13 Surprising Things We Learned From Lisa Marie Presley’s Memoir

5. Lisa trapped her older children’s father, Danny Keogh, into marriage

Though she aborted a pregnancy with musician Danny Keogh (“the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life”), Lisa planned her pregnancy with Riley to get him to marry her. He had run from her for two years, according to Riley, because he feared her fame and mercurial nature. (“He knew she would be his destruction,” Riley writes.) Lisa loved being a mother, since it gave her both a family and a purpose. She and Keough later had a son, Ben, with whom she had a powerful soul bond.

6. She was happy when she married Michael Jackson, whom she thought was “normal.”

She writes that she “was actually so happy.  I’ve never been that happy again.” Danny Keogh would remain her rock throughout her life, but Lisa divorced him for Michael Jackson, who claimed he was a virgin at age 35 when they met. His screwball life felt familiar, and he was different than his public image when she was alone with him, “He wasn’t that high-pitched, calculated thing. That was an act.… I fell in love with him because he was normal,” she adds. As a couple, they led a regular life, if L.A. style — taking the kids to school in the morning with a driver at the wheel and Michael’s chimpanzee by his side. (Super normal.) As for his abusing young children, Lisa says, “I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.”

Lisa Marie and husband Michael Jackson in 2004 at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York City

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7. Her feelings for Jackson ran deeper than they appeared

Although Lisa tried to get back with Danny Keough (he refused), dated others, and was married to Nicolas Cage for a hot minute (during a fight, her $65,000 engagement ring ended up in the ocean), she and Jackson continued to see each other after their 1996 divorce. “I’m not really sure what the vibe was between my mother and Michael — I don’t know if they were still hooking up or not — but we were certainly over there a lot,” Riley remembers. They split because he wanted kids and she didn’t, and because she thought he was doing drugs, which she had quit. But at Michael’s funeral in 2009, “My mother sat with his coffin for hours after everyone left, just like she had with her father.” 

8. Lisa’s relationship with her mother waxed and waned

Their troubled relationship improved once Lisa had children of her own, but the tension between them remained. Lisa, Elvis’ sole heir, describes once sitting at the head of the table at a board meeting of Elvis Presley Enterprises. “My mom came in and said, ‘Don’t you ever sit in my seat at the head of the table. Who do you think you are? This is my business, I am the one who opened Graceland. You can’t just come in and sit there like you’re something!’ ”

Lisa Marie and her twin daughters, Harper and Finley, in 2014.

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9. Addiction stalked her

In 2008, when Lisa was 40, and had just given birth to her twins, Harper and Finley, with musician Michael Lockwood, doctors prescribed opioids for pain after her C-section. Soon, she escalated to 80 pills a day. When her head and face swelled up to twice their size, Riley, Ben and Danny got her into a hospital in L.A., but Lisa insisted they drive cross-country from Nashville instead of flying so she could do cocaine during the trip. On arrival, she was in heart failure. (“My heart was dead, just in pieces,” Lisa writes.)

10. Riley thought her brother Ben was the real love of their mother’s life

Riley — more mature, resilient and astute than the rest of the family — felt that she had to parent both her mother and brother, whose mental health had begun to suffer as he watched Lisa deteriorate. Riley considers herself more of a Keough, while Ben was a Presley in looks, temperament, vulnerability and self-destruction. “Ben was very similar to his grandfather, very, very, very, and in every way … so much like him it scared me,” Lisa said. Like his mother, Ben soon entered rehab for drinking and drugs. Riley: “I was the only one who wasn’t an addict.”

Lisa Marie with her children, Benjamin Keough (R), Riley Keough (L), along with her half-brother, Navarone Garibaldi (back), at a movie premiere in Hollywood.

CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images

11. Ben’s suicide at 27 blindsided them all

Nobody saw it coming when Ben shot himself. “He still had his sense of adventure, his humor,” Riley remembers. Before officials wheeled him away, Lisa grabbed his head and sobbed, “What did you do, Benjamin? What did you do?”

12. Lisa kept Ben’s body at home for two months

Just as Elvis was comfortable around death (he had a habit of touring mortuaries), Lisa brought Ben back from the funeral home and kept him on dry ice in a 55-degree room for two months before burial in Memphis. In a comical scene, Lisa takes a tattoo artist in to see Ben to replicate his body art for her own. Writes Riley, “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.” Eventually, Riley writes, they all got the vibe from Ben to let him go. “Guys,” she sensed him saying, “This is getting weird.”

13. She neglected her health

In late 2022, Lisa began experiencing severe nausea and stomach pains from the bariatric surgery she’d undergone to lose weight. Yet she refused to see a doctor, even as Riley scheduled appointments for her. Riley worried: “She seemed resigned to something, as though she wasn’t going to find the joy she once felt here anymore.” Until then, her strong-mindedness had carried her through, her daughter writes: “She was like a character from the Greek myths — she had human emotions, but she was such a force that sometimes I really thought if she focused hard enough, real thunderbolts would appear.”

Lisa died January 12, 2023, and was buried at Graceland next to Ben, across from her father.