Lisa Marie Presley is speaking from the grave.
Her daughter, Riley Keough, has just published her posthumous memoir taken from recordings Riley made with her mom. They shed an extraordinary light on long unanswerd questions.
Michael Jackson fans will now get Lisa Marie’s side of their odd marriage in the mid 90s. It’s actually unclear if it was ever consummated. Michael told Lisa Marie he’d wanted to get married to have children. If she wouldn’t do it, he said, he’d already secured a promise of kids with Debbie Rowe, his doctor’s nurse.
Keough says she and her brother Ben would call Michael “Mimi” because Ben couldn’t say his name (he was a baby). Lisa Marie says in the book that she loved Michael because he was “normal,” but you have to remember she was the daughter of Elvis Presley and had been in Graceland as a child when he did. Lisa Marie’s idea of normal is a little skewed.
Keough says, “I think Michael got right at my mom’s core. She wanted to fix him, and she felt he was misunderstood, a feeling she was very familiar with.”
Lisa Marie writes in the book:
“As for child molestation, I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.”
Eventually this peculiar relationship came to a quick end. The reason? Drugs. Michael started spending a lot of time at the doctor’s office — this would have been Arnold Klein, Michael’s Dr. Feelgood and Debbie Rowe’s boss. In New York, Lisa Marie reveals, Michael ditched filming an HBO special at the last minute.
Lisa Marie says: “I think he didn’t want to do it, so he feigned a fall and went to the hospital. I kept asking what was wrong with him, and I got a different answer every day. Karen, his makeup artist, told me that he’d totally planned it because he didn’t want to do the HBO thing.”
When Lisa Marie arrived at Michael’s hospital room in New York, she found he was surrounded by by his mother, his team, and his own anesthesiologist. She says: “Nobody has their own anesthesiologist—every hospital has their own. It was a big red flag.”
The marriage was over soon after that.
Some other hot takes from “From Here to the Great Unknown”: Lisa Marie hated her mother, Priscilla, who she felt was constantly fobbing her off on various schools. She says they got into Scientology after Priscilla had a chance meeting with John Travolta. When Priscilla sent Lisa Marie to live at the Scientology Center in Hollywood, she immediately took the mirror off the wall and did coke.
Lisa Marie recalls Priscilla “had mostly just dumped me off into Scientology because she thought they could handle me. Scientology kind of raised me for her. But every time she’d try to get me into a boarding school, I’d fuck with the admission test and they wouldn’t take me.”
There’s no explanation why, but Lisa Marie does say in the recordings that she left Scientology as time went on. I wrote a lot about that at the time. She finally realized they were soaking her for money, which she couldn’t afford.
There’s more in the book, it’s actually a fascinating read in that it does answer some questions about what was going on all those years. Lisa Marie’s death is a tragedy. It seems like she knew it, too. Bravo to Riley for publishing the book. It’s courageous.
Ri
