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. I believe in energy in utero, so maybe I already felt her vibe of trying to get rid of me. Eventually she just kind of decided to keep me, but at the time, she didn’t have great maternal instincts. That might be what’s wrong with me.

I had terrible earaches, and one time my dad rushed me in the wee hours of the morning to Dr. Cantor. I was screaming bloody murder from the pain. Dr. Cantor pulled out some kind of device to get the wax out, or whatever it was, and I was screaming so loudly my dad could not take it and left the room. He didn’t want to leave, but he also couldn’t bear what was going to happen. He was up against the wall in the hallway, completely white. After Dr. Cantor pulled whatever it was out of my ear, my dad picked me up and carried me out.

Later, I had to have a tonsillectomy. My dad was there in the hospital for that, too. I remember being given ice cream—which obviously no child would be upset about—but it was painful to eat anything, so I made some kind of face every time I had to swallow. My dad was sitting next to my hospital bed, just waiting for me to swallow, and then he would start laughing. He thought that face was so funny.

I realized in that moment that all of these phrases I use, and the things I say to my daughter, are the ways my mom spoke to me. She had gotten them directly from her dad. From the South. And all of them are alive in me. I can hear her saying, “Get over here, goddamn it, and give me some sugar!” She mothers my daughter through me. Whenever I go to the South and hear the Memphis accent, I feel a longing, a nostalgia for something I never lived. I’ve never lived in Memphis. But something inside of me has.

I was four when they split up. But I remained so close with my dad. I knew how much I was adored, how much he loved me. I knew that he knew that I hated, hated, hated leaving him. Hated, hated, hated going to my mother’s new home in Los Angeles. Loathed it. He got a house there to be closer to me.

Dad and his mother, Gladys, had been so close. But she loved him so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. She just couldn’t bear him being away in the army—he went to Germany—and she died because of it. And that left my dad with his demons, self-destructive demons, and he acted out on them. I have everything in me that wants to numb out, too, and do the same fucking thing.

My dad loved to have fun and he loved everybody else to have fun with him, and he loved to laugh. He was very gregarious in that way: He didn’t do it to have an entourage follow him. He was generous because he wanted everyone else to enjoy everything.

He had a little plaque on the wall up there with a poem that always broke my heart. It’s titled “Why God Made Little Girls”: God made the world with its towering trees Majestic mountains and restless seas Then paused, and said, “It needs one more thing, Someone to laugh and dance and sing To walk in the woods and gather flowers, To commune with nature in the quiet hours.” So God made little girls, With laughing eyes and bouncing curls, With joyful hearts and infectious smiles Enchanting ways and feminine wiles And when He’d completed the task He’d begun, He was pleased and proud of the job He’d done For the world when seen through a little girl’s eyes Greatly resembles Paradise.

While we waited for the tours to finish, my mom loved to go through her dad’s books to understand him better. He was clearly searching for a deeper comprehension of the world—most of the books were spiritual or self-help titles, things like Understanding Who You Are, and Sacred Science of Numbers, and How to Be Happy, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, even Ram Dass’s Be Here Now—really human things. There were also lots of Bibles. Elvis would underline phrases and write things like “AMEN!” next to them.

When you saw the underlines and the spiritual searching, you got a sense of the fundamentally broken feeling he shared with my mom. He was searching to fix himself, searching for a deeper meaning, something she would then search for in her own life, too. So often we’d sit up there, and my mom would go line by line...

You can still feel him in that room. His spirit is imprinted there. 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.

I must have been around twenty years old this particular year, and I watched as an older fan, one clearly from Elvis’s generation, hugged my mom. That fan was there every year, so I recognized her, but this time I was really watching their interaction; I became keenly aware of my mom’s body language in a different way, I guess because I was older. And the way that my mom surrendered to this woman’s arms broke my heart. In that moment I saw so clearly that she was searching for a parent.

Sometimes when I watch videos of Elvis performing, I think about the fact that if he hadn’t done exactly what he did in exactly that moment in time—if he hadn’t walked into the right building, recorded the right song, danced the way he did in front of the right person—there would be no Elvis Presley. We probably would have lived somewhere in Mississippi. I didn’t even finish high school in this version of my life, so I can’t imagine where I’d be in that one. My great-grandfather drove trucks, maybe we would have carried on that tradition. Maybe we would have made furniture in Tupelo. My mom would have ended up in jail for sure.

In California, when I was with my mother, I had a nanny named Yuki Koshimata. Yuki was a short Japanese woman, and she took really good care of me. She was always there—she wrote to me until the day she died. I would get cards every Christmas, every birthday, even after I got married and had children. Whenever we dropped Yuki off at her house for her weekend, or her time off, I would scream. I remember being in the car with my mom driving away and I would be screaming at the top of my lungs, watching us drive out of view of her. I was so attached to her.

Leaving Graceland and flying out of Memphis International Airport to go back to L.A. was a true emotional trauma for me. As soon as I got out of the car in Memphis, though, I would completely transform. I never wanted to leave. I loved everything about it. I loved the weather, I loved the storms, I loved the cold, the sounds of the birds, the fireflies. I loved the people, I loved the smells. One of my favorite snapshot memories—I was around seven or eight—was of getting off the plane in Memphis, looking down, and seeing snow.

