In the mid-1970s, two of the biggest acts in music were working the same city. Elvis Presley was performing at the Hilton in Las Vegas. The Jackson 5 were playing a show of their own nearby, with a teenage Michael singing lead. And Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie, was in town with her dad.
Fans of both families have repeated what happened next for years. The best-known version comes from “Growing Up Presley,” a timeline on Oprah.com: “Lisa Marie was 7 years old when she first met 17-year-old Michael Jackson at a Jackson 5 concert in Las Vegas.” The next line is just four words long. “Elvis introduced them.”
Biography.com, writing in 2019, tells it much the same way. It says Lisa Marie was seven years old and “tagging along to one of her dad’s concerts in Las Vegas” when she first met Michael, who was then part of the Jackson 5.
People hold on to that version for a reason. It puts the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the future King of Pop in the same place, two decades before the little girl and the teenager became husband and wife.
Then the years went by. By Biography.com’s account, it wasn’t until about November 1992 that they “truly reconnected as grown-ups.” On May 26, 1994, they married.
For a long time, the meeting in Las Vegas was a story other people told about them. In October 2024, Lisa Marie’s memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” finally gave readers her side of it. Her version doesn’t match the famous one.
TODAY reported on the book in October 2024. In Lisa Marie’s telling, she first met Michael at around age 6, when the Jackson 5 were playing a show near her father’s performance at the Hilton. Salon’s write-up of the memoir that same week also put her at 6, and Michael at 15.
Then comes the line that turns the whole story around. In TODAY’s words, she met him that day, “though she doesn’t remember it.”
So the one person who could have settled every detail of that famous meeting had no memory of it. She was a small child in a city full of famous grown-ups, and her father was one of the biggest names in town. She didn’t fill the gap with the legend, either. She simply said she couldn’t recall it.
That’s why the accounts still don’t line up. Was she 6 or 7? Was Michael 15 or 17? Was it her dad’s concert or theirs? And did Elvis make the introduction himself? Oprah.com says he did. Lisa Marie’s own book, as TODAY and Salon describe it, leaves that meeting as something she knew about rather than something she saw.
The Jackson 5 sing a medley with Cher in 1975
This is the official upload of the Jackson 5’s medley with Cher on “The Cher Show,” which aired March 16, 1975. It’s Michael at 16, with his brothers, in the same years as that meeting in Las Vegas.
Lisa Marie sings “I Love You Because” with Elvis, set to their family home movies
In this official 2012 video, Lisa Marie sings along with the version of “I Love You Because” her father recorded at Sun Studio in July 1954. It’s filled with family photos and home movies of Elvis with his little girl, plus shots of Lisa Marie singing her part in the studio. She recorded it in August 2012 at The Village in Santa Monica.