No One Has Heard My Side of the Story
Ladies Home Journal
July 2003


Priscilla Presley, in a rare interview, open up about her daughter Lisa Marie's marriages, her own private memories of Elvis and why she's taken to the road to warn women not to lose themselves in marriage. By Gerry Hirshey.

Imagine this single-mom dilemma: When Lisa Marie Presley was 8, her proud papa, Elvis, gave his only and much beloved child a wee mink coat and a diamond ring. This horrified his ex-wife, Priscilla, who made her return them. Elvis spoiled their little girl with such kingly abandon that Lisa Marie would throw tantrums when she returned to her mother after a Daddy visit, whining for special Elvis foods “like in Memphis,” screaming “I wanna go back to Graceland!”, the mansion where she could do no wrong. There, Daddy let Lisa Marie tear around in her golf cart, squishing frogs and spooking security men until 4am. “She was a terror when I got her back,” says Priscilla now. “You cannot imagine.”

The child needed perspective, especially since they lived in celebrity-addled Los Angeles. Like so many of her peers, Lisa Marie dabbled in drugs from the ages of 13 to 17. In 1984, seven years after the King's drug-related death, Priscilla handed her daughter, then 16, a rather unique gift: “I gave her all the tabloids I had kept, everything that was written about her. And me.” She got the message: No matter what you do – or don't do – your past will always find you. Then mother and child laughed and laughed as they spent hours flipping through that brittle, yellowed stack. The Presley women have a well-developed sense of the absurd. Says Priscilla, “Lisa got a huge kick out of that.”

A strange Sweet Sixteen, you say? Not really. Not when mother and daughter have been – and forever will be – American pop royalty. Not when they have dodged paparazzi together since 1968, from the maternity ward onward. Not when creepy hucksters are exhibiting Priscilla's false eyelashes (stolen and sold by a maid) in a tacky “museum” near Graceland. Not when reputable outlets are auctioning barber clippings of Daddy's hair on-line for $115, 120. As Graceland braces for this summer's tourist season, there are expectations of crowds even greater than last year's 600 000 paying pilgrims. “Normal” has always been out of the question for Elvis's two lovely survivors – especially when, for one stranger-than-fiction year from 1994 to 1995, Lisa Marie was married to Michael Jackson making Priscilla “Wacko Jacko's” mother-in-law. “I am a tabloid queen”, Lisa Marie deadpanned recently not long after the flameout of her third – and four-month long marriage to actor Nicolas Cage.

What's a mother to do? “There were definitely difficult times for us”, Priscilla admits now on a chilly spring afternoon at her home high in the hills above Los Angeles. “The press has written horrible stories about the two us. Look, Lisa Marie is 35 now and a mother herself. I want to be by her side and I totally support her.”

Priscilla is about to step out this summer to talk about her family and the lessons her amazing life has afforded. Her lecture tour is part of the “Smart Talk” Women's Series which features speakers such as Coretta Scott King and Erin Brockovich. “There is a shyness about me and I really need to get out more”, she says. “It's really good therapy for me in many ways”. She says she has rarely done print interviews – she has been burned too many times. But now, “I seem to have more understanding of what happened. I understand the process of what happened. I understand the…bigness.”

Two decades after she reinvented Graceland as a museum and flung open the doors to the public – reluctantly to reinvigorate the near-bankrupt Presley estate for its sole heir, Lisa Marie – Priscilla says she's ready and strong enough to conduct a guided tour of her own life, which she calls “an adventure”. Sitting in her paneled den, she insists we'll get to it all – the Elvis years, the Lisa Marie/Jacko chronicles, her own second family with Marco Garibaldi, an Italian-born film producer and software architect and their 16-year-old son, Navarone. That's a lot of talk, and Priscilla has prepared fortifiers – lemonade, a pyramid of organic strawberries, a cozy fire. She bought this gorgeous fortress in 1973, after she fled her marriage. Fountains splash outside the French doors; leopard-spotted Bengal house cats glide beneath blue delphiniums. Towards dusk, Priscilla will call her pets in, since coyotes prowl these hills. More predators lurk without: a quarter of century after Elvis's death, paparazzi still rustle in the bushes. There is a low, reassuring boom when the solid metal gate grinds shut after admitting a visitor.

