Priscilla Presley’s new memoir, “As I Leave You, Gently: Life After Elvis” revisits the end of her marriage and the death of her daughter, Lisa Marie
Priscilla Presley loved Elvis, but left him anyway.
“I have never regretted my decision to leave Elvis,” she writes. “But I never stopped lamenting it.”
In her new memoir, “Softly, As As As As Leave You: Life After Elvis,” (Grand Central Publishing, 336 pp., released Tuesday, September 23rd), she will be greeted with the departure of her 1985 book, “Elvis and Me.” From the addiction struggle of her son Navalon Garcia to the premature death of her daughter Lisa Marie Presley and the suicide of her grandson Ben Kewu, the enormous amount of love and loss is phenomenal.
In an early copy of the book provided to USA Today, Priscilla (age 80) miswritten after the end of her marriage, but through the perspective of her great grandmother, her relationship with the king of rock and roll.
It is clear that her feelings towards him remained unchanged.
These are the book’s greatest revelation:
Priscilla Presley made the difficult decision to remove her daughter, Lisa Marie from life support
After Lisa Marie was found to not respond, EMT was able to impact her back with a defibrillator and epinephrine, but “from the first moment I walked to Lisa’s hospital room and knew she was already gone,” Presley wrote.
When Lisa Marie’s mind stopped again, the doctor asked Presley what she wanted to do.
“I asked the doctor, he looked at me with compassion and said, “There’s absolutely no quality of life.”
“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious and passionate girl.
Presley won’t say whether she consulted Lisa Marie’s eldest son, Riley Keefe, before making a decision. However, in Lisa Marie’s own memoir, From Here to The Great Unknown, Riley explains that she is on a plane to LA and gets devastating news of her mother’s death in texts from her father.
Lisa Marie had mentioned her stomach pain, but “what she wasn’t telling me was that she was probably doing a stomach bypass a few years ago because she wasn’t aware of the connection,” Priscilla wrote. “She just said she was having ‘a little cosmetic surgery’. ”
Lisa Marie, 54, died of a small intestinal obstruction from complications from bariatric surgery.
Priscilla believes that Lisa Marie has married Michael Jackson.
“She wanted to be with a guy of the same level as her,” Presley writes about Lisa Marie’s decision to divorce Michael Jackson, who married musician Danny Kee three weeks later.
“I was appalled,” Presley says. “I didn’t believe he loved her.”
She goes to a dinner party at Lisa Marie’s house and wants to know him, Jackson plays outside with her kids “who were as far away as possible from me.” He later appeared in honor of Elvis in Memphis, but they didn’t speak there. That was all she saw her step-son.
“I asked her if she had a physical relationship. Like many, I wasn’t sure,” she wrote. Lisa Marie told her they did it.
When Lisa Marie filed for divorce less than two years later, “I was able to hear Elvis sigh in peace,” Priscilla wrote.
Elvis once called his ex-wife Priscilla when he was in bed with Robert Kardashian.
“If I had known Robert was in my bedroom, I would have been literally ballistic,” she wrote. It never happened to him that Priscilla might have been asleep at 2am. And “It certainly never happened to him that I might be with another guy.”
After the chat she returned under the cover, but neither person was wise.
Kim Kardashian was able to have a final conversation as he called Priscilla from the hospital in 2003 when Robert was dying of esophageal cancer.
“He was the kindness of a man and I remember him with great affection,” she writes.
Lisa Marie Presley claimed that Priscilla’s boyfriend had abused her for years. Priscilla learned from her daughter’s book
Presley writes that 14-year-old Lisa Marie told her that Michael Edwards came to her room drunk and pulled the cover back to see her in her nightgown. When questioned by Priscilla, she denied that he had ever touched her inappropriately. (In Lisa Marie’s memoirs, she remembers the incident occurred when she was 10 years old and touched her and kissed her. She also writes that the abuse escalated into spanking.)
Priscilla decides there is no risk of having Edwards in the house and asks him to move in.
A few years later, Priscilla wrote, and Edwards told her he regretted that he had published all of his books.
“If Elvis was still alive, Michael wouldn’t have called me about his regrets,” she wrote. “Elvis would have shot him.”
USA Today contacted Edwards for comment. In 2024, Edwards told USA Today in a statement:
On her part, Priscilla writes that Lisa Marie’s revelation “makes no meaning.”
“I’m struggling to reconcile with Lisa’s words. We couldn’t talk about it together because we hadn’t heard them since she passed away. I know that it will never be closed.”
Priscilla Presley reveals what led to her alienation from Lisa Marie
Things were never the same between mother and daughter after Lisa Marie failed to custody of twins Harper and Finley during their divorce from Michael Lockwood.
Lisa Marie has accused Lockwood of child abuse and sexual misconduct — his lawyer, Jeff Starman, has denied the Associated Press, claiming it was called “very sensational” and “inaccurate.”
When the court’s investigation found nothing to support the claim, Lisa Marie asked Priscilla to sign a deposit stating that Lockwood was “not worthy of custody.”
She refused, “Because I’d never seen Michael behave in the harmful way she was claiming it.” “Signing it is perjury. …To her, it was a betrayal.”
Priscilla “will stab me in my heart and she will never forgive me completely,” she writes. “And she never did.”
Priscilla suggests that if she and Elvis had lived a long life, they might have met again.
When Elvis left her house, one Christmas after their divorce, “He kissed me on the forehead and looked at me,” she recalls. “There was a moment, and then he said, ‘Someday, maybe someday.’ ”
She admits that Elvis “undetectedly” why she is reluctant to remarry or is in another serious relationship.
“People long for true love, the kind of thing that will make you fall deeper until you realize it’s bottomless,” she writes. “I found it before I was old enough to understand it. He had no chance to get older, so I lost the opportunity to find it again with Elvis.”
The report discusses suicide and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is struggling or in a crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 Or chat 988lifeline.org.
If you are a sexual assault survivor, Rainn will provide support through the national sexual assault hotline (800.656.hope and online.rainn.org).
