Enter: Lisa Marie Presley
Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of rock and roll trailblazer Elvis Presley, had known Michael Jackson since 1974; the two met in Las Vegas during one of the Jackson family’s engagements at the MGM Grand. Lisa was six, Michael, sixteen. Elvis brought her to see the show because she was a big fan of the group’s. ‘I always liked him,’ Lisa Marie, who prefers to be called Lisa, recalled. ‘Michael fascinated me with his talent. I loved watching him dance. He wanted to know me better, but I always thought he was sort of freakish. I didn’t really want to know him any better than I already did.’
Born on 1 February 1968 to Elvis and Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie was destined for controversy just by virtue of her illustrious lineage. She had a privileged childhood. Her father lavished her with gifts, including jewels and a fur coat – for a five-year-old! Or, as her mother once put it, ‘She had everything a child shouldn’t have and couldn’t appreciate.’ She was spoiled or, as she bluntly recalled it, ‘When I was a kid, forget it! I was a fucking little tyrant.’
She would also say of her childhood, ‘There is not one bad memory about any of it, I have to admit. There was always a lot of energy around him [Elvis] and all over the house [at Graceland] when he was around. He was very mischievous.’
She would sit outside his bedroom at Graceland for hours, just waiting for him to awaken. Then, she would cuddle in his lap and, for no apparent reason, say things like: ‘Daddy, please don’t die.’ She sensed that his time on earth would be brief. ‘I was aware of the drug use,’ she would later admit. ‘I sensed it, knew it. His temper was bad at times. He didn’t seem happy. I saw him taking pills, like cocktails of pills. But I think he tried to hide it from me as best he could. Still, I knew. I felt sort of helpless. It hurt. It still hurts. He was such a good man, so decent.’
Lisa was nine when her father died in 1977. Horribly, she was present when his body was found on a bathroom floor, and watched as people attempted to revive him. ‘What’s wrong with my daddy?’ she tearfully demanded to know. At the funeral, she seemed in complete shock as she walked about Graceland in a daze, saying to relatives, ‘You know, I just can’t believe that Elvis Presley is dead.’
In October 1988, Lisa married musician Danny Keough, already pregnant with their first child. Danielle Riley was born the following year, and Benjamin Storm in 1993. The relationship would last six years.
In February of 1993, Lisa and Michael were brought together again at a private dinner in the Los Angeles home of artist Brett Livingston-Stone, a mutual friend. At this time, Lisa had recorded four songs produced by her husband. She felt she had a lot to say about her unusual life as daughter of an icon, and was looking for a way to say it through her lyrics and music. ‘I had a voice,’ she once told me, in retrospect, ‘but I didn’t have the experience. Things always got too wild when people found out that Elvis’s daughter wanted to sing. It became a matter of deals and money, money, money: I lost my fire for it. I lost the urge to create. I was scared, I guess, soI pulled back.’
‘She had no confidence in herself as a vocalist,’ said Brett Livingston-Stone. ‘She was afraid of being compared to Elvis, afraid of rejection. When I suggested that Michael could help her, she said, ‘He’s a superstar. Do you really think he’d help me?’ After dinner at my house, Lisa played tapes of some of her music, and Michael was blown away. He told her, “You have real talent… a fine voice. You could be a star. Let me see what I can do for you.”’
As she sat with him and listened to stories about his life in the business, she found herself falling under his spell. According to Brett Livingston-Stone, when Michael was about to leave, he offered Lisa a penetrating look and, in a conspiratorial voice, said, ‘You and me, we could get into a lot of trouble. Think about that, girl.’
In days to come, Michael and Lisa forged a surprising friendship, speaking on the telephone nearly every day. They realized that they shared the same kinds of backgrounds, both had been sheltered and protected from the real world, both felt they had missed out on their childhoods, both were mistrustful of outsiders after having spent most of their lives feeling exploited by outsiders. They had problems with the media. She was raised in Graceland. He lived in Neverland. On some strange level that only they understood, as Lisa recalled it, they seemed to be soul mates. ‘The difference between them was that Lisa was working on herself, trying to come to terms with her celebrity,’ said Brett Livingston-Stone. ‘She didn’t see herself as a victim. Michael did. I think she wanted to help him view himself in a different way.’
He truly was misunderstood, he told her. ‘I know you think I’m gay,’ he said. ‘But I’m not. I get tired of people thinking I am gay. But, oh well, fuck them. I know you have heard a lot of things about me, in fact,’ he continued, ‘but most of it isn’t true. And the stuff that is true, you shouldn’t hold against me.’ He winked at her.
‘Hey, I’m a married woman,’ Lisa said. ‘And you’re coming on to me.’
