She's a "singer, songwriter, philanthropist,
mother, and daughter of 'the King'" — yup, Lisa Marie Presley is truly multi-faceted. However,
she's also no stranger to hardship. These are the tragic details about Lisa Marie Presley.
Lisa Marie Presley first experienced tragedy at a very young age. It was August 16, 1977,
when she discovered her father's body on the bathroom floor inside Graceland.
She was only nine years old at the time. His girlfriend,
Ginger Alden, was trying to help, but the first thing Lisa Marie did was call her father's ex,
Linda Thompson. As Thompson told Larry King, she was very close with Lisa, and talked to her
on the phone often. When she answered the phone, she could tell something was awry.
"But she had this desperate tone in her voice. And I thought she was playing,
I thought maybe she was just out of breath. She said, 'My daddy's dead, my daddy's dead.'"
Elvis was battling an addiction to food and prescription drugs and, although Presley was
too young to fully understand, she knew something was wrong. She told Larry King:
"I remember first seeing his stomach and worried to death over that."
Following his passing, Elvis' body remained in Graceland for three days,
but it didn't spook the young Lisa Marie. She remembered:
"There was something very oddly comforting about that, which made it not necessarily real to me."
In 1994, Lisa Marie Presley married Michael Jackson in a top-secret ceremony.
According to People, she declared:
"I am very much in love with Michael, I dedicate my life to being his wife."
In 1996, they called it quits. Explaining why the union dissolved,
Presley told Oprah Winfrey in 2010:
"There was a very profound point in the marriage when he had to make a decision:
Was it the drugs and the sort of vampires, or me? And he pushed me away."
Clarifying that "vampires" were "sycophants,"
she highlighted the similarities between her husband and late father, saying:
"The one thing that correlates with Michael and with my father on this subject is that
they had the luxury of creating whatever reality around them they wanted to create."
Years later, in 2019, Jackson's personal assistant, Scott Shaffer, told The Sun he, quote,
"noticed things kind of going downhill between them because he wouldn't tell her things — like
where he was going." He believes "the final straw" came when Jackson collapsed on stage
while filming an HBO special sometime around 1995. When Presley arrived at the hospital,
he gave her some time with him and then asked her to leave. Shaffer said:
"At that point, she'd just had enough and that was literally
when she called her lawyer to start divorce proceedings."
Lisa Marie Presley "loved taking care of" Michael Jackson. In fact, she told Oprah
Winfrey in 2010 it was, quote, "the highest point of my life." Unfortunately, things took
a turn for the worse when Presley realized she couldn't help Jackson deal with his demons. When
the pop superstar died in 2009, Presley opened up their marriage on her MySpace blog, sharing
how difficult it was to watch Jackson suffer from addiction in the same way her father had.
Placing much of the blame on herself, she wrote:
"The person I failed to help is being transferred right now to
the L.A. County Coroner's office for his autopsy."
She also noted that 14 years earlier, she, along with Jackson's family, were,
quote, "worried that this would be the outcome,"
Presley admitted that all she wanted during their marriage was to save him from an untimely death.
Presley also revealed how, following their divorce, she spent a lot of time
thinking about what she could have done differently. Ultimately, she came to
realize that leaving him was a decision she had to make for her own well-being. She said:
"In trying to save him, I almost lost myself. I became very ill and emotionally/spiritually
exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from
the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him."
You might assume that being Elvis' daughter would entitle Lisa Marie Presley to a large sum of cash,
but as of February 2018, her net worth had dwindled to a mere $14,000.
At least, that's what Presley claimed in a lawsuit against her former business manager,
Barry Siegel. According to Radar, she accused him of diminishing her $100 million
fortune through his, quote, "reckless and negligent mismanagement and self serving-ambition"
and sued him for "breach of trust, breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, constructive fraud
negligent, negligent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment and accounting."
According to The Blast, Presley said in the suit that Siegel sold off 85% of her interest in
Elvis Presley Enterprises, leaving her with over $500,000 in credit card debt. And that's not even
scratching the surface. As People reported, her overall debt was a whopping $16.7 million. Siegel
denied such claims and countersued Presley in June 2019, alleging that she wasted away her own money
and that she owed him $800,000 in fees for all of the work he did before being fired in 2016.
Lisa Marie Presley has a penchant for headline-making weddings.
In August 2002, she married Nicolas Cage in a top-secret Hawaiian ceremony. However,
by November 2002, the couple had filed for divorce. She admitted:
"I'm sad about this, but we shouldn't have been married in the first place."
The following year, during a May 2003 interview with Larry King,
Presley explained what went wrong, saying:
"It looked attractive like I could be equal. Similar situations, similar backgrounds. So we
connected, we had a great connection. [...] we're sort of these gypsy spirited, you know, tyrannical
pirates. And one pirate marries another, they will sink the ship [...] is what it comes down to."
Asked how soon after the ceremony she had realized her mistake, Presley told King:
"We'd been together for two years before we got married, so — it was one of those
things where you're marrying hoping that you're going to either stabilize it or it's going to,
you know, accentuate all that was going on prior to what was problematic.
So it kind of did the latter, that's all."
In 2003, at the age of 35, Lisa Marie Presley finally followed in her father's footsteps and
released her debut album. Titled "To Whom It May Concern," the record featured 11 tracks and
peaked at number 5 on the Billboard 200 chart. Its first single, "Lights Out," touched on,
quote, "the overwhelming burden of being Elvis' daughter," according to the track's co-writer,
Glen Ballard. But despite Presley putting her heart on the line,
critics took her personal approach to the album to task. Slant, for example,
found that "To Whom It May Concern" had too much "baggage" and criticized the fact that, quote,
"sentiments get jumbled in her grand effort to make an emotional or socio-political statement."
