Lisa Marie Presley was rock ‘n’ roll royalty, a doomed princess from the start | Guest Opinion
America has troubled royal families, too. Britain’s House of Windsor has nothing on the House of Kennedy, not when it comes to tragedies and rivalries, adultery and connivance, heirs and spares, and press manipulations.
Yet the Anglo and American cultures remain besotted by fairy tales. The two nations, both so practical in so many ways — whether power looms or medical science and high finance — are nonetheless suckers for princes and princesses and happily ever after. The rest of the world seems more skeptical of happiness, especially among the rich.
The unhappy life of American princess Lisa Marie Presley came to an end Thursday. At 54, she died of “cardiac arrest,” which raises as many questions as it answers. Her age was difficult to credit even for old men like me who can hardly remember a time before she existed. How could someone who has been around forever be so young?
She was a princess because her father was the King: Elvis Aaron Presley, sovereign of America’s highest realm: fame. More than 65 years after he erupted like nothing since Vesuvius, you might think we would know what the bomb was made of. But the Elvis explosion remains a mysterious chain reaction of talent, daring and vulnerability, magnified by television and detonated by sex.
To account for Lisa Marie Presley, the royal saga must first incorporate Priscilla Presley, a rootless and beautiful foundling of the World War II aftermath. After her pilot father was killed, her young mother married another pilot and, like so many military offspring, Priscilla moved from base to base. In 1959, when she was 14, she reached West Germany, where the King was also serving, and Elvis realized the thing he hadn’t done while becoming the biggest star on Earth was learn to talk to a girl.
They both told it that way. The Elvis of “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” the Elvis who couldn’t be shown from the hips down on TV because he might thrust clean through the space-time continuum was tongue-tied around a teenager. If that sounds adorable, it is only because you believe in happy endings to royal tales. You imagine that life lost in a mad pursuit of fame at the fickle moment when it beckons can be recovered after the fame is won. That growing up can be somehow paused until it is restarted as a global superstar.
While they flirted and courted as young people do, the royal Elvis had a parallel life making love to starlets and doing drugs. When the King and his queen finally married in 1967, Priscilla was still only 21. The marriage was doomed by the time their only daughter was born nine months later. He was 10 years away from a miserable death.
Yet Lisa Marie Presley was a princess. Everyone said so. They said it when the King died before her 10th birthday. They said it when she became a joint heiress of his estate at age 25. They said it when she divorced her first husband and married her own king, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, whose youth was even more brutally interrupted than her father’s. As Jackson once confessed to Oprah Winfrey, by the time he was barely a teenager, his talent and fame had so imprisoned him that he sobbed quietly as he watched children playing outside the window of the studio where he was wanted back at rehearsal.
Daughter of the King. Wife of the King. Lisa Marie Presley grew up among lives starved by celebrity and stunted by fame. Expectations were defined by the accomplishments of people who never completed the first mission in life: formation of the self. The British sage Walter Bagehot wrote that monarchy runs on a magic that cannot stand the scrutiny of daylight. The same is true of America’s star-making machinery.
The story of Lisa Marie Presley, princess, ends with happily never after. Her son, Benjamin Keough, took his own life in 2020. He looked a lot like his grandfather, which is to say he had a magical and powerful appearance that settled on him like a curse. A friend said after his death that the princeling had felt pressed to match the family fame — and was miserable about falling short.
Yet people wish for these lives.
Last year, Lisa Marie Presley wrote that she had suffered unremitting grief from the moment she lost her son. Now she is gone, too.
Can you look on them, mother and son, and still believe in the fairy-tale machine?
David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Washington Post.
The Washington Post
