Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Lisa​ Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child and heir, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, the year of the Comeback Special, the year that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From Here to the Great Unknown, a memoir told in two voices – those of Lisa Marie and her daughter, the actress Riley Keough.

On 8 October, the book’s publication date, CBS aired An Oprah Special: The Presleys – Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley. Dressed all in white, Oprah and Riley sat down on pristine white armchairs in Graceland’s sunny living room, with its stained-glass windows of peacocks and Elvis’s white grand piano in the background. During an hour-long ‘exclusive conversation’, Riley read aloud her ‘Letter to My Mama’, which she wrote for Lisa Marie’s funeral. She and Oprah put on white gloves to sift through Graceland’s archives and relics: Elvis’s Bible, Lisa Marie’s golf-cart key, Elvis’s Amex card and hair comb. Oprah introduced From Here to the Great Unknown as her next Book Club pick. The next day, it was the top selling book on Amazon, and several anecdotes – including one involving the corpse of Lisa Marie’s son, Ben Keough, dry ice and a tattoo artist – had gone viral.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Elvis has heard about Graceland and the hijinks of the ‘Memphis Mafia’, but Riley Keough is pitching to the widest possible audience, so she describes the mansion, what it looks like, its symbolism (‘the physical manifestation of the most incredibly American dream come to life’). For Lisa Marie, growing up at Graceland meant ‘freedom’ and ‘mayhem’, demolition derbies, stink bombs and pool-cue fights, firework-filled sheds going up in flames and Elvis’s buddies’ ‘never-ending cigarettes, dirty magazines, dirty cards, dirty books’. But Graceland was also family: Lisa Marie’s great-grandmother Minnie Mae Presley, aka ‘Dodger’, sitting in a rocking chair with her snuff pipe; her daughter, Delta Mae Biggs, Elvis’s aunt, a ‘diabetic alcoholic’ wild card greeting tour visitors in her bathrobe, middle finger raised; and ‘double first cousin’ Patsy, who became Lisa Marie’s ‘actual surrogate mom’. Vernon, Elvis’s father, lived in a house across the pasture. Lisa Marie adored her Southern family; the fried chicken, grits and French fries that the Graceland chefs would make at any hour of the day; the stormy weather that seemed to reflect her father’s changing moods. In this telling, Elvis is gregarious, nocturnal, prone to volcanic rages and tender gestures. Lisa Marie is a tiny terror in her golf cart, barrelling through fences and running over people’s feet: ‘I would drive … real fast and close by the fans and yell obscenities at them. “Fuck you! Fucker!” They’d just sit there and smile and wave.’

When Elvis shows up at Lisa Marie’s school in LA for a parent-teacher evening, the swagger is unmistakable:

I knew he was coming, and I couldn’t wait. I could feel the teachers’ nervousness and excitement, too. My little student friends were so excited that I got even more excited – everybody was just running around crazy.

Then my dad showed up. He got out of the car and he had on a respectable outfit – black pants and some kind of blouse – but he was also wearing a big, majestic belt with buckles and jewels and chains, as well as sunglasses. He was smoking a cigar. I met him at the car, and I walked up the walkway with him, and I just remember that feeling of walking next to him, holding his hand.

After Elvis died, Lisa Marie watched the public file through her home, screaming and fainting. She was in shock: ‘I don’t remember how long the viewing went on, but there was so much drama. I held it all in. I would think: Wow, look at that person, they’re totally losing their shit.’ For years, she had dreams she believed were visitations from her father.

The move back to LA to live with her mother full-time was brutal. ‘It was a one-two punch: he’s dead and now I’m stuck with her.’ Priscilla had told Lisa Marie that while pregnant with her, ‘she’d thought about trying to fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage.’ Lisa Marie writes: ‘My mom was an air force brat. She met my dad at fourteen and her parents allowed it. It was a different time.’ On their divorce: ‘Twenty minutes before my dad was due to walk onstage in Las Vegas my mom told him, “I’m leaving,” and he still had to go out and perform.’ Most fans will know more than is being presented here: the fact that Priscilla becoming a mother was a sexual deal-breaker for Elvis, for example, complicates our reading of Priscilla’s ‘chilly’ treatment of her daughter. And the image of Priscilla abandoning Elvis denies what was undoubtedly a complex marital breakdown and ignores the inherent power imbalance in their relationship.

