🎵 Lisa Marie Presley's Tragic Story

Lisa Marie is reading 'From Here to the Great Unknown' by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jersey and Amanda jam Nation. Well, I was reading this book.
We've interviewed Lisa Marie Presley before and found her engagingly
funny and warm and surprisingly charming. Did you agree with that? Yeah,
very much. Yeah, And so I've been reading this book.
This is bits of a memoir she set out to
write that she recorded bits for and then when she
passed away, her daughter, the actress Riley Keo, has taken over.

(00:24):
And there's bits from Lisa Marie and bits from Riley,
and it's called From Here to the Great Unknown, a memoir.
I just thought i'd read out a few bits and pieces.
Such an insight into her life. She talks about how
she says my mom meaning Priscilla. So this is Lisa
Marie saying, my mom was an Air Force brat. She
met my dad at fourteen, and her parents allowed it.
It was a different time. Back then, women were admitted

(00:47):
to the hospital while they were in labor. They'd get
knocked out and wake up with a baby. She went
into hospital looking glamorous, beautiful, and when she came to
she was handed a child. She didn't want to gain
pregnancy weight. She thought she wouldn't look good for Elvis's wife.
There were many women after them after him, all of
them beautiful. She was so upset when she was pregnant
that she initially said she'd only eat apples and eggs

(01:08):
to never gain weight. I was a pain in her
ass immediately, and I always felt she didn't want me.
I believe in energy and utero, so maybe I already
felt her vibe of trying to get rid of me
at the time. She didn't have great maternal instincts. So
she's hard on Priscilla through all this because during all
of this stuff, when she was a kid, she spent
a lot of time her dad indulged her with everything

(01:32):
that she would He'd wake up in the middle of
the night and say, let's go on the golf carts,
and I'd get on these golf carts, and just right
around he'd shut down an amusement park for her. They'd
sleep all day, and she'd get up late afternoon and
everyone would be asleep, but they'd party all night. She
was a little kid when all this was happening, and
then when her father died and her mother kind of
tried to put some well. When the parents broke up,

(01:54):
she'd spent a lot of time with Dad, and then
when she was with mom, her mother tried to be
more strict with her, and she felt her mother was
cold and brittle lest Marie would have been what nine
when Elvis died, Yeah, she was nine. And so this
is what she said here. She said that when her
father died. This is the quote. That was the first
time I really felt the loss, obviously from my dad passing,

(02:17):
but more than anything, I felt I was stuck with
this woman. It was a two punch, one two punch.
He's dead, and now I'm stuck with her. So her
whole life changed a lot, and you could just see
she was this kid who had everything but had no anchor.
She didn't listen enough, As she says later, she got
on with her mother in her afterwards when she was
a mother herself, but she careered, careened and careered all

(02:41):
over the place and didn't want discipline. She'd scream and
scream until she was taken out of school. She was
all over the shop and was looking for an anchor
and couldn't find one, And bizarrely, she found an anchor
in Michael Jackson. And she says that was the most
normal she ever felt, which just shows you how crazy
her life was. Are you kidding me? And she said
he when he didn't have the artifice around him, he

(03:03):
was really normal and he was the person who reminded
her of her dad red Flag much. But she said,
here he knew I understood him, that we really connected
because I didn't judge him. I completely got who he
was and why he thought the stuff he thought. We'd
come from, and we were now in similar circumstances. Everything
about our lives was incredibly abnormal. There was no reason

(03:24):
why we shouldn't connect. Hadn't they meet him, Well, they'd
met first of all when she was a little kid.
She didn't remember any of it. He remembered every detail,
even the dress she was wearing, everything, because we asked her,
because he did meet there was a time when he
met Elvis. That was the time. That was the time time.
And then when she started to produce a bit of music,

