From Here to the Great Unknown

by Lisa Marie Presley

My mother told me that she’d thought about trying to fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage. She didn’t want to gain pregnancy weight. She thought that wouldn’t be a good look for her as Elvis’s wife. There were so many women after him, all of them beautiful. She wanted his undivided attention. She was so upset that she was pregnant that initially she’d only eat apples and eggs and never gained much weight. I was a pain in her ass immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me.

My mom fundamentally felt she was broken, unlovable, not beautiful. There was a profound sense of unworthiness in her, and I could never really figure out why. I’ve spent my whole life trying to work out the answer. My mother was an incredibly complicated person and deeply misunderstood.

He was determined to make his new home an opulent place,

When you come up from poverty, your responsibility is to bring everybody with you, and that’s what he did.

There are apparently at least six vortices in the world—like Hawaii and Jerusalem—places with an energy that scientifically acts up. Graceland was like that. When you were there, you could feel it. You’d feel good, recharged. My dad went there to recharge.

He would replace all the l’s with y’s when he spoke to my mom.

There were never-ending cigarettes, dirty magazines, dirty cards, dirty books. I was all about those dirty magazines.

Upstairs at Graceland is just as Elvis left it—so you can really feel his presence.

I have a vague memory of this one conversation we had in that room about a passage that Elvis had underlined. I started to call someone to help me remember it, but realized that there’s no one left to call.

Sometimes he would fly back with me. And he would land the fucking plane, too. At the end of the trip he would get in the copilot seat, which made everybody nervous, and announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts, Elvis is going to land the plane.”

He was respectful, though—he wasn’t rude to people, he wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction, others buy some real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.

I knew that something tragic was coming, which made me feel protective, that I had to watch out for him.

Looking back, there was really only one thing I was sure of: that I was loved by my dad.

My mom learned from these experiences to put her children before her partners. Anytime she got a new partner, she’d bring us into the kitchen and say, “Guys, this is [insert name],” and she’d smile and watch as an uncomfortable exchange happened. But she always wanted to see our read on the new boyfriend—she trusted our instincts.

If we said no, he’d be gone. If he said one wrong thing to us, she would put him in his place.

That afternoon, once they took him away—and this is something I’ve been upset about my whole life—it turned into a free-for-all. Everybody went to town. Everything was swiped, wiped clean—jewelry, artifacts, personal items—before he was even pronounced dead. You can still find things from that day coming up at auction.

I knew that soon he wasn’t going to be here anymore. I don’t remember much after that. I was nine. It was all so fucking beyond me. It’ll hit me still, on and off it comes. There have been nights as an adult when I would just get drunk and listen to his music and sit there and cry. The grief still comes. It’s still just there.

That was the first time I really felt the loss—obviously from my dad passing away, but more than anything, I felt I was stuck with this woman. It was a one-two punch: He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her.

I don’t think she ever processed the loss. I think she started to the last year she was alive—she only began using terms like trauma as late as 2021. But I certainly knew that she was heartbroken my whole life. I remember when I was little feeling angry at Elvis for leaving my mother and for causing all this pain. Whenever I would hear Elvis’s voice, I would feel my mother’s anguish. Feel the loss of him.

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 took to it quickly and I really liked it. I got the idea that we weren’t just our brains, we weren’t just our bodies, we weren’t just our emotions. We had those things, but that wasn’t all that we were. We were spirits. 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 organized religion, really. It attracted cool, unusual, artistic people. It became my tribe.

My mom was very strict, in fact. She was never a friend, someone I could talk to. I felt like I was her trophy. She wanted a cotillion for me. I didn’t even know what that was, but she always wanted one. She wanted me to go to finishing school. I felt like she should have gotten a different daughter. It was about how things looked—the way things appeared seemed more important than feelings. My mom would never allow herself to lose control. Everything was all in its place.

Twice a year after he died, I’d dream about my father. The dreams were so real that I would cry when I’d wake up because it felt like I was with him and I hadn’t wanted it to end. I’d try so hard to get back to sleep, to be with him again. I don’t really believe they were dreams. I believe they were visitations.

The dreams only stopped in 1992, when my son was born.

My mom couldn’t control me. There was nothing she could do. I was not easy for her.

I felt like my mom was always actively trying to figure out how to send me away—beyond Switzerland and Israel she 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.