Priscilla Presley has been living behind security gates for more than 40 years, since she was Elvis's teenage bride-to-be cosseted in Graceland. We all know the background story: that Priscilla Presley was one of six children, the stunning 14-year-old daughter of a strict career Air Force man and a former model when she met Army Pvt. Presley in 1959. The King fell hard and by 16 she was living at Graceland, under the supervision of Elvis's dad, Vernon. Few 58-year-ols grandmas (Lisa Marie has a son, 10, and a daughter, 13, by her first marriage to musician Danny Keough) could possibly look so unburdened – by age, gravity or a lifetime in the harsh limelight. The once over-inflated hair dyed jet-black (to match Elvis's) is now streaked honey and ash, whispy-cut to frame a face enhanced with just the subtlest strokes of eyeliner. Any woman would be moved to ask: despite all the dramas, no frown lines? Not fair! But how?

“I'll tell you why I have no lines”, she says, and laughs as she often does during this long conversation, “Elvis used to used to slap in the forehead every time I looked up.” This was in her Catholic high-school days, when he was intent on moulding her into his “ideal woman.” She explains: “I'd be sitting in the kitchen doing my homework, and I'd look up at Elvis - like this – and he'd tap me on the forehead”, (Here she whacks herself, not gently, above her brows.) “He'd tell me not to use my forehead to look up, only to use my eyes. Pow! I still feel his hand there. I've never had Botox, any of that, in my forehead. She simply never furrowed, no matter what. If she hunched over, Elvis would tap her on the back.

Thanks to Elvis, plus years of dance, karate, Pilates and her current thrice-weekly yoga, she is slim and Beverly Hills chic. She is petite and seems even smaller perched on an overstuffed sofa. The room we are sitting in is so handsome, so impeccably accented with tapestried pillows, antique secretaries, and distressed leather club chairs that you'd think she'd been married to Ralph Lauren, and not a guy who once covered the ceilings of his Graceland inner sanctum in green Naughahyde. “Well”, she says, “this place is me.” Photographs of Priscilla and her handsome men, Marco and Navarone, line the mantle. Not a trace of…him. “Not here”, she says. “That would be foolish”. Lisa Marie smiles from many framed photos around the room, as a child and as a beautiful woman with her mother's bright eyes and her father's sensuous mouth. She lives nearby with her children and (in a separate apartment) their father Keough, who sometimes home-tutors their kids. “I know the living arrangements sound odd to others”, Priscilla says, “but Danny's very much there for his children”. It's especially helpful now their mother is on the road. In interviews surrounding the spring release of her first (and fairly autobiographical CD, To Whom It May Concern, Lisa Marie has been talking bluntly about her strange and sometimes gloomy childhood. The CD features sad and haunting songs about her father. Her mother thinks it's healthy. “I feel she's got it all together. This is her destiny,” says Priscilla. “I really feel that. Music is something she has had in her blood since she was 3, when she'd listened to records in her room instead of playing with other kids. It's in her blood.”

As her daughter starts her recording career, Priscilla is launching an armada of adventures herself. Besides the lecture tour, she is developing a Broadway musical centered on “my life from my perspective”, a Priscilla Presley Collection of fine jewelry and a Hollywood film project. Her charity work centers on the Dream Foundation, which grants special wishes to terminally ill adults. And at Lisa Marie's insistence, she is still on the board of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which has ballooned, under her stewardship, to an estimated net worth of over $250 million. It seems a watershed time for both women, as they come to terms with their monumental past – and take strides toward the future. America loves a second act.

