1993-2000 Lisa Marie Presley

LMP, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Wednesday, April 16, 2003


What she craves, she says, is to be known for “something that I created. Not who I married, or where I came from — not that I’m trying to run from that.”

“It’s Michael (Jackson), Nic (Cage), your dad. Did you really have sex with Michael Jackson? Where were you when your father died?”

(For the record, the answers are: Hard as it is to believe, yes. And, home at Graceland, at age 9.)

Presley understands people’s fascination with her lineage and hersecond and third failed marriages — she refers to herself as a “tabloid queen” — and she wants people to know that she’s not dishing for self-serving reasons.

“Michael Jackson fans claim that I’m trying to sell records by talking about it. No!” she says, emphatically. “Like I’m enjoying this?”

“I was exposed to a lot of things real fast,” she remembers of the crowd that surrounded her father. “I had to watch these guys cheating on their wives,” which led her to a low opinion of women, not men. To this day, “I don’t have many close friends who are women.”

LMP, MTV, April 17 2003


Though her three failed marriages were a great impetus to start putting her life on paper, and much will be made of songs that seemingly reference her second and third husbands Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage, it’s Presley’s first husband, Danny Keough, who’s all over this record. Presley worked with Keough in addition to producers Eric Rosse (Tori Amos) and Andrew Slater (Fiona Apple, the Wallflowers), but there’s not enough drama in their peaceful reconciliation and collaboration for anyone to notice. But Jacko or Nic? Could the breakup song “Gone” be about one of them? She won’t say, except to say that she’s “done worrying” about them.

“God, I don’t know, lately I can’t follow any of it,” she said of the past year’s Michael Jackson news. “He’s seemingly progressively more [unusual] lately, more in these last couple of years, more than when I was around.”

LMP, Arizona Republic – April 20th, 2003


Her rocking debut single, Lights Out, contains a chilling reference to the famed Graceland mansion (“That’s where my family’s buried and gone / Last time I was there I noticed a space left next to them”), but other songs have been inspired by her failed marriages to singer Michael Jackson and actor Nicolas Cage, as well as her love for her two children.

[…]

You’ve said you dove deeply into writing after your divorce from Michael Jackson. Was that due to the stress you were under?

That’s kind of how I get through everything: I start writing. But none of those songs ended up on the record, believe it or not. For the first year or two of my writing after that, every song was about that. Then I got bored of it and started having other things going on in my life that I was much more amused by or affected by, and it ended up taking over. I ended up throwing (the earlier songs) aside.

Do songs such as S.O.B., Sinking In and Important relate to Michael? It also seems that Gone refers to Nicolas.

Maybe some references and a concept here or there, but nothing specific. I’m not really answering (questions of) who they’re about. When I’m listening to records and (the songwriter) tells me what they were thinking, I hate it, because I can’t interpret it for myself.

Did Michael show any interest toward your musical side during your marriage?

I didn’t have any musical interests particularly at that point. I wasn’t planning to do anything, contrary to popular belief at the time. I had no interest in a record. I was more interested in trying to be a wife, trying to be supportive and basking in the idea that someone else was even more in the limelight than I was.

[…]

What do your children think about Mom cutting a CD and filming a music video?

They like it, but they have other things going on in their minds. They have their friends and their own interests, which is good. They’re not all wrapped up in me.

[…]

Do you consider yourself a happy person these days?

Yes. I’ve produced something that was mine, that I’m proud of, so it helps me hold my head up a bit higher. It’s not based on some other B.S. that I’m getting attention. I get attention for the right reasons, which makes me happy with the record.

LMP, Rolling Stone Magazine – April 20th, 2003


Daughter of Elvis, ex-wife of Michael Jackson — you better believe she has a story to tell. In a no-holds-barred interview, she speaks about her three marriages, her dad and her crush on Darth Vader.

[…]

For most of these years she has avoided talking in public. (There was, of course, the very surreal live TV interview with Diane Sawyer alongside her second husband, Michael Jackson, but we will get to all of that.)

[…]

“He’s a sweetheart,” Presley says. “He and his wife, Sheri.” They met though one of her closest friends, Johnny Ramone, about whom she says, “I think we’re both pretty no-bullshit, and we don’t put up any fronts.” She laughs and adds, “We’re irritable assholes, really.” She didn’t even know any Ramones records until after they’d met. “I was into the Sex Pistols and Devo and all that stuff when I was a teen, but I didn’t get into the Ramones. I had a huge crush on Sid Vicious.”

Your taste in men . . . , I sigh.

“I know,” she says. “If you lined up all the men I’ve been with in a row, you’d think that I was completely psychotic.”

Presley knows that the world has never thought about her in quite the same way since her second marriage, her 1994 union with Michael Jackson. She is infuriated by this and by the notion that she wanted anything else out of it other than those things most people hope for in a marriage.

“All I did get out of it was a shit storm,” she says. “And I got out of it. Now people go, ‘You seem somewhat sane, you seem pretty together — what the hell was that all about?’ It put a stigma on me. A ‘What the hell was she thinking?’ stigma.”

She says that Jackson first tried to get in touch with her when she was a teenager. She got a message through her lawyer — “He wants to meet you; he thinks you’re very pretty” — but she blew it off: “I was completely in love with Danny, and I thought he was weird, and I had no interest in meeting him.”

A few years later a friend called and said that Jackson wanted to hear a demo she had made. She wasn’t interested in being on his label but was persuaded it would at least be good manners to take the meeting. They were introduced at the friend’s house, and that is how it started.

“He was very real with me off the bat. He immediately went into this whole explanation of what he knew people thought of him and what the truth was.”

Which was persuasive?

“Yeah. You get sucked into the ‘you poor, misunderstood person, you.’ I’m a sucker for that. Then we sat down to talk, and he was so not what I thought he was. He was very real — he was cursing, he was funny, and I was like, ‘Wow. . . .’ I fell into that ‘You have this whole Howard Hughes thing that goes on in the press, and you’re not anything like that.’ ”

But why wouldn’t he want people to know that?

“I don’t know. I think it worked for him to manipulate that image for a little while. The hyperbaric chamber thing and all that monkey shit and the elephant shit. It made him mysterious, and I think he thought that was cool. But then it backfired, like it always does.

“I was always saying, ‘People wouldn’t think I was so crazy if they saw who the hell 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. I don’t know why you think that works for you, because it doesn’t anymore.’ ”

After that first conversation, they were friends who talked. Then the child-abuse accusations surfaced, and Michael Jackson’s world exploded. “That whole shit hit the fan,” Presley recalls, “and he was quick to call me and tell me what his side of the story was, so it looked like an extortion situation. I believed him, because he was so convincing.” She frowns wryly. “I don’t know. . . . I just believed everything he said, for some reason. It’s very strange, because there’s not a lot of people who he’ll allow to see who he really is — there’s probably only five or six people, not including kids, who have seen who he really is. But when you do . . . ” She smiles. “He didn’t get where he is because he’s an idiot. You see a real person who’s very much the opposite of what he was presenting.” Jackson was under attack, and it brought out Presley’s protectiveness. “I got into this whole ‘I’m going to save you’ thing,” she says. “I thought all that stuff he was doing — philanthropy and the children thing and all this stuff — was awesome, and maybe we could save the world together.” She pauses. “OK. Hello. I was delusionary. I got some romantic idea in my head that I could save him and we could save the world.”

At this point she was still married, and they were yet to become girlfriend and boyfriend. “He called me a lot,” she says. “Confided in me a lot. Which could be very manipulative — I don’t know. I hung out with him more, and I made the mistake of saying I was not happy in my marriage, and the courting started. And I left [my marriage] probably quicker than I would have, and that was probably one of the bigger mistakes of my whole life.”

When you say “courting,” do you mean as between any boy and girl?

