2024-10-11 15:34:00
Elvis Presley’s daughter dictated his memoirs. The dying woman was helped by her daughter Riley Keough. Lisa Marie Presley reveals why her cold mother was never much help to her. And why her short-lived husband Michael Jackson could only confess his love in the dark.
What do you expect from a celebrity’s biography? The matter is soon explained to the reader: some gossip perhaps and intuitions about something hidden as well as the hope of recognizing oneself in the demigods of Promilimpus. And Olympus is the category we’re talking about when we talk about Elvis Presley. But the author’s expectations are probably more interesting than the reader’s. What makes someone who has spent their life fighting for privacy willingly open the door?
Lisa Marie Presley gives her answer to this question at the end of her biography: she wants to help people who have experienced pain similar to hers. Show them they are not alone. And his memoirs, which have now been published posthumously, talk a lot about pain. Presley could no longer hold the book in his hands; she was already too ill and died while it was being written. So her daughter Riley Keough, who listened to her mother’s recordings as she lay in bed, created a book of Lisa Marie’s memories and her own. The biography is told from the dual perspective of mother and daughter.
The lives of the Presley family have already been examined from the inside. In 1985, Priscilla published her memoirs, which Sofia Coppola made into a film last year. The film stayed true to the memories of Elvis’ wife and showed the music icon as a loving but also short-tempered husband, who sometimes declared his undying love for her and sometimes threw chairs at his mistress. Now Lisa tells Marie, who lost her father in early childhood. Her father’s death is at the beginning of the book and, as she describes it, determines the rest of her life. The relationship with her father was the most important for her and his death marked the end of her comfort.
Fittingly, the sections from Lisa Marie’s point of view read very juvenilely, at least in translation. They are simple sentence constructions peppered with filler words and expletives. This suggests that some of her audio recordings were taken in their entirety because she could no longer take part in the editing process. This makes the mother’s voice in the book sound more childish than Riley Keough’s. It is the story of the eternal daughter.
Childhood without rules
In the first part, Presley describes his childhood growing up in the Wild West: “Once the gates closed, Graceland was like its own town, with its own legal system. My father was the police chief and each person had his own rank. There were some laws and rules, but mostly not. That was freedom.” The father often slept until the afternoon, and the friendly mother had other things to do than take care of her daughter. And so Lisa Marie Presley, an elementary school girl, crashed golf carts through fences and threatened to fire the staff if they didn’t comply with one of her wishes.
Presley describes himself as a spoiled only child who, despite his attitude, was plagued by great insecurity. Because his father’s mood was fickle. Presley portrays him as a man of extraordinary charisma and spiritual energy. He was nine years old when he died. From then on, she struggled with what her father left her: global fame and a predisposition for addiction.
The tragedy surrounding Elvis also dates back to a time when the dangers of drugs were still little studied. Just like the topic of therapy. Furthermore, the influence of celebrities on their doctors was so great that they could obtain and have prescribed anything that was prescribed to them. A phenomenon that still exists today, as seen in cases like that of “Friends” actor Matthew Perry.
Lisa Marie Presley, who pursued addiction her entire life, fell into a similar trap. Her money and celebrity allowed her to build a world of her own, full of people who didn’t want to mess with her. So don’t contradict her. Those who did were rare and often found themselves in a similar situation.
Among these Michael Jackson. Presley never seemed to want to hide from fame or just stick to what she was used to. She went from the father of the King of Rock to the husband of the King of Pop. Presley describes her marriage to Michael Jackson as a soulmate alliance. Jackson was romantic and sensitive. When he nervously confessed his love to her, he would turn off the lights and ask her not to look at him. Of course there was also a guitar song.
At the same time, Jackson was also moody and easily offended. Her daughter describes the relationship this way: “My mother always said that she learned to treat people coldly then, she learned it from Michael. The marriage only lasted a short time.” Until Presley began criticizing Jackson’s use of the pill.
Elvis is everywhere
The oversized father haunts Lisa Marie not just as an internal struggle, but in a very real and absurd way. The singer describes scenes at her concerts where she was always peering through the curtain to spot possible Elvis impersonators in the audience. They often sat there. It must have been bizarre to be haunted by caricatures of your late father. She herself would not have wanted to sing Elvis’ songs on stage.
She also wanted to listen to them only in exceptional situations: “When his songs came on the radio, I turned it off however, his father remained the affectionate and loving ideal.” On the other hand, Presley describes his relationship with his mother as distant, especially as a young man.
The trauma Lisa Marie did not survive was the loss of her son Ben. He suffered from depression and shot himself at his mother’s house. After his death, Presley kept his son’s body on dry ice in his home for two months. The slow goodbye helped her come to terms with the loss and not repress it. Her daughter Riley also describes that this time, which seemed morbid to the reader, helped her say goodbye.
The book’s dual narrative style makes these bizarre, sad, yet colorful moments feel real in a special way. Not because the daughter would correct the mother and put things right. But because his versions and those of his father, which he shares, indicate by their very existence that in memories we move in the realm of memories and therefore on unstable ground.
At one point, for example, Keough points out that father and mother remember one of their first nights together very differently. What his mother describes as an evening with a bit of talking and snogging is remembered by his father: “We had a few drinks and fought with each other, throwing things around, and then we knocked over an old cupboard and the we broke up.”
Life in high-fame circles – in a time when, without social media, it was even more mystical than it is today – seems tragic. But life is always just as dazzling or sad as the current situation from which it is told. Lisa Marie Presley recorded her memoirs at a time of loss, that of her son and her health. Perhaps in happier days the tone would have been different. But perhaps, wickedly, it is precisely this hard-to-penetrate tragedy that maintains the mystique surrounding the Presley name, even when secrets are supposedly revealed.
Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough: “From here to the Great Unknown – Von hier ins UngewissAnd”. Penguin Verlag, 240 pages, 24 euros. Translated from English by Sylvia Bieker and Henriette Zeltner-Shane.
Lena Karger doesn’t hear much about Elvis Presley, but when she does, it’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” on a constant loop. You can find your other lyrics Here.
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