Priscilla's Act One – the Graceland years – is an America myth as potent as the Kennedy's fabled White House Camelot. She says she got to write very little of it, and that she doesn't regret the days in her gilded cage as Mrs. Presley. But she understands now what made it so unworkable in the end: “I lived somebody else's life. It was never about me, it was really about him on every level.” It's something she'll be telling largely female audiences in her lectures: “Honey, have your own thing going, too”. She learned the hard way that total submission in marriage – by either party – is a bad idea. But she also wants people to understand, “I have absolutely no anger. I don't look back and go 'Oh my gosh, look what happened to us'. I lived a really wonderful life with this man and even after our divorce, it was incredible. We had a closer bond, probably because the effort was off and there was just a purity. We realized we like each other and that's very special.”

In fact, she can laugh remembering the special beguilements of the man: “Elvis brought out this mothering quality. I cut his meat up for him. I tasted it before he ever had it. I would fix his deviled eggs, cut off the top, put his butter in, prepare all his food as a mother would for a child. I would test it to see if it was too hot. Even making his coffee…I loved doing it for him. We'd all baby him. Then you'd see him on stage and He looked so strong and so virile, it was like 'Oh my god! But there was this child that was still in there.”

We can never get enough of Act One, the glamorous, wild Viva Las Vegas years. And those are the years she wants to make into a Broadway musical, the crazy-in-love, anything goes time of her extreme youth. Her voice is different, breathy as she imagines how to stage it: “Vegas 1962. I'm going to have the showgirls, where they come down the steps and do their show – Sinatra's Rat Pack on one side, us on the other, baiting back and forth. Here I am, 16 years-old, all dolled up in clothes I certainly should not have been wearing. Going to the blackjack tables and the crowds parting when we'd come in”. She was so young it was hard to do the math in lightning games of “21”. To flesh out these princess diaries, she has approached the writers who staged Annie and other big hits. “No-one has really heard my side of the story, the adventure we had together, the transformation that I had going from schoolgirl to a woman overnight.”

Yes, she wrote a short memoir, Elvis and Me in 1985, but she hated every minute of it, she says, and only did it “for my daughter” to counter the infamous Elvis biography by Albert Goldman, a smarmy marathon of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that revealed, among other things, the private Polaroids that Elvis liked to snap of his wife and other women. “The book was so appalling, just horrendous,” she says. “And I read it and said 'I can't let this be a book that my daughter could read about her father.' I wanted her to see that her father was very sensitive and wonderful and that was every bit what she thought of him as a dad.”

One hundred and sixty-five Elvis books later, this effort to have the last word seems haplessly naïve, she admits, laughing. The outrages, the hokey “Elvis sightings”, the invasions of privacy keep coming. Both Priscilla and her daughter are still stung by the betrayals of Elvis's “guys”, members of his tight, macho entourage who have been pedalling scandal and stolen objects for years. Priscilla says she can cope with the lively trade in half-smoked Elvis cigars, fingernail clippings and the like, though she refuses to look at what's available on eBay. “I'm more upset about the pictures. I took pictures all the time and had left many photos in a drawer in our bedroom when I moved out. Some I had cut in half, torn and thrown in the trash. They're on the market now. You can see where someone put them back together. They were stolen and sold.”

And those Polaroids? For the first time, there is a hint of shadow on that smooth brow. “I got most of those back and did destroy them. But there are a few out there.” Some day they'll come back to bite her. And Lisa Marie. She does not waste a lot of time anticipating the attacks, but it has made her very cautious. “I have a terrible time giving interviews. It's so much more a sensitive issue for me because I am so protective of Lisa Marie and her father. I'm leery of giving away too much because I feel that's a betrayal. We were all prone to protect Elvis. Protect, protect, protect. That's all we did. We lived his life, and we protected him. You don't realize how much that becomes a part of you.”

