Priscilla Presley has admitted she was "appalled" by her late daughter, Lisa Marie's marriage to pop icon, Michael Jackson. In her upcoming memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. Priscilla