“I haven’t had any great musical success. I never graduated from high school. I’m not pretty.” The tormented fate of Lisa Marie Presley.

In the life of Lisa Marie Presley, images are juxtaposed and often go in pairs. There’s his mother Priscilla, an icy beauty dressed to the nines who forces him to learn French in order to appear respectable in the eyes of a new lover. Later, Lisa Marie, newly engaged to Michael Jackson, finds herself making three rounds of her kitchen looking for her favorite lipstick so she too can look flawless. There is the memory of his beloved father, Elvis, staggered in his room, addicted to multiple substances. Years later, Lisa Marie also dived. her children hired a tour bus to take her from Nashville to Los Angeles “because I wanted to do cocaine all the time and I couldn’t if I was on a plane.”

Foremost is the King’s casket, which has been on display for days at the family home in Graceland. Elvis’ only daughter was 9 years old at the time and, hidden behind the door, watched how thousands of fans paid tribute to this beloved father, this “god” who was able to “thunder”. In 2020, when her son Benjamin committed suicide at the age of 27, Lisa Marie kept his body in dry ice to keep him awake as long as possible. “I think someone else’s embarrassment would scare her son into having one at home. But not me,” writes Lisa Marie From here to the Great Unknown. memoirhis autobiography published by JC Lattès on October 9 (1). “I felt so privileged to be able to be present with him, to delay the deadline so that I could agree that he should go in peace.”

Memories of a family unlike any other

Begun by Lisa Marie Presley in 2022, completed and enriched after her death (January 2023) by her daughter, actress and director Riley Keough, this two-voice biography tells both the cost of fame and how trauma is passed down from generation to generation. generation. This dialogue between mother and daughter is a powerful declaration of love, especially in the last third of the book, when Riley, who has become a mother herself, is treated almost alone in the story. “My mother was deeply affected by what was being written about her,” Kyo writes, simply and caringly. “He had no siblings to share this burden, no one who understood what he was really feeling. In a way, she was America’s princess against her will.”

Born into the limelight in 1968 in Memphis, Lisa Marie Presley spent a happy and wild childhood destroying the lawns of Graceland on a golf cart driven at full speed. There are no rules here: the only child of the world’s biggest star stays up until midnight, drives as much as he wants, and if his father asks, he immediately appears to shower him with kisses and jewels. In her domain, the Queen threatened to fire a cook when she was four years old who refused her a cookie.

A turbulent youth

Elvis’ death marks the end of the world. Lisa Marie rebels under the care of her mother’s family, who desperately try to “taint” her. “My mother’s parents thought I was nothing special. The change was so confusing that I kept yelling. I remember spending over an hour screaming and my mother’s younger brothers laughing at me.”

At the age of 11, Lisa Marie was abused by her mother’s boyfriend, actor Michael Edwards. Priscilla forces her partner to apologize. “I felt guilty and forgave him.” A troubled, bad student, he enrolled in half of Los Angeles’ private schools, from which he was inevitably kicked out, before finding refuge in the Church of Scientology; “Scientology raised me for my mother.” Here again family history catches up with him. She was 14 when she began her first romance with a 23-year-old, like Priscilla and Elvis. When she discovers that he is selling her photos to the tabloids, Lisa Marie takes twenty Valium pills to end her life.

“There is a long line of young women in my family who became mothers when they were still children. When I grew up, I remember thinking that I wish I was my mother’s mother and my grandmother’s mother,” writes Riley Keough. Lisa Marie was 21 when Riley was born, 24 when Benjamin was born. She recounts having fun “trapping” her father, her soon-to-be ex-husband, musician Danny Keon, by calculating her ovulation cycle with her aunt.

Welcome to Neverland!

Then Michael Jackson enters the scene. Lisa Marie met him for the first time when she was 6 years old (she doesn’t remember). When he falls in love with her, she is 35 years old and still a virgin. The King’s Daughter takes down the King of Pop.

“Michael was called ‘Mimi’ because my brother couldn’t pronounce his name,” Riley wrote. “Michael was extraordinary, he reminded my mother of her father. He told me that no one had been able to get close to his father except Michael. (…) At home, they were a married couple like everyone else. They both dropped us off at school in the morning, like a normal family, except that Michael sometimes took a chimpanzee with him.”

Their story ends when Lisa Marie refuses to have her children. It’s not the child abuse allegations against him, “I would have killed him myself if I’d witnessed it,” but his increasing drug use that convinces him to end it; “I was so happy. I have never been so happy.”

The age of reason.

The years that followed were sweet, according to Riley, “a decade in which he created a magical life for my brother and me.” Lisa Marie takes her children to Hawaii, Japan, a bohemian life with several lovers and many friends. The king’s daughter has indeed had several romantic relationships. She was engaged to guitarist John Ozaika from 1999 to 2001 before marrying Nicolas Cage in 2002 and divorcing in 2004. “He wanted every moment to be extraordinary. And then there were those evenings when I came to his room and found him alone, lying on the floor listening to his dad’s music, in tears.”

Just after giving birth to twins Harper and Finley in 2008, the result of her marriage to guitarist Michael Lockwood from 2006 to 2016, Lisa Marie used opiates. A scar from a painful C-section pushes her over the edge. “In my forties, I suddenly became a drug addict,” Presley writes. “I was getting eighty pills a day.”

When Benjamin dies, Riley knows her mother won’t survive. “I remember standing next to him while he was trying to light his cigarette. He made several attempts over a good five minutes to no avail. The cigarette was no closer than thirty centimeters to the lighter.’

Riley’s voice and grief resonate in the book’s poignant final pages. Now alone at the head of Presley’s empire, after a painful legal battle with Priscilla, the self-confessed actress who has led a “nonsense life” displays an admirable gentleness and guides the reader through her grief.

“My mother was like a hurricane,” he writes, echoing what Lisa Marie said about Elvis, this “god who could change the weather.” “His power and strength scared people. He had an extraordinary ability to see into your soul. And he was capable of deep, unconditional love.” Lisa Marie reproduces. “I’ve never had any serious musical success. I never graduated from high school. I’m not pretty. I’m not good enough, but I’m a great mom.”

(1) From here to the Great Unknown. memoirBy Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough, eds. JC Lattès, 333 pages, €23.9.