While Lisa Marie was still reeling from Elvis’s death, Priscilla began dating a volatile actor, Michael Edwards; their cocaine-fuelled screaming matches turned physical, sending the furniture flying. When Lisa Marie was ten, Edwards started molesting her. The abuse went on for years. She developed behavioural problems, acquired a voracious appetite for drugs and dropped out of various schools. Despite her ‘fuck you, fuck authority, fuck any system, fuck teachers, fuck parents’ attitude, she tried to keep on Priscilla’s good side so she could still spend the holidays in Memphis. But when she returned to Graceland, her old bedroom was locked: her childhood home was being turned into a museum/mausoleum.

John Travolta convinced Priscilla to join the Church of Scientology. She told Lisa Marie: ‘It can help you become really powerful.’ Lisa Marie writes that ‘I was always obsessed with Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie – I wanted to have superpowers. OK, I thought, that’s really cool. I want to do that.’ She found an outlet in the new religion, and a haven at the Celebrity Centre:

Scientology actually helped. It gave me someplace to go, and somewhere I could be introspective, somewhere to talk about what had happened and some way to deal with it … I would ask myself: ‘Why are we here? Why am I here? What’s the point of everything?’ At that point the Church felt radical in an exciting way – it didn’t feel like an organised religion, really. It attracted cool, unusual, artistic people.

Danny Keough was 21 to Lisa Marie’s 17; he played bass in a band called D’bat, whose members ‘dressed in the New Romantic style, with earrings, silk blouses, necklaces, bandannas, feathers’. He was darkly handsome, rode a ‘bright red Kawasaki GPz550’ and ‘all the girls loved him.’ It’s a classic rock’n’roll meet cute: she baits him with ‘So, you think you’re hot shit, huh?’ and he licks cake frosting off her face. An unplanned pregnancy resulted in Lisa Marie getting an abortion, which she instantly regretted. She plotted to conceive again, tracking down Danny on a cruise ship near Aruba on a night she knew she was ovulating. They got married and named their pug after Danny’s hero, the jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius; Lisa Marie gave birth to Riley and then to Ben. Motherhood meant everything to her: ‘That thing where you either do what your parents did, or you do the exact opposite of what was done to you? I did the opposite.’

She was also pursuing a musical career of her own. In 1992 she made a demo tape that got attention from Prince and Michael Jackson. She and the King of Pop ‘worked out a signal’: ‘If it rang three times and then stopped it was Michael, and you had to clear the fuck out the way for me to get on the phone with him.’ She counselled him through child abuse accusations, and, when he got back from rehab in Switzerland for prescription painkillers, they met up at the Mirage in Vegas, where he turned off all the lights and told her he was in love. By the time Danny cottoned on, it was too late; twenty days after divorcing him, Lisa Marie married Michael ‘on the DL’ in the Dominican Republic. A devastated Danny took hallucinogenic drugs in the Mexican jungle, as one does, found a Bukowski poem about a bluebird that reminded him of Lisa Marie, and returned with ‘a tattoo, a black eye and orange hair’. Lisa Marie and Danny remained best friends and continued to take ‘every single’ family vacation together.

The romance with Michael raised Lisa Marie’s profile ‘exponentially’: she travelled with ten security guards; there were photographers in the trees. ‘When we would drive around, people would throw their bodies at our car, smashing into the windows, screaming, trying to grab us.’ Trying to be the ‘perfect woman’ for Michael, Lisa Marie painted her nails ‘fire-engine red’, put away her NDAs and hid the tabloid magazines she liked to scan for coverage of herself. For his part, Jackson brought a pet chimp on school runs, giving us Riley’s best line – ‘Before you ask, ’twas not Bubbles’ – and serenaded his wife with ‘Happy Birthday, Lisa’, a song he wrote for the Simpsons episode ‘Stark Raving Dad’. (To Ben, he rather unimaginatively sang ‘Ben’.) Riley characterises their interactions as ‘sassy’ and remembers a fight where ‘somebody threw a plate of fruit at somebody. They were two big spirits and they both had big tempers.’

