With the release of Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown in paperback, I thought it would be interesting to compare Lisa Marie’s with her mother Priscilla’s book Softly As I Leave You, released this year. While there’s obviously differences of perception, the contrast is sometimes quite large. Priscilla’s book would even at times appear to be direct responses to accusations made by Lisa Marie and Riley in their book.
In this installment (part one here), we’re comparing recollections involving Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and family dynamics.
All excerpts are from each respective book and are being used for educational purposes only. I only quote relevant portions and do not include every variation of recollection. If you want the full stories, please read the books.
So let’s begin!
Priscilla:
Lisa was a good mom, a really good mom, fiercely devoted to her children. She would do anything to keep them happy and safe. Her parenting style was different from mine, of course. She was as much a friend as a parent. Lisa held her children close. With Riley and Benjamin, there weren’t that many trips to see Nona (as they referred to me). Lisa was jealous of anybody being too close to the children, even me. They were her babies.
But I understood, and I couldn’t have asked for a more loving and committed mother for my grandchildren.
Riley:
We lived in a big, old house. To the right of the front door there is a bedroom, and I am peeking through the door. It is dark in the room—all the shades are down even though it’s daytime. I’m watching my mom shushing my brother—he is on her shoulder. I remember the rhythm of it, the sh-sh-sh, three notes repeated over and over.
I realize now that this was my first understanding of the depth of her maternal instincts—my mom had the strongest such instincts of anyone I’ve ever met. Eventually it would be clear to me that should anyone hurt Ben or me, she’d probably track them down for as long as it would take, like in a Western. This was the presence you could feel in her, and it wasn’t small. It was terrifying.
Lisa Marie:
I fell in love with being a mom. I realized I had been called to care for something else. Being a mom was everything to me and Riley was the most precious gem. I was going to do whatever I could possibly do to protect her and raise her.
That thing where you either do what your parents did, or you do the exact opposite of what was done to you? I did the opposite.
Power Over the Elvis Estate
Priscilla:
I remained busy and involved as the trustee for Graceland and Elvis’s estate as well […] I am proud that I played a key role in saving not only Graceland but also Lisa’s inheritance.
[…] Three weeks later, on February 1, Lisa officially came of age. I was not involved in the financial transfer that took place; that was handled by Lisa’s attorney and by her business manager, Barry Siegel. It was essential for me to stay out of Lisa’s financial affairs. I was her mother, not her business manager. It is never a good idea to confuse those two roles.
Lisa:
One day I made the mistake of sitting at the head of the table at a board meeting. My mom came in and said, “Don’t you ever sit in my seat at the head of the table. Who do you think you are? This is my business, I am the one who opened Graceland. You can’t just come in and sit there like you’re something!”
Interacting with the “Real” Michael Jackson, Lisa’s 2nd Husband
Priscilla:
My relationship with Michael was bizarre from the beginning. Not long after Lisa started dating him, she invited me to a party that he was attending at her house. […] I thought it might be a good chance for me to get to know him a little and see if my concerns were valid. I was prepared to be pleasant, but he wanted nothing to do with me […] In fact, he stayed far away from all the adults. The adults were sitting up near the house, and there was a field below where children were playing ball. Michael was down below, playing with them. The adults were all chitchatting away, watching them play, but he stayed away from everyone. I don’t know if he didn’t want to answer questions about the court cases or if he simply preferred playing with the children.
I thought maybe he was just very shy […] He was courting my daughter, and I wanted to know who he was as a person.
[…] He continued to go to great lengths to avoid me. My only actual contact with him was during an Elvis event in Memphis. I think it was a tribute concert. Michael showed up at Lisa’s hotel unexpectedly, planning to sit with her at the concert, and his plans bothered me. His appearance was guaranteed to draw a great deal of attention, which would detract from the focus on honoring Elvis. It felt almost like another publicity stunt.
I went by the hotel beforehand to meet up with Lisa and asked her where Michael was. She said he was in the other room. He didn’t come out to greet me. A few minutes after I arrived, the door down the hall opened, and Michael popped out. He grabbed his hat off the table where he’d left it, sort of smiled, and then popped back in the room and shut the door. He said nothing to me on the way to the show. […] Early the next morning, he was gone. That was the sum total of my direct interactions with my son-in-law during the marriage.
