In her revealing new memoir, “Softly, As I Leave You,” Priscilla Presley, 80, pulls back the curtain on decades of life under the shadow of Elvis and the subsequent tragedy of her daughter, Lisa Marie. The book, excerpts of which were seen by Page Six, is an uncompromising look at the most tumultuous chapters of her life, including Elvis’s willingness to consider abortion when she became pregnant shortly after their wedding. Presley also details the King’s shocking sexual aggression towards her after their separation, and offers a candid, painful account of Lisa Marie’s lifelong struggle with addiction, financial ruin, and the emotional wreckage left by her iconic father. The revelations are a stark, often heart-wrenching, correction to the polished fairy tale image of one of rock and roll’s most famous families.
The Shock of Pregnancy and Elvis’s Abortion Offer
Priscilla and Elvis Presley’s iconic romance began when she was just 14 and he was 24, culminating in a Las Vegas wedding in May 1967. However, the excitement of their public union was immediately shattered by an unexpected pregnancy just weeks later. Priscilla writes that she was “so excited” to finally be in the open, but when she got pregnant on her wedding night, “those dreams fell apart.”
Neither she nor Elvis felt ready for parenthood. Priscilla describes weeks of worried silence, admitting she sank to a “lowest point” where she guiltily wondered how she would feel if she miscarried. It was Elvis who then brought up the unmentionable. Looking at her one day, he asked if she wanted to have an abortion, assuring her he would support “whatever I wanted.” Priscilla calls his words a “wake-up call” that brought the enormity of the situation home. She immediately broke down, telling him: “No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!” When Lisa Marie arrived in February 1968, the couple immediately “fell hopelessly in love with her.”
The Final, Violent Act of Intimacy
Priscilla’s memoir offers a chilling account of the end of her marriage to Elvis, revealing an unsettling post-separation encounter that she says ended their sexual intimacy for good. Priscilla left Elvis when Lisa Marie was four, having started an affair with her karate instructor, Mike Stone. When the King discovered the infidelity, the ensuing rage led to a disturbing sexual experience.
According to Priscilla, Elvis “forced” himself on her in a way that “he imagined a karate master doing it.” She is clear that this was not a shared, loving experience. Priscilla writes that the incident left her with an “unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis.” Despite the trauma, she never regretted her decision to leave, even as she “never ceased to mourn it.” The book also touches on the dark side of Elvis’s despair, recounting how he was so distraught over Stone that he asked his closest aide to find a hit man, though he was eventually persuaded to back down.
The Challenges of Raising ‘Lisa Marie F—ing Presley’
Priscilla admits that raising Lisa Marie, who was left “so broken” by Elvis’s death in 1977, was a decades-long struggle. Priscilla described her daughter as a “conundrum, complicated and challenging,” who, much like her father, was “strong-willed from the beginning.” As the daughter of an icon, Lisa Marie famously dubbed her public persona “Lisa Marie F—ing Presley,” an identity that Priscilla says “both enamored and haunted her for the rest of her life.”
The memoir delves into Lisa Marie’s tumultuous youth, including a shocking anecdote about Priscilla’s former boyfriend, actor Michael Edwards, who allegedly came into a teenage Lisa Marie’s room and lifted her bed covers. Priscilla asked him to move out, but was later “sickened” when he published a book admitting to a “sexual obsession” with her daughter. The pain was compounded when Lisa Marie, years later, claimed in her own posthumously published memoir that Edwards had molested her—a claim Edwards has denied. Priscilla admits the differing accounts meant she could never achieve closure on the matter with her daughter.
Distrusting Michael Jackson and the Financial Ruin
The book makes another surprising celebrity revelation concerning Lisa Marie’s highly publicised marriage to Michael Jackson in 1994, which occurred shortly after the pop star faced child molestation accusations. Priscilla confesses she was “appalled” by the union and never trusted Jackson’s motives.
“I didn’t believe he loved her,” Priscilla writes, explaining that Jackson married her daughter at a time when he desperately needed “good publicity that depicted him as a desirable heterosexual man.” Priscilla saw the marriage as a cynical public relations move, noting that photos of Elvis’s daughter wearing his diamond ring were “pure gold” for Jackson’s image. Priscilla says she “could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief” when Lisa Marie filed for divorce in 1996. The subsequent years saw Lisa Marie’s financial woes, including selling 85 percent of her inheritance by 2005.
The Tragic Descent into Opioid Addiction
The most heartbreaking sections detail Lisa Marie’s final years, ravaged by drug abuse. Priscilla attributes her daughter’s vulnerability to opioids to a tragic inheritance: “Lisa had inherited Elvis’s vulnerability to opioid addiction.” The addiction began after she was given painkillers following the birth of her twin girls in 2008. By 2014, the problem had escalated, leading to Lisa Marie mixing opioids, cocaine, and large amounts of alcohol.
Priscilla was “stunned” when the severity of the addiction—at one point as high as “eighty pills a day”—emerged during Lisa Marie’s 2016 divorce battle. The addiction ultimately cost Priscilla her relationship with her daughter, as Lisa Marie never forgave her mother for refusing to testify against her estranged husband. Priscilla writes, “I would be arguing with her addiction… I was losing one of the two people I loved the most.” Lisa Marie’s life spiralled further after the suicide of her son, Benjamin, in 2020. Priscilla recounts their last days, including Lisa Marie barely being able to walk at the Golden Globes in January 2023, just before she suffered the fatal cardiac arrest caused by complications from bariatric surgery. The book closes with a final, mournful farewell: “My little wild child, I love you forever.”
