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Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter, Riley Keough, recall the late singer’s fraught conversations with Michael Jackson about his fears of dying in her book, From Here to the Great Unknown.
The late singer, who was the only daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, wrote about her recollections of being married to the King of Pop in her memoir, which was completed by Keough and published posthumously last week.
In the book, Lisa Marie wrote that Jackson, whom she married in 1994 and divorced just over a year later, could be “very controlling and calculating”.
“He had wanted me to have his children so badly and I didn’t want to,” she wrote. “I knew that he ultimately wanted to be the only caretaker of the children. Michael wanted to control things. He didn’t want a mother influence, or any other influence, in fact.
“I figured that Michael would have me have the children and then dump me, get me out of the picture. I could read him like a clock. I understood everything about him because all we did was bare our souls to one another. I knew his nature.”
She recalled one time when he was working and called her, during which she told him: “You’re like a snake – I don’t know what you’re going to crawl out from under.”
In the following segment written by Keough, the Daisy Jones and the Six star said that Lisa Marie realised she needed to end her relationship with Jackson after a near-disaster where the family’s private plane almost went down “in the middle of nowhere” as they were travelling to visit Jackson, who was on tour in South Africa.
“[It] felt like a bad omen to my mum,” she wrote.
Years later, Jackson called Lisa Marie: “He didn’t sound sober.”
“You were right,” Jackson is said to have told Keough’s mother. “Everybody around me wants to kill me.”
That was their last conversation, Keough wrote. “My mom was in London, writing a record, when Michael died. My mom later told Oprah that Michael often said he was afraid of ending up like her father.
“He was forever asking my mom about when Elvis died, how it happened, where, why. Michael said: ‘I feel like I’m going to end up the same way.’”
She revealed that Lisa Marie sat with Michael’s coffin “for hours” after everyone else had left the funeral service, “just like she had with her father”.
“She told Oprah that she didn’t think she could make peace, that it was more like she wanted to apologize for not being around,” Keough said.
“My mom told me that she communicated with Michael through her dreams for months after he died.”
Jackson died from cardiac arrest in 2009, aged 50, just weeks before his sold-out concert residency was due to begin in London.
Lisa Marie died on 12 January 2023 from a small bowel obstruction linked to weight-loss surgery she’d undergone years before, according to a report released by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner.
In a recent interview with People, Keough said she believed her mother had died of a “broken heart” after the suicide of her youngest son, Benjamin, aged 27 in 2020.
“My mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,” Keough said. “My mom physically died from the after-effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
From Here to the Great Unknown is out now.
If you have been affected by the issues addressed in this article, you can contact the following organisations for support: mind.org.uk, nhs.uk/livewell/mentalhealth, mentalhealth.org.uk, samaritans.org.