She is having to reassess it all as she works on the musical, which she intends to be “uplifting”, to celebrate the good times. She's been thinking a lot about her “transformation scene”, which she imagines as a big set piece, very visual, part Dreamgirls, part Hairspray. It happened when she was 16, and something had to be done to get her in to the over-21 Vegas casinos. Elvis summoned beautician Armando. The sink ran black with dye, the rat-tail comb got busy. “Then I was….presented”. Elvis flipped. As casino crowds fell back in awe and flashbulbs popped, she recalls, “I really felt on top of the world.” This is what Priscilla Presley would like the dreary Elvis mythology to understand: Act One was no grand American tragedy. Sure, she was devastated by her husband's sad demise, his own infidelities, her own retaliative affair, the divorce. But the couple remained close, and she totally relied on him until his death when, as she puts it, “the sun went out.”

She sees now that his death released her from being that child-woman who hadn't ever experienced an adult life of her own making. “When that rug is pulled out from under you, when you realize the people who were around you to soothe you, tend to you, comfort you are no longer there, it's a wake-up call.”

Act Two of her life, authored completely by Ms. P, is upbeat and leavened by a deep sense of humour. Priscilla tried acting but not as a tragedienne: In the 1980s she played Bobby Ewing's babe Jenna Wade for five years on Dallas, then took pratfalls and cavorted in neon-lit negligees as the sexy girlfriend of bumbling detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielson) in the Naked Gun comedies. She is also on the board of MGM Studios. As a producer she has bought the rights to the Peter Sellers classic comedy, The Party, and has assembled an impressive team that includes Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers films) and co-produce Darren Star (late of Sex and the City). But are the Hollywood players taking her seriously? She sighs. “They are. I think at first it was 'Why is she doing this'. There's always that. But I can get by that. I just plow through.”

Navigating the more personal stuff is another matter. In 1995 the world watched, aghast, when Lisa Marie acknowledged her sexual relationship with husband Michael Jackson in a freaky televised interview with Diane Sawyer. “Oh, my God”, Priscilla moans. “That relationship was the hardest to watch. People have asked me 'Why didn't you say something?' As a mother, I certainly didn't want to sever my relationship with my daughter or my grandchildren. It had to ride itself out. I was there for her, 100 percent. But I was the last person to say something.” This was because she knows her daughter so well: “Lisa's not the type of girl that I could say 'Don't do this'. If I were to say 'Don't marry him,' she would look at me and do 'Well, screw you.' I had to be really delicate about it. Say 'I know you you're going to do the right thing.'”

She did issue a few subtle warnings: “Look at the timing here, he needs you.'” The courting came just after Michael's child-molestation allegations which were finally, and expensively, settled with the boy's family. A marriage to gorgeous female rock royalty was clearly good public relations for the King of Pop. Quietly, Priscilla urged her daughter, “Look for the red flags. Just be careful, honey.”

Priscilla had sensed something odd early on, when Lisa Marie was still married to Keough and had just given birth to their second child. Even then, “Michael had an agenda”, she says. He called me while I was still doing Dallas and asked to meet Lisa Marie. It was just when he was getting Neverland (his California estate) together. So Michael was calling and I was getting a little bit suspicious.” Looking back, she realizes the fix was in. “This fit into his big scheme. I mean, Graceland…Neverland? King of Pop…King of Rock? You have to open your eyes.” There was no telling her headstrong baby that maybe Jackson was using her to shore up his crumbling façade. “I didn't want to say too much so she'd run to him. I was biting my tongue, afraid to read the paper, afraid to watch the news. Because there were things he was doing with her [after they were married]. He would show up in Memphis when there was a tribute to her father knowing the commotion he brings. Or he would just disappear. I think she started seeing things as it progressed. But as a mother sitting back, watching that, it's horrifying.”

Nothing was worse than sitting through that Diane Sawyer interview. “I was stunned. It was another manipulation. We were meeting in Hawaii at the time, and Lisa was delayed. Last minute, she said she was going to do this interview. We didn't really know what it was about. It was taped, and Lisa arrived in Hawaii in time for the whole family to watch it together. Priscilla says that those red flags were bristling all over the TV screen: “Seeing her sitting there protecting him, looking very defiant and defensive. I knew that the marriage was in trouble. Because she couldn't have gone on like that. Lisa's too outspoken to be so cautious and contain herself that way. I knew she couldn't continue that type of relationship, that's for sure.”

