Lisa Marie Presley was the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, so she knew exactly what it meant to grow up with a famous last name. When she had little girls of her own, she went looking for something quieter.
In 2012 she was splitting her time between Los Angeles and a spot just outside Rotherfield, a village in Sussex, England. With her were her twin daughters, Harper and Finley. The British newspaper The Times described the girls as 3 at the time.
She didn’t pick the place for its fame. She told The Times she wanted somewhere “in the middle of nowhere,” and her one must was that it be “an hour by train from London.” The family “moved there knowing no one.”
That didn’t last long.
“When I moved here, I was getting notes and flowers and people reaching out to me, and I just thought it was incredible,” she told FemaleFirst that September. She added, “The locals are also pretty protective of me, which I really found charming as I’d never experienced that before.”
You can hear how much that life meant to her in this clip from the same year, where she talks about raising her family over there.
Lisa Marie talks about family life in England in 2012
For the twins, the change was even bigger. Lisa Marie wanted them in a school “not with a bunch of celebrity children as I was for a while.” And she loved what she saw around her.
“For the children it’s vastly different. In the US you’re saturated with celebrity. It’s more civilised in England. It resembles something from the Fifties, the children in their school uniforms.”
Her dad’s decade, right there on a village street. She also said, “I love that I know lots of people in my village,” and “I needed to be around normalcy, which I have found the English countryside gives me.”
But the part of that interview people remember came when reporter Tim Teeman asked about her own joy in England. He wrote that her biggest pleasure there had been gardening, and that she was beaming as she talked about it.
Then she lost a word for a second.
“I’m growing all these vegetables, potatoes and… what were they? So incredible? Oh, radishes.”
Radishes. The daughter of the King of Rock n’ Roll, the heir to Graceland, was proudest of the radishes in her English garden. Teeman joked that the tabloids had missed the real headline: “Elvis’s Daughter: Proud of Her Radishes.”
Anyone who’s ever pulled something out of the dirt and carried it inside like a trophy knows that feeling. She wanted the girls to have quiet days, too. “I want the little ones to make a conscious decision and for things to be as normal as possible until then,” she said.
That same September she sat down for an interview on BBC Breakfast, Britain’s big morning TV show, and it’s a chance to see her during her England chapter.
Lisa Marie on British morning TV in 2012
Back in Sussex, she wasn’t a headline. In her village she was the American mom with the twins and the garden, the new neighbor people left notes and flowers for.
If you’ve got a vegetable patch of your own, you’ll understand why she lit up.