
The book also reveals that Lisa Marie Presley was suffering from an opioid addiction when she died. His autopsy already showed that both oxycodin and other medications were found in his blood when he died, but that they were not key to his death. It has now been learned that he took 80 pills a day. “It was getting harder and harder for me to get high, and I honestly didn’t know when my body wasn’t going to be able to deal with it anymore. But at some point, he decides,” he says, explaining that for a couple of years he used “recreational” drugs but then it went further: “It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal syndrome in the big leagues. I just wanted to leave it. Being sober was too painful.”
According to Keough, this addiction began after undergoing a cesarean section when Lisa Marie’s two young daughters were born in 2008. She took them because of the pain, but it “progressed to needing them to sleep,” which made her feel ashamed, since that since her adolescence she had never taken substances, not even any medicine for mild pain when she was an adult. Therefore, the addiction was “a surprise,” says his daughter, for the entire family. That put her through rehab and Keough explains that she was no longer taking narcotics but was getting high “with the post-rehab cocktail.” According to the actress in an interview with People Shortly before the book was published, that chapter was “incredibly difficult to write,” as was the chapter on his death and the suicide of his brother.
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