And when the credits rolled? “We were stunned. No-one said anything.”

Lisa Marie left the marriage soon after, and mother and daughter have talked about the disaster a good deal. The brief marriage to Cage last year was, in Priscilla's view, “probably more of that rebelliousness she has in her.” But no-one in the Presley clan is quick to point fingers. Says Priscilla, “I see how she's following in my path of dating and marrying superstars. I think she can probably identify more with me now – what you have to go through and why it's very difficult.”

So many of the dictates in the Jackson marriage came from what Priscilla calls the Jackson “camp”. Reminded of Elvis's guys, who surrounded them to the point of suffocation, Priscilla got the willies: “I think the sad thing about stardom – and Lisa and I have talked about this – is that it makes everyone cater to you. You never the get other perspective.” Brutal honesty wasn't an option in Elvis's camp, she says. “You couldn't bring anything bad to him. But you need to see the bad reviews, because you start thinking you can do no wrong.”

An Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing? “Absolutely. Even as a wife wanting to say -and I did say – 'You really shouldn't be wearing those jumpsuits anymore. It's not looking good.' All of a sudden you're the bad guy because you're delivering the news. Then Elvis goes to the guys [his entourage] and says, 'How does this look?' and they say 'Oh great!'”.

For the last sixteen years she has been with a man so open, capable and secure that he does not feel threatened by her tending and protecting the Elvis flame. Nor has she felt the need to marry Marco Garibaldi, whom she describes as “the father of my son, my confidante, companion and lover.” Nine years her junior, he enjoys the occasional Elvis tune, but opts out of Graceland ceremonial affairs. “It's a balancing act”, she says, “Probably the toughest line to walk. He came into the relationship knowing that, hey, this is where I came from, and this is what I'm about. We made an agreement when we first came together that we would not bring other peoples' baggage into this relationship. So I don't share my Elvis experiences with him, and I don't know anything about his ex-girlfriends, or his first marriage. It's healthy and we really keep to that.” And Navarone? “He doesn't ask me anything about my past. Never. And I don't offer. If there's ever a time when he wants to, I'm there. Boys don't talk like girls do. My daughter and I talked about every little thing.”

She admits that she's nervous about talking to thousands of women, live, on the lecture tour. And she will be taking questions. She's done it once, in New Jersey, to try it out: “I find that the audience is really pulling for you and wants to like you.”

Could she share some key points? “Being able to take responsibility for yourself. Never having to depend on anybody. There are no more justifications. It really does depend on you.” She is not one to toss a problem “to a higher power”. Instead, “I believe God helps those who help themselves.” This self-sufficiency theory has been boosted by her studies in that mysterious celebrity-heavy religion of Scientology, which she insists is no cult, but a guide to taking charge of one's life. Lisa Marie is also a member and turned to it, her mother says wryly, for “crisis management”. Priscilla takes classes, for three hours, each morning.

Asked if, after all this years with a self-confident, less possessive man, she has made good women friends, Priscilla shakes her head. “I have a really hard time. I have some friends from the old days, and I keep those up. I have friends, other parents, because of my son. It doesn't go much further than that. I don't want to be someone's entertainment.” This is one legacy from Act One that she understands she'll never escape, regardless of all the good things in her life now. “It's lonely. You have so much to share, you have so much to tell, you have so much you want to expose, so much that's inside that you've learned from that little period. There are really very few people I can share that with.”

Getting her musical produced – mounting a flamboyant, joyous huzzah to all the good times before the dark – would be the best of balms, she thinks, for herself, for Lisa, for Elvis's bruised legacy. But one must ask her gently: Where would you end such story? “I'm still not sure”, she says, smiling. “We're going to have to work that out.”