“Yeah. Flowers. Calls. Candies. You name it . . . everything started coming.”

I think people are still pretty incredulous at the idea that you had any kind of normal married relationship with him.

“Right.”

But I presume that is the case.

“That is the case. Like I said, I got caught up in this thing of ‘it was all a show.’ That was my first experience with being accused of that, which was shocking for me.”

But, to be clear, is it fair to say that in private you were doing all the things that married people do: kissing, going to bed together, having sex?

“Yeah. That was part of it, for a while. And then it became the Def Con 2. It just got really ugly at the end.”

Before that, when it was good, was it your understanding that that was what he wanted?

A pause. “I don’t know what he wanted anymore. I know that it looks very timely for him, in retrospect — the record was coming out, that other shit was happening, and I was too caught up in . . . ” She stops, and recasts the thought. “I can tell you my intentions; I can’t tell you what his were.”

News of their union leaked out slowly — of a marriage in the Dominican Republic in May 1994, first denied, then confirmed. Their first surreal public appearance was opening the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, during which — as they stood center stage — Jackson kissed her fully on the lips.

“That was not my idea, by the way,” she says. “I was terrified. It was his manager’s idea. I thought it was stupid. All of a sudden I became part of a PR machine.”

It seemed like a blatant gimmick to prove — to start with — that he was straight.

“Yeah, but again, I wasn’t looking at it like that. See, if I had been, that wouldn’t have ever happened.”

Even stranger and more astonishing was the interview the married couple gave to Diane Sawyer in 1995, in which Presley steadfastly defended her husband, the genuineness of their relationship and his character.

“I don’t recognize who I was then, now, watching it,” she says. “I was really in this lioness thing with him — I wanted to protect him. Naive as all hell. I never thought for a moment that someone like him could actually use me for any reason like that. It never crossed my mind, and I don’t know why — I’m sure it crossed everybody else’s.”

People are still confused by Michael Jackson’s love of a certain kind of relationship with young kids, whether it’s totally innocent or not. And you made a huge defense in the Diane Sawyer interview of how you watched him with kids and how it was all totally innocent. Is that what you think on reflection?

“The only thing I can say is that I didn’t see anything that would ever allude to that ever. Otherwise I would have been the first one out there going, ‘You motherfucker.’ I’ve got children. But I never saw anything like that. I meant what I said when I said it, because I didn’t see anything weird or bizarre like that ever. And I did notice that he had an amazing connection to kids, whether it be a small baby or a two-year-old girl or a four-year-old — children really responded to him.”

Back then did you ever worry or even think whether there could be any truth in what he was accused of?

“Did I ever worry? Of course I fucking worried. Yeah. I did. But I could only come up with what he told me. The only two people that were in the room was him and that kid, so how the hell was I going to know? I could only go off what he told me.”

And what do you think now?

She purses her lips. “I don’t know. I still don’t know. I wasn’t there. I never saw anything else that could possibly lead to that. And there’s two sides of it. There’s the side of the dad. Why would the dad take the fucking money? If I had a kid and he was molested, I would fucking take that guy and hang him by his balls off a tree and let him sit there and die like that. Nobody could buy me, ever, if my child were molested. Fuck that. I don’t care if I didn’t have a penny — I would take his ass down in front of everybody.”

She says, by way of recap, this: “I understand it did affect people’s perception of me. That’s fine; I understand why. But I did fall in love with him. I can’t say what his intentions were, but I can tell you mine was that I absolutely fell in love with him and fell into this whole thing which I’m not proud of now.”

Do you rule out that he fell in love with you?

“As much as he can, possibly. I don’t know how much he can access love, really. I think as much as he can love somebody he might have loved me. It was always like a mind that was constantly working. It was a scary thing — somebody who’s constantly at work, calculating, calculating, manipulating. And he scared me like that.”

[…]

When I am sent the lyrics to her new album, there’s one more lyric than there are songs on the advance CD. It is called “Disciple,” and its remarkable first verse is:

You will flourish in your bringing you pleasure In so many masturbative ways Until you’ve simply no use for them anymore And then they will remain and suffer in your concentrated haze

The first seven songs that spilled out of her in the aftermath of her split with Jackson were all about the same thing, and “Disciple” was the one that summed it all up the best.

Everyone around you, they’re sick, they’re on medication or they willFinally lose their mindsBut they will always defend you and justify your insanity like I didBecause you make them blind

“I’m not into Michael-bashing at all,” she says, when I discuss the song with her. “I have no interest in doing that. He is who he is. I know people want to know what that was about, and I’m trying to say it without making him a bad guy, you know. . . . It’s hard to do, because it was such a bad situation and it was so fucked up.”

It wasn’t too long after the Diane Sawyer interview that things started going wrong. “We were really on shaky ground,” she says. “There would be periods of time where I had no idea where he was — only by the press. He would just disappear.” The final media spectacle documenting their union’s disintegration was the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards. She was in the audience; he was singing a medley of his greatest moments onstage.

“I was glaring at him,” she says. “That was a pretty infamous moment.”

Why were you glaring at him?

“Because I hadn’t seen him, or heard from him, in six weeks. He got upset and he would just disappear.” She says that after about a month without any contact, his people started calling, saying that it was important that she show up at the MTV Video Music Awards. She agreed to show up if she didn’t have to go down the red carpet; they consented, then led her down it anyway. “I was pissed. I just felt like I was being used at that point.” She was then told that he was going to sing to her and that he had a surprise for her. “I remember my whole look was: ‘Don’t you come anywhere fucking near me — we haven’t spoken in a month.’ And he got it. He didn’t come over. I talked to him later and he said, ‘I saw the look on your face, and I knew that if I walked up to you, I didn’t know what you were going to do me.’ ” (Weirdly, this performance — glare and all — would later be included on Michael Jackson’s video collection History on Film.)

There were other fault lines opening. Jackson had asked her never to speak about him, and she felt he was taking liberties, particularly in a TV Guide story at the time. “He was quoting me, ‘Lisa Marie told me Elvis had a nose job,’ which is absolute bullshit,” she says. “I think it justified something in his mind — they were asking him about his plastic surgery. I read that, and I threw it across the kitchen. ‘I told you what?’ ”

How did it come to a head?

“I’d had enough. That’s all.”

You pulled the plug?

“Yes. I told him I wanted a divorce. Then he didn’t talk to me for a couple of weeks.”

In the period following her split from Jackson, her health collapsed: “My body started to deteriorate. I started to have panic attacks. I went through two years of baffling every doctor from East to West Coast. One week it was asthma . . . hypoglycemia . . . candida . . . reflux . . . I had everything. My gall bladder just fucking stopped working, and I had to get it taken out. This was when the tabloids said I tried to kill myself or something like that. We settled out of court. But anyway, I wound up in the hospital. I had everything happening; my body completely fell apart. And nobody knew what the hell was wrong with me.” She was allergic to everything. “I had to eat chicken and broccoli for a year,” she remembers. “I was absolutely falling apart, physically and emotionally, for a two-year period.” At times she thought of death. “It was the constant physical breakdowns that were going on that I didn’t understand.”

You really thought you might not make it?

“I really thought it. It was just non-stop.” Then she went to a homeopathic doctor, told him all her symptoms, and he asked her to open her mouth. He told her to get her fillings removed. “But once I started to get it out, it all stopped.” (She now thinks her problems were caused by a mixture of mercury fillings and extreme stress.) “Mercury can make you go fucking crazy. That term ‘mad as a hatter’ comes from mercury: people working in felt factories and going crazy. They try to say mercury is safe, but it’s the second-deadliest poison known to man, underneath plutonium, and it’s in people’s fucking teeth.”

