"Was still able to mother him" Lisa Marie Presley kept her son's body in the house for two months

In January 2023, Elvis' daughter Lisa Marie Presley died at the age of 54. Her autobiography has now been published posthumously. It reveals that Presley did not want to part with his body after the death of his son Benjamin.

A year and a half after the death of Lisa Marie Presley, the memoirs of music icon Elvis Presley's only child have been published posthumously.

Her daughter, actress Riley Keough, completed the memoirs "From Here to the Great Unknown" with the help of tape recordings made by her mother, according to Penguin Publishing.

Lisa Marie Presley died on January 12, 2023 at the age of just 54 as a result of weight-loss surgery. Around a month before her unexpected death, her mother asked her if she wanted to co-author the book with her, Keough writes in the foreword.

"I knew something tragic was imminent"

The book is now told alternately from Presley's and Keough's perspective, characterized by different fonts. Her mother was "a kind of princess of America", writes Keough - "and she didn't want to be that".

The autobiography begins with the early years of Lisa Marie Presley's life, most of which she spent with her famous father at his Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee. "He was a god to me. A chosen one." Even as a small child, however, she was afraid of his death. "I knew that something tragic was imminent."

When Elvis Presley died in 1977 at the age of 42, his daughter was nine years old - and witnessed everything first-hand. His lifeless body was carried out of the house past her. "I didn't see his face, but I saw his head, his body, his pyjamas and I saw his socks at the foot of the stretcher."

Presley and Jackson as a "completely normal married couple"

At this point, Lisa Marie Presley was already living most of the time with her mother Priscilla Presley in Los Angeles, her parents had separated. A new boyfriend of her mother later sexually harassed her, writes Lisa Marie Presley.

She attended different schools, consumed drugs and alcohol at an early age, was a member of Scientology for a time and married the musician Danny Keough at the age of 20, with whom she had daughter Riley in 1989 and son Benjamin in 1992.

The marriage broke up in 1994. Just a few weeks after the divorce, Presley married the "King of Pop" Michael Jackson. "I was really very happy. I was never that happy again," Presley writes. "We just wanted to be alone, normal, anonymous. I did his laundry and we ran errands together, went shopping."

Daughter Keough also writes that the two were "a normal married couple". "They drove me to school in the morning, just like a normal family."

80 tablets a day

But in 1996, the marriage with Jackson also broke up. After that, Presley's two other marriages failed, one of them with Hollywood star Nicolas Cage. In 2008, she had twin daughters with musician Michael Lockwood. She also pursued a singing career and released three studio albums.

Lisa Marie Presley managed to live without drugs for several years, but her addiction caught up with her again. At times she took around 80 tablets a day, she writes. Time and again, Presley spent time with her children at Graceland, where they all slept together in what was once Elvis' bed.

In 2020, Lisa Marie Presley's son Benjamin Keough took his own life. After his death, she kept his body in a suitably cooled room on dry ice in her house for two months, writes the Elvis daughter.

Presley got a partner tattoo

"I think any other person would shit their pants in fear at the idea of having their son with them in this way. But not me," the book says.

And further: "I considered myself so lucky that there was a way I could still mother him, delay it a little longer, until it would be okay for me to lay him to rest."

Lisa Marie Presley is even said to have called in a tattoo artist after Benjamin's death to get a partner tattoo. The death of her son broke her mother's heart, writes Riley Keough.

Lisa Marie Presley herself died around three years later. In the book, Keough quotes from her eulogy, which her husband Ben Smith-Petersen read out at the funeral service: "Thank you for showing me that love is the only thing that matters in life."

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