Lisa Marie Presley Memoir Recap/Discussion: Chapters 1 & 2
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ONTD Book Club time!
Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown was released on Tuesday and both book and audiobook are bestsellers. I wholly recommend the book/audio book but if you have no intentions to read/listen but are still nosy, I'm here to help you out chapter by chapter (if that's okay with the mods)!
Lisa Marie’s memoir was 85% done and spread across 16 tapes when she passed away in January 2023. The book consists of Lisa's recollections, daughter Riley Keough's assessments, memories and clarifications, as well as occasional input from Danny Keough, Lisa Marie’s first husband and best friend (and Riley's father).
First post is going to be the first two chapters. I'm not including every story, just the general tale. Trigger warning just to be safe.
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Chapter One: Upstairs at Graceland
• Riley opens up the book with the excerpt People magazine posted. She does say that her mother didn't get the chance to talk about certain topics and she would do her best to fill it in.
• Lisa was able to make her father laugh and their connection was deeper than Lisa Marie led on previously in interviews. She also feared him and wanted his approval on everything, any criticism of his would devastate her.
• Priscilla told Lisa Marie she thought about miscarrying her by falling off her horse because she didn't want pregnancy weight as Elvis' wife. She wanted Elvis' undivided attention and Lisa Marie always felt Priscilla didn't want her. Lisa Marie believed in energy in utero and felt Priscilla didn't like her and she didn't have great maternal instincts. Lisa says bluntly, "That might be what's wrong with me."
• Riley remembers her mother felt she was broken, unlovable and not beautiful. Riley thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world and deeply misunderstood.
• The Presley family has a history of having young mothers. All the women were missing "something," according to Riley. Lisa Marie wanted to be like Priscilla.
• The Presley family was poor and Graceland was the "physical manifestation of the American dream." Poverty meant it was Elvis’ responsibility to take care of his family and he did as expected. Riley says she feels her ancestors there, all the laughter and tears in the house.
• Riley and her brother Benjamin grew up going to Graceland on the holidays. After the visitor tours were done, they had a run of the place. They would sleep in Elvis’ room and her mom would flip through Elvis’ book, looking for answers to questions regarding a meaning in life. Riley tried to think of who to call regarding questions of her visits to Graceland with her mother and brother before remembering there was no one left to call [Benjamin committed suicide in 2020, Lisa would pass away in 2023].
• The upstairs at Graceland only holds Elvis’ and Lisa Marie’s bedrooms and Lisa Marie considered it a sanctuary. Her grandfather Vernon was stricter than her father and she wasn't close to him, although she wished she had been. She didn't like authority.
• Lisa Marie remembered a time her father shut down a pet store because she wanted a pet. Every member of Elvis’ crew the Memphis Mafia got a pet that day.
• A lot of people feared Elvis but Lisa Marie found him funny because she knew him (she also found him always carrying a gun funny). She remembers her father having fleeting bursts of rage but also says he didn't have an anger problem. She muses her father's self-destructive tendencies worsened after his mother Gladys- whom he was incredibly close to- died. She remembered one burst of rage happening because he needed a fix before they went to an amusement park a week before he died.
• Lisa Marie recalled Graceland having very few rules. She and her friends would race and wreck golf carts, and her dad and his friends would shoot firecrackers at each other. She remembered at four years old threatening to fire a cook because the woman refused to bake her a chocolate cake. She would be summoned to see Elvis and talk to him and she loved those calls. Her father loved to have fun and wanted everyone to have fun with him.
• Riley remembers for years during holidays her mother having the staff make what she had with her father as a child and it became tradition to ride the golf carts. Her mother hosted Billy Idol at Graceland and accidentally flung Idol off the back of her golf cart.
• Lisa Marie knew how much her father loved and adored her and the feeling was mutual, she hated leaving her father to go back to Los Angeles to her mother. She calls leaving Memphis for California a true emotional trauma for her. Her father would call her at all times of the night just to talk. Her father always wanted her to sing so she did it to please him. There's a brief correlation of Lisa's relationship with Elvis to Elvis’s relationship with his mother.
• Lisa talks about the crowds of fans that would wait outside Graceland for a glimpse of Elvis. She would yell obscenities at them, take their money and steal/destroy their cameras. She isn't proud of her actions during this recollection.
• She had a Japanese nanny who took amazing care of her and wrote her letters and sent holiday cards until the day she died. She would scream and cry when they would drop Yuki off at her home, she didn't want to be away from her. Riley remembers how at twenty years old she watched how Lisa interacted with a fan at a Graceland vigil, an older woman who was there every year. She felt her mother was searching for a parental figure.
• Lisa Marie loved attending Elvis’s concerts and never felt anything like that. She however did not like the attention on her, she just liked basking in his fame with him. On the other hand, Riley muses that if Elvis wasn't in the right place at the right time, the family would have built furniture in Mississippi, her mom certainly would have been in jail, it was a game of chance.
