From Here To The Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough: Was Elvis’s only
From Here To The Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough (Macmillan £25, 304pp)
From Here To The Great Unknown is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Like millions of his fans, Lisa Marie Presley thought her father Elvis was ‘a god’. But unlike those of us who stuck his picture on our bedroom walls, and shed lovestruck tears over his soft intakes of breath in Love Me Tender, Lisa Marie saw the real man, whose moods ‘could change the weather’ and even ‘make it storm’.
The pretty child, who knew nothing but a crazy life of ludicrous wealth and rackety irresponsibility, both adored and feared the king of rock ’n’ roll.
From her birth in February 1968 – with Elvis and Priscilla leaving the Memphis hospital to face the ecstatic crowds and cacophonous clicking of cameras – Lisa Marie’s over-indulged existence teetered on the edge of disaster.
You don’t have to be a Presley fan to be riveted by the revelations in From Here To The Great Unknown. Hard to put down, Lisa Marie’s memoir can stand as a testimony to the destructive power of adulation and wealth.
In the years before she died she decided she wanted to write down her memories but didn’t know how to do it, ‘unsure what her value to the public was other than being Elvis’s daughter’.
So she narrated her story on tape, and asked her eldest child, the actress Riley Keough, if she would write the book with her.
Just one month later, on January 12, 2023, Lisa Marie died from cardiac arrest and complications of bariatric surgery, after years of drug abuse. She was 54.
When she finally obtained the tapes, Riley Keough was poleaxed by grief to hear her dead mother’s voice, but saw the recordings ‘as a gift’. In spite of her pain, she knew a promise had been made and must be kept.
The result is a memoir all the more powerful for being told in two voices, each cleverly distinguished by a different typographical font. Lisa Marie’s rough and raw account of her life is punctuated by her daughter’s calm and measured story-telling, filling in the details we need. The unusual mixture of personal memoir and biography works very well.
What is carried within the genes? Lisa Marie is unequivocal. Her mother Priscilla met Elvis at 14 (‘a different time’, she says) and was allowed to visit him at Graceland for two weeks at 17, when she first tried amphetamines and sleeping pills.
The Presleys: Priscilla, Lisa Marie and Elvis
Daddy’s Girl: Lisa Marie and Elvis photographed by Frank Carroll
At 21 she was married, giving birth to her baby girl nine months later.
But she didn’t want to be pregnant, hated the weight, and wanted glamour as the wife of Elvis. Lisa Marie’s matter-of-fact explanation is heartbreaking: ‘I was a pain in her ass immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me. I believe in energy in utero, so maybe I always felt the vibe of her trying to get rid of me. At the time she didn’t have great maternal instincts. That might be what’s wrong with me.’
Life at Graceland was predictably lawless. Elvis’s entourage, the ‘Memphis Mafia’, devoted themselves to his every whim, including fetching Lisa Marie out of school whenever he wanted her company.
She learned recklessness; she deliberately wrecked golf carts with impunity, saw dirty magazines, had ‘pool-stick fights’ with her friends, ordered food from four chefs any hour of the night or day, and told staff they were fired if they didn’t bend to her will: ‘It was open season… I was wild.’
Lisa Marie was four when her parents split up and she loathed going to her mother’s new home in Los Angeles.
It must have been tame after Graceland, which included (apart from the huge entourage) an irascible great-grandmother, an alcoholic aunt and of course the beloved father increasingly bloated by his self-destructive lifestyle. Lisa Marie admits, ‘I have everything in me that wants to numb out too, and do the same f****** thing.’
A Family Affair: Lisa Marie with her actress daughter Riley Keough
Many times she witnessed her father collapse because of barbiturates and, on August 16, 1977, at the age of nine, she finally saw him dead, stretchered away – and then the awful free-for-all as ‘friends’ pillaged the whole house.
How could this child be anything other than traumatised? Riley Keough recalls: ‘Sometimes I’d walk into my mom’s room and find her sitting on the floor, drunk, listening to her father’s music.’
Dispatched to school after school, the child whose parents could summon stars such as Elton John or John Travolta if she wanted, had no guidance and not much love.
Her coke habit was set while still at school, and she had sex – underage – with an older drug dealer who sold pictures of them together.
Years later she told Riley how ‘used’ she felt by that betrayal. At 17 Lisa Marie met the man who might have turned her life around, charismatic, handsome bass player Danny Keough.
Lisa Marie in 2004
He was wary of her fame, she was besotted and determined, so made a plan to get pregnant and make him marry her. It worked. They tried to
live what passed for a normal life, and when Riley and then Ben arrived, a kind of happiness seemed possible.
But Lisa Marie’s demons were active. After six years, she began a bizarre affair with Michael Jackson and married him as soon as shocked Keough divorced her. That marriage was to last for only two years.
Although ‘devastated’, Riley’s father – kind and decent Danny – remained loyal to Lisa Marie until the end, even through her brief marriage to Nicolas Cage and longer one to actor Michael Lockwood.
Riley Keough’s account of her mother’s last years dominates the second half of the story – which gathers unbearable momentum. Ben Keough, regularly bingeing on alcohol and drugs, was to take his own life at 27, after which his increasingly unstable mother kept his dead body on dry ice at home for two months.
Her already-chronic addiction to opioids increased. Was she unconsciously copying the father she worshipped? Not long before her death, she recorded: ‘I get really overwhelmed and start crying, looking at how f***** up my life has been.’
At the end, the person with poor, doomed Lisa Marie – when she died in hospital – was Danny Keough.
And her daughter Riley was left mourning and wondering ‘how many times a heart can break’.