From Here to the Great Unknown

by Lisa Marie Presley

When he decided to first kiss me, he just did it. He was instigating everything. The physical stuff started happening, which I was shocked at. I had thought that maybe we wouldn’t do anything until we got married, but he said, “I’m not waiting!”

Danny said, “I don’t want anything.” There had been no prenup, but I said he had to take something, so I forced him to take a little bit of money.

Danny was amazing like that. He never did anything to betray me. He’s always, always been there for me. He literally filed divorce papers so that I could go marry Michael.

We were best friends. We shared every single family vacation together. Riley and Ben never saw anything bad between us....

We called Michael “Mimi” because my brother couldn’t pronounce his name. Michael was larger than life; he reminded her of her father.

In a way she was the princess of America and didn’t want to be.

Once Michael came into our lives, the fame grew exponentially. I don’t think anyone fully anticipated the scale of it. My mother certainly didn’t. She rarely thought about consequences.

Michael and my mom got married in the Dominican Republic twenty days after her divorce from my father.

He wasn’t doing any drugs at that point. We were up all night, talking sober. Michael was an amazing conversationalist. He was someone who never wanted to talk about himself, hated it, in fact, so he would always divert. He was super interested in people, and could really lift them up. He would do anything he could to turn a conversation back to you and what you were doing—he’d be deeply fascinated by everything you had to say about what you did. There was an energy there, something about him that was truly remarkable, something that I’ve never ever seen or felt in my entire life, other than with my dad.

Well, he loved that part of me until we started fighting and I aimed my honesty at him, which was at the end.

Michael really wanted kids with my mom from the minute they got together, but she never felt certain about it. She didn’t have that feeling she’d had with my father. Whether to have children was a fundamental conflict in their marriage from the start. I know that once in a while Michael would say, “If you’re not going to have children with me, then I’m going to find somebody who will.” He would also say, “Debbie Rowe told me she will have my children.”

My mother started sensing there was drug use on Michael’s part, and she started seeing behaviors that she recognized from her father. He began to be more secretive around her. She told me that she thought he was protecting his addiction.

During the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, she had no idea he was going to kiss her until right before it happened. Eventually, the thought crept into her mind, Did he just do that for press? Was he just another version of her first love who had sold photos from the park? It sparked a fear that maybe he was only around because she was Elvis’s daughter, a novelty.

His mom was there, too, along with his team, including his own anesthesiologist. Nobody has their own anesthesiologist—every hospital has their own. It was a big red flag.

So I left. I wanted him to come, too, but he didn’t. I filed for divorce very shortly thereafter.

Somebody had told my mom that Michael was planning on filing for divorce but that it would be better for her if she did it first. My mom told Oprah in 2010 that she made the decision to walk because she saw the drugs and the doctors coming in, and they scared her and put her right back into what she went through with her father.

So, she filed. But the truth was, Michael never intended to file. It was Romeo and Juliet, the poison mistakenly drunk.

My mom always said that was how she learned to ice people, from Michael.

They had a back-and-forth, sort of toxic relationship going on. He told her he was going to marry Debbie because he wanted kids. Their divorce was finalized in August 1996, and Michael married Debbie three months later. But we’d still go to Neverland.

My mom was in London, writing a record, when Michael died. My mom later told Oprah that Michael often said he was afraid of ending up like her father. He was forever asking my mom about when Elvis died, how it happened, where, why. Michael said, “I feel like I’m going to end up the same way.”

Ben was very similar to his grandfather, very, very, very, and in every way—he even looked like him. Ben was so much like him it scared me. I didn’t want to tell him because I thought it was too much to put on a kid.

We were very close—he’d tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship that my father and his mother had. It was a generational fucking cycle.

my dad had his demons and acted out on them. I have everything in me that wants to do the same thing. And then my son’s got the same genetic makeup—I feel like he’s more genetically me than Danny. Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance.

My mom desperately wanted to get back together with my dad. She believed she’d broken up her family and felt immense guilt, but my dad couldn’t risk being that vulnerable again.

something is not interesting to me anymore, I’m out of there. And whenever you get with a new person, the whole thing—the beginning, middle, and the end—will play out in two years. That’s why I got married multiple times.