A Tribute to Lisa-Marie Presley

by Emma Burns

(Image by David French -
https://www.flickr.com/photos/thedonquixotic)

Obituary writing is a peculiar business. I have written a number for entertainers and cultural figures for the Portsmouth Point Blog and it has been a great chance to reflect on a person’s legacy or how their work has impacted a community or generation.

It is less easy to work that process for Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley, who has died at the untimely age of 54. 

She was only four when her parents divorced and nine when she was amongst those who discovered her father’s dead body in his bathroom in 1977.

As many people are aware, I am an admitted Elvis bore. As someone who is very close in age to Lisa Marie, I felt a strange connection with her when I spotted her picture in the papers following her father’s death. She usually looked very unhappy - as one might well imagine. Stories abounded of kidnap plots foiled (she was the only heir to Elvis’s estate), boarding schools in England considered, first boyfriends and then her forays into adulthood were exposed: all with the macabre shade of her father hovering in the background. 

As she grew older, she assumed the mantle of the ‘Freak Show Celebrity’ - famous for being someone else’s child, famous for being the spitting image of her father, and then, due to two of her four marriages being to celebrities, famous for being married to famous people. Firstly, to the actor Nic Cage and secondly to megastar Michael Jackson. She seemed to occupy the ‘Oprah Space’, that rarified public domain where the great and the good pour out their feelings in minute and vacuous detail, the apparently tell-all interviews that leave more questions than those answered. 

The marriages broke down, perhaps unsurprisingly. The trauma of early loss, intense celebrity and the cost to personal development and good mental health is well documented.  

Michael Jackson died in similar circumstances to the death of her father; Lisa Marie's anguish was real and unfiltered. Her son died by suicide two years ago: an immense grief to carry. The music that she made, which was very good, became, as always happens, of lesser significance to the wider world. She was always Elvis’s daughter, MJ’s former wife…

I saw her in Paris once. She was in the city with Michael Jackson and, unaccountably, he decided to visit the WH Smith store near their hotel. There was an immense hubbub as he toured the comic book section with numerous children. I turned away from the sight to see a small brunette walking towards me, and, as she looked at me, her eyes enjoined me not to say anything to her. I nodded. She smiled in the slightest way. It was an uncanny moment and I was glad not to have broken her moment of privacy, which, in that goldfish bowl, must have been rare.

Some years ago Lisa-Marie wrote an album of material which contained the song ‘Lights Out’, documenting her feelings towards her father and the fact there was a space left for her in the Meditation Garden at Graceland where she would be buried next to him. That this ghoulish day has come so soon is shocking. And very, very sad.