Priscilla Presley’s new memoir ‘Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis’ revisits the end of her marriage and daughter Lisa Marie’s death
Priscilla Presley loved Elvis, but she left him anyway.
“I never regretted my decision to leave Elvis,” she writes. “But I never ceased to mourn it.”
In her new memoir “Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis” (Grand Central Publishing, 336 pp., on sale Tuesday, Sept. 23), she picks up where her 1985 book “Elvis and Me” left off. The sheer quantity of love and loss is staggering, from the addiction struggles of her son Navarone Garcia to the premature death of daughter Lisa Marie Presley and suicide of grandson Ben Keough.
In an early copy of the book provided to USA TODAY, Priscilla, 80, writes mistily about her relationship with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll after the end of their marriage, but through the perspective of a great-grandmother.
It’s clear that her feelings for him never changed: “He was the most beautiful, talented, loving human being I have ever known.”
These are the book’s biggest revelations:
Priscilla Presley made the difficult decision to remove daughter Lisa Marie from life support
After Lisa Marie was found unresponsive, EMTs were able to shock her back with a defibrillator and epinephrine, but “I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone,” Presley writes.
When Lisa Marie’s heart stopped again, the doctor asked Presley what she wanted to do.
“I asked the doctor, ‘What kind of life will she have if we keep her on that machine?’ He looked at me with compassion and shook his head. ‘No quality of life at all.’
“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life. I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor.’ “
Presley doesn’t say if she consulted with Riley Keough, Lisa Marie’s eldest child, before making the decision. But in Lisa Marie’s own memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” Riley describes being on a plane to LA and getting the devastating news of her mother’s death in a text from her dad.
Lisa Marie had mentioned pain in her stomach, but “what she wasn’t telling me, perhaps because she didn’t recognize its relevance, was that she’d had a gastric bypass a couple of years before,” Priscilla writes. “She had just told me she was having ‘a little cosmetic surgery.’ ”
Lisa Marie, 54, died from a small bowel obstruction, a complication of bariatric surgery.
Priscilla believes Lisa Marie married Michael Jackson because they were both wealthy and famous
“She wanted to be with a man on the same level she was,” Presley writes of Lisa Marie’s decision to divorce musician Danny Keough and wed Michael Jackson three weeks later.
“I was appalled,” Presley says. “I didn’t believe he loved her.”
She describes going to a dinner party at Lisa Marie’s house, hoping to get to know him, where Jackson “stayed as far away from me as possible,” playing outside with the children. He later showed up at a tribute to Elvis in Memphis, where they didn’t speak. Those were the only two times she saw her son-in-law.
“I asked her if they had a physical relationship. Like so many people, I wasn’t sure,” she wrote. Lisa Marie told her they did.
When Lisa Marie filed for divorce less than two years later, “I could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief,” Priscilla wrote.
Elvis once called his ex-wife Priscilla while she was in bed with Robert Kardashian
Elvis would “have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom,” she writes. It never occurred to him that Priscilla might have been asleep at 2 in the morning. And “it had certainly never occurred to him that I might be with another man.”
After their chat, she slipped back under the covers, and neither man was none the wiser.
Kim Kardashian called Priscilla from the hospital in 2003, when Robert was dying with esophageal cancer, so they could have one last conversation.
“He was the kindest of men, and I remember him with great affection,” she writes.
Lisa Marie Presley alleged Priscilla’s boyfriend sexually abused her for years; Priscilla found out from her daughter’s book
Presley writes that Lisa Marie, 14, told her that Michael Edwards had come into her room drunk and pulled back the covers to look at her in her nightgown. When questioned by Priscilla, she denied that he had ever touched her inappropriately. (In Lisa Marie’s memoir, she remembers that the incident occurred when she was 10 and involved touching and a kiss. She also writes that the abuse escalated to spanking.)
Priscilla decided she couldn’t risk having Edwards in the house and asked him to move out.
Years later, Priscilla writes, Edwards told her he regretted publishing his tell-all book, in which he acknowledged having a sexual obsession with Lisa Marie.
“If Elvis would have still been alive, Michael wouldn’t have been calling me about his regrets,” she wrote. “Elvis would have shot him.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Edwards for comment. In 2024, Edwards told USA TODAY in a statement: “These claims are absolutely untrue. I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion that I did.”
For her part, Priscilla writes that Lisa Marie’s revelation “didn’t make sense” because “she never told any of us.”
“I struggle to make peace with Lisa’s words. Because I didn’t hear them until after her passing, we never got to talk about it together. I know I will never have closure.”
Priscilla Presley reveals what led to her estrangement from Lisa Marie
Things were never the same between mother and daughter after Lisa Marie’s unsuccessful bid for sole custody of twins Harper and Finley during her divorce from Michael Lockwood.
Lisa Marie had accused Lockwood of child abuse and sexual misconduct − claims his lawyer Jeff Sturman denied to the Associated Press and called “highly sensational” and “inaccurate.”
When the court’s investigation found nothing to support the allegations, Lisa Marie asked Priscilla to sign a deposition stating that Lockwood was “unfit to have custody.”
She refused, because “I had never seen Michael behave in the harmful ways she was alleging,” Priscilla writes. “Signing it would be perjury. … To her, it was a betrayal.”
Priscilla knew “with a stab to my heart that she would never completely forgive me,” she writes. “And she never did.”
Priscilla hints that she and Elvis might have reunited if he’d lived longer
One Christmas after their divorce, as Elvis left her house, “he kissed me on the forehead and looked at me,” she recalls. “There was a moment, and then he said, ‘Someday. Maybe someday.’ ”
She acknowledges that Elvis is “unquestionably” why she’s reluctant to remarry or be in another serious relationship.
“People long for true love, the kind where you fall deeper and deeper until you realize it is bottomless,” she writes. “I found it before I was old enough to understand it. I lost the chance to find it again with Elvis, because he never had the chance to grow old.”
This report discusses suicide and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
If you are a survivor of sexual assault, RAINN offers support through the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE and online.rainn.org).