• Elvis would take Lisa out of school on a whim to hang out and Lisa looked forward to that black car that would come get her. Later, that car pulling up would signify death as she was alerted of other family members’ passings.
• Elvis never spoke badly of Priscilla because he didn't want Lisa to have a negative opinion of her. Lisa says Elvis and Priscilla had a lot of love and friendship between them and they did a great job of having a united front.
• Lisa had a lonely life in California with her mother. She wasn't alone but she was lonely and music was what saved her. Her Snoopy doll was her best friend.
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Chapter Two: He's Gone
• Lisa Marie had anxiety about her father dying and would ask him to not die. She recalled near the end he would be unsteady or find him passed out, one time finding him passed out in water in the bathroom. Her father would be out of it, only gaining lucidity upon seeing her.
• Lisa Marie remembered her maternal grandparents thinking she was nothing special and found the jolt of being adored by her dad to that and having to be “de-braticized” to be awful. Priscilla had the same chilly personality as her own mother and her grandmother. Lisa remembered her grandmother stealing her fancy compact and perfume that she loved and snapping at Lisa that she didn't see anything when she asked about it.
• Lisa felt Linda Thompson really cared about her and her father and she loved her back, so much so that her father didn't tell her when they broke up. She didn't mind Ginger Alden but she didn't like her, nobody did.
• Elvis’ tumultuous relationship with Ginger shaped how Lisa Marie presented her partners to her children, and put her children before her own partners. If Riley and Benjamin didn't like them, they were gone and they weren't allowed to say anything negative to her children.
• On the afternoon of Elvis’ death, nine year old Lisa had woken up in a sudden panic. Joe Esposito told her that her daddy was sick, and she ran into his bedroom. She remembered being carried out of the chaos screaming when she saw her father on the floor. She remembers seeing his feet on the stretcher.
• Lisa lit up a cigarette as everyone waited for word on her father, Ginger has time to get her hair done, and it was her grandfather's wailing that alerted her of her father's death. Elvis was 42 years old. She recalls staff and entourage stealing Elvis’ personal possessions before he was even pronounced dead, and those items are still being auctioned off to this day.
• Lisa recalled anger being her first emotion, before the grief. She knew life as she knew it was over and was upset that her mother was flying in from California, calling it an invasion.
• Lisa felt happy when Elvis’ body was brought back to Graceland, only to experience fans wailing, fainting and screaming in grief at his funeral over the loss of the performer Elvis Presley. The spectacle made her bury her own grief for her father Elvis. She would sneak down to his coffin to hold his hand and talk to him. The grief over her father's death never went away, even into adulthood. She always kept her watch on Memphis time.
• She felt “stuck” with Priscilla and her mother took her to Europe as a distraction, the paparazzi always finding them. She remembered her life changing completely, her mother putting her in a ritzy school, then putting her in a French school when she had a French boyfriend. She felt like her mother was trying to get rid of her. Her mother would threaten to take away trips to Memphis to get her to behave, which worked. When in Memphis, her grandfather and mother wouldn't allow her back into her bedroom at Graceland.
• Lisa Marie became numb to death and trauma as the Presley side began to die off and Memphis became a place for funerals instead of paradise. Riley recalls walking into her mother's room and finding her drunk and crying, listening to her father's music. Lisa never listened to Elvis sober or talked about her trauma.
• Lisa didn't choose to listen to Elvis sober until her twin daughters were young, when Riley was twenty-two. Riley says her mother didn't actually begin to process her trauma until the last years of her life and only then actually uttered the word “trauma.” Riley remembers feeling angry at Elvis for leaving her mother, and hearing Elvis music made her feel her mother's anguish.
• Lisa Marie says while her mother sent her away a lot, she was also great at birthdays. At one of these birthdays, John Travolta was there and introduced Priscilla and Lisa Marie to Scientology and they became members. Lisa felt Priscilla dumped her off at the scientology center a lot so she wouldn't have to deal with her. Lisa Marie felt scientology actually helped her in her youth and the organization felt radical, attracting cool and artistic people.
• Lisa Marie says her mother was worried about her being spoiled, although Lisa Marie disagreed that she was spoiled. Lisa felt Priscilla saw her as a trophy. Lisa got more nannies and chefs to take care of her as Priscilla went off traveling with her boyfriends, and she became close with the workers, as well as Priscilla's sister, her aunt.
• Lisa Marie says she has her mom's “chilly thing” and found it hard to make friends, which was made even harder when kids felt competitive or intimidated.
• Lisa Marie recalled having dreams of Elvis that lasted until 1992, when her son Benjamin was born. She would tell her father to stop before he ODs, has a heart attack, and dies and he would smile and say “darling, it's already happened.”
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Next up, chapter three.
Source: me and my handy dandy book and audible account, pics: one, two, three, four