[…]

Like everybody else, she saw Martin Bashir’s interview with Michael Jackson. “I watched it and cringed,” she says. “I had the same reaction everybody else had — it was like watching a train wreck. It seemed like it was overly cruel — the guy [Bashir] had his agenda and was after him. I don’t make a habit of feeling bad for that guy [Jackson], because he kind of likes to push that sympathy button sometimes, and I don’t really go for it anymore, but that time I did. I was, ‘Oh, no, you really just got screwed.’ It honestly looked to me like, it would be like somebody walking into a convalescent home and just antagonizing someone and having it on film the whole time.”

Michael Jackson Responds To Lisa Marie Presley, April 2, 2003

Michael Jackson has responded to Lisa Marie Presley’s recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine. He said in a statement, “Michael Jackson wishes Lisa Marie all the best in the world. However, as to a comment on anything to do with their marriage, as a gentleman Michael prefers not to respond.”

LMP, Daily Telegraph – April 24th, 2003


In music, as in men, Presley is attracted to the dark side.

“I’m drawn to artists. I’m drawn to people who rattle, who shake things up. I’m definitely attracted to that. I don’t like mediocrity. I like people who are different, tortured. I like people that are shaken up and that aren’t status quo.

“And that’s the problem. You get attracted to them and there’s just another side – it’s attractive but it’s also destructive.”

The Life Of Brian, Marilyn Manson, THE FACE, May 2003


Have you ever met Michael Jackson?

No, but I have a puppet of him! (Manson dashes out the room and returns gleefully with a horrendous figurine.) I shipped this home and – no lie – the nose broke off! (He shows me. It has no nose.) And I’m very good friends with Lisa Marie Presley, but I forgot about her relationship with Michael Jackson – as she would probably like to- and this was hanging in my hall. I felt kind of bad when she came over. So I did a little puppet show with it and made her laugh.

Isn’t she a bonkers Scientologist?

I don’t talk about religion with her, but I don’t think she’s bonkers. I said to her, look, you can’t get more punk rock than getting married to and/or fucking a baby dangler. He’s a baby dangler! At this point he’s saying, “fuck it, my nose has gone, I’m gonna dangle a baby.”

Manson suddenly leaps to his feet again. ‘I also have this! Worth about 700 bucks!’ He bounces back in clutching another Jackson doll more horrible than the first, ‘This is about when he built the big statue and thought he was Stalin. You’ll notice they went back and reconfigured his face to look more like now,’ He flips a button and the doll sings ‘Black or White’, Manson is delighted.

Did Macaulay Culkin buy any of your art?

He didn’t come to the art show but he did buy me cigarettes. I play this character in Party Monster and I really wanted to go for broke on it.” So I put on my man- boobs, this gut and padded ass and I had a fake German accent and I smoked cigarettes. I wanted to practice, so I went with Macaulay to the liquor store. They didn’t recognize either one of us! They carded him!

LMP, San Francisco Chronicle – May 4th, 2003


Q: I know. Are you ever going to get married again?

A: I’m not saying I wouldn’t. It just has to be the right situation. I’m not going to be whimsical about it. If it ever happened again, it would be a really long time before it happened, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be some big romantic, I don’t know, outburst.

Q: So you still believe in the institution of marriage.

A: I do. But I come from a different situation than most people. I don’t want to be looked at as an example. I’ve been handed a different set of chips, and I’ve tried to find my way with it. Unfortunately, it’s been in front of the public, but it’s a genuine search to find the right mate. It’s just that I can’t quite find the right way to go because of the situation I’ve been handed. It’s been difficult. I’ve struggled, and it’s been obvious, so I don’t necessarily want to be looked at as the cheerleader in that department. I probably shouldn’t have too much attention in that area.

Q: Oh wait, I forgot to ask you about Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage, your dad, drugs, Scientology and Macaulay Culkin.

A: Macaulay Culkin? How did he get in there?

LMP, Larry King Live – May 6th, 2003


KING: What broke you out at 20?

LISA: Oh, God. I think I just needed to start — I don’t know, I just started to write to get myself through, you know, things, so …

KING: You were having tough periods in your life?

LISA: Yes, I think I was really having tough periods, but …

KING: And writing helped?

LISA: Writing got me through, yes, it was very cathartic, very therapeutic, so I did that.

KING: And then how finally did you make the break through to say I’m going to record and appear, concert, and …

LISA: I think it sort of happened all at a good period where I had just gone through my second divorce and was kind of aimless and somebody — Foster — David Foster came. We had worked on something and he basically said, you know, why don’t you do this now, you should do it, you know, you can do this and you should and it kind of came at a time where I was somewhat purposeless in my life, or aimless, not quite sure what to do at that point, and thought it was a great idea that I just sort of do the record, you know, put everything I had and felt and went through into that album.

[…]

KING: How did you handle when she got all that attention for being married to Michael Jackson? How did you as the mother handle that?

PRISCILLA PRESLEY: Concern. Concern. I think — I think any mother would be concerned, you know. I — you know, obviously, If my daughter is happy, you know, then I don’t have any problem. But she’s very strong willed.

KING: Wonder where she got that from.

PRISCILLA PRESLEY: I don’t know.

KING: Was she happy for a time?

PRISCILLA PRESLEY: I think so. I think so.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: All right, we have to ask it. How do you explain the Michael Jackson thing?

LISA: You know I’m going to explain this over and over and over…

KING: Yes, but I haven’t heard it.

LISA: You haven’t heard it? God, it wasn’t — it was just.

KING: How’d you explain it to little Larry?

LISA: OK. I just met someone who — because we were born, raised in different situations, different upbringings, there was a connection, on that front. You know?

KING: Superstars, superstars.

LISA: Yes, this fishbowl life, oddities, different circumstances thing. I think that I was trying to, at the time, obviously the marriage to somebody who wasn’t you know — what’s the word- – famous enough or enough on their own.

It wasn’t really working out like that.

KING: In other words, he wasn’t going to be bothered that you were a Presley.

LISA: Right. I kind of — right — so in my mind at the time I’m thinking I’ll marry somebody who’s even bigger or as big or whatever than I am and I can actually feel like a wife, feel like somebody who which I really liked feeling to be honest with you.

I liked the idea that I could be next to someone and they are getting all the attention and I was fine with that.

You know? It felt more natural, like a female type of a natural.

KING: Very understandable.

LISA: So I thought that would be a good thing now because of that and things seemed relatively normal to begin with.

KING: Why didn’t it work?

LISA: A lot of reasons but I — you know it was just — it was a messy — you know it’s never — when you have that situation then you have – it’s drawbacks which is, you know, entourages of people.

I didn’t like the attention, particularly. I really did sort of thrive in being finally a woman who could take care of someone and have that person be getting all the attention. I liked that whole idea.

But then that had it’s own things connected with it, you know?

KING: So you were smart enough to know that once that took place, you were going to be in the tabloids every week.

LISA: I kind of — yes , I wasn’t trying to live my life via some of the damn tabloids, pardon my French, but I just kind of did what I wanted to do, but I thought I…

KING: Was he good to your kids?

LISA: Yes, he was always good to my kids.

KING: Are you friendly now?

LISA: Don’t talk to him right now. But, you know, it’s kind of something I walked away from a long time ago, not something I try to keep in my life any more.

KING: Is his life going to straighten out, do you think?

LISA: I have no idea.

KING: Because he keeps seeming to always have little problems that develop around like there’s a little cloud that follows him around with all that talent.

LISA: It’s true. I don’t know. You know, it’s kind of — I really can’t even predict it any more. I can’t keep up with it either. It’s always changing. I can’t keep up.

KING: Do you think he’s a good father to his kids?

LISA: I’m sure. I met — I only got a chance to meet his son and he was adorable and he was great with him. But when I did have — it was very brief; it was a long time ago, it was fine.

KING: Was he interested in your father’s music, by the way?

LISA: I — you know — he didn’t go out of his way to tell me that but I heard from others and I kind of got the idea that he was.

