Lisa Marie Presley has died of a heart attack at the age of 54. /
Married four times, including Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage, her tragic life was marked by drugs, the suicide of a son, Scientology and economic problems.
History always repeats itself tragically. Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977 at his Graceland mansion of a heart attack. He was 42 years old, with a heart twice its normal size, a long list of heart diseases and a body full of drugs. His only daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, has also died this Thursday as a result of cardiac arrest. The singer, ex-wife of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage, was found in the room of her house in Calabasas (California), 50 kilometers from Los Angeles, by one of her employees. Her ex-husband Danny Keough tried to revive her with cardiac massage, and emergency services injected her with epinephrine to no avail. She was transferred still with signs of life to the county hospital, where she died.
“Priscilla Presley and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of our beloved Lisa Marie,” a representative of the Presley clan said. “We are deeply grateful for everyone’s support, love and prayers, while asking for privacy during this very difficult time.” Lisa Marie Presley has been a member of showbiz aristocracy since she was born in Memphis in 1968, just nine months after Elvis married Priscilla Presley. “It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us. She was the most passionate, strong and affectionate woman I have ever met », her 77-year-old mother has fired her.
Elvis and Priscilla Presley, with their only daughter, Lisa Marie, born in Memphis in 1968.
Both mother and daughter were last seen in public last Tuesday at the Golden Globes ceremony at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. They accompanied Austin Butler, the Californian actor who stars in ‘Elvis’ by Baz Luhrmann and who won the Golden Globe that night for best dramatic actor. «I was quite young, but I still remember the energy of my father. Austin nailed it », he declared in an interview when asked about a film that he has had the support of the family and that he has once again brought the figure of the king of rock to the fore. Lisa Marie was nine years old when she watched her father die, leaning on the toilet in her bedroom at Graceland, while the singer’s then-girlfriend, Ginger Alden, tried to revive him. “His body was in the house for three days and there was something strangely comforting about it that made it not necessarily real to me,” she later told Time magazine.
Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley leave their footprints at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood on June 21, 2022 to coincide with the theatrical release of ‘Elvis.’ /
Lisa Marie Presley was last Sunday at Graceland, which since Elvis’ death has become a place of pilgrimage for devotees of the musician. She did it every January 8 to commemorate the birthday of the man who popularized rock all over the planet. After Elvis and Priscilla divorced in 1973 after five years together, she lived with her mother although she frequently visited her father. The long shadow of hers always hung over an artistic career in which the composer Linda Thompson, ex-girlfriend of Elvis, and Glenn Ballard, the usual producer of Alanis Morisette, were instrumental. In 2003 she debuted with the album ‘To Whom It May Concern’, which reached fifth position on Billboard, and two years later came ‘Now What’, produced by T-Bone Burnett. His third album, ‘Storm & Grace’, would take until 2012. His greatest success was, of course, one of his father’s mythical songs, ‘In the Ghetto’, sung as a duet with him thanks to the magic of studio recording, which in 2007 reached number one on iTunes downloads in just one week. Likewise, her song ‘People’ sounds on the soundtrack of the series ‘The Walking Dead’.
She was married to Michael Jackson for two years.
However, Lisa Marie appeared more in the roles for her marriages and personal tragedies than for her artistic side. In 1988, she married musician Danny Keough, a member of her band, in Morocco, with whom she always had a good relationship, to the point that she was at her house the night he died. They had two children, Riley Keough and Benjamin Storm Keough. The first is a successful actress, filmmaker and model. She acted in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ and series like ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ and ‘Riverdale’. He has been the image of Louis Vuitton and Paco Rabanne, appeared in a Justin Timberlake video and last year won the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival for his first behind-the-scenes work, ‘War Pony’, co-directed with Gina Gammell. Her second son, Benjamin Storm, shot himself in 2020 at age 27 at her mother’s mansion in Calabasas after years of drug addiction and depression. She bore a strong physical resemblance to her grandfather and she kept a low media profile throughout her life, although in 2009 she was signed to a five million dollar record deal with Universal.
Video.
Video clip of the song ‘Where No One Stands Alone’, in which Lisa Marie Presley sings with her father, with familiar images from when she was a child.
After her divorce from Keough, Lisa Marie Presley surprised the world by marrying Michael Jackson in the Dominican Republic in 1994, a marriage that barely lasted two years. The two had met at an Elvis concert in 1975, when she was 6 and Michael was a 16-year-old. The singer faced abuse allegations during their relationship. Lisa Marie confessed to Oprah Winfrey that the drugs taken by the author of ‘Thriller’ were key in their separation, although they remained good friends until Jackson’s death in 2009. The singer’s third marriage lasted three months, which took allege “irreconcilable differences” after marrying actor Nicolas Cage in Hawaii. Her fourth husband was her guitarist and producer, Michael Lockwood, with whom she had twin daughters, Harper and Finley, born in 2008. Danny Keough was best man at the wedding. The divorce came in 2016, also alleging irreconcilable differences.
Her marriage to actor Nicolas Cage lasted three months.
Lisa Marie Presley’s biography would be incomplete without her relationship with the Church of Scientology, of whom she was one of its most popular and fervent followers. She and Lisa Marie were introduced to this sect by John Travolta. She raised her children with her first husband in this creed, to the point of going to live near the Scientology Celebrity Center in Clearwater (Florida), next to the actress Kirstie Alley. In 2002, she testified with businessman Neil Bush, the brother of former President George Bush, against the medication of children with mental disorders, a practice that Scientology rejects. In 2005, Presley and her mother attended the opening of the controversial Hollywood museum Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. In 2012 she announced her final distancing from Scientology. “I was starting to slowly self-destruct. They were taking my soul, my money, my everything,” she lamented.
Lisa Marie Presley with her four children in a 2019 Instagram photo, a year before Benjamin Storm committed suicide.
Drugs were also part of Lisa Marie Presley’s diet throughout her life. According to her divorce documents from Michael Lockwood, she took about 80 opioid pills a day that she mixed with alcohol, so she would go up to 11 days without sleep. She argued that her addiction began when a doctor prescribed opioids for pain after the delivery of her daughters. Her acrimonious divorce with her fourth husband, whom she accused of possession of child pornography, also brought her financial status to light. The legal custody of the twins passed into the hands of Grandma Priscilla, who despite the fact that Elvis only left her an inheritance of 85,000 dollars, has managed to build an empire around her figure, resurrecting Graceland and maintaining a heritage valued at 80 million dollars. Five years ago, Lisa Marie claimed that she had only 10,000 euros left in the bank and that she had debts of 16 million. In 2018, a judge ordered her to pay $100,000 in legal fees to her ex-husband.