Elvis Presley had millions of fans all over the world. He only ever had one child though, a little girl named Lisa Marie.
Her parents, Elvis and his wife Priscilla Presley, ended their marriage in 1973. Lisa Marie was five. She went to live with her mom out in California, while her dad kept touring and recording, often a long way from home.
So you’d think a young girl in that spot would hardly ever see her famous father. Lisa Marie always said it wasn’t like that.
Sometimes, right in the middle of an ordinary school day, a car would pull up outside with no warning and no plan made the night before. It was just there, sent for her.
For a lot of kids that might feel strange. Lisa Marie loved it.
This short clip from Graceland’s own channel walks through the toys and little keepsakes they still keep from when she was small, the world Elvis built for his daughter at home.
Inside Graceland: the toys Elvis kept for his little girl
Years later Lisa Marie explained the car herself, in a 2003 Playboy interview that Elvis Australia republished in full this month. The car wasn’t bad news at all, it was just her dad calling for her.
“When they divorced, I would go out on the road more and miss more school, which I liked,” she said. “People say I didn’t get to see him very much, but I was with him quite a bit. All of a sudden, a car would show up at school, and he was calling for me to go out on the road.”
Going “out on the road” meant leaving the classroom behind and flying off to wherever Elvis was playing. Hotel suites, backstage halls, long nights full of music and people. For a kid, that beat sitting through long division.
And life on the road ran on Elvis time. He’d head to bed around four or five in the morning and get up at two or three in the afternoon, so the whole house flipped day and night.
When the interviewer asked her what hanging out with her dad was actually like, she gave a separate answer that fans still hold onto. She called it nocturnal, said it was always a lot of fun, and then said something plain that stuck with people:
“There is not one bad memory.”
She talked too about all the energy and life in that house, and how mischievous he could be.
It helps to picture that world before you watch. This next clip puts you right alongside Elvis out on the road in the 1970s, the exact life that car was carrying his little girl off to.
Elvis out on the road in the 1970s
That’s the part a lot of people miss about Elvis and Lisa Marie. The story got told like he was always gone and she barely knew him. She remembered the car at the curb, and a dad who kept sending for her.