Lisa Marie Presley recalls the horrifying moment she found her father, Elvis Presley, dead — and the realization that she was now “stuck” with her mom, Priscilla Presley, in a new book.
Lisa Marie, who died in January 2023, left behind hours of tapes that her actress daughter Riley Keough has turned into the memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown,” out now.
When the King of Rock ’n’ Roll died of a heart attack at home on Aug. 16, 1977, nine-year-old Lisa Marie was staying with him at Graceland, his Memphis estate.
Waking up that day, Lisa Marie recalls in the book, she felt something was off and ran to her father’s room — only to be stopped by Joe Esposito, Elvis’ longtime road manager and friend, who told her, “Your daddy’s sick.’”
She ran into his bathroom and saw Elvis lying on the ground. “I tried to run to him, but somebody grabbed me and pulled me back,” she said.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen her 42-year-old father, who had long abused opiates, in distress.
“There were so many times that I found him down on the floor or unable to control his body very well. It was the barbiturates,” she writes.
But this time, “They were standing over him, moving him around and trying to work on him. I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good. Then I got taken out of the room.”
As Elvis was taken out on a stretcher while paramedics worked on him, Lisa Marie writes, “I started screaming that I wanted him, that I needed him, and I started kicking and punching whoever was holding me back, trying to get away from them, but they wouldn’t let me go.”
She admits she was glad not to see his face which would have traumatized her more.
The distressed nine-year-old smoked a cigarette with the niece of Ginger Alden — Elvis’s last girlfriend — before hearing her grandfather Vernon Presley “wailing”: “Your daddy’s gone, he’s gone! My son is gone!”
Elvis’ open casket was kept inside his home at Graceland before he was buried on the grounds.
“I went down to where he was lying in the casket, just to be with him, to touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him,” Lisa Marie writes. “I asked him, ‘Why is this happening? Why are you doing this?’”
In October, Elvis was moved to the backyard of Graceland, buried next to his mother, Gladys.
For Lisa Marie, that was the moment reality hit her. She now only had her mother, Priscilla.
“That was the first time I really felt the loss — obviously from my dad passing away, but more than anything, I felt I was stuck with this woman,” she writes. “It was a one-two punch. He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her,”
In the book, Lisa Marie talks of her relationship with her mother, which would be rocky for much of her life. She admits she ran rampant, prompting Priscilla to send her to a variety of schools and turn to the Church of Scientology for help.
Lisa Marie writes how she continued to dream about Elvis, warning him that he was going to die, and he would tell her ‘Darlin’, it’s already happened.” The dreams only stopped in 1992, she said, when her son Benjamin was born.
“I don’t think she ever processed the loss … ,” Riley writes in the book. “I certainly knew that she was heartbroken my whole life. I remember when I was little feeling angry at Elvis for leaving my mother and for causing all this pain,”