According to Ballard, who opened up about the recording process
nearly two decades later in 2021, such negative feedback was exactly what Presley
was afraid of. According to the songwriter, lyricist, and music producer, he "absolutely"
sensed what the outlet called the pressure Presley felt to live up to her dad's legacy.
Of the recording process, he noted:
"It wasn't easy and I'm not so sure, all that fun for her. But we certainly tried to make it fun."
However, Ballard added that, in the end, it was an important experience for Presley. He said:
"I think it was a cathartic thing for her to do."
In a 2003 Paper interview, Lisa Marie Presley admitted she began to mix, quote, "cocaine,
sedatives, pot and drinking" at a young age because she "just couldn't be sober." In 2005,
she mentioned in a Biography special that drugs were not an issue for her anymore.
"I haven't touched a drug since any of that. I am
thirty seven years old right now. Can we get over this?"
However, her 2016 divorce from Michael Lockwood brought her secret struggle into the open.
According to a 2017 deposition obtained by Radar,
Presley admitted to excessive cocaine use during the last three years of her marriage,
revealing she was also taking opiods. She said that she went to rehab numerous times. She
added that she, quote, "didn't mix the pills and alcohol until like the last two years."
In August 2016, US Weekly confirmed that Presley sought help for her addiction to prescription
pills at LA's Hills Treatment Center. According to Radar, she returned to rehab in late 2018.
Presley shared more on her opioid addiction in a 2019 foreword for The United States of Opioids,
writing that it started in her forties:
"I was recovering after the [2008] birth of my daughters,
Vivienne and Finley, when a doctor prescribed me opioids for pain. It only took a short-term
prescription of opioids in the hospital for me to feel the need to keep taking them."
Noting she's "grateful to be alive today," Presley added she's thankful, quote, "to have four
beautiful children who have given me a sense of purpose that has carried me through dark times."
Lisa Marie Presley suffered unspeakable heartbreak yet again when, in July 2020, 27-year-old Benjamin
Keough, her only son and second child with first husband Danny Keough, died by suicide. Presley's
manager confirmed the tragic news, saying that his client was, quote, "heartbroken, inconsolable and
beyond devastated. She adored that boy." While he wouldn't offer any details about the circumstances
surrounding Keough's death, the L.A. County Medical Examiner-Coroner later confirmed that
Presley's son had died by suicide at their home — no one else was present at the time.
While Presley hasn't spoken out about the loss, her mother,
Priscilla, got candid on Facebook. She shared:
"These are some of the darkest days of my family's life. The shock of
losing Ben has been devastating. Each day I wake up I pray it will get better. Then,
I think of my daughter and the pain she is going through as she was a doting mother."
Presley's oldest daughter and Keough's sister, Riley,
also opened her heart on Instagram, revealing:
"Mornings are the hardest. I forget you're gone.
I can't cry because of the fear that I will never stop [...] I hope you give me strength
to endure the giant hole you've left in my heart. I guess this is true heartbreak."
Following the tragic loss of her son, Lisa Marie Presley decided to
leave the $1.8 million mansion — and its heart-breaking memories — behind.
According to The Sun, Presley and her family had been living in the home since 2017,
but had temporarily moved out into a Beverly Hills hotel due to mold problems. It was during this
time, while the house stood empty, that Benjamin returned on his own and took his own life. While
Presley was forced to visit the premises to speak with police, when everything was taken care of,
she left for good — and has no plans of going back. A source told the outlet:
"They were already dealing with the mold problem and now Lisa doesn't want to return,
she is too distressed and doesn't ever want to relive that morning.
She had been looking for a rental while staying at the hotel,
going back and forth to the house only to sort things out, and she's now found somewhere."
Elaborating further on the matter, the insider added:
"It's the right place for the family to hole up for a while and grieve
privately as they navigate this awful time in their lives."
After a decade of marriage to Michael Lockwood, Lisa Marie Presley filed for divorce in 2016,
and a years-long legal battle — which just kept getting nastier — ensued. While Presley accused
her ex of everything from stealing "millions" to sexual misconduct, claiming he had "disturbing
photos" of their twin daughters, Lockwood fired back with accusations that Presley was, quote,
"paranoid and hallucinatory," taking as many as 80 opiate pills a day, and using their kids as "bait"
to discredit him. What's more, in February 2018, Presley was ordered to pay Lockwood's
$100,000 legal fees. Jump to December 2019, and he was ordered to pay her $140,000 legal fees.
Money was a major point of contention for the exes, with Lockwood arguing that he didn't
fully understand the couple's 2017 postnuptial agreement — in which they agreed their assets
would remain separate — when he signed it. But in August 2018, a judge ruled the postnup was
valid, and Lockwood seemed to turn his attention to the custody of their twin girls.
In July 2020, right after Benjamin Keough's death, Lockwood filed a motion asking for sole custody,
claiming he was worried Lisa Marie would relapse and jeopardize the "safety of the children."
It wasn't until May 2021, nearly five years after they split, that US Weekly confirmed they were
officially divorced. However, they had yet to settle such details as, quote, "child support,
financial disclosures, alleged misappropriation of properties, and attorneys' fees and costs."
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).