Michael was desperate to have kids with Lisa Marie, and when she hesitated, suspecting that he ‘would have me have the children and then dump me, get me out of the picture’, he threatened that Debbie Rowe, his dermatologist’s assistant, had ‘told me that she will have my children’. To which, Riley writes, ‘my mom would respond jealously, “Then go fuck Debbie Rowe.” All I knew of Debbie was that she was a kind lady who helped me with my ear infections.’ Another time Riley picked up the phone to hear her dad telling Lisa Marie: ‘Get my son off that guy’s fucking lap.’ Eventually, Jackson’s drug use came between them (travelling with his own anaesthetist was a red flag) and Lisa Marie filed for divorce. After Michael’s death, she wrote a blog post calling him ‘the person I failed to help’.

Lisa Marie gave interviews throughout her life, usually to promote her music; this isn’t the first time she has told many of these stories about Graceland or tried to ‘set the record straight’ about her marriage to Jackson. She covered Rolling Stone and Vogue (once by herself, once with Priscilla and Riley); she talked to Larry King, Jay Leno, the New York Times, Playboy and Ellen DeGeneres. Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time she (flippantly) said she had a crush on Darth Vader. She was visibly fidgety and uncomfortable with Howard Stern, who said he’d ‘do’ all three of the Presley women – Lisa Marie, Priscilla and 15-year-old Riley – which is all the more stomach-turning given the abuse Lisa Marie suffered as a child. Appearing on Primetime with Jackson in 1995 amid the swirl of allegations against him, Lisa Marie, sphinx-faced in a flippy baby-blue miniskirt suit, stared down Diane Sawyer. When Sawyer, all faux concern, alluded to Jackson’s (at this point, truly freakish) appearance, Lisa Marie shut her down: ‘He’s an artist.’

Despite being used to celebrities, none of these hosts could contain their fascination with Elvis, greedy for any morsel of information. In the face of the same intrusive, often prurient questions, asked over and over again, Lisa Marie was unflappable, unpretentious, frank and funny. She refused, politely, to discuss the night of her father’s death. Regarding Scientology, she compared herself to Humpty-Dumpty, falling off a wall and needing to be put back together: ‘There they are with the glue.’ She called her tempestuous relationship with Nicolas Cage ‘Mr Toad’s Wild Ride’. Her best interviewer was Oprah, with whom she had an instant rapport. Lisa Marie first appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005, and Oprah ‘went there’ about the marriage to Jackson:

Oprah: What do you say to yourself when you look at that period in your life?
Lisa Marie: Um … Holy Mother of God. [They both dissolve into laughter.]

For their first interview, Oprah wore an Elvis-style popped-collar black pantsuit with a large chain belt. Lisa Marie called her ‘Miss Oprah’ after a particularly pointed question. At another moment, Oprah reached over and fixed her subject’s hair. Asking whether Lisa Marie consummated the marriage to Michael, Oprah implicated the audience: ‘And you all know damn well you wanna know!’ After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Oprah ‘knew just who to call’ to help with disaster relief, airing a segment in which Lisa Marie helped a convoy of trucks deliver aid to evacuees. Oprah and Gayle King visited Graceland in 2006 and ate dinner with Lisa Marie. In 2007, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis’s death, Lisa Marie performed ‘In the Ghetto’ with the Harlem Gospel Choir on The Oprah Winfrey Show at Madison Square Garden. And Lisa Marie turned to Oprah in 2010 when she wanted to do an interview about Jackson after his death to get it out of the way before her next album promo. Riley knew she could trust Oprah with the launch of the book.

