LISA MARIE PRESLEY: A roller-coaster life packed with heartache and pain

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Smouldering-eyed pop culture princess Lisa Marie Presley’s life was a roller-coaster ride of heartache and tragedy that only ended with her death.

Presley, 54, died Thursday of a heart attack in a Los Angeles hospital with her mother, Priscilla, by her side.

The only daughter of iconic rock star Elvis Presley, Lisa Marie shared her father’s stunning good looks and personal demons.

Since the day she was born, Lisa Marie was in the public spotlight and struggled to find her place in the unrelenting world of Hollywood, the paparazzi and having a famous father.

In 2020, her son Benjamin Keough fatally shot himself. Lisa Marie’s final social media post is a chilling coda to her turbulent, sad life.

She shared a link on Aug. 30, 2022 to an essay she penned for People magazine for National Grief Awareness Day. In the essay, she wrote: “Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe. You do not ‘get over it,’ you do not ‘move on,’ period.”

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ELVIS

Born on Feb. 1, 1968, in Memphis to parents Elvis and Priscilla Presley, the King of Rock and Roll reportedly wept when he saw his wife holding his beautiful baby girl.

The pair broke up when Lisa Marie was just four years old. After the divorce, she split her time between her father in Memphis and Priscilla, who had moved to LA. Father and daughter were, according to reports, “thick as thieves.” It was Lisa Marie who found her father dead in his washroom at Graceland on Aug. 16, 1977. She was nine.

Her eldest daughter Riley Keough later said Lisa Marie would become weepy when she heard her father’s music decades later.

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QUOTE

“I feel like I’ve lived four lives in one. I dealt with death early on. It wasn’t just my father, it was my grandma, my grandpa, my great-grandfather, my aunts — all in a two-year period. I didn’t have much of a runway into life. I was, like, a deep, dark kid who was always melancholy.”— Lisa Marie Presley, Newsweek, 2003

LOVE

Lasting love would remain elusive for Lisa Marie until the day she died. She first married fellow Scientologist Danny Keough in 1988. The marriage resulted in the birth of Riley and Benjamin.

And then, bizarrely, she married Michael Jackson in 1994. Lisa Marie would say they met in 1975 following a Las Vegas concert. Years later, they reconnected. But the marriage was plagued by the troubled Billie Jean singer’s pill-popping and accusations he was sexually abusing children. Lisa Marie later said she had been “sucked into” believing the singer was merely “misunderstood” and wanted to save him.

“All I did get out of it was a s*** storm. And I got out of it,” she told Rolling Stone.

In 2002, she married actor Nicolas Cage. The marriage lasted a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 107 days. He filed for divorce after they “failed to stabilize each other’s lives.”

“So we connected, we had a great connection. We were both a bit — we’re sort of these gypsy spirited, you know, tyrannical pirates,” she said in 2003. “And one pirate marries another they will sink the ship basically is what it comes down to.”

Next was musician Michael Lockwood, who she married in 2006. The marriage lasted 10 years and produced twins Finley and Harper, but a decade later they were at each other’s throats in a bitter divorce battle.

DRUGS

As a Hollywood wild child, Lisa Marie became addicted to drugs in her teens. Numerous stints in a Scientology rehab centre appeared to do the trick — but it was a lifelong battle. She later admitted that by 2003 she was off the wagon in a big way. The singer-songwriter would recall seeing Elvis gobble handfuls of pills.

Lisa Marie said a therapist once told her: “I don’t know how you’re alive.”

But as her marriage to Lockwood broke down, she began pounding cocaine again with a new chaser — opioids. The struggle became so difficult, her two youngest daughters went to live with her mother, Priscilla, while she did “three to five” stints in a Mexican rehab.

MONEY

Money was never a problem for Lisa Marie Presley until it was. At 25, she took control of the Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE) trust worth more than $100 million which had been cannily managed by Priscilla exploiting her late hubby’s massive popularity.

She appointed a respected Hollywood money manager to oversee the trust. In 2005, he sold 85% of her share in EPE, which resulted in her loss of her father’s name and image rights. Barry Siegel said the sale cleared $20 million in debts Lisa Marie had built up and put $40 million in her pocket, along with millions in yearly payouts.

HEARTACHE

With each personal setback, Lisa Marie always seemed to bounce back. Until she could no longer. Her death warrant may effectively have been signed on July 12, 2020: The day her son Benjamin Keough, 27, shot himself. The coroner labelled it a suicide.

QUOTE 

“Anytime I was in Memphis with my dad and at the house, I was happy. That was, like, a given. It was what I lived for. And I still feel the same excitement and warmth.”— LISA MARIE PRESLEY

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun