Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir has shared details about her relationship with Michael Jackson, and claimed that he was “still a virgin” when they began dating.
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The claims were first shared in her posthumous memoir, From Here To The Great Unknown, which was shared yesterday (October 8) and recalls her time in Graceland as a child, her battle with opioid addiction, the loss of her son Benjamin and more.
Lisa Marie – who is the only daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley – began working on the book before her death in January 2023. It was completed by her daughter Riley Keough (Daisy Jones & The Six), who listened to tapes of memories left behind by her mother.
One part of the memoir sees Lisa Marie open up about her relationship with Michael Jackson, who she began dating in 1994 and married later that year.
The two met when they were young and got together romantically after Jackson declared his love for her in Las Vegas – leading her to divorce her then-husband Danny Keough.
“Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children.’ I didn’t say anything immediately, but then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too,” an excerpt from the memoir reads (via People).
Michael Jackson and his then wife Lisa-Marie Presley in 1994. CREDIT: AFP via Getty Images
It also goes on to see Lisa Marie recall how the two got together after her amicable split from Keough – when she was 25 and Jackson was 35 – and claim that the pop star was still a virgin at the time.
“He told me he was still a virgin. I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss,” she wrote. “He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened. I was terrified because I didn’t want to make the wrong move.”
The two remained married for around two years – finalising their divorce in August 1996.
Jackson died from a cardiac arrest in 2009, aged 50, and Lisa Marie Presley died at the age of 54 after an emergency admission to the hospital in January last year.
While her death was initially thought to be caused by cardiac arrest, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office later confirmed that Presley died from a “sequelae of a small bowel obstruction”, or an intestinal obstruction that constricted blood supply to her digestive tract.
Other anecdotes shared in the memoir include the unusual ways that Lisa Marie grieved the loss of her son Benjamin, following his death by suicide in 2020.
In both the book and in a follow-up interview with Oprah Winfrey, Riley Keough explained how her mother “couldn’t imagine a world where she would make it without him”. She also recalled how Lisa Marie decided to preserve Benjamin’s body using dry ice for two months, and brought in a tattoo artist to give her a matching tattoo to what her son had.
Lisa Marie Presley attends the 2013 CMT Music awards. CREDIT: Michael Loccisano/WireImage/Getty
Speaking with People, Keough also explained how she contributed to the release of the memoir in an attempt to get people to “relate” to Lisa Marie, and “know that they’re not alone in the world”.
“Because my mother was Elvis Presley’s daughter, she was constantly talked about, argued over and dissected,” she told the outlet “What she wanted to do in her memoir, and what I hope I’ve done in finishing it for her, is to go beneath the magazine headline idea of her and reveal the core of who she was.
“To turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatised, joyous, grieving, everything that she was throughout her remarkable life. I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”
To celebrate the release, Keough is set to embark on a book tour later this week, which will see her pay tribute to her mother. For the tour, she will also be joined by currently unnamed special guests on each of the dates.
The tour will take place across six dates in October, with stops in New York, Graceland, St. Louis, Nashville, London and Los Angeles. You can get tickets to the book tour here.
The post Lisa Marie Presley’s new memoir claims Michael Jackson was “still a virgin” at 35 when they dated: “I was terrified” appeared first on NME.