There were the times I would be in school in L.A., and I would see a black car pull up, then someone would come to the classroom to get me, and it was to go to see him. They’d put me on a plane and fly to wherever he was. It was usually on a whim—he would tell someone, “Go get her,” and then I would get brought to wherever he was. I waited for that car to show up—it was always a black one, usua...

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.” I’d think, Um, can I get off? and I would tighten my seatbelt as tight as it could go and then I just remember everyone applauding as we landed, because we were alive. We were alive.

I was supposed to go back to L.A. because I was about to start school. “Please, ask Mommy if she’ll let me stay,” I begged my dad. “I’ll call her and ask her,” he said, and told me to go wait in my room. I remember pacing outside his doors, in that hallway with the foot-long shag rug. Eventually he came out and hugged me. I heard this kind of wheezing sound. He was crying. “You can’t stay,” he said, “she wants you to come home.”

My dad didn’t talk about my mom in a bad way at all. He did not want me to think negatively of her. In retrospect, they did a fantastic job maintaining a united front and a real friendship bond. There was still a lot of love between them, and they really put on a good front for me. I was very lucky. So, he didn’t want her to look bad, but he was very, very sad. He pulled himself together and said, “You know, your momma’s right. You have to go back because you need to start school and she needs to get you ready. I don’t want you to go, you know that, but your momma’s right, it’s the right thing to do.” That wheezing sound never left me, him crying and trying not to let me know it. It showed how much he loved me.

But I wasn’t crazy about my scenario. In school once, I picked up a book about Japan—everything was so beautiful there, the architecture, the ponds, and I remember wishing that I could live there. Not that I was ungrateful, but I was lonely in L.A. I wasn’t alone, but I was very lonely. I didn’t have a lot of friends. So I’d just stare at that book, want...

The only thing that saved me was music. I had a little 45 record player and music was the only thing that would take me away. I’d play Neil Di...

That machine and my Snoopy doll were my imaginary friends. Snoopy was everything to me. I loved him so much that his nose broke off and I sewed it back on. I had outfits for him, clothes for each day. He came with me everywhere. He was my best friend. I took him to school because I was scared to be there, and they made me keep him in my locker, which I hated. But it made it easier for me to be there, knowing he was there, too. —

You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible; if it was bad, watch the fuck out. Step back. He had this magnetism about him. Whatever it was going to be, it was going to be a thousand percent. And when he got angry, everybody would run, duck, and take cover.

Eventually, he calmed down, and someone said to me, “It’s okay, you can come out now, he wants to see you.” I thought, He wants to see me? I said, “Why was he so mad?” “Well,” someone said, “he ran out of water.” So, I grabbed four bottles of water and I walked into his room. “Somebody told me you didn’t have any water,” I said, and he just motioned for me to come give him a hug.

One of my dad’s visits to anger came one time when we were supposed to go to Libertyland. I had invited all my friends, but when I went upstairs the night before, I could hear the wrong kind of tone—this baritone sound, the wrong kind of intensity. I went to my room and could hear loud crashing sounds. He was yelling his fucking head off at somebody. I could hear him saying that we weren’t going to Libertyland the next day. I was devastated. I found out later that he had run out of something again, and he needed to get it before we went—either that or they wouldn’t give it to him. So, he hit the roof and called about ten different doctors and nurses until he found someone who would give him a fix. Once the nurse or doctor had administered whatever it was he needed, he was fine. And we went to Libertyland.

I remember sitting next to him on the roller coaster that day—the Zippin Pippin—keeping one eye ahead on the ride, and the other on his gun in his holster, which was on my side. Unless you knew or understood him, that sounds terrible, I know. You might think he was crazy, carrying a piece with his daughter sitting next to him, but he was just from the South. It was just really funny. So we rode and rode. That was about a week before he died.

I was always worried about my dad dying. Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, “I hope my daddy doesn’t die.” He had a TV and a chair set up in my room, so he would often come by and lounge in the chair and smoke his cigars. I could wake up at any time and he’d be sitting there. Once, I was with a friend in my room and when he came to my bedroom door, he started to fall. I could tell that he was moving too far to the right, starting to lean, and I yelled, “Go get him!” Me and my friend managed to get underneath him and hold him up until he grabbed hold of something and regained his composure, and then he just went back to his room. That happened a few times—happy to see me, then the swaying. And it happened a lot toward the end. I was sitting next to him in my room watching TV and I said, “Daddy, please don’t go anywhere. Please don’t die.” He said, “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he smiled at me.

I knew that something tragic was coming, which made me feel protective, that I had to watch out for him. One time I was walking by his bedroom, and he was lying flat on his back. I saw how bloated his stomach was and it terrified me. A few days later I was in my room with my friends. We were in the hamburger bed, all watching that sad movie Brian’s Song. About halfway through the film, I suddenly got really worried about my dad and went into his 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 him up, gave him coffee, and got him walking. I watched them walk him around the room. He was clinging on to 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 away from 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.” So they took him to the bathroom, and sure enough, he got sick. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t talk to anyone about anything. I just internalized it all.

