Priscilla Presley has explained why she was appalled by her daughter Lisa Marie’s marriage to Michael Jackson.
Priscilla, 80, has opened up about the 1994 marriage in her new memoir, recalling the moment Lisa Maria phoned to inform her she was engaged to the “Thriller” singer.
She said she was not happy with the news as she questioned Jackson’s motives.
“I was appalled by the marriage,” Priscilla wrote in Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis.
”I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty.”
Priscilla accused the King of Pop of being “a manipulative man”, adding: “I think he had his sights set on her long before she realised it.”
She claimed Jackson actively avoided her after the marriage – and said Jackson’s “childlike innocence was part of his public mask”.
When they announced their divorce less than two years later, Priscilla said she could “practically hear Elvis sigh with relief”.
Lisa Marie, who died in January 2023, was 25 when she married Jackson, who was 35. When the pair became romantic, she was still married to her first husband, musician Danny Keough.
In a memoir published posthumously, Presley recalled Jackson declaring his love for her during a trip to Las Vegas.
“Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children,’” Presley writes.
“I didn’t say anything immediately, but then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too.”
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Presley and Keough soon split amicably, and she started her relationship with Jackson.
“He told me he was still a virgin,” Presley wrote in the book. “I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss.
“He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened. I was terrified because I didn’t want to make the wrong move.”
Jackson died of cardiac arrest in 2009, at the age of 50. Presley, the only child of rock’n’roll icon Elvis Presley, died of small bowel obstruction caused by complications from bariatric surgery, aged 54.