Riley remembers her childhood as ‘magical’, a ‘golden moment’ in which Lisa Marie was happy, healthy, surrounded by loving and devoted friends. In 1997, Lisa Marie, Riley and Ben moved to Clearwater, Florida (a city with a large Scientologist population), to a house with an ocean dock. Riley and Ben collected lizards and sand dollars, climbed kumquat trees and watched their neighbour play the fiddle on his porch. Lisa Marie drove Riley in her black Mercedes – ‘always a black Mercedes’ – to get chocolate-dipped ice cream cones at the Dairy Kurl and frozen yogurt at the Sandcastle, ‘just me and her’. Like Elvis, Lisa Marie was a high-spirited daredevil; she tore up the harbour on her jet ski, ‘doing doughnuts and throwing everyone off the back. It was that same energy she’d had at Graceland with the golf carts – totally wild.’ They went to family movies: Riley remembers Flubber and ‘being dragged to see Titanic’, though Lisa Marie covered her daughter’s eyes during the sex scene. ‘So I was allowed to see the catastrophe of the sinking ship but not the boobs. She inherited the modesty from my grandmother.’ (Very Southern.) But Lisa Marie was suffering from panic attacks and a grab-bag of mysterious ailments; she had her gallbladder removed and the mercury fillings taken out of her teeth. Danny flew down to help her, and they started recording the music that would become her first album, To Whom It May Concern.

Their next home, in Hidden Hills, California, was a rustic idyll, with fruit trees, horses, goats, chickens and peacocks, a 600-year-old oak tree with a swing. Riley and Ben spent their days ‘crashing bikes and running off finding snakes and getting cuts and falling into rosebushes’. At four o’clock, Ben’s South African nanny would ring the bell for tea and crumpets with jam. ‘My mom curated all that for us – it was her version of Graceland.’ As well as Lisa Marie’s and the children’s friends, they had ‘a private chef, three assistants, ten security guards, agents, business managers’, two nannies and Lisa Marie’s holistic doctor living with them.

To Riley, it was a ‘dreamlike communal life’ in which she fell asleep every night to the sound of ‘a party, the piano being played and people singing’. Outside, coyotes howled and great horned owls hooted. The kids went to a Scientology school called Lewis Carroll, though Lisa Marie was happy for them to bunk off. She and Priscilla reached a détente. They had big Sunday suppers with Priscilla’s mother and their ‘loads’ of cousins. ‘From my point of view, we were a close, normal family.’ But there is an anxious undertone to Riley’s recurring dream about ‘a place where nothing bad ever happened, and where we all lived forever in each other’s orbits, the closest family you could imagine’. She uses the words ‘normal’, ‘perfect’ and ‘magical’ repeatedly, trying to convince us, herself. There was an edge to the heightened reality Lisa Marie created: ‘Nothing was low-key. She wanted every moment to be extraordinary. But then there were those nights when I would come in to her room and find her alone, lying on the floor listening to her dad’s music, crying.’

At a certain point, Lisa Marie became disillusioned with Scientology and suspicious of the people around her. As a ‘last shot at stability’, she married Michael Lockwood, a guitarist in her band who never met a funny hat he didn’t like. After giving birth to twin girls, she moved to England to give them ‘a sort of fairytale life’. Her new home in Rotherfield, East Sussex had fifty acres and included a lake, topiary and an orangery. Lisa Marie cooked, gardened, created her own pub at the house where local friends such as Jeff Beck would pop by for a pint and a singalong. She became close with Sarah Ferguson, who called her ‘sissy’; Riley thinks they bonded over having been ‘torn apart and shamed simply for being women who were unapologetically themselves’. Again, it’s ‘truly magical’. But all was not well. Lisa Marie had become addicted to opioids after being prescribed painkillers for the caesarean birth of her twins.