‘Yes, but are you happy?’ Michael asked.
‘No.’
‘See?’ Michael remarked. ‘I knew that. You look like a woman who needs to let go and have some fun. You look like a woman who needs to hook up with
me
.’
Lisa was unable to disguise her surprise at his candour and his… normality. She recalled staring at him thinking, Who
is
this man? She was right to be perplexed; he sure wasn’t acting like the Michael Jackson others had known over the years. It was as if he had taken macho lessons from Joseph! Unbeknownst to Lisa, many people along the way had tried to put together the puzzle pieces of Michael’s mercurial psychology, often flattering themselves into thinking they and they alone understood him better than others. It usually ended badly for them; they would learn that Michael is truly the only one who understands Michael.
Lisa recalled, ‘I thought to myself, Wow, this is a real guy. He swears. He’s funny. I told him, “Dude, if people knew who the hell you really are, they would be so surprised. People wouldn’t think I was so crazy for being into you if they saw who you really are; that you sit around and you drink and you curse and you’re fucking funny, and you have a bad mouth and you don’t have that high voice all the time.”’
‘He said, “Well just don’t tell them.” I thought he was normal and that everything you saw of him publicly was just a mask.’
Lisa recalled, ‘As time went on, Michael and I talked more, I thought, I’m getting to know the real man here. He puts on an act for outsiders, this sort of victim thing, I thought, but I’m the one seeing the real deal, the real person. I started thinking I was special, that he was opening up to me as he never had to anyone else. He made me feel that way. He can be very seductive when he’s pulling you in.’
In truth, as a potential mate, Michael did seem to have it all: intellect, drive, brains, energy, vision, success… money. As for his appearance, well that, admittedly, was a bit off-putting, with the plastic surgery and pale skin colouring. And his sexuality still seemed ambiguous. However, he was kissing her fairly passionately and, from many accounts, in public places. He seemed to enjoy doing it, too. Either he was playing some kind of manly role, perhaps an emotional consequence of the damaging allegations, or he was really interested in her. Lisa was definitely into him. ‘I’m not a woman who goes for the norm, anyway,’ Lisa said in explaining her attraction to him. ‘I like strange guys, the ones on the edge, the ones
with
an edge, the ones with fire in their bellies. That was Michael, to me.’
Lisa was Elvis’s kid; she’d been around ‘strange’. When she was seven, she and her daddy were eating breakfast in front of the TV when singer Robert Goulet happened to appear on the screen. For some reason, Elvis hated Robert Goulet. When he saw his image before him, he pulled out a .22 shot gun and blew the TV away, blasting it to smithereens. Then, he calmly went back to his ham and eggs. Lisa just sat in her chair, stunned. At least Michael was afraid of guns…
As far as Lisa was concerned, she and Michael were dating, and her motive was to see where it could take her, romantically. Most people in his circle, though, were not as certain as to his motives for being with Lisa, though he did seem to like her. There was talk that he was after her money, which was ludicrous – as if he didn’t have enough of his own.
As Elvis’s sole beneficiary, Lisa would come into a fortune of about $300 million, but not until she turned thirty. Most of Lisa’s money would be the result of the savvy Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s business acumen. While Elvis had earned roughly $250 million in his life, by the time he died his estate was valued at $5.4 million. It was his ex-wife, Priscilla, who turned Elvis’s failing Presley Enterprises around to make a profit. Turning Elvis’s fourteen-acre estate, Graceland (purchased by him in 1957) into a tourist attraction, in 1982 was one stroke of genius on her part. It brought in $20 million a year.
Throughout 1993, during the time Michael seemed obsessed with Jordie Chandler, he was dating Lisa, intermittently. When the molestation allegations surfaced in his life, however, Michael’s relationship with Lisa became a more urgent matter to him. Ironically, if not for Jordie’s accusations and the ensuing scandal, he and Lisa may never have become anything more than just friends, a coupling similar to the innocuous, non-sexual ‘romances’ he had with Brooke Shields and Tatum O’Neal. However, after Michael began the second leg of his Dangerous tour and the investigation intensified, he began to depend on Lisa for emotional support, telephoning her from overseas, seeming desperate and alone. During such anguished calls, Lisa would attempt to counter his sadness with humour, cheerfulness and good advice. As he grew to depend upon her, their relationship strengthened.
‘I was in on the beginning of the molestation stuff, and I was getting the phone calls, and he was telling me that it was extortion,’ she recalled. ‘I believed him at the time. I mean, I was convinced. He was freaking out. I believed that he didn’t do anything wrong, and that he was being wrongly accused and, yes, I started falling for him. I wanted to save him. I felt that I could do it.’