KING: And the Nicolas Cage thing, what went – I like Nic.

LISA: Yes.

KING: Don’t you like Nic?

LISA: I adore Nic. I do.

KING: What was — what happened there?

LISA: That was — you know — again, I’d been with two people that in between, Michael and Nic, that were really known people…

[…]

KING: We’re back with Lisa Marie Presley. The album is “To Whom It May Concern.”

We’ll get back to the music — remember that Diane Sawyer interview of you and Michael?

Was that weird?

LISA: Yes that was a little strange. That was very strange. I mean, I was a nervous wreck, so…

KING: Did you regret doing that?

LISA: I did after I sort of got my head and cleared of all that.

You know it took me a long time to come out of that emotionally and once I did and I watched it again I was — it was a little disturbing, startling.

[…]

KING: Now, about relationships, are you — do you want to meet, finally, Mr. Right, or whatever his name may be? And get married? Would you have another kid?

LISA: Yes, I do. I do. But I want — I try not to focus on that right now. I’m obviously not very good at it, just yet, so I’ll just lay low until I figure it out.

KING: Why do you think you’re not good at it?

LISA: Because I have an unusual situation, you know? I’m not…

KING: I would say.

LISA: Yes, I’m not an average — you know, I’m not living an average situation here where it’s easy to just meet your match and you know — with me it’s a little different.

You get with somebody who doesn’t have a name or doesn’t quite have the whatever it is to stand up next to me they get — they get swamped and then you get somebody who is a celebrity then that’s got it’s things where you get too bold an opinion and then there’s another problem.

So, it’s kind of you know, it’s me trying to find something in the middle, something right.

KING: There’s no natural life for you. If you meet a guy who isn’t well known he’s going to have a tough time. If you meet a guy who’s very well known, he’s going to have a rough time for the opposite reasons of the other guy.

LISA: Exactly.

KING: So you’re almost in a no-win.

LISA: Almost.

KING: Yes. Do you miss being in love?

LISA: Do I miss it?

KING: Well I’m assuming you’re not in love now.

LISA: No. Do I miss it? You know it’s too distracting…

KING: You know what those moments are like.

LISA: I get too distracted when I’m in love. It’s better that I’m not.

KING: Better to be in like.

LISA: Yes, yes.

KING: Do you date?

LISA: Not right now.

KING: Do you intimidate men?

LISA: Probably.

KING: The average guy don’t call up and say, Hey, Lisa Marie, what are you doing Saturday night, we’ll go to the movies.

LMP, Playboy, June 2003


The relationship lasted six years, until she left Keough for Michael Jackson in 1994, marrying him in the Dominican Republic in a ceremony even Priscilla didn’t know about. There was widespread skepticism about any physical union, especially since Jackson had recently faced civil charges of sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy. JACKSON-PRESLEY UNION SPARKS SHOCK, DOUBT, LAUGHS read one headline. During an interview around the time of their one-year anniversary, Diane Sawyer asked the couple if they had sex. Lisa Marie responded indignantly, “Yes, yes, yes.” Seven months later she filed for a divorce. The marriage was “a mistake, everyone knows,” her lawyer declared.

After that mistake, she met actor (and longtime Elvis aficionado) Nicolas Cage at a party in 2001. They started a relationship, broke up, got back together, broke up, got back together and got married in Hawaii. He filed for divorce 107 days later.

[…]

PLAYBOY: What are people most eager to know about you?

PRESLEY: It’s the same thing: “Three marriages! Three marriages!”

PLAYBOY: Your ex-husband was involved with the record right?

PRESLEY: When you say “ex-husband” you have to be specific. [Laughs] I almost said, “Which ex-husband?” Yeah, Danny and I wrote two songs together.

[…]

PLAYBOY: Your dad died at 42, and his mother died at 46. You’re 35. Do you think more about death these days?

PRESLEY: No. When I was writing this album, I went through a period when I was not doing very well physically. It was mercury poisoning, from fillings. Everyone has a threshold, but after my divorce from Michael, I was under a lot of stress. My allergies caused craziness–I had my gallbladder removed, I went through hell. I constantly had these weird symptoms no one could explain. That was probably the worst period in my life, those two or three years.

PLAYBOY: Hey, at least you got some songs out of it.

[…]

PLAYBOY: OK, let’s discuss your ex-husbands instead.

PRESLEY: No–we’re going to stay on my dad, then. [Laughs]

[…]

PLAYBOY: Do you provide romantic advice to each other?

PRESLEY: No. He just shakes his head and laughs at me. I’m his entertainment. “How much of a shit-storm can you cause?” He intervened with Michael. But even then he wasn’t vocal. He just let me know he wasn’t happy about that one.

PLAYBOY: So you left Danny, an insecure, struggling musician, to marry Michael Jackson, the King of Pop.

PRESLEY: I walked away from Danny and went into Michael. And that was stupid. I thought it would help, because Michael and I had so much in common, our upbringings. And then it hit me in the face a year later.

PLAYBOY: Other than Danny, who know you were going to marry Michael?

PRESLEY: No one except the people who arranged the wedding.

PLAYBOY: Why didn’t you tell your mom?

PRESLEY: Because I knew she was against it. She was already saying, “Don’t you think this is just good timing for him? Wake up.” But I wouldn’t hear anything about it.

PLAYBOY: What did Priscilla say when you told her you had married him?

PRESLEY: She called me casually one day and said, “Ugh, there are helicopters flying over my house, driving me crazy. They’re saying that you married Michael Jackson.” And I was silent. And she went, “No, you didn’t. Lisa! Tell me.” And I went, “Yup, I did.” And I have to say I got a bit of a kick out of it, just for old times’ sake. One more middle finger going going up.

PLAYBOY: Lots of other people suspected it was a publicity stunt, because he had been accused of child molestation.

PRESLEY: We met casually at a friend’s house, and he immediately disillusioned me of any preconceived ideas I had of him. He said, “I know you think this about me, you think that,” and I immediately said, “Oh my god, you’re so misunderstood!” I forgot who he was within 20 minutes, because we were so locked into a conversation.

PLAYBOY: You’re saying that Michael Jackson is seductive?

PRESLEY: He’s not sexually seductive, but there is something riveting about him. He doesn’t let people see who he is. When he does, it’s hard to shake. I got caught up and thought I was in love with the man. I don’t know what else to say.

PLAYBOY: When you announced the marriage, you said in a press release, “I understand and support him.” Please explain Michael to those of us who really don’t understand him.

PRESLEY: Here’s the thing: For awhile, Michael was like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain. At one time he was really good at manipulating a Howard Hughes type of image: “He’s mysterious, fascinating.” He became this freak. And now he can’t get out from under it. When you’re the king of your own palace, there are no morals or ethics or integrity. Everyone will kiss your ass and then give you the push that knocks you over.

PLAYBOY: Did you and he ever have children join you in your bed?

PRESLEY: Never. Never, never, never, never. I never saw him sleep in bed with a child, ever.

PLAYBOY: Did you ever see him with photos of nude children?

PRESLEY: Never. Never.

PLAYBOY: Do you have any reason to think he’s a child molester?

PRESLEY: If I’d had any reason to suspect that, I would have had nothing to do with the guy. I had no reason to, other than the allegations themselves. The only two people who know are Michael and that kid in the room. I’ve never seen him behave inappropriately. He was great with my kids. He does have a connection with kids, babies. He’s a kid, and other kids sense that in him.

PLAYBOY: It would help his case if he’d stop saying, “Yes, I sleep with children.”

PRESLEY: I know! Someone should call him and go, “Would you just stop saying that? It’s not working for you!”

PLAYBOY: Did you and Michael discuss having kids?

PRESLEY: Yeah. [Laughs] I got out of that one. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea right now.” But I knew that’s what he wanted. And I knew Debbie Rowe was offering to do it for him while we were married, according to him. She was a nurse who had a crush on him and offered to have his babies.

PLAYBOY: Was he trying to leverage you into agreeing?

PRESLEY: Kind of. “Debbie Rowe says she’ll do it.” Ok, have Debbie Rowe do it! And it’s funny, when I imagined having a child with him, all I could ever see was a custody battle nightmare.

PLAYBOY: He just wanted to find someone to bear his children.

PRESLEY: I think so, but I don’t know.

PLAYBOY: Did you watch his TV interviews last winter with Martin Bashir?

PRESLEY: I watched, because I was on the radio tour that week and I was being asked about it everyday. I was like, Could there be any worse timing? I walked away in 1996. It’s not something consuming my thoughts anymore.

PLAYBOY: When Diane Sawyer interviewed you and Michael, she asked if you two had sex, and you were indignant. Can you see how the marriage looked suspicious to people.

PRESLEY: I can see that, only because that’s his thing, not mine. That always upset me. I was married for several years to a bass player nobody knew and before that never dated a celebrity. I never did anything to try and get publicity. I got caught up in Michael’s thing, which was manipulation. I was like, “Fuck you people, that’s not who I am. Why am I being blamed for a publicity stunt? Oh, I’m Miss Aspiring Singer, and now I want a record deal? That’s why I’m with him?”

PLAYBOY: It sounds like you think he used you.

PRESLEY: I’m not going to say he did or he didn’t. There are things that don’t look good, that’s all I can say. And most people saw it at the time except me.

PLAYBOY: When did the relationship go sour for you?

PRESLEY: Not long after Diane Sawyer. I started to wake up and ask a lot of questions. I don’t want to go into detail, but it went downhill pretty quick.

PLAYBOY: What about your kiss at the Video Music Awards in 1994? It looked staged and awkward.

PRESLEY: It looked awkward because I wanted out of my skin. At the 11th hour, he says, “I’m gonna kiss you.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that. Do we have to? That’s bullshit.” On the way there I kept saying, “Do we have to?” I squeezed his hand so hard that I cut off the circulation. He wouldn’t tell me when it was going to happen.

PLAYBOY: It was reported that you asked him for a divorce while he was in the hospital recovering from “exhaustion.”

PRESLEY: Not true. There was a bit of a showdown in the hospital, and I didn’t understand what was wrong with him. I didn’t know what he was up to. When I started asking too many questions about what was wrong, he asked me to leave. This is the real story. He said, “You’re causing trouble.” The doctors wanted me to go. I freaked out, because it was all too familiar. When he got out, I called him and said, “I want out.”

PLAYBOY: Later, when you met Nic Cage, were you thinking marriage?

PRESLEY: After Michael, I wasn’t in a hurry to get married again.

[…]

PRESLEY: Like when Michael and I split up, he said, “Don’t talk about me.” He never wanted anybody talking about him. I didn’t say a word about him. So the next three interviews I saw, he was talking about me. And I was like, “All bets are off, dude. You did it.”

[…]

PLAYBOY: How would you characterize your taste in sex?

PRESLEY: Probably “porn style.” [Laughs] I am a little dark on the subject. I like it rough, the way they do things in porn movies.

[…]

PRELSEY: [Laughs] If I get married again, I’ll stay married. I don’t know if I really thought I’d stay married with the last two. I’m whimsical about things. I get caught up in the moment. It’s the one area where I’m naive.

[…]

PLAYBOY: Do you want more kids?

PRESLEY: I’d like two more.

PLAYBOY: And if you don’t have someone to be the father–

PRESLEY: Are you kidding me? No, I will not go to a sperm donor. I could ask Debbie Rowe to be a surrogate for me.

LMP, The Guardian, June 7, 2003


As if her enduring adherence to Scientology, her children, even her highly publicised, at times disastrous, relationships, have all been an attempt to dress some ancient wound – the wound being caused by her own name, and her lifelong search for her own identity.

[…]

Her subsequent marriage to Michael Jackson would present the 1990s – a decade obsessed with celebrity – with the ultimate pairing of famous names. From the outside, the Jackson-Presley union looked like monolithic pop art: a pure Warholian fantasy of fame, wealth and beauty, as it might have been staged by Jeff Koons. The couple’s now legendary television interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s Prime Time Live, in which they announced that they were “just a normal married couple” and would indeed “be expecting a child”, prompted the gossip columnist Cindy Adams to retort, “I’ll bet my pearls he gets pregnant before she does.”

The marriage lasted 21 months, with Lisa Marie allegedly asking for a separation in December 1995 while Jackson was in New York’s Beth Israel North Medical Centre after collapsing with what was reported as low blood pressure. Of Martin Bashir’s recent television interview with Jackson, she says simply, “It was like someone antagonising a patient in a hospital – not that he’s a patient; but someone who’s in a vulnerable position. It just seemed cruel.”

But if the Presley-Jackson marriage seemed weighed down by the celebrity, wealth and eccentricity involved, there was, perhaps, a kind of method in its madness. Until now, she has spoken of the marriage only as a “delusional” episode in her life, prompted by a desire to save Jackson from his own demons, and a greater, more infantilist desire that together they could save the world; she has chosen not to comment on what might be seen as the far more understandable reasons she had for attempting marriage to Jackson – and for seeking happiness with the actor Nicolas Cage.

“I think I’ve been with 14 people in my life, and I’m 35, so that’s not too bad,” she begins. “Two of them were famous because I realised that, in the other situations I was in, although the men may be amazing people, may be beautiful, may be talented, they would just get pummelled by me. Their egos would be shot to hell, and it would create resentment, and love would never overcome that in the end. Because their identities would be taken away from them, or their importance; basically, they’d have their balls cut off, every time. Probably Michael and I connected because there was an unusual upbringing, unusual circumstances, and I felt honestly more comfortable being with someone who was as famous, or more famous, than me.

Because it took the pressure off me and I could feel like a female for the first time – like a regular female, not some female who has balls and who runs everything. I never liked that positioning, even though I’m strong and I have the name and the celebrity and whatever it is I have, it doesn’t feel natural. Because I want to be able to have a man who’s running things, and who I can admire and respect – and that’s always been my dilemma. So… I go with Michael.

“And then when you go with that, that’s got its drawbacks; because then you’re surrounded by whatever circumstances that person’s been in their whole life – which can be completely unrealistic, but that’s the way they are and you have to deal with whatever’s going on around that person – like entourages, shady people, all that that’s about. Then, I left Michael; two more people in a row that weren’t anyone. Again, it was all about me, and they’d get…” Here, Lisa Marie pauses for breath.

“…Like, I was engaged to someone who was an amazing singer and had a great record out, and none of that mattered – it was about me. And I saw too many men lose their identity and purpose in life because it was all about me. And so I ended up with Nic… It’s like ping pong, what do I do? And, somewhere in the middle, there’s got to be the answer. But I’ve got to find something in between where it’s not too extreme – right now, I go to extremes.

“And you know what I’ll say that I’ve not said before? I think that me being with these high-profile people is an attempt to hide – it’s kind of like I was too afraid, too uncomfortable with the attention on me, so it was kind of a way to hide behind someone, you know what I mean? That’s what’s really underneath it for me, it’s like I can just exist and be a female and not have the pressure on me. It was probably a way to run away and never deal with who I am and what I can do. It was always: hide behind somebody else, because they’re good at what they can do. I just realised that. And that probably has a lot to do with it.”

LMP, The Independent – July 2003


She also sings about misery and drugs, and specialises in character assassinations of former lovers.

“Perhaps I should go on record now and say that there are no songs on this album that refer in any way to [second husband] Michael Jackson,” she says, impatiently. “Sure, I’ve written a bunch of songs about him in the past, but they are old songs and I ditched them long ago.”

“I write about subjects that are close to my heart, but not every one of them is necessarily about the men in my life. Maybe two or three at most.” Which? “I won’t say. That’s why it’s called To Whom It May Concern. Go speculate.”

[…]

Come May 1994, Lisa Marie Presley would do something very strange indeed, something that would further propel her into the limelight she claimed to so loathe. As news was reverberating around the world of Michael Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, she married him in a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic, before subsequently announcing it to the world’s media with a full kiss on stage at that year’s MTV Video Music Awards.

The very mention of Jackson now causes the atmosphere in the hotel room to plummet further still. Her decision to enter into wedlock with the King of Weird is something she no longer wishes to discuss. “It was a moment of madness, old news, boring,” she says.

But then in the ensuing heavy silence she decides to explain herself.

“Look my whole life has been a constant battle of trying to find my own way. I have never met a man who could cope with me – who I am, the Presley name. I was always the dominant one in any relationship, and it’s unnatural for the woman to be the bread maker, the bread… whatever.” Winner? “The breadwinner, exactly. Which is why I ended up marrying someone even more famous than myself. Being Elvis Presley’s daughter is a whole lot of pressure. It’s been a constant burden in my life. Believe me, I had no idea just how great the pressure would get sometimes. Ultimately, it made me too chickenshit to step out of the shadow and into my own identity. Hiding behind someone else’s was, I guess easier, although not necessarily the right thing to do…”

The marriage remained a bizarrely public one – the couple being interview on US TV, seemingly happy to answer even the most intimate questions (yes, they were a regular couple; yes, they had sex) – but Presley became increasingly wary that she was merely a pawn in Jackson’s PR rebuilding exercise. Exasperated by his increasingly erratic behaviour, she divorced him three years later, and promptly fell ill with stress. She suffered from panic attacks, suspected asthma, hypoglycaemia, and had her gall bladder removed. The tabloids were convinced she was trying to kill herself, and her depression deepened, she lived on a diet of chicken and broccoli, and lost a lot of weight. Eventual salvation came from some unlikely advice: a homeopathic doctor told her to have the fillings in her teeth removed because mercury fillings, as she so succinctly puts it, “can make you go fucking crazy”. As soon as she had them taken out, her health started to improve.

LMP, The Mirror, July 10, 2003


And who can blame her? Her first marriage to musician Danny Keough may have lasted six years and produced two children – Danielle, 13, and Ben, nine – but her second, to Michael Jackson, lasted just 21 months. And the most recent, to volatile actor Nicolas Cage, ended when he filed for divorce, after 107 days, last November.

“I’m sure there was happiness, at some point, in the beginning, with all of them,” she tells me in her ultra-cool London hotel suite. “The first, the most. In fact, I’m still friends with Danny. He’s holding the fort right now, looking after my daughter in the States.

“And I’m still in contact with Nicolas. We talk on the phone all the time. We’re friends – we’ve managed to work that one out. I can’t say that about everyone I’ve been with.”

She smiles ruefully. In repose, you see strong echoes of her mother Priscilla’s doll-like features. But when she smiles, her mouth makes her look so much like Elvis, it’s heart-stopping.

And she adds: “If I were to bump into Michael in the hotel lobby, I’d just say “Hi’… and then walk. We have no contact at all.”

Her other less high-profile relationships have foundered because of her fame. Lisa Marie has been in the spotlight since the day she was born. “Because of the baggage I’ve got, unless they have their own thing they feel really good about, men just get bowled over,” she says. “If a man isn’t confident in himself, it just won’t work.

“So with Michael, I had the bright idea that being with someone more famous than me would be better.”

Their wedding in 1994 shocked the world but Lisa Marie insists that, at the start, it was genuine. “At the time, I thought, ‘This is it.’ I was vulnerable and got into his whole philanthropy thing. I thought I could help him save the world. In a way, I was hiding behind him – I didn’t have to deal with myself.”

It’s obvious when you talk to Lisa Marie – and it’s not an easy task, because she is both weary and wary, her black-shaded, heavy-lidded eyes evasive – that their marriage was a seismic event.

WHEN she filed for divorce the following year, she suffered a breakdown. “I was screwed up. It was two years of unwinding the web that was woven in my head.”

Lisa Marie won’t explain what she means but adds: “I’ve put that very concisely. Deliberately woven? I don’t know, you’d have to ask him.”

Then she chronicles the list of disasters that followed…

“It started emotionally and then it became physical. I was in a lot of trouble health-wise. Every week there was something wrong. It started with panic attacks, stomach problems. Then, one week hypoglycemia, next week asthma. I was in hospital twice. I lost my gall bladder.

“I worried constantly. My body seemed to be failing at every turn. It wasn’t a mental breakdown, it was physical. It was really amazing and it went on for about two years.”

When I ask her if she is surprised by what has happened to Michael in the intervening years – the money problems, the backlash following the baby-dangling incident, the Martin Bashir interview – Lisa Marie sighs.

“I will just say that at one point I did say: ‘This is like I’m on the Titanic and it’s sinking.’ And I wanted to help, because I could see certain things happening.

“But I said: ‘I’m either going to jump now, or I’m going to go down with you. So I’m going to get out.’ He said: ‘Am I sinking?’ I said: ‘Yeah.’ And then I walked. And he is sinking.

“I didn’t know how long it would take, I didn’t know when. I just knew there was going to be a karma situation. You can’t possibly conduct yourself a certain way and get away with it. I knew the karma police were coming. Do I feel guilt that I left him? On the contrary.” Her eyes flash and she shakes her head emphatically.

Lisa Marie is also determined that there will be no more actors in her life, although she is quick to point out that “this is not about Nicolas. But actors are out. They don’t know who the hell they are, what they’re doing. Drama – big, big, big! Everything’s so overblown.”

She goes on to confide: “Musicians have always been my weakness. My whole life – drummers, singers, guitarists. I’m always attracted to artists, to rebels, to bad boys. Troubled, usually!” She rolls her eyes and grins sheepishly.

[…]

Lisa Marie swears that not one song on her distinctive rock album – she has written all the lyrics – is about Michael: “They were all written about things that have happened in the past five years.”

LMP, New York Post – July 11th, 2003


In those inquiring-minds-would-like-to-know exposes, we learned, yes, she did have sexual relations with her second husband, Michael Jackson. And yes, he actually has a man’s voice when he’s not speaking in public.

Whodathunkit?

[…]

Post: There is so much negative writ ten about your relationships. What are the good memories of your dad, of Michael Jackson, of Nic Cage?

Presley: I’m not interested in talking about those memories of (Elvis). I have many great memories of good times, but I’d prefer not to talk about them. I don’t like to capitalize on my dad’s memory. As for Nic and Michael, there were good times, but people are just interested in the bad stuff. It’s just sensationalism. With Michael, I learned a lot. Nothing was all that terrible. As far as Nic, he and I still talk.

[…]

Presley: I had to do this record for me. I don’t like attention on me, and that’s a problem, but if I get it, I’d rather have it because I made a record and not because of who I married or who my dad was.

LMP, Q Magazine – July 14th, 2003


Who expected Elvis’s little girl to grow up entirely sane? Certainly not Lisa Marie Presley, survivor of one gothic drug phase and three car crash marriages

A bright spring day in Knightsbridge, London. Lisa Marie Presley takes a seat on a chintzy hotel sofa and watches as the tape recorder in front of her is switched on. “Michael Jackson, Scientology, Nic Cage,”; she says without prompting. “What else?”

What else indeed? Given that Lisa Marie has been a tabloid fixture for most of her life, a celebrity sideshow occupying the space between Drew Barrymore and Elizabeth Taylor, variously infamous as Elvis’s daughter and the ex-wife of Michael Jackson and, more recently, Nicolas Cage, it’s not too surprising she’s a little cynical. Still she says it with a smile.

