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The biggest revelations in Lisa Marie Presley's book, from Elvis to MJ

Posted on by Vanessa
The biggest revelations in Lisa Marie Presley's book, from Elvis to MJ

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Her heart never healed after losing Elvis. That was always evident as Lisa Marie Presley clumsily searched for love and contentment in her shortened life.

But in Presley's raw new memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown” (Random House, 281 pages, on sale Tuesday), completed by her daughter Riley Keough after Lisa Marie's death at age 54, the tragedy is amplified and repeated. It's a captivating but relentlessly depressing read.

The book, transcribed from tapes in which Elvis and Priscilla Presley's only child speak openly about their lives, is written in vignettes that alternate between the mother and daughter's voices. About a third of the book focuses on Lisa Marie's childhood years, both with and without her father, detailing her strained relationship with her mother, and a sizable section is devoted to Michael Jackson.

There are large gaps in the timeline – most notably her marriages to Nicolas Cage and Michael Lockwood – which are cursorily filled in by Keough, who also provides insight into Lisa Marie's eventual addiction and, later, the suicide of her son Ben Keough. Although her love of music is obvious, surprisingly little is said about her career.

The book's biggest revelations include:

How to watch: Oprah interviews Elvis' granddaughter Riley Keough on CBS

Long before Elvis' death, Lisa Marie Presley feared that he might die

“I wrote a poem with the line 'I hope my dad doesn't die,'” she remembers. Among many incidents, she describes finding him lying face down on his bathroom floor. He had tried to support himself on a towel rack, but it broke and he collapsed.

The last time she saw Elvis alive, she had just returned from playing racquetball. Her father hugged and kissed her, they exchanged “I love yous,” and he told her, “Go to bed.”

She awoke to a commotion and Elvis being carried away on a stretcher. Lisa Marie, 9, went to her bedroom, nervously smoked a cigarette and waited for the news. An hour later, she heard her grandfather Vernon crying, “He's gone, he's gone.”

“My life as I knew it was completely over,” she wrote, later realizing that “he's dead and now I'm stuck with her,” meaning Priscilla.

Keough adds, “I remember as a kid being mad at Elvis for leaving my mother and causing all this pain.”

Lisa Marie claims Priscilla Presley's boyfriend sexually abused her for years

When she was 10, Lisa Marie says, her mother's boyfriend, Michael Edwards, a model and actor, came into her room in the middle of the night. “He said he would teach me what would happen when I got older,” she says in the book. “He put his hand on my chest and said a man would touch you here, then he put his hand between my legs and said they would touch you here.” She remembers him kissing her gently and leaving.

Priscilla was furious when Lisa Marie revealed the incident and called her daughter over so Edwards could apologize. “In Europe that’s how they teach kids, so I did that too,” he told her.

But the abuse didn't stop. “He touched me and spanked me, told me not to look” and left her with a bruised bottom. “I assume he jerked off,” says Lisa Marie. When Priscilla confronted him, “he would say, 'Oh, I was drunk' or 'She was actually flirting with me'.”

“I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” says Lisa Marie.

He once complained that Lisa Marie had left her underwear in the dryer, and she replied, “It's not like you don't enjoy it.” She says he then threw a dining room chair at her, killing her hit the back.

USA TODAY has reached out to Priscilla Presley's rep for comment. No contact could be found for Edwards.

Priscilla brought teenager Lisa Marie to the Scientology Celebrity Center

As their relationship deteriorated, Lisa Marie remembers her relief when Priscilla told her to pack her bags in the middle of the night and dropped her off.

“The first morning I took the big mirror off the wall, called my coke dealer and invited him and about six or seven other people over,” she says in her memoir. “We had a four-day binge in that room.”

But overall, “Scientology has actually helped,” she says. “The church felt radical in an exciting way – it didn’t actually feel like an organized religion. It attracted cool, unusual, artistic people. It became my tribe.”

Lisa Marie was devastated after aborting Danny Keough's baby and intentionally became pregnant with Riley Keough

She calls her abortion “the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life,” and shortly afterward the couple separated.

So “I planned and planned and planned. “I figured out exactly when I was ovulating” and met up with Danny when his band played a gig on a cruise ship. Two weeks later, with a positive pregnancy test in hand, “Danny knew he had to marry me. I caught him. I didn’t really mean to, but I did it.”

Michael Jackson told Lisa Marie Presley he was a virgin

He had chastely kissed Tatum O'Neal and Brooke Shields and “he said Madonna had tried to get involved with him once but nothing happened,” says Lisa Marie.

“I was scared because I didn't want to make the wrong move. When he decided to kiss me for the first time, he just did it. He started everything. The physical things started happening, which I was shocked about. I thought maybe we wouldn't do anything until we got married, but he said, 'I'm not waiting!'”

Lisa Marie remembers their early time together as idyllic: honeymooning in Orlando and going to Disney World every other day. “I was really so happy,” she says. “I’ve never been this happy.”

“There was an energy, something really remarkable about him, something I've never seen or felt in my entire life, except from my father. … I fell in love with him because he was normal.”

As for the allegations of child abuse? “I've never seen anything like this before. Personally, I would have killed him if I had.”

Grieving Lisa Marie kept her son Ben Keough's body on dry ice at home for months

She brought Ben home after his suicide in 2020. “I got so used to him, taking care of him and keeping him there” in a 55-degree room, she says.

Lisa Marie and Keough decided to have Ben's name tattooed on their collarbones and hands, just as he had her name tattooed on his own. When the artist asked if he had any photos showing the location of the ink, Keough was stunned by what happened next.

“I've had an extremely absurd life, but this moment ranks in the top five,” writes Keough. Lisa Marie led the artist inside to open Ben's casket and get a first-hand look at his tattoos.

“Soon afterward, we all got such a vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in that house anymore,” Keough writes. “'Guys,' he seemed to say, 'this is getting weird.'”

Ben Keough once drove Lisa Marie across the country during a health crisis so she could do drugs along the way

During the worst phase of her drug addiction, which began after the birth of her twin girls in 2008, Lisa Marie took 80 pills a day.

“My whole life had fallen apart, it felt like one thing after another, and I couldn’t take any more beatings,” she says in her memoir.

Keough writes that she often traveled to Graceland to sleep in Elvis' bed. She “desperately longed to feel protected, desperate to connect with her father. … It was the feeling of going to church when all is lost and saying, 'Please, Jesus, help me.'”

Because her health was failing, Ben rented a tour bus in Nashville to drive Lisa Marie and the twins to LA, where her doctors were. “We drove because I wanted to do cocaine the whole time and couldn’t do it on the plane,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d even make it through airport security.”

While in rehab, Lisa Marie underwent bariatric weight loss surgery, which ultimately led to her death from a small intestine obstruction.

Two weeks before his suicide, Ben texted Lisa Marie that his mental health was failing

“I think there's something wrong with me mentally or something like that,” Ben told her. “I think I have a mental problem.”

He was numbed by alcohol and drugs and didn't realize the extent of his depression until it was too late, Keough wrote. “He never went to therapy once. And he had certainly never attempted suicide before – no overdose, nothing. No cry for help.”

Somehow, Lisa Marie remained sober even though “we all knew my mother was dying of a broken heart,” Keough writes.

This article is about suicide and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

If you are a victim of sexual assault, RAINN offers support through the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE and online.rainn.org).

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