Lisa:
I met Michael Jackson when I was a little girl in Las Vegas. I think I was about six. My dad was performing at the Hilton and the Jackson 5 were playing down the road. Michael remembered that I went backstage and met them. I don’t remember it at all. […] Michael told me later that when I was on the cover of People magazine after Danny and I got married, he was devastated. He thought that he should be with me instead.
[…] The first time meeting Michael that I actually remember was in 1993, right after he did his famous Super Bowl halftime performance and his interview with Oprah. We met through a mutual friend. I had a demo tape out—he said he’d heard it and wanted to meet me. I didn’t want to go at first.
[…] When Michael arrived, I was shocked that he was alone, and further shocked that he was really subdued and extremely nice […] We just clicked. Phone numbers were exchanged, and he’d call me.
[…] And as for that meeting as children? He remembered every detail—where I’d sat, what I’d said.
He said, “You remember the white dress?”
I said, “How do you remember the white dress I wore? My God. You remember? I don’t remember any of this. All I remember was being afraid to tell my dad I wanted to go see somebody else’s show.”
[…] The final night, Michael again invited me to his room. When I arrived, he said, “Don’t look at me, I’m really nervous. I want to tell you something,” and then he turned out the lights.
And in the darkness Michael said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely gone in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children.” Then he played me a song about how he felt and when he finished, he said, “You don’t have to say anything. I know I’ve thrown you off, but I really want you. I want to be with you.”
I didn’t say anything immediately, but eventually I said, “I’m really so flattered, I can’t even talk.” By then, I felt I was in love with him, too. I had told him that my marriage was in serious trouble.
[…] I hadn’t wanted to tell him that I felt the same way because I had my two kids with me, and first I had to go home and tell my husband. But I was fully in love, too.
[…] I fell in love with him because he was normal, just fucking normal. His normal was a side that no one saw.
Lisa’s Connection to Michael
Priscilla:
I’m not sure anyone was stronger than Lisa, and she was certainly wealthier. She wanted to be with a man who was on the same level she was.
Lisa:
I was only supposed to go to Vegas for two days, but I ended up staying for eight. Nothing happened physically, but the connection was so insanely strong.
Riley:
I think Michael got right at my mom’s core. She wanted to fix him, and she felt he was misunderstood, a feeling she was very familiar with.
[…] My mom told me that she communicated with Michael through her dreams for months after he died.
Marrying Michael Jackson
Priscilla:
In the spring of 1994, she divorced Danny. Three weeks later, on May 26, 1994, she married Michael Jackson in a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic […] I was appalled by the marriage. I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty. The King of Pop was allying himself with the King of Rock and Roll.
Lisa:
I was actually so happy.
I’ve never been that happy again.
Riley:
At first, we had no idea if they were in a romantic relationship or if this was just a friend she was bringing around […] With Mimi, as with others, we would hang out and do activities together long before she would ever tell us that they were in a relationship.
I don’t remember the moment that she told me they were getting married, but I do recall he started sleeping over.
The Abuse Allegations
Priscilla:
He married her at a time when he desperately needed good publicity that depicted him as a desirable heterosexual man. It was one thing to legally fight the child molestation charges against him. There was no way to come out of that looking good. But photos of him with Elvis’s daughter wearing the huge diamond engagement ring he’d had made for her? That image was pure gold.
[…] Michael had started reaching out to her when the child abuse charges went public. I think that’s how he hooked her in the beginning. She felt sorry for him, and naturally, she believed in his innocence. Nobody wants to believe those kinds of allegations against someone they know. They began talking on the phone regularly, and she was gradually drawn in. Michael was a manipulative man, and I think he had his sights set on her long before she realized it. The childlike innocence he projected was part of his public mask. She learned this early on, and it bothered her, but she didn’t see it for the warning sign it was.
Lisa:
When Michael had called me after the allegations, what he told me at the time was that Evan Chandler, the father of one of the accusers, was extorting him, and I think I told Michael to settle it, everyone advised that he settle because it was going to be a fucking nightmare.
As for child molestation, I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.
Riley:
Just as my mother used to pick up the phone to listen in on conversations between Elvis and Ginger Alden, I once unwittingly picked up the phone in Florida in time to hear my father—who had just seen a photo in the press of Michael Jackson, my mother, me, and Ben—say, “Get my son off that guy’s fucking lap.”
I quickly hung up the phone.
Strangely, this was the first time I realized my father was upset about my mom’s marriage to Michael—that’s how well they protected us from their adult problems.
For further context, Riley on the Call Her Daddy podcast, 2025:
“I was never told anything. And it’s actually not something I ever asked as an adult. I think it just was what it was. It just never came to mind. I would imagine that my dad was really heartbroken in reading the news […] I would imagine he said all kinds of things to my mom that we didn’t know about.
The way my parents parented was very much like, ‘We don’t fight around the kids. We don’t ever say anything around them’…We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know about any allegations.”
Was MJ Actually in Love with Lisa?
Priscilla:
I didn’t believe he loved her.
Lisa does not directly address this in her memoir, but said in a 2003 Rolling Stone interview:
“[MJ was in love with me] As much as he can, possibly. I don’t know how much he can access love, really. I think as much as he can love somebody he might have loved me.”
Riley on the Call Her Daddy podcast, 2025:
“The one thing I know is that they were in love and that their love for one another was genuine because I was there and I remember […] Everything else, I don’t know ’cause I wasn’t there.”
Michael’s Obsession with Having Children with Lisa
Priscilla:
We were on vacation in Hawaii not long after they married when Lisa told me, “Mom, Michael wants us to have a child.”
We were walking down the beach alone, and it was clear that Lisa wanted to talk. I said, “I think it’s too soon , Lisa. I don’t think you should have a child with him.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
I told her, “Well, you just got married. You need to work out the marriage first.”
I reminded her that she’d been with a lot of guys over the years and then broken up with them. I told her that I thought she needed to put some time in first and make sure the relationship worked out before bringing a child into it. I was privately wondering why the hurry. I didn’t trust his motives. A child would be a proof of virility. And I couldn’t help wondering if he wanted to have Elvis’s grandchild.
There was a pause, and then she said, “But I hardly ever see him, Mom.”
I said, “What do you mean, you hardly ever see him?”
“I don’t see him. He’ll come for a couple of days, and then he leaves again. I don’t know where he goes.”
Lisa:
He had wanted me to have his children so badly and I didn’t want to. I knew he ultimately wanted to be the only caretaker of the children. Michael wanted to control things. He didn’t want a mother influence, or any other influence, in fact.
I figured that Michael would have me have the children and then dump me, get me out of the picture. I could read him like a clock. I understood everything, and I knew everything about him because all we did was bare our souls to one another. I knew his nature, and he was very controlling and calculating.
[…] One time he was working, and he called me. During the conversation I said, “You’re like a snake—I don’t know what you’re going to crawl out from under….”
Michael said, “Oh, that’s great. I call home and talk to my wife, and she tells me I’m a snake.”
“Well,” I said, “yeah, you are.”
Riley:
Michael really wanted kids with my mom from the minute they got together, but she never felt certain about it. She didn’t have that feeling she’d had with my father. Whether to have children was a fundamental conflict in their marriage from the start. I know that once in a while Michael would say, “If you’re not going to have children with me, then I’m going to find somebody who will.” He would also say, “Debbie Rowe told me she will have my children.”
To which my mom would respond jealously, “Then go fuck Debbie Rowe.” All I knew of Debbie was that she was a kind lady who helped me with my ear infections.
Divorcing Michael
Priscilla:
Lisa was very unhappy. Michael was never around. She knew that sometimes when he was gone, he was at his ranch with kids. It bothered her that he would rather be with them than with her. I think that eventually, the allegations ate away at her. Both of them were so famous, and Michael had such a huge fan base, that she felt as though they were constantly under a microscope. She didn’t feel comfortable criticizing him publicly, because she would come out of it the culprit. Her words would spread like wildfire, and she was the one who would look bad.
Finally, she’d had enough. She called to tell me she wanted a divorce. She had begun to feel like the marriage was a setup. He didn’t want to be with her; he wanted to be with Elvis Presley’s daughter. If he’d wanted to be with her, he wouldn’t have been gone for most of their marriage. On January 18, 1996, Lisa filed for divorce.
I could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief.
Lisa doesn’t really touch on the divorce in detail but said in conversation with journalist Tony Ortega in 2015, released after her 2023 death:
“I was in love with Michael, believe it or not. I didn’t want to leave him. He was in trouble and I wanted to help him. And they made sure that I left him […] they realized he was getting too much bad press […] DM [David Miscavige] facilitated my divorce with MJ.”
Riley:
Somebody had told my mom that Michael was planning on filing for divorce but that it would be better for her if she did it first. My mom told Oprah in 2010 that she made the decision to walk because she saw the drugs and the doctors coming in, and they scared her and put her right back into what she went through with her father.
So, she filed. But the truth was, Michael never intended to file. It was Romeo and Juliet, the poison mistakenly drunk. Michael was incredibly hurt, and my mom tried and tried to reach him, calling and writing him. But he refused to speak to her.
My mom always said that was how she learned to ice people, from Michael. Eventually, they started talking again and hanging out. They had a back-and-forth, sort of toxic relationship going on […] Their divorce was finalized in August 1996, and Michael married Debbie three months later. But we’d still go to Neverland.
I’m not really sure what the vibe was between my mother and Michael—I don’t know if they were still hooking up or not—but we were certainly over there a lot.
Nicolas Cage, Lisa’s 3rd Husband
Priscilla:
Nick also fit Lisa’s image of a man who was on the same level she was. He was successful in his own right, and heaven knows, he was strong enough for her, as would soon become apparent.
I liked Nicolas Cage from the beginning […] After the Michael Jackson marriage, I was particularly sensitive to men pursuing Lisa because she was Elvis’s daughter. But I never got that sense with Nick. He was clearly and passionately in love with Lisa.
Riley:
My mother’s relationship with Nic Cage was very short-lived. It felt like something that came in and then left, like a Florida storm—and was, I think, something of a distraction from her breakup with John. She even ping-ponged between Nic and John for a minute. I remember going in her room and Nic was there one day, and then the next day it was John. She clearly couldn’t make up her mind.
But Nic and my mom had a ton of fun together. I don’t know if they were truly in love, though she said they were.
Navarone, Priscilla’s Son & Lisa’s Younger Brother
Priscilla:
Like his sister before him, he was the center of my life from the day he was born. Yes, I was busy with movies and perfumes and Elvis Presley Enterprises. But nothing has ever mattered to me more than my children.
[…] Navarone was more outgoing and gregarious than Lisa had ever been, and he made friends easily. His ability to make friends was hard on Lisa. When Navarone was born, Lisa adored him at first. He was a cute little baby, and she loved being his sister. But as he got older, things gradually changed. By the time he was seven or eight, she regarded him as competition. She accused me of loving him more than her, which, of course, wasn’t true. I don’t look that way at my babies, my children. She resented the time I spent with him
[…] I took him and his cousins and friends to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm— all the places I’d taken Lisa Marie as a kid. The problem was, she didn’t remember much of that. She was always peppering me with resentful questions. “Did you take me to school?”
“Yes, unless I was working.”
“Did you pick me up?”
“Yes, unless I was working. Remember, we used to get ice cream after school.”
“You’re always taking him to Disneyland.”
“I took you, too. Lots of times. Don’t you remember?”
And so on and so on. It became exhausting. I knew she’d always been possessive of me, and I was sorry she felt threatened by Navarone. But there was nothing I could do about it. They were both my children. Besides, she was an adult. It’s not like they were siblings living at home and fighting over their room. Lisa was almost twenty years older than Navarone. She had her own life and her own children.
Riley:
A couple of years before I was born, Priscilla had a second child, a boy named Navarone. Priscilla was a new mom again, and my mom was a new mom, so they spent a lot of time together because they both had little kids. It became a point of understanding between them, a new start, a burying of the hatchet—though I know my mom was a bit jealous of Navarone, too, because here was this little boy that Priscilla just adored.
Next up: Lisa’s music career, Lisa gets married (again), and everything goes downhill for the Presley family.
Sources: From Here to the Great Unknown – Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough (2024), Softly As I Leave You – Priscilla Presley (2025), Instagram: one, two, three