A plan was formed to get clean, move to Nashville and make a new record, while Lockwood stayed on in England to sell the house. But once she was alone in Nashville with the twins, Lisa Marie started spiralling. She would drive two hundred miles to sleep in Graceland in Elvis’s bed, desperate for her father’s protection. On each visit, she pointed out the plot of grass where she would be buried. Eventually a breaking point was reached. From Here to the Great Unknown includes part of a text conversation between Riley, Ben and Lisa Marie:

Lisa Marie: Please come get me out of here ASAP. We can find a trailer or something. We can get to California. I’m not kidding. I need you both. I don’t have the strength to leave. I’m not well in any way. My legs and body are swollen. I spit up blood. My ankles are twisted. My lips are bleeding. I throw up everything but yoghurt. My feet are so swollen I’m scared.
Riley: You need to go to the doctor now! You need to get checked up and get vitamins. Go to the doctor now. This is not OK.
Ben: She doesn’t want to go to a doc. There’s a doc that will go to the house. That’s the best move right now …
Lisa Marie: Not a doctor here. Tennessee has strong laws. They’ll take away my babies.
Riley: For drugs? Who cares? You’re going to die. Mom, you just need a doctor to check your vitals.
Ben: I don’t care if the devil himself came to earth and said he was a doctor, as long as he’s a doctor.
Lisa Marie: I have my doctors in LA I want to see.
Riley: Can I please get you an RV to drive you to LA tomorrow?
Ben: Get in an RV and come here.
Riley: Mom, I’m booking an RV in Tennessee tomorrow. Ben will [fly to Nashville and] go with you and the babies.
Ben: Answer, Mom.
Ben: Mom, answer my fucking phone call. I’ve called you 21 times. If you don’t want to talk to me that’s fine but I have a plan.
Riley: Mom, Ben has a good plan. You’ll take an RV with the babies.
Lisa Marie: Where do we stay?
Riley: I’ll find you somewhere.
Ben: Call me.

The next ten messages are Ben repeating ‘Call me.’

There are scripts in this family: about Elvis’s mother, Gladys, loving her son so much she drank herself to death worrying about him. About Lisa Marie and Danny being ‘a pair of pirates’ and Riley the ‘narc’. Riley calls Ben ‘a mama’s boy through and through … like Elvis and Gladys – one inextricably tied to the rise and fall of the other.’ Or as Lisa Marie put it: ‘Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance.’ He accompanied Riley to Japan on a movie shoot where they had a dreamy Lost in Translation interlude, wandering around Tokyo, taking ceramics classes, eating sea urchin at omakase restaurants, going to surfer beaches and mountain shrines, delighting in rice balls from 7-Eleven. A few pages later, back in LA, Ben is dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. ‘He said he was just going to get a beer.’ After his death, Riley was shocked by a voice note on his phone; she had never heard him sing.

Riley and Lisa Marie’s​ sections of the book are printed in two different fonts, but it’s clear who is narrating at any given moment. Riley writes carefully, in measured tones, like the poised professional she is. She talks about ‘intergenerational addiction issues’ and uses distanced, therapised language about her mother’s experience of physical and sexual abuse: ‘Hearing my mother describe these incidents broke my heart. I know what happened was one of her deepest childhood traumas but I don’t think she – or any of us who knew her – fully considered how it may have contributed to some of the fundamental feelings she carried, like shame and self-hatred.’ (Discussing the book on Reddit, Riley’s fans fret about her experiencing ‘parentification’ at a young age.) Lisa Marie, a Gen-Xer, uses the rougher language of her generation, calling herself a ‘pervert’, a ‘brat’, a ‘chick’ who was ‘all about those dirty magazines’ as a child and was later ‘sloppy’ about birth control. She experienced ‘parentification’ too, with both Elvis and Priscilla. She doesn’t have the language for it but her childhood stories exemplify it. Here she is, not yet ten years old, watching Brian’s Song in her hamburger-shaped bed at Graceland:

About halfway through the film, I suddenly got really worried about my dad and went into the bathroom, where I found him facedown. He had used the towel rack to hold on to, but it had broken and he’d fallen. I ran downstairs and got Delta; she called for help, and they got up, gave him coffee and got him walking. I watched them walk him around the room. He was clinging onto them. At one point his head was hanging down, but once he saw me in the chair, we locked eyes and his whole face lit up. He tried to get them to come over to where I was, but I could tell he was going to be sick.

I said: ‘No, he’s going to throw up.’

