Before her untimely death at just 54 in Janaury last year, Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie Presley was writing a memoir with her eldest daughter Riley Keough.
Published today, From Here to the Great Unknown features heart wrenching confessions of her father’s final years, before his sudden death at just 42 in 1977.
Lisa Marie, who was nine-years-old when The King died, writes how he was “a God to me. You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible. If it was bad, watch the f*** out.
“Whatever it was going to be, it was going to be a thousand per cent. When he got angry, everybody would run, duck and take cover.”
She remembered his throwing objects off the balcony of a penthouse suite in Tahoe “really angry, cursing and screaming” as he was unable to get the prescriptiond drugs he wanted, an addiction that would contribute to his early demise.
Lisa Marie even predicted Elvis’ early death, writing a poem with the line: ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.’ There were so many times that I found him down on the floor or unable to control his body very well. It was the barbiturates.” The Presley princess recalled finding him face down on the floor of his bathroom, having tried to steady himself on a towel rack before it broke and collapsed.
Tragically he died in this ensuite upstairs at Graceland, after suffering a heart attack on the toilet on August 16, 1977. Before he went up to bed that morning, Lisa Marie saw her father alive for the last time, when he gave her a huge and a kiss, told her he loved her and to “go to bed.”
On Elvis’ death, Lisa Marie wrote: “My life as I knew it was completely over.” She thought at the time: “He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her.” She was referring to her mother Priscilla Presley.
As The King’s corpse was taken out on a stretcher, she remembered: “I started screaming that I wanted him, that I needed him, and I started kicking and punching whoever was holding me back, trying to get away from them, but they wouldn’t let me go.”
A day later, she recalled: “I went down to where he was lying in the casket, just to be with him, to touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him. “I asked him, ‘Why is this happening? Why are you doing this?’”
