Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley divorced in August 1996, twenty months after they married. The world filed it away as a short, strange chapter that had ended. It had not ended. By Lisa Marie’s own account, the relationship carried on in some form for another four years after the paperwork was done — and they came genuinely close to getting back together.
She said so to Oprah Winfrey, and there is no ambiguity in the wording: they “spent four more years after we divorced, getting back together and breaking up, talking about getting back together and breaking up.”
She also described what that actually looked like in practice, and it is not the picture anybody had. “He and I were still… I was flying all over the world still with him for years to follow.” She was not sending the occasional message. She was traveling with him.
Love After Divorce: Michael Jackson & Lisa Marie Presley | The Detail.
To understand why it did not simply stop, you need to know what ended it in the first place. It was not a falling-out or another person. By her account, it came down to his dependence on prescription medication — and specifically her asking too many questions about why he needed an anaesthesiologist. She had watched her own father go the same way, and she recognized it. When she pushed him to choose, he pushed her away.
So the marriage ended over something neither of them had stopped caring about. That is why it kept restarting.
Riley Keough, writing in her mother’s posthumous memoir, recorded something Lisa Marie told her that reframes the entire relationship: no one ever came close to being like her dad apart from Michael.
Lisa Marie Presley Speaks Candidly Michael Jackson & Their Marriage | The Detail.
Lisa Marie described the years after in stages, and it is one of the most honest things she ever wrote about anybody. First came regret — “I spent a few years obsessing about him and what I could have done different.” Then came anger, at the whole situation. Then, eventually, indifference, which she said she had worked extremely hard to achieve.
Then he died in 2009, and all of it collapsed. She wrote publicly that “the person I failed to help is being transferred right now to the L.A. County Coroner’s office,” and that every bit of the detachment she had built over the years had gone into the bowels of hell. She said she was gutted.
One final image says more than any of the quotes. At Michael Jackson’s funeral, when everybody else had left, Lisa Marie was the last person still sitting beside his casket.
They had been divorced for thirteen years.