Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir is chock full of revelations, ranging from heartbreaking to salacious, regarding her own life as well as the private lives of fellow famous faces, including her ex-husband Michael Jackson and late father Elvis.
“From Here to the Great Unknown” hit shelves Tuesday and was co-written by Presley’s eldest child, actress Riley Keough.
Of agreeing to help pen the book, Keough — who became the sole trustee of her mother’s estate, as well as the owner of Graceland, following Presley’s sudden death in January 2023 — says her mom believed she could have a “more holistic view of her life than she could.”
“The last 10 years of her life had been so brutally hard that she was only able to look back on everything through that lens,” Keough writes in the introduction, according to an excerpt published by People. “I agreed to help her with it, not thinking much of the commitment, assuming we would write it together over time. A month later, she died.”
Here are some of the biggest revelations and bombshells revealed in “From Here to the Great Unknown.”
Michael Jackson was a virgin at 35 when he and Lisa Marie started dating
At the time they got together in 1994, when Presley was 26 and Jackson was 35, the late King of Pop revealed to her that “he was still a virgin.”
“I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss,” Presley wrote in an excerpt obtained by People. “He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened.”
US pop star Michael Jackson and his wife Lisa Marie Presley arrive at Budapest’s airport 6 August 1994. Jackson is starting a three day visit to film new video-clip. AFP PHOTO (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
She and Jackson wed soon after, in May 1994, just weeks after Presley divorced Danny Keough, with whom she shared Riley and son Benjamin.
The memoir also details how Presley and Jackson got together, with the “Thriller” singer confessing his love for her during a trip to Las Vegas while she was still married to Keough.
Presley and Jackson were married for just over two years before finalizing their divorce in August 1996.
Lisa Marie kept son Benjamin’s body on ice for two months after his suicide
Following the suicide death of 27-year-old Benjamin in July 2020, Presley arranged to have a funeral home bring her son’s body to her house in Calabasas, Calif., where she preserved him at 55 degrees until October of that year. It was then that Benjamin was laid to rest at Graceland, where Elvis and now Lisa Marie are also buried.
Priscilla Presley, second from left, her daughter, Lisa Marie, second from right, and Lisa Marie’s children, Riley Keough, 21, left, and Benjamin Keough, 18, right, take part in a ceremony commemorating Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday on Friday, Jan. 8, 2010 in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
“I think it would scare the living f–king piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” she wrote. “But not me.”
The dysfunctional, yet traditional role Elvis played in her life
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Presley recalls how the “Suspicious Minds” crooner would attend her parent-teacher conferences, during which Elvis would don a simultaneously ostentatious yet “respectable outfit,” remembered as “black pants and some kind of blouse — but he was also wearing a big, majestic belt with buckles and jewels and chains, as well as sunglasses,” per People.
Though Presley made clear her adoration for her father, who died in 1977 of complications from drug use, the domesticity didn’t override the dysfunction to which she was privy.
“I was always worried about my dad dying,” Lisa Marie recalled in the memoir, according to another excerpt published by People. “Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.’”
Lisa Marie’s own struggles with substance abuse
After welcoming twin daughters Finley and Harper Vivienne, now 16, Presley said she was given “short-term prescription of opioids” and felt “the need to keep taking them” after.
“For a couple of years, it was recreational, and then it wasn’t,” admitted Presley, who shared the girls with Michael Lockwood, whom she divorced in 2016. “It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal in the big leagues.”
