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.

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.

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.

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.

There were so many times that I found him down on the floor or unable to control his body very well. It was the barbiturates.

We were watching the news, and then it hit me, hard. My life as I knew it was completely over. It’s your greatest childhood fear: When you love someone, you don’t want to lose them. It’s fucking terror and it tortures you. Most kids have that worry. Whenever I told my dad I was scared he was going to die, he’d say, “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere.” But he did. —

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 don’t remember how long the viewing went on, but there was so much drama. I held it all in. I would think, Wow, look at that person, they’re totally losing their shit. Then I would go grieve in my room where nobody could see me, or at night before I’d go to sleep. I didn’t know what to do with my grief. I would do stuff that would distract me, which would work for a little while, but if I had a minute, I would lose it.

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.

So now we were members of the Church of Scientology. 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.

I know my dad spoiled me, but my mom did the opposite. 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. 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.

All I wanted to do was drugs—weed and coke mainly. I wasn’t addicted to one particular substance. I liked it all. I wanted to get my hands on anything I could swallow, snort, eat, sniff, you name it. I never ran into heroin, though. Never was in the same room with it, thank God. (That would happen later.) My main purpose in life was just to find a score. I soon settled into a heavy metal phase, dying my hair all black, or bleaching it, and drugs.

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.

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. When I saw him, all I wanted to do was have sex or make out. It’s all I could think about.

I didn’t know he’d set up the photo shoot. He later denied it, but my mom told me it was him. When I found out, I swallowed twenty Valium, but I also made sure that somebody saw me. I wasn’t that serious about my suicide attempt. I went to the local hospital, and they gave me ipecac to make me throw up and that was the end of that. But I was really devastated. That was my first big love and first big betrayal.

She chased him for two years. There was no shame in her. But he was just afraid of her fame, was running from the phenomenon of her—he knew she would be his destruction. He was not afraid of much when he was younger, but she scared the living shit out of him. He felt like a minnow in an ocean of sharks. He was just a bass player. This was way too big.

That second time, I didn’t know what to do, and neither did Danny. I ended up having an abortion. And it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I was devastated. I did it and we both cried. We were both destroyed and not long after that we fell apart and broke up. I couldn’t live with myself.

My mom subsequently told me every detail of timing her ovulation for that moment in Aruba. And she absolutely meant to trap my dad.

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.

I think Michael got right at my mom’s core. She wanted to fix him, and she felt he was misunderstood, a feeling she was very familiar with. My father was devastated. After the divorce from my mom, he traveled for three months, first around Italy on a boat with his friends and then down to Mexico.

As for child molestation, I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had. I didn’t want to be on the front lines, didn’t want to make any kind of headlines. I grew up avoiding it and hating the press.

Gladys loved my dad so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. And then 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.

After the divorce from Michael, my mom started having panic attacks. This is why she took us out of L.A. and to Florida to begin with. They were so severe that she was in and out of the hospital. Even in Florida she had to put aluminum foil over the windows so the paparazzi couldn’t take photos of her. She had her gallbladder removed and the mercury taken out of her teeth. But nothing helped because it wasn’t just physical. She was having a sort of mental breakdown.

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.

My mom would pick us up at the end of the day, but she didn’t really have a lot of interest in our education. We didn’t have to be sick—we could just tell her we didn’t want to go to school, and she’d say, “Great! You’re staying home and hanging out with me.”

A couple of years before I was born, Priscilla had a second child, a boy named Navarone. Priscilla was a new mom again, and my mom was a new mom, so they spent a lot of time together because they both had little kids. It became a point of understanding between them, a new start, a burying of the hatchet—though I know my mom was a bit jealous of Navarone, too, because here was this little boy that Priscilla just adored.

In October 2000, my mother met Nicolas Cage at a birthday party for Johnny Ramone, and on August 10, 2002, they got married in Hawaii. I was thirteen. When she met Nic she had been in a serious relationship for two years with a musician named John Oszajca.

After 108 days, her hurricane of a marriage to Nic Cage was over. In that interview with Diane Sawyer, my mom said of the relationship, “We were so dramatic, the two of us, that we couldn’t stay contained.”

My mother desperately wanted a normal life, and Michael Lockwood felt like her last shot at it. It seemed that in Michael she felt she’d found a person who could help her stop running from stability.

My mom desperately wanted more children. She did many rounds of IVF, and eventually she got pregnant. During her pregnancy with my sisters, she rented a house in Montecito as the first chapter of a sort of fairy-tale life she wanted to create for herself with her new babies.