The horses represented some kind of freedom for her. I don’t think she ever realized that her own mother had the same connection to horses.

By this point in my life, my mother’s role was just to be a chronic stop sign. She didn’t try to talk to me, hang out with me, be a friend. I was very much in love with my father’s side—they were wildly colorful people and I related to them in ways I couldn’t with my mother.

Eventually it became that he would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look—“Don’t look at me,” he’d say, “don’t turn your head.” I assume he was jerking off. He wouldn’t be mad at me—he did it very calmly, just sitting in a chair, whacking my ass. My butt would be black, blue, orange, green.

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.

He was a twenty-three-year-old being chaperoned by someone’s mom. But it was also history repeating itself. My mom was fourteen when she met my dad. I was replaying her life in a weird way, but she and my dad waited until she was eighteen to have sex. I was fourteen when I lost my virginity to this guy.

He didn’t care about me. It was just an opportunity to him.

she said it was her first memory of feeling used, the first time she realized people had an agenda with her.

I told him he wasn’t boyfriend material, and that made him want to pursue me. And the cockier and less interested he seemed, the more I found myself smitten with him.

And like my mom, he couldn’t care less about fame—he was maybe even allergic to it, just like she was.

He says he developed a crush on her because of her unobtainable qualities.

My dad says, “She didn’t just lay down and agree with stuff. She was really fiery and would hold her own—in a real way, not just being contentious. I liked the verbal sword fighting. When she said I wasn’t boyfriend material, that made me want her more.”

I didn’t know what I wanted except that I wanted to be with Danny. And I knew that I needed to have children with Danny, too, which is the weirdest, craziest part of it. I felt like I was supposed to have children with him—I somehow knew that we would always be connected, that it would always be okay, that it would never be a bad situation for a child.

I’m going to have this child. There is a child that I need to be having.

My parents named me Riley but couldn’t think of a middle name. Priscilla’s mother, Ann (aka Nana), suggested I should be named after my dad. My parents had no other ideas, so they left it up to the hospital, and someone there thought Danielle sounded better before Riley, so that’s why my government name is Danielle Riley Keough.

Danny started doing mushrooms, smoking weed, and it was causing huge fights between us because I had become totally anti-drug by that point. But mostly we had gotten our shit together.

My parents weren’t very responsible back then, but they loved me so much. I never doubted that. Ever. That was what my mom had felt from Elvis. That’s what she wanted me to feel.

I wanted a boy so badly. My mom had given me advice on how to have a boy or a girl. Basically, she said that boy sperm gets there quicker than girl sperm, but dies off faster, so if you want a boy, you have to have sex just before the start of your ovulation (to get the first sperm only).

I don’t quite remember holding Ben, but I remember the essence of just being there, that nighttime newborn feeling filling the room.

I was about to marry Danny, so nothing came of it. Michael told me later that when I was on the cover of People magazine after Danny and I got married, he was devastated. He thought that he should be with me instead.

Michael had an energy and a presence, and that week he was fully allowing me into his world, into his mind. I knew he didn’t do that very much. I don’t think he ever did, actually, until we started talking. He knew that I understood him, and we really connected because I didn’t judge him. I completely got who he was and why he thought the shit that he thought. We had come from, and were now in, similar circumstances. Everything about our lives was so incredibly abnormal. There was no reason why we shouldn’t connect.

Nothing happened physically, but the connection was so insanely strong. No one had ever seen that side of him. He wasn’t that high-pitched, calculated thing. That was an act.

And in the darkness Michael said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely gone in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children.” Then he played me a song about how he felt and when he finished, he said, “You don’t have to say anything. I know I’ve thrown you off, but I really want you. I want to be with you.” I didn’t say anything immediately, but eventually I said, “I’m really so flattered, I can’t even talk.” By then, I felt I was in love with him, too. I had told him that my marriage was in serious trouble.

I hadn’t wanted to tell him that I felt the same way because I had my two kids with me, and first I had to go home and tell my husband. But I was fully in love, too.

She wanted to be the perfect woman for him—Michael never knew my mom smoked, for example—which, again, was not dissimilar to how her mother had been with her father. But after she and Michael had been together for a while, he finally told her he liked her nails the best when they were natural—he certainly didn’t require her to be a perfect woman. She couldn’t believe that she’d spent thousands of dollars on nails over an entire year, and he preferred the bitten ones.

He told me he was still a virgin. I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss. He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened.