WWhat to expect from Lisa Marie Presley's memoir? Some refined, cagey reminiscences dutifully peppered with stories about Elvis, the king of rock'n'roll, who died in 1977 at the age of 42? Instead, it's a warts and all jaw-dropper. Marriages (including Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage). Drugs (Lisa Marie became addicted to opioids after having a caesarean section to deliver her twins). Even before revelations about his son Ben Keough's suicide came out in 2020 (he kept his body in dry ice for two months at his California home). While his actress daughter, Riley Keough (from Daisy Jones & Six), writes that he wants Lisa Marie to emerge from the pages of the memoir as a “three-dimensional character,” and he's not kidding.
Keefe co-wrote the book from in-depth taped interviews with his mother shortly before she died in 2023 at age 54 (of heart failure and small bowel obstruction due to complications from bariatric surgery). Keough's own words appear throughout (in a different font), especially often at the end.
First, we're transported to Presley's childhood in the Memphis, Tennessee mansion of Graceland, an extravagant princess with a hamburger-shaped bed and her eponymous airplane. A daddy's girl, even after Elvis was divorced from his mother Priscilla, he would drive around the grounds in his own golf cart and threaten to fire employees.
Elvis looms large in these passages: taking his daughter on a rollercoaster with a gun in a holster; Shooting snakes in the field. He was a long-time prescription drug addict and Lisa Marie sometimes found him passed out on the floor. She saw Elvis being carried out of Graceland the day he died: “I saw his head, I saw his body, I saw his pajamas, I saw his socks at the bottom of the gurney.” She is nine years old.
What does that do to a child? In the years that followed, he responded with a standard teenage cocktail of cynicism and rebellion: any drugs, bar heroin (“I can swallow, snort, eat, sniff anything I want”); Terrible boyfriends, one of whom organized a paparazzi organization. She had screaming insecurities as the daughter of a “king”. When Presley eventually made music, he resisted the pressure to sound like his father.
She is also not close to her mother. Elvis met Priscilla when he was 14 (“It was a weird time”, writes Lisa Marie, who didn't have sex until her mother was 18). Priscilla emerges from these pages like some southern belle snow queen. After Elvis' death: “It's a two-punch: He's dead and I'm stuck with her.” When they both became scientists, Lisa Marie felt that Priscilla had “dumped” her there. And then there was a truce, but you don't feel a real compromise.
Her healthy relationship was with Riley and Ben's father (Danny Keefe), and they remained lifelong friends. While Cage's union was handled relatively quickly and politely, the mid-'90s marriage to Jackson gets the full honest treatment. He brushes aside accusations of child abuse (“I have never seen such a godly thing. I would have personally killed him”). He told her that he was a virgin (“Madonna also tried to date him once, he said, but nothing happened”) and that he was sexually interested in her (“He said: 'I'm not waiting!'”). Later, Presley began to suspect Jackson, who had drug problems and his own anesthesiologist. She suspects he would have dumped her if he'd had the most coveted children: “He's so controlling and calculating.”
As she succumbs to opioids and goes in and out of rehab, there's more going on. But it's the passages about her son's body that make you wonder if you're hallucinating (“I'd imagine anyone else having their son there would scare the living piss out of me. But not me”) – especially when she shows a tattoo artist showing it on Ben's dead arm. Green of choice.
A perplexing thought arises while reading this. Presley may have been happy doing the tapes, but would she have loved it? All Published? We'll never know. Of course, it's clear that Presley is nothing if not seriously honest. It is remarkable how Keefe pleads with the reader to understand and love like his mother. Ultimately, this is a book built on grief: Lisa Marie Presley's book is for her father and son, but A Daughter is for her mother.
