For a short while in the 1990s, two of the most famous names in American music lived under the same roof. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only daughter, were married.
Plenty of people assumed it had to be a stunt. Lisa Marie always said it wasn’t. In her memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown,” finished by her daughter Riley Keough after Lisa Marie was gone, she explained what pulled her in. She fell for Michael, she wrote, “because he was normal.”
That word surprises folks. The Michael the world watched, the soft high voice and the careful manners, she called that an act. The man she came home to was funny and plain and easy to be around.
And their days were far more ordinary than you would ever guess.
Michael and Lisa Marie, together, in their own words
This is the famous 1995 sit-down where the two of them answered questions side by side, so you can watch how they really were with each other.
Here’s the part that gets people. On a normal Los Angeles morning, the kids had to get to school. So Michael would come along for the school run, with a driver up front, helping get Elvis’s grandchildren out the door and off to class like any other blended family around town.
Almost like any other family.
Because riding along in that car was Michael’s pet chimpanzee.
Nobody else on the block was dropping the kids at school with a chimp in the back seat. Riley, who adds her own notes all through her mom’s book, knew exactly what every reader would be thinking. So she headed it off with one line.
“Before you ask,” Riley wrote, “’twas not Bubbles.”
That’s the joke, and it’s a good one, because Bubbles is the chimp everybody remembers. This was a different one. The book doesn’t even give his name.
A closer look at the two of them
Watch a few minutes of this and you start to see what Lisa Marie meant about him being normal under all the fame.
It’s easy to see the scene once you let yourself. The driver, the kids with their backpacks, Michael in the morning light and a chimpanzee sitting there like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Lisa Marie spent years swatting away the question of whether any of it was real. Her answer lived in moments like this one, the quiet mornings and the small strange details only a family would know.
She knew him in a way the rest of us never could. And when she finally wrote it all down, she reached past the headlines for the everyday stories, chimp and all.