(03:45):
he reached out to her and she just found him
instantly warm. They had this instant connection, extraordinary And by
then she had two little kids with Danny Keo, and
she went home and said, I'm marrying Michael. It was
with Danny, Yeah, well kind of bit on and offish,
but she said, hey, how about this, I'm going to
marry Mike. Here's some news. Yeah, here's some news. And
she said this, This is from the book. He told

(04:07):
me he was still a virgin. I think he had
kissed Tatum O'Neil, and he had a thing with Brooks Shields,
which hadn't been physical apart from a kiss. He said.
Madonna had tried to hook up with him once too,
but nothing had happened, and so they were Actually she says,
it was a very loving, normal relationship in the midst
of all of that. But then he was desperate to

(04:28):
have children with her, and she didn't feel right about it.
And this is a quote. He said, if you're not
going to have children with me, then I'm going to
find someone he will, who will? He would also say,
Debbie Row told me she'll have my children, to which
my mother, because this is Riley telling the story, to
which my mother would respond jealously, go and beep Debbie Row.

(04:50):
And this is what Riley says. All I knew of
Debbie was that she was a kind lady who helped
me with my ear infections. Wow, she was a nurse.
What about this bit I keep reading. Tell me what
I'm boring you because this bit's so fascinating. That Michael
was about to do an HBO special. This is Lisa
Marie writing he didn't want to do it. He feigned
a fall and went into hospital, and she started to

(05:10):
get a suspicion he was taking some industrial strength drugs.
Gave that away. Well, I'll tell you what gave that away.
I flew to New York where he was in hospital
and was with him every day. His mother was there too,
along with his team, including his own aniesotist. And she said,
no one has their own anesotist. Every hospital has their own.
This was a red flag. She said he needed some

(05:33):
or deemarole he was taking, which is a giant opioid.
She said he needed someone around who could legally administer
the drugs. Anyway, the whole relationship started to fall apart,
and this is really sad insight. This is one of
the things she wrote that she had a son called
Ben with Danny Keo and as from the minute he
was born, he was everything to Lisa Marie and she said,

(05:55):
here Ben was similar to his grandfather. This is Marie.
Lisa Marie is saying He was similar to El, very
very similar. He even looked like him. Ben was so
much like him it scared me. I didn't want to
tell him. I thought it was too much to put
on a kid. We were very close. He told me everything.
I had the same relationship with Ben that my father
had with his mother. He was a generational effing cycle.

(06:16):
She said. Gladys loved my dad so much she drank
herself to death worrying about him, and then my dad
had his demons and acted on them. I have everything
in me that wants to do the same thing, and
my son's got that same genetic makeup. Ben didn't stand
an effing chance. So Ben's dead, isn't he? Ben took
his own life. He was the sunshine in their lives.
He had and he started well. When she, at the

(06:37):
age of forty, got a drug addiction, and Ben was
so close to her, watching her fall into a spiral
put him in a bad place. That's what happened there.
And in the midst of all that, you're hearing these
stories about her marrying Nicholas Cage. Have I got time
to tell you that bit? Not? Really, We've got more
about it. I'll give you the rest where it's like

(06:59):
a man who's been time story. Nick bought my mom, Lisa,
this is not Riley. Nick bought my mom two beautiful
old cars, a nineteen fifty nine blue Corvette Convoidable and
a Cadillac from the sixties. We went on lots of trips.
On one of those trips, she and Nick got into
a fight and her sixty five thousand dollars engagement ring
ended up in the ocean. A diver was immediately killed
out to find it. There was no chance, so he

(07:20):
bought her another bigger, more expensive ring. After that, it
just goes on and on and the cycle of addiction,
and it's such a sad story where no one has
in any inner love for themselves. It's an incredible book
with more juicy bits. But we've run out of time. No,
we haven't run out of time. I'm shutting me down.

(07:40):
I'm not shutting you down at all. You can do
whatever you want. Well, let's keep reading. Tune in tomorrow,
kids for more of Avantage, for another in dorment. We're
all gathered around. Look at jim Uri Raie sitting. He says,
who's Elvis Coffee