There are significant omissions in the book. Leaving the Church of Scientology after thirty years, Lisa Marie thought: ‘I’ve lost my religion and it’s been my only pavement to walk on, my replacement family.’ She writes that she was ‘devastated’ and turned to drugs as a coping mechanism. But we don’t hear about why she became disillusioned. Perhaps this is because she was trying to protect her family, or because she still employed assistants and nannies who were Scientologists. An interview published after her death claimed that she was working behind the scenes to expose some of the Church’s worst abuses. Lisa Marie told Tony Ortega, a famous Scientology defector, that she had been declared a Suppressive Person and followed by private investigators; that she had travelled to Clearwater to confront Ron Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige, whom she referred to as ‘Hitler’; and that Scientology, bizarrely, blamed her for the deaths of both Elvis and Michael Jackson.

And while Nicolas Cage (of the 108-day marriage) gets several pages, Michael Lockwood, to whom she was married for a decade and with whom she had two children, isn’t discussed beyond the fact that he sang David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ at karaoke the night before their wedding in Kyoto. There is nothing from either Riley or Lisa Marie about the marriage or their divorce on her return to the States, which resulted in an ugly custody battle: Lisa Marie claimed she had found inappropriate images of children on Lockwood’s computer; he accused her of using the Scientology tactic of ‘fair game’, by which an ‘enemy may be lied to, cheated, tricked or destroyed by any means’, to avoid paying $40,000 a month in child support. These elisions matter because they are stressors, like Lisa Marie’s secret drug addiction, that must have contributed to the unbearable pressure she felt, and explain some of her otherwise confusing statements about the seemingly peaceful time in England: ‘My whole life had blown up. It felt like one thing after another and I could not take any more beatings.’

Propelled by Riley’s sold-out book tour and PR juggernaut, From Here to the Great Unknown has been a big hit; there’s a huge amount of interest, still, in Presley stories. And stories about trauma, abuse, addiction and grief are catnip to readers. Vulture called the book ‘a Presley-family therapy session’; Variety, a ‘portrait of intergenerational sorrows’; the Guardian, ‘a book built on grief’. The New York Times believes the point of the memoir ‘is to show the toll of fame and addiction’. Penguin Random House, the US publisher, describes ‘a mother and daughter communicating – from this world to the one beyond – as they try to heal each other’. And the book’s internal logic holds: this is undoubtedly, unabashedly, a labour of love – Riley embracing her mother and brother, making their collective memory whole.

But there are plenty of cautionary showbiz tales about fame and addiction. The problem with this book is that to understand the scope of the tragedy of Lisa Marie Presley, and why she couldn’t find her own identity or get out from under the loss of her father, you need to have some understanding of the scope of the Elvis tragedy, who he was and what he meant. Many of the young women who are buying this book because they watched Daisy Jones and the Six and are fans of Riley Keough have little idea about Michael Jackson beyond the caricature and the punchline, let alone Elvis. I would bet good money that most of them have never watched footage of Elvis in concert or heard him sing the gospel songs that Lisa Marie so loved. They are more likely to have seen Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, one of the top-grossing movies of 2022. Deep in grief over Ben’s death, Lisa Marie posted a rare Instagram message praising the film as ‘nothing short of spectacular … FINALLY done accurately and respectfully’. Its young star, Austin Butler, had ‘channelled and embodied my father’s heart and soul’. Readers may also have seen Sofia Coppola’s candy-coloured Priscilla (2023), which Lisa Marie called ‘shockingly vengeful and contemptuous’. Before its release, she sent Coppola emails begging her, as another daughter of a famous father, to reconsider her portrayal of Elvis: ‘I would think of all people that you would understand how this would feel.’ (Priscilla, meanwhile, loved the film and publicly supported it.)

It’s also a problem that Lisa Marie hadn’t been a public figure for a long time before her death. She was visually magnetic, sharing some of her father’s astonishing vitality and charisma, but her singing – unlike his – didn’t express her power and intensity, and her words certainly don’t. Photographs give a better sense of her personality (the next edition of this book should have many more of them, in colour) but it’s most evident in filmed footage of her as she moves, talks, smiles. You can find videos of her online, vibrant and open, quick to laugh, flashing that joyous grin.