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

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 heard my mother was coming for me. That was the worst. It felt like an invasion—Graceland was my place with my dad, and I didn’t want her there. She was going to wreck the whole vibe.

My mom stayed in Memphis until everything was finalized and in October my dad was moved from Forest Hill Cemetery to the backyard of Graceland, next to his mother. 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.

After camp, my mom wanted me in a good school, so she put me in a ritzy one in Los Angeles. Everyone had a famous father and mother, and I wasn’t into that at all. Then my mom got a French boyfriend and became obsessed with being French, so she put me in a French school and made me do fucking French lessons. I wanted my other life back.

I always wanted to go to Memphis. I wanted to make sure I could go to Memphis, and that’s what she used sometimes to threaten me: “You’re not going to be able to go to Memphis if you don’t blah, blah, blah…” and that would really upset me, but I would do whatever I needed to do. She knew it meant everything to me.

Upstairs was locked. I could go up there, but I had to come back down. I don’t know why, maybe because his room was there. I think there were a lot of conversations going on about what to do with the upstairs to keep it preserved, but Vernon and my mom decided I wasn’t allowed back into my room.

My grandfather had known that I’d had a crush on Rory Miller. After Vernon died, I found out the Millers were moving to Colorado. I was supposed to meet and hang out with Rory before they left—in fact, I’d arranged to spend the whole day with him. Patsy knew it and, last minute, I got a phone call: “Your mom wants you to fly home to L.A. today.” Patsy had told my mom, and my mom was not having it. I was devastated. Rory took me to the airport. That was the first time I remember having actual, real, specific hatred toward my mother.

My mother sent me away a lot, but I will say that she was really good at birthdays.

My mom would drop me off after school at their building in Hollywood. I felt like she was dumping me there so they could handle me, and she didn’t have to. 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.

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.

My mom was gone a lot. She was on some island eating something she caught out of the ocean, or she was off in some other foreign land, or she was on another adventure with another man,

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. I know a lot of people will disagree with me and think that’s nonsense. You might have these kinds of dreams, too, and blow them off and say they’re just dreams. That’s fine. But I believe that people we love from our past can visit us. And my dad would do that regularly.

I knew by then that she’d been thinking of putting me in a boarding school, in Switzerland or on a kibbutz in Israel—I had found four or five applications to different places. I felt like my mom was always actively trying to figure out how to send me away—beyond

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.

My mom had been dating a guy named Michael Edwards. They dated for about six years in all. Edwards was an actor and model, a dramatic guy with a horrible temper. He was often on drugs, too. He and my mom would fight constantly, and it was physical. I’d hear her screaming. They would party a lot, go to discos, and there was a lot of cocaine around. When they’d come home from a night out, that’s when I would hear him screaming, the furniture flying. It was so destabilizing.

In the craziest turn of events, Edwards got a part in the movie Mommie Dearest, playing Joan Crawford’s lover. One day, while he was still making the movie, my mom came into my room, went through my closet, and was yelling at me because I had wire hangers: “Why are you using these? These come from the cleaners! These need to be exchanged for the nice ones, the plastic ones!” As she was yelling, we could hear laughter from down the hallway. “The irony!” Michael shouted. “This is too crazy that you’re actually yelling at your daughter about wire hangers and I’m in Mommie Dearest!” My mom realized that it was crazy and started laughing, too. I thought, This is my life now. You’re both fucking crazy.

One night my mom made dinner, and when I cut into the chicken, it wasn’t cooked, so I said so. The next thing I know, Edwards flipped his plate so that it flew across the room and smashed into the wall. I threw my hands up as if to say, “What the fuck?” and at that he jumped up and started screaming gibberish and ran out of the room. When he got back, he was holding the end of the cord that attached to my record player—he’d cut it off with scissors. He was still yelling.

The first time Edwards came into my room in the middle of the night, drunk, kneeling, was years before. I think I was ten. I woke up to find him on his knees next to my bed, running his finger up my leg under the sheets, and if I moved, he stopped—so I moved. I was awake, but I was trying to be asleep. He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I get older. He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, then he put his hand between my legs, and he said they’re going to touch you here. I think he gently kissed me and then left that night.

I told my mom in the car the next day and I watched her slam her foot down on the gas. At home I ran to my room and she flew into her room and slammed the door. Eventually she called me in and said that Edwards wanted to apologize. Edwards was sitting on their bed looking very sullen and sulky. He said, “I’m so sorry, but in Europe that’s how they teach the kids, so that’s what I was doing.” I didn’t know what to say. I would always feel bad for him when he apologized.

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. It was kind of the same drill every time. He’d come in the room, do what he did. Once, I showed my mom my butt and she said, “Well, what did you do to cause that?” as if he had just given me a spanking for misbehavior. And then she’d go scream at him. He’d say, “Oh, I was drunk,” or, “S...

He’d still come into my room now and then, but I would move or do something to make him think that I was waking up, then he’d run down the hallway back t...