From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough Macmillan £25
Can there really be anything new left to say about Elvis Presley?
I’m not talking just about the inevitable biopics and dodgy stage tributes. Since Elvis terminally left the building in 1977, we’ve also had the written thoughts of his ex-wife Priscilla, a shelfful of gossipy books by former girlfriends and bodyguards, and the growing number of highbrow studies attempting to place the King in his proper historical context.
The latest entrant to the overcrowded field of Elivis biographies is this memoir by Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley. It’s tainted by a certain amount of grief from the start. The author herself died in January 2023, aged 54, owing to weight- loss-surgery complications.
She left behind three daughters. One of them, Riley Keough, completed this book from tapes her mother bequeathed her. Lisa Marie’s son, Benjamin, had predeceased his mother, killing himself in 2020 at the age of 27. He bore a striking resemblance to his famous grandfather and, like him, wanted to be a recording star.
Among the more startling revelations is that Lisa Marie chose to keep Benjamin’s body preserved on ice in her spare bedroom for two months following his death:
‘I felt fortunate that there was a way I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become OK with laying him to rest,’ she writes.
I’m afraid that From Here to the Great Unknown is rather that kind of book. Lisa Marie was born to be tabloid fodder. The first photos of her showed the proud parents carrying her home amidst a scrum of reporters following her birth in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.
She spent her early years at Elvis’s mansion Graceland, before moving with her mother to Los Angeles when the Presleys divorced in 1973.
The little girl was Elvis’s ‘princess’. Before she was in school, he gave her a customised Harley-Davidson golf cart. He also named his private jet (with a king-size bed and a washbasin with gold taps) after her.
Nine-year-old Lisa Marie was visiting Graceland when her father succumbed to a fatal heart attack, precipitated by an extensive drug habit, at the age of 42, an event she recalls movingly here.
Somehow it fails to come as a shock that Lisa Marie’s adolescence and early adulthood were a merry-go-round of opioids and sex, from which she periodically alighted only for another stay at a rehab facility.
In 1994, she went to the Dominican Republic to obtain a quickie divorce from her first husband, the father of this book’s co-author, and as an alternative married Michael Jackson. When accusations emerged of child abuse at Jackson’s estate Neverland, his own private Graceland, Lisa Marie loyally stood by him. Even so, she admits that, ‘after about a year, things started to go downhill’, largely due to Jacko’s drug use, another strange parallel to the Elvis story.
In August 2002, she in turn married actor Nicolas Cage, a union that lasted three months. Lisa Marie later said Cage considered her just another Elvis souvenir.
Amid the litany of drink, drugs and ill-advised marriages (a fourth followed to Michael Lockwood, a hirsute young guitarist, again triggering her season ticket to the divorce court), Lisa Marie found the time to release three well- received pop albums, as well as several duets with her late father, patched together using archival recordings.
Like Elvis, she was notably generous to charities, despite once filing papers in which she claimed to be $16 million in debt.
At one stage Lisa Marie abandoned her life in the gilded neighbourhoods of Beverly Hills to take up residence in Rotherfield, East Sussex, apparently chosen for its proximity to the headquarters of the Scientology Church she then patronised.
‘They became my tribe,’ she explains, although by 2013 she was describing the church as a ‘big sinister situation, where there was, like, kind of intel and covert ops going on, and a whole effort to control me that I didn’t know about’.
Americans do this kind of self-analytical (or, if you prefer, narcissistic) story-telling rather well, because they believe their inner lives are intrinsically interesting.
We Britons, on the other hand, find navel-gazing rather vulgar and embarrassing – though there is a growing number of exceptions to the rule.
Your reaction to From Here to the Great Unknown will depend on which side of this particular line you happen to fall. It’s a compelling enough tale in its way, but the inescapably sad conclusion is that, for all her restless globetrotting, Lisa Marie’s most enduring residence was Heartbreak Hotel.
Christopher Sandford is author of 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began