This is one of the most heartbreaking things about the last decade of her life—being a mother was the most important thing to her, she had really wanted another chance at it, and yet her addiction showed up. 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.

My mother had started by taking opioids for pain after her C-section, and then she progressed to taking them to sleep. She had turned forty in February 2008; my sisters were born in October that same year (I would turn twenty the following May). After her brief stint with drugs as a teenager she had never touched them again. She drank, but, like she said, as an adult she wouldn’t even take Advil or Tylenol. Throughout my life she would often say, “If I tried drugs, it would be over for me.”

It escalated to eighty pills a day. It took more and more to get high, and I honestly don’t know when your body decides it can’t deal with it anymore. But it does decide that at some point.

My mom came up with all kinds of reasons why she didn’t want to get off drugs, but I think one of the most poignant ones was her feeling of shame about becoming an addict with two young children. Her parenting standards were so high that I don’t think she could ever truly get sober knowing what she had put my sisters through. The one thing that she had always really prided herself on was that she was a great mother. She said, “My music wasn’t that successful, I didn’t finish high school, I’m not beautiful, I’m not good enough—but I’m a great mother.”

When she arrived in L.A. from Nashville, Mom’s head and face were twice their normal size. She went straight from the emergency room to the ICU—she was in heart failure. It was chaos, and in the midst of it, she told Michael Lockwood she was leaving him. It took about a week for her to start to recover.

I was more physically incapacitated than my parents. I had always been the responsible one, in charge and taking control of pretty much everything. But I couldn’t this time. My parents ended up doing all of the arrangements—choosing his coffin, all that. I think they needed to stay busy.

There would have been so much room for him to try to heal his pain. He hadn’t even scratched the surface of his struggles. He hadn’t tried and failed; he simply hadn’t tried yet. He hadn’t gone to therapy, not even once. And he certainly hadn’t attempted suicide before—no overdose, nothing. No cry for help. The truth is that he hadn’t recognized the depth of his depression until it was already too late, and he went straight for a gun. The finality of that was so deeply shattering and confusing.

When Ben died, I thought it would be a matter of hours until my mother relapsed. But she surprised me and remained completely sober to honor him. She really wanted to get her life together and help others somehow. She wanted to be of service. But she was too broken.

I have never been angry with my brother for doing what he did. I feel a tremendous empathy for him, and a profound sadness that he felt, in that moment, that dying was his only solution. I know in any death there’s a feeling of responsibility in the ones left behind, but with suicide, the guilt is deeper. And because he was my little brother, I feel a sense of personal responsibility, like I failed in my role as his big sister. Of course, my parents felt this even more than I did.

I was in the most pain I’ve ever been in in my life, but I also had the deeply transformative experience of surrendering to that avalanche of pain and not trying to avoid the grief. This was a huge lesson for me—the only way out is through. You must allow pain in to free yourself from it.

My daughter, Tupelo, was born in August 2022, and the first week after Tupelo’s birth, my mom would come over and do the night shift so Ben and I could sleep, just as I had done for her when she’d had the twins. My mom instantly became obsessed with Tupelo—she felt she had a special connection with her, so she’d come over to my house in Silver Lake and take her away to be alone with her. I’d watch through the window as they’d go off to sit in the garden—my mom would call it her fairy garden, just as I had called our garden in Hidden Hills a fairy garden for Ben Ben when we were little.

How do I heal? By helping people. One kid wrote to Riley and said, “I didn’t kill myself last night because of what you said it would do to my family and those that are left behind. So thank you. I’ll find some other way.” That helped me. That brought me up. You’re going to have to find something that’s probably nothing that you’ve done before, and that’s going to be your purpose now, like it or not. And you have to follow through. That’s what I care about. If I’m honoring my Ben Ben, and if I’m helping other people by sharing the experience I had with him, with addiction or suicide, that feels really authentic to me. That’s where I’m at. —

I always thought, Why does everybody always say I look sad? And now I get it. I don’t think my spark will ever come back, to be perfectly honest. Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was. The other day somebody said, “I know you better than anyone,” and I said, “No, you don’t. You don’t have a fucking clue who I am. Because I don’t even know who the fuck I am anymore.” The real me, whoever I had been, detonated completely a year and a half ago.

maybe people will say, “Holy shit, I can’t believe you survived that. I can’t believe you’re still alive.” When I tell people my stories, they tell me I’m strong. But that makes me crazy because I think, What’s it for, though? Throw stuff at me and I’ll get through it, but for what? What does the strength matter? It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not strong. I am not. But I am still here. I didn’t lose my mind, even though I wanted to. And I could have.