Back in 1992, Elvis Presley’s only daughter made a demo tape. She wanted to find out if she had a future in music of her own. Two of the biggest names on the planet heard that tape and took an interest. One of them was Prince. The other was Michael Jackson, and before long he was calling her all the time.
This was before cell phones. When a phone rang back then, you had no idea who was on the other end until you answered. So Michael and Lisa Marie worked out a little trick of their own.
They set up a signal just for his calls.
In her memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown,” she wrote about those phone calls and what they meant to her. The book was finished by her daughter Riley Keough and came out in October 2024, after Lisa Marie was gone. In it she looked back on her years with Michael and wrote one short line that stays with you. “I was actually so happy,” she wrote. “I’ve never been that happy again.”
So what was the signal? When Michael called, the phone would ring three times and then go quiet. That was it. Three rings, then nothing. The moment the people around Lisa Marie heard that pattern, they knew to clear out of the way so she could get on the phone with him in private.
It sounds like something two kids would cook up at summer camp. In a way that’s the sweetest part of it. Two of the most famous people alive, and the thing they shared was a goofy little code over a plain old landline.
They married in 1994. The marriage didn’t last long, but the feeling clearly did, going by how tenderly she wrote about him near the end of her own life.
There’s one place you can actually watch the two of them together.
Michael and Lisa Marie in their only sit-down TV interview as a married couple
Watch just the first few minutes. In 1995 they sat down with Diane Sawyer, and right away you can see the ease between them that Lisa Marie described in her book. They held hands and finished each other’s sentences.
Plenty of people doubted the marriage was even real. That interview was partly meant to answer the doubters. Whatever you make of it, the warmth in those opening minutes lines up with what she put on the page almost thirty years later.
Michael had his own private name for how much she meant to him too. But the detail fans keep coming back to is that phone code, because it’s so small and so human.
Three rings and a pause. That was the sign the King of Pop was on the line, and that everyone else needed to give her the room.