CURSE OF THE PRESLEYS

THE DEATH OF ELVIS

Lisa Marie was 9 years old when she last saw her father alive in August 1977. She once wrote that around 4am on the day he died, he found her awake and told her to go to bed. “I said ‘OK’ and I think he kissed me goodnight, and I ran o .” When she woke again, she reportedly saw him lying face down on the red shag carpet being attended to by his last girlfriend, Ginger Alden. Elvis’ ex-girlfriend Linda Thompson has said Lisa Marie then called her on the phone and screamed, “My daddy’s dead! He’s smothered in the carpet!”

A COMPLICATED LOVE LIFE

Lisa Marie remained close to rst husband, Keough, who she wed in 1988. Less than a month after her divorce, she became Mrs Michael Jackson. “I fell into this whole, ‘You poor, sweet, misunderstood man, I’m going to save you,’” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2003. Their divorce was nalised in 1996. Her third marriage, to Cage, lasted three months. “We’re sort of these gypsy-spirited, tyrannical pirates,” she later said. Her marriage to Lockwood ended in a bitter custody battle over their twin daughters.

THE LOSS OF BENJAMIN

The star’s only son was 27 when he took his own life in July 2020. The pair had a very close bond, getting matching tattoos of a Celtic eternity knot for Mother’s Day in 2009. “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,’” Lisa Marie wrote in an essay on grief in August. “My and my three daughters’ lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death. We live in this Every. Single. Day.”