When Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, the world lost a legend. But there was a nine-year-old girl in that house, and she lost her dad.
Her name was Lisa Marie Presley, and she was his only child. In 2022, she sat down and recorded her memories onto tape so they could be turned into a book. She died a month later, aged 54, and her daughter Riley Keough finished it for her. What she left behind is the only first-hand account we will ever have of that day from the person closest to him.
She was staying at Graceland that summer, visiting her father before the new school year started. She last saw him around midnight, when he kissed her and told her to go to bed. It felt, she wrote, like an ordinary late night in that house.
She woke up in the early afternoon and immediately sensed “something’s not right.” She found her father’s friend Joe Esposito, who told her: “Your daddy’s sick.” Her bedroom connected to her father’s suite, so she ran through to his bathroom — and saw him lying on the floor with people crowded around him.
Lisa Marie Presley Talks Elvis’ Memories And His Death
What happened next is the part that stops people cold. “I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back,” she wrote. “They were trying to work on him. I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good.” She remembered the awful specifics too — his head, his body, his pajamas, and his socks at the bottom of the gurney as they took him away.
Then she heard something she could never leave behind. Downstairs, her grandfather Vernon Presley — Elvis’s father — had been told. “That noise,” she wrote. “I’ll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, ‘Oh, he’s gone. He’s gone.’” And then the sentence a nine-year-old should never have to write: “My life as I knew it was completely over.”
Lisa Marie Presley Reveals Toll Of Elvis’s Death In Posthumous Memoir | BBC News
There is a detail in the book that makes it all worse and explains why she reacted the way she did. She had been frightened of this for years. Her father had a long addiction to prescription medicines, and she had seen the effects of it up close. “I was always worried about my dad dying,” she wrote. “Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out.” Then she mentions something she did as a small child that is almost too much to read. She wrote a poem, and one of the lines in it was: “I hope my daddy doesn’t die.”
She never really stopped grieving. Riley Keough has described what it looked like from the outside, decades later. “It was totally devastating to her. I think that she, in some ways, spent her life grieving.” And she described walking into her mother’s room and finding her sitting on the floor, alone, playing her father’s music and crying.
Lisa Marie died on 12 January 2023. She is buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland, a few feet from the father she lost when she was nine — the same garden that now holds her grandmother, her grandfather, her great-grandmother and her own son.
Her book is called From Here to the Great Unknown. Riley said the point of finishing it was to turn her mother back into a real person, rather than a headline. “I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”