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I was so afraid to hear my mother’s voice—the physical connection we have to the voices of our loved ones is profound.
When he got upset with me, I took it so personally, I was just shattered. I wanted his approval on everything. There was one time I popped my knee, and he said, “Dammit, why’d you go and hurt yourself?” It devastated me.
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.
In my family, there’s a long history of young girls becoming mothers—my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother all had their first babies young, when they were just babies themselves.
Graceland was built in 1939 by a doctor and his wife, Tom and Ruth Moore. The land had been gifted to the family by the wife’s aunt Grace, so they named it after her. Elvis liked the name so much that he kept it when, in 1957, he paid $102,000 for the then-ten-thousand-square-foot house and its fourteen acres.
He was determined to make his new home an opulent place, and what you do, when you’re from the South, is move the entire family in—the aunties, the cousins, everyone. When you come up from poverty, your responsibility is to bring everybody with you, and that’s what he did.
“He’s up and he wants to see you.” Damn, it’s only two or three in the afternoon, he’s not supposed to be up yet. Every possible thing I’d ever done went through my head. What has he found out? Somebody’s told him something. I’m gonna kill whoever told on me.
My dad was sitting on his bed in his usual spot. He would always sit in the same place, leaning back on one of those pillows that has arms and moving his leg or shaking his head. He was always rocking.
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.
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.
he’d talk to me and ask what I was doing while he watched one of his seventeen televisions
Graceland was really busy during the day, so that’s when my dad would sleep. But at night it was peaceful for him—people would leave him alone.
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.
Michael was larger than life; he reminded her of her father. She told me that no one ever came close to being like her dad apart from Michael.
When significant things were happening in our lives, things that would make the press go crazy, she would take us out of school—we had to stay home until it blew over a little. Once we were back in school, we had security outside all day. And if I went to a sleepover at a friend’s house, security would sit outside all night there, too. My mom was really affected by what people wrote about her. She had no siblings to share the burden, nobody who understood what it truly felt like. In a way she was the princess of America and didn’t want to be.
No one had ever seen him with his guard down. I knew that it was rare. With everyone else, he would snap his fingers if somebody brought up anything he didn’t like—snap, and you’re out. Because he could create his own world. And in that world, everyone had to agree with what he said.
Both brought with them generational addiction issues and both of their families came up from poverty, too: Vernon had been a sharecropper and carpenter, Joe Jackson a crane operator. And both Michael and my mother’s father knew all too well what it was like to have godlike fame, a fame that seemed to have appeared overnight.
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.
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.”
my mother told me everything about her life (which, again, could sometimes feel like a curse for me as her daughter,
She would have the music blaring in her black Mercedes—always a black Mercedes—and we listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket (it was the nineties) and Toni Braxton and Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack,” though my mom loved all R & B.
(my mom always got a medium popcorn and a red Icee).
My kids would say the wildest shit as early as three years old, and I’d just say, “Really? That’s cool!” I never wanted to say, “That doesn’t happen,” or “That’s not possible,” or “You don’t know that.” I never felt like I had to cut them down like I was when I was young.
He never really got in trouble. All he would ever get was “Benjamin…” And if he was really in trouble, “Benjamin Storm…” Everyone loved him too much to stay mad at him.
When my mom would go to parties in the Hollywood Hills, if there was a person there who she thought I was a fan of and would want to meet, she would call me to get out of bed in the middle of the night to come to wherever she was. One night after I had fully gone to bed, somebody came in with a phone for me. “I’m at a party,” my mom said, “and you’ll never believe who’s here!” “Who?” I said groggily. “Marilyn Manson! Do you want to come meet him?” At the time I was a big Manson fan. So even though it was a school night and an hour’s drive from Hidden Hills to the Hollywood Hills, security took
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My mother always had her own bottle of Dom Pérignon that no one was allowed to touch.
As I headed off to bed—I could never last as long as my parents—I noticed that my dad had taken off the rest of his clothes and was now sitting naked in a lawn chair, calmly drinking champagne with my mom’s security guards.
In fact, my grandma and my mom were thick as thieves for a minute. They were always giggling and laughing and having fun and getting drunk together, constantly up to no good.
My mother was like a hurricane. Yet everyone notices how sweet and gentle her kids are.
Both of them had the Cupid bow lips and heavy eyelids we all have.
Her father had been an addict, but there was scant awareness of it in the 1970s. Back then, everyone in Hollywood seemed to be an addict, but no one had language for it. Elvis had thought he was just doing what his doctors advised—if the doctor told him to take a drug to go to sleep and one to wake up, that’s what he did. His intentions were pure. So there might have been a genetic component to my mom’s addiction—either way, it just waited around all her life until right after my sisters were born. And then it showed up and burned everything down.
She had so many staff, running everything for her, that she didn’t know simple things like how to turn on the living room TV.
released the dormant feeling that everyone around her had an agenda. Even deeper than that, she thought she was unlovable. The way she would handle these feelings was to exile people, regardless of how big or small the offense.
virtually overnight, my mother had let everybody go at Hidden Hills—friends, security, assistants, people she had known and loved for years. Her religion. She just suddenly wanted everything gone.
can get really mean and really angry and I freak people out when I get like that. It comes from trying to protect myself from pain. I just push people the fuck away. It’s the fear of being hurt. I know people can hurt me, so I’ll shut them out.
And then I woke up. I woke up about a lot of stuff that had been going on around me for years. A lot of people were invested in having me quiet and manageable.
unbeknownst to all of us, she was regularly taking the opioids prescribed to her after the C-section she’d had for my sisters’ birth.
If you don’t have something to keep you focused, or some kind of purpose, it’s hard out there. Life is not easy. Who doesn’t want to be high? Drugs or drinking make you feel great. You have to have something bigger, bigger than that feeling of being high, bigger than that happiness, bigger than that emptiness. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.
She had been holding it back with Scientology, with raising children, with marriages, with spirituality. But it was there, like a shadow, the whole time.
they’d both been through similar onslaughts in the press and in life, torn apart and shamed simply for being women who were unapologetically themselves.)
After fights, we wouldn’t typically have a conversation to resolve the fight. Eventually one person would just break the silence and it was back to business as usual—this
Since she had admitted it to us, the honesty seemed to give her the license to continue with her addiction.
Eventually she realized that moving to England hadn’t been such a good idea. She had distanced herself from all of her friends, and the drug use had increased along with the loneliness and isolation. Or she needed to be alone to take the drugs. Or both.
When I entered, I found her crying in her bathtub. She had a black eye and a bloody nose—she’d fallen while high. She was sobbing and clearly felt ashamed. She’d told Michael to take my sisters out so that they wouldn’t see her face.
This became a theme in my family: They would do things behind my back. I was kind of the narc—my mom always said I was too harsh on Ben or too harsh on her, but I think it was simply that I was the only one who wasn’t an addict—so I was the downer.
After I left Scientology, I started upping the pills. I thought, Oh my God, I’ve lost my religion and it’s been my only pavement to walk on, my replacement family. Everything was gone—all my friends, everything. I knew it was over. And I was so devastated, I used the drugs as a coping mechanism.
It escalated to eighty pills a day.
I just wanted to check out. It was too painful to be sober.
I took a tour bus all the way from Nashville to L.A. We drove because I wanted to do cocaine the whole time and couldn’t if I was on an airplane.
Bending doctors, anyone, to her will was a celebrity phenomenon that she was very aware of. She often told me that the issue with her father, and with Michael Jackson, was that everyone around them always just said yes—but of course she didn’t see the issue the same way when she was doing it herself.
