In her memoir, finished by her daughter Riley Keough after she passed, Lisa Marie Presley shared the kind of Elvis stories only a daughter would have. The ones about the dad, not the showman.
One of them happened in the air. Elvis didn’t just own a private jet, the Lisa Marie. Sometimes, on the way home to Memphis, he flew it himself. And he would put his young daughter right up front beside him, in the co-pilot’s seat, which Lisa Marie said made everyone else on board awfully nervous.
On one of those flights, Elvis got on the intercom to make an announcement to his passengers.
Riley Keough on finishing her mother’s memoir
What he told them, in Lisa Marie’s own words, was simple. Elvis is going to land the plane. And then he did. She remembered the whole cabin breaking into applause when the wheels touched down, mostly out of sheer relief that everyone was still alive.
It fits the father she described so well. This was the same Elvis who once turned up to her parent-teacher conference in sunglasses, smoking a cigar, wearing a huge jeweled belt, while her teachers tried their best to keep it together.
The private side of Elvis, from his daughter
The world knew Elvis as the King up on a stage. Lisa Marie knew him as the dad who would fly her home himself, then land the plane just to hear the whole cabin cheer.