[…]

Her life is very different from that of her ex-husband, imprisoned behind the gates at Neverland. Lisa Marie often ventures out into the city to browse the fashion outlets on Melrose Avenue or meet friends for dinner. Since her album came out she gets recognized more but has yet to feel the need to go out wearing a mask. “I just go out looking like shit,” she says.

[…]

She’s also not doing the record to talk about Michael Jackson, but it’s another part of her past that continues to fascinate. The married in 1994 in a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic and, despite the “shit storm” that followed, she insists now that she married with the best of intentions and that Jackson in private is very different from the falsetto man-boy who appears in public. Yet she also admits that her tie spent in Jackson’s world distorted her perceptions and twisted her emotions. The level of scrutiny he live under was too much, even for her.

“There’s good and bad to it. I felt I’d be more at ease with someone who was more famous than I was, that I could be second to, because I had no interest in having a record deal or anything like that,” she says. “There are drawbacks, because that person can build their own reality and everyone around them then goes into that reality and nothing’s real anymore. And I’ve been through all of that, I’ve seen all sides of it. Power or celebrity, you walk a really fine line. It’s a struggle to keep your sanity, to keep on a straight line.”

After splitting from Jackson in 1995, Lisa Marie Presley fell seriously ill, sparking rumours of suicide attempts and a nervous breakdown. In fact, she now believes, her health problems (which included everything from asthma to weird allergies) were related to stress and old mercury fillings. At the same time she was trying to get her emotions back to a stage approaching normality. In her case, this meant reaching a stage where she felt nothing towards Jackson at all.

As opposed to just hating his guts.

“The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference,” she says. “Someone kept telling me that and I was like, Bullshit!, because I could never get there. And then I finally didn’t care anymore. When you sit there full of venom and hatred for years, and you want so badly for the person to rot in hell, and I’m not saying this about Michael, but when you feel you’re caught up in something and theirs still enough emotion to even hate someone, it’s not ideal.”

But having “recovered” from her post-Jackson travails, Presley didn’t exactly play it safe.

[…]

So, is she learning to be “indifferent” to Nicolas Cage now, too?

“No, Nicholas and I are still in good condition. We’re good. That’s wasn’t as exciting or controversial as the other one [with Jackson]. There’s no big story behind it. ”

LMP, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic , July 17, 2003


Ask if she was into Michael Jackson growing up and the irritation in her voice begins to rise. “Probably like anybody else. I wasn’t over the top, but I’m sure you would have found me dancing to some of his music in a club here and there. Way back when.”

As to what attracted her to Michael when they met, she moans, “You know, I’ve kind of gone into this so-o-o many times” before working her way around to a fairly fascinating revelation. She was attracted, she says, to the fact that he was “raised in a fishbowl.”

[…]

Why now? “Because it happened that way,” Presley says. “I don’t know. I’d gone through my second divorce and was sort of aimless at that point and someone basically said, ‘Why don’t you just do this now?’ And I thought I’ll use everything I feel to channel it into this record.”

[…]

It’s important, after all, for people to start seeing her for who she is outside the context of her famous dad and famous former husband.

“Very possibly I’ll never shake that,” she says of the public image she acquired when she hit the tabloids as the girl who married Wacko Jacko, “but I don’t care.”

Well, she cares a little.

“I don’t want them to perceive me wrongly,” she admits. “I mean, I’d rather them perceive me correctly and decide based on that what they think as opposed to some sensationalistic idea of me that I never had anything to do with. I can tell you my logic or my method behind my madness, and if you don’t like that I can understand, or I’ll respect that. But don’t judge me before you actually ask me a question and try to figure out where I’m coming from.”

LMP, TRIBUNE-REVIEW, July 17, 2003


And Presley is especially pleased that as she does more interviews there are less questions about former husband Michael Jackson and more questions about her music.

“That’s when I’m happiest,” she says, and it’s evident that Elvis’ only child is taking her first steps beyond the mythology of Graceland, and taking them in stride.

LMP, Asbury Park Press – July 18th, 2003


Tired of being defined by the men in her life — do we really have to tell you their names? — Lisa Marie Presley is putting herself out there, come what may.

Presley doesn’t need the money, thanks to her inheritance from her dad, Elvis (oops, that’s one). She doesn’t need the spotlight; her marriage to Michael Jackson (oops, that’s two) afforded her plenty of face time.

[…]

Q. I’m guessing you watched that British TV special on Michael Jackson. Did any of that ring true for you?

A. You know, I don’t wanna go there. I’ve already done the Michael Jackson thing.

LMP, July 21, 2003


“It never occurred to me before – I wasn’t interested in attracting more attention to myself,” says Presley of her musical debut. “I wrote cathartically forever. It kind of just happened. I had been through a lot in my life. My second divorce (to Jackson) happened. I was pretty aimless, trying to get it together. I thought it was the right time.

[…]

On the tracks “S.O.B,” “Better Beware,” and “Gone,” the three-times divorced Presley squarely takes aim at problematic relationships. During a recent phone interview, she is more circumspect about her tabloid-fodder personal life.

“I think (with) anyone if you put their relationships under a microscope, everyone’s going to be scandalous somewhere along the line,” she says. “It’s all out there – I screwed up. Mine’s a little more high profile. I’m in an unusual situation. Unusual things happened. I get attracted to unusual people, and that’s the way it’s going to bloody go.”

Now in the position of wanting to talk to the press about her music, Presley has decided it’s better to respond to coverage than to ignore it.

“I’ve realized that not saying anything isn’t any good,” she says. “Now that I’m out there, at least I have the opportunity (to respond). I can counteract them now, then it’s done. It’s unavoidable that people want to know that stuff. The (ABC) ‘PrimeTime’ interview and a few things I did … I tried to answer as much as I could without going too far.”

LMP, July 27, 2003


Q – When you were married to Michael Jackson, did you ever talk about music or try make music together?

A – Never. I wasn’t interested then at all.

LMP, The Commercial Appeal – August 1st, 2003


You are getting a lot of stuff out of your system on this record. What would be the album’s most revealing song?

Excuse Me would be. [Sample lyric: “Did you know I broke up my family/And the guilt is never gone.”]

They’re all revealing. My God, they’re pretty to the bone.

[…]

What lyric that you’ve written on the record best describes Lisa Marie Presley?

It’s in Better Beware, I have to say. “I’m no longer (laughs) your erection or your congregation, I’m your disease.” There you go. That’s probably my favorite line. It’s metaphorical and literal; so many different angles on that one suit me on every level.

[…]

What would be your favorite Michael Jackson song?

Uh, good God. I can’t even answer that question.

LMP, Jane Magazine, September 2003


I’m nestled in a park-view suite at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park and asking my bride-to-be, Lisa Marie Presley, the former Ms. Jackson (if you’re nasty), what color satin she wants to use for our top secret ribbon-binding wedding nuptials.

“Um, black. It seems appropriate right now,” she says.

Much like her hush-hush Dominican Republic marriage to Michael Jackson, there are no photographers here, and our only witness is her preppy bodyguard (though I had a minister waiting on call), who cased my room before the ceremony.

[…]

After I snap a few Polaroids of our hands for our wedding album, we sit down to our reception feast of American Spirits (hers) and Winston Lights (mine) and get to know each other better. First and foremost, I want to know what kind of guy (besides me) she goes for, since her taste seems pretty all over the map. “I get attracted to someting that’s different, that sticks out. It’s always an artist. One of my first boyfriends who I actually fell in love with just sold me out. He cheated and lied and was just the biggest player, drug addict, drug dealer, crazy-ass motherfucker. He was the only one that was really ever diabolical with me.”

[…]

Her next marriage, to Michael Jackson, produced a lot of speculation about their sex life. And not just because of that “You Are Not Alone” video in which they frolic nearly naked at a Roman bath. While she never actually moved into Neverland Ranch, she says they still did mundane married couple things, like watch TV together. “I remember Alanis [Morissette] broke like a bat out of hell back then. I pulled him into the room and said, ‘You gotta listen to this.’”

“Did he like her?” I ask.

“Yeah, and then when she took the Grammy, he goes, ‘Well, that’s your girl, you were on it.’”

Since Lisa has said that their 1994 MTV Video Music Awards kiss was a stunt dreamed up by Michael’s manager, I want to know how Lisa’s “people” got along with Michael’s “people,” and how much these “people” participate in the day-to-day dealings of a relationship. “It’s a strange thing, but the camps either work or they don’t. You have to deal with those people’s agendas, and if you’re a threat to them and what they are trying to do, those people will start to get in the other one’s ear and you have to be really hyper-perceptive to all of that.”

Interestingly, Michael owns the rights to some of her father’s songs. “I saw a Velveeta commercial, and it was playing, I think, ‘Burning Love.’ [Jackson] had approved it–that’s something we can’t control. He can do whatever he wants with the songs he owns to make money, and that got under my skin.”

“What about that Club Crackers commercial, where one of the Keebler elves dresses up like Elvis?”

“I just saw that too–I freaked out!” she says, her eyes widening in disbelief. “Thanks for reminding me. I’m going to kill whoever approved that one.” And she probably can, since she’s the owner and chairman of the board of Elvis Presley Enterprises, a worldwide licensing company worth an estimated $500 million.

When her marriage to MJ fell apart after 20 months, so did she. “I was insane, and nobody could tell me what was wrong. I was trying to pull myself out of somebody else’s world, somebody else’s way of thinking.” At that time, she went under the care of a doctor who sounds totally psycho.

“She was the most treacherous soul, she was like fucking Nurse Ratched. She gave me too many pills, which created a problem with my stomach, which led to my gall bladder failing. So, I get it taken out, and she came into the hospital and said [using a spooky voice], ‘It was the most beautiful gall bladder I’ve ever seen.’”

[..]

“So, for real,” I ask, “now that we’re divorced, where are you with you love life?”

“I’m nowhere,” she says, picking at her veggie-filled salad. “It hasn’t happened very often that I’ve actually given my heart. Sometimes I can be completely smitten, but I’ll still keep it back at arm’s length. Because if I do give it to someone and I get hurt, it’s tragic. It incapacitates me. I have to be really careful of that. But that’s not to say I would be opposed to falling in love with somebody.”

LMP, Bunte Interview, November, 2003


“I am not here to attack Michael. Until now, I have disclosed very few details of what has really happened in this marriage. I suffered. I was so mad at how they were treating me. When our marriage ended I wanted to call a press conference and tell everyone what had really happened. That my heart got broken. I was deeply disturbed and shattered because I truly was in love with Michael.”

“This relationship has poisoned me. I couldn’t lead a normal life for about a year after that. And I wasn’t allowed to say anything.”

November 23, 2003


Likewise, Lisa Marie Presley, who married Jackson in August 1994 in the midst of a criminal investigation of a previous pedophile allegation against him, had nothing to say publicly, her spokeswoman said.

Myrna Smith, Syndey 2004


EIN – I believe that you were the first person to introduce Lisa Marie to Michael Jackson! ]

MS – Yes, Jerry and I did that! She would have been 6 years old I think and she wanted to see The Jackson 5. So we took her to see the show and afterwards we went backstage to meet them. But she didn’t remember that! I saw her on my birthday recently and she asked me about it because Michael had remembered the meeting and reminded her of it. Apparently Michael had tried to get in touch with her long before she started seeing him but until Lisa was 18 years old her Mother had her kinda’ under her thumb.

EIN – Now was that was a weird relationship, wasn’t it?

MS – In my mind it was a strange one. Lisa didn’t talk to me for a couple of years because I told her that, “No way are you going to get together with Michael Jackson”! She defied me anyway. She knows her own mind and she’s going to try it whether it’s right or wrong. She’s definitely like her Dad in that respect.

LMP, GQ Magazine – January 2004


OK. Michael Jackson: what was that all about?

(Silence)

Were you in love?

I was. See, you have a difficult situation with me because of the celebrity thing. If I’m with a guy, he might be a talented and beautiful person but he basically becomes Mr Fucking Presley. Their whole identity just gets pummelled. Which is very hard for a man and creates resentment. That’s what happened with my first marriage. Then I met Michael and I could tell he was interested in me – we had a connection at the time. I don’t know him any more and I don’t know what’s happened since then but at the time he was different to how he presents himself to people.

Did he understand you?

We probably connected because our lives were different to most other people.

Were you sexually attracted to him at first?

I didn’t think of him like that when I first met him. We had something though. We were sitting talking and after 20 minutes I’d forgotten who he was.

He must be a pretty charming man.

He is and what people always forget is that he didn’t get where he is without being shrewd and very, very, very intelligent. Also I was trying to find my way at the time: should I be with someone who is on the same level as me – celebrity-wise – or someone bigger?

Did you ever think, “I’ll go mid-table rather than top of the Premiership?”

I guess I was looking for someone to deflect attention from me. I was happy to support someone but I didn’t want the spotlight.

Then it turned out that he wanted you in the spotlight with him.

That was a whole twist I wasn’t particularly read for. Like going and doing public things with him.

You looked uncomfortable in that role.

That was because I hated it.

But didn’t you ever say, “No, I won’t kiss you, live on national TV, for a full minute”? [As happened at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.]

That happened, like, literally 20 minutes before we went out there. So I didn’t have a whole lot of say so.

Did he tell you that he intended to linger on the lips for quite so long?

No and he wouldn’t tell me when he was going to do it. He told me what he was going to say, which I didn’t think made any sense, but I was going along with the machine, not knowing that I was part of the machine.

How about the video when you were blacker than him? [“You Are Not Alone”]

I know. I’d just come back from Hawaii. Again, last-minute call. And then suddenly, like, “Oh by the way, you’re going to be naked.”

It sounds as if he was pulling a fast one on you.

There was always an element of manipulation. It would be, “Come meet me here”. And I’d turn up and there’d be press everywhere. That happened a lot. To the point where I’d think it was going to be a charming dinner, just the 2 of us, then bam! Paparazzi all over us.

Looking back, do you see how much you were used?

I can see that the whole operation was in operation. There was a record coming out but I just shut that out at the time. It didn’t seem possible that a person would be so cynical.

Was any part of the marriage normal?

When he wasn’t working and we’d just hang out at the house it was fine. We’d go shopping and go to dinner, people would come over. Although that was only for the first six, seven months, then all that kind of dwindled away. It kind of went to hell in a handbasket.

Did you feel physically for him?

Of course, I wouldn’t have married him at the time if I hadn’t. It wasn’t instinctive to me right off the bat. He needed to make that overture because I wasn’t going to.

He’s a fairly unappealing guy physically.

He’s somewhat asexual but he can be whatever he wants to be when he wants to be.

In the Martin Bashir documentary on Jackson, did you recognise him as the man you’d been married to?

No, but I thought there was agenda there. You can edit eight months’ worth of footage to look any way you want it to look. But I never saw any behaviour like that when I was with him or if I did it was so brief. There were so many sides to him but they seemed to want one particular side in the documentary. The whole thing, to me, was like someone going into a hospital and badgering a patient. It was like he was antagonising him and it was cruel. Unnecessarily. And that’s screwed up.

What’s the closest you’ve come to completely losing it?

I guess after my divorce from Michael. My body just started falling apart: panic attacks for two years. Then I got every allergy and illness going. I was constantly sick with something or other. It turned out I was suffering from mercury poisoning. They found a really high level of mercury in my system, which came from nine fillings in my teeth. It was way beyond my tolerance level.