Music

‘I was trying not to refer right off the bat to my heritage’: Lisa Marie Presley on Elvis, Michael Jackson and her music

Lisa Marie Presley, who has died aged 54, kept her famous last name in the media throughout her life

Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson pose at the Chateau de Versailles in France, 1994. Photograph: Stephane Cardinale/Sygma via Getty Images

Fri Jan 13 2023 - 08:39

Lisa Marie Presley, who as the only child of Elvis Presley kept her famous last name in the media spotlight with four weddings and three albums of her own, died on Thursday at the age of 54.

She was married briefly to Michael Jackson, and even more briefly to Nicolas Cage. Here is some of what Presley, who owned her father’s Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee, said about navigating her birthright of celebrity and fame.

Her father

Presley, who was nine when her father died of a heart attack, at the age of 42, once recalled how he had flown her on a private jet to Idaho so she could see snow for the first time. They spent half an hour in the powder and left to go home.

“He was so extraordinary a presence – not even as an entertainer, just as a person,” she once told the New York Times. “Yes, he sang well, and, yes, the songs were great, but that was him coming through the music. He was bigger than life.”

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In an interview with Larry King, she said her father’s soul had come through in his voice.

“Everything you saw and people appreciated about him, he was that or more offstage, and there was nothing contrived or preconceived about anything he was about or did,” she said. “And I think people feel that genuineness, and that doesn’t happen very often any more.”

[ Lisa Marie Presley’s life in pictures: From her early days in Graceland to marriage with Michael Jackson and beyond ]

Her music

Presley said she had been hesitant to lean on her father’s legacy when she started her own music career. But she was overruled by her record label, which made the personal Lights Out – “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis. That’s where my family’s buried and gone” – her debut single, in 2003.

“I just was trying not to be predictable and make reference right off the bat to my heritage,” she told the New York Times. “My concern was that it would go against everything I’m trying to do now, which is make my own thumbprint.”

Presley followed her first album, To Whom It May Concern, with Now What (2005) and Storm & Grace (2012).

In her interview with King, she described the title track of Now What as “representative of me in that it is seemingly sarcastic and sort of bold and had an attitude”.

“But yet if you hear the actual song,” she continued, “it’s very sort of vulnerable and soul searching to some degree.”

Her relationships

Of Presley’s four marriages, it was her relationship with Jackson that enthralled the tabloids. Following a secretive ceremony in the Dominican Republic, they began their honeymoon at Trump Tower.

During the two-year marriage, Presley told Diane Sawyer, rumours the relationship was a publicity stunt were untrue. At the time, Jackson was facing allegations that he had molested a 13-year-old boy.

“How can you fake this 24 hours a day, sleeping with somebody, waking with somebody?” she said. “I’m not going to marry somebody for any reason other than the fact that I fall in love with them.”

Years after Presley and Jackson divorced in 1996, she explained to the New York Times the difficulties of navigating the dynamics of stardom.

“I was still relatively young, and trying to decide what would be better for me: being with someone who doesn’t have anything, and then they get trampled and have no ego because they just become ‘Mr Presley’, or being with someone whose situation is comparable to mine,” she said. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times

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