“What is the point of an autobiography?”
Lisa Marie Presley asks this question toward the end of her incredibly sad memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown.”
Presley died of a bowel obstruction — a complication of bariatric surgery — before she could finish the book, having endured 54 years of intense public scrutiny. Her daughter, Riley Keough, picked up where she left off, listening to interviews her mother had recorded for the project. Their perspectives appear in alternating sections — a haunting harmony that builds to a crescendo of heartbreak.
The answer to Presley’s question comes from Keough, who is best known for her star turn in Amazon’s adaptation of “Daisy Jones & the Six”: The point of an autobiography — this one, anyway — is to show the toll of fame and addiction.
Anyone who’s skimmed tabloid headlines at the grocery store knows the basics, but here’s a quick summary for online shoppers: Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Priscilla and Elvis Presley, grew up without stability or peace, hounded by paparazzi, criticized for her looks, her weight, her drug use, her marriage to Michael Jackson. From start to finish, her life took place in the public domain.
“I guess I didn’t really have a shot in hell,” Presley writes.
“My mom was really affected by what people wrote about her,” Keough tells us. “She had no siblings to share the burden, nobody who understood what it truly felt like. In a way she was the princess of America and didn’t want to be.”
The first third of “From Here to the Great Unknown” is full of nostalgic musings about Graceland, the Presley family home in Memphis. We get a peek at the parts that aren’t on the tour. We learn about Lisa Marie’s tonsillectomy and her baby blue golf cart. She is just 9 when we see her father’s body leaving the house on a stretcher — his pajamas, his socks. We see his entourage picking over his belongings.
Then Presley is 11, being abused by her mother’s boyfriend, Michael Edwards, who played Joan Crawford’s lover in “Mommie Dearest.” This went on for three years. Then she’s 14, in a relationship with a 23-year-old who sold compromising pictures of her, which leads Presley to take 20 Valium in an attempt to end her life. There are occasional glimpses of a star-studded youth — tea with Elton John! — but, honestly, it’s hard to get too excited about the fact that Vidal Sassoon’s daughter Catya had Liquid Paper and sandals with heels when the poor young woman dies of a drug overdose on the next page.
Enter Michael Jackson. Presley met him for the first time when she was around 6 years old (he remembered, she didn’t) and fell in love with him when she was in her early 20s. According to her, he was a virgin. At the time, she was married to Danny Keough, whom she soon divorced, and had two children — Riley and her younger brother, Ben. We see Presley and Jackson holed up in a Vegas hotel room, watching “Jaws.” We can smell their picked-over room service dinners moldering beneath metal domes.
Presley writes, “The physical stuff started happening, which I was shocked at. I had thought that maybe we wouldn’t do anything until we got married, but he said, ‘I’m not waiting!’”
Keough writes, “At home they were a regular married couple. They would drive us to school together in the morning, just like a normal family, though sometimes Michael would bring along a chimpanzee. Before you ask, ’twas not Bubbles.”
One has the sense that Keough cannot skate through this phase of her mother’s life quickly enough.
As for the accusations of child molestation against Jackson, Presley writes, “I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would have killed him if I had.”
The marriage ended because Presley didn’t want to have Jackson’s children. By that point, he already had his own anesthesiologist to administer drugs. A family member asked Presley “to try to get his urine to test it,” but she declined.
There was a happy decade when Presley stopped using drugs and devoted herself to her children. Keough recalls her saying, “My music wasn’t that successful, I didn’t finish high school, I’m not beautiful, I’m not good enough — but I’m a great mother.” Keough agrees, while acknowledging that Presley occasionally felt the need to cover windows with aluminum foil so as not to be spotted by photographers.
When she was 40, Presley had twin daughters, Harper and Finley, with her husband Michael Lockwood. (They divorced in 2021.) She experienced her first “oh-my-God high” from painkillers prescribed after a C-section; the memoir’s final 80 pages cover her free fall into addiction. (“It escalated to 80 pills a day.”) This is difficult territory, and it becomes even more treacherous when Keough’s brother, Ben, ends his own life, but it’s the most powerful part of the book. Instead of tap dancing around the hard parts, we’re drilling into the bedrock. We hear less from Presley and more from Keough, who comes across as level headed, valiant and kind. At a Nar-Anon meeting, she would definitely be the one brewing the coffee.
Is this a book for addicts? Their families? Elvis fans? Hard to say.
Here’s the detail that will land in those checkout lane headlines: After Ben died, Presley kept his body on dry ice in a temperature-controlled room at her house in Calabasas, Calif. for two months.
“I felt so fortunate that there was a way I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become OK with laying him to rest,” she writes.
Keough approaches the episode with respectful levity, the best tool available to members of a dysfunctional family. When Presley invites a visiting tattoo artist to take a peek at the ink on her dead son’s body, Keough writes, “I’ve had an extremely absurd life but this moment is in the top five.”
Keough knew her mother wouldn’t survive her brother’s death. “When I would go visit her, she didn’t even know who I was,” she writes. “I remember sitting with her while she tried to light her cigarette for five full minutes. Unsuccessfully. It was as if it was all happening in slow motion. The cigarette was never closer than a foot away from the lighter.”
Presley still gets a word in here and there, and these passages show how determined she was to stand up to her demons.
“Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing left, no purpose,” she writes. But “I have three remaining children, so I fight it, I fight it, I fight it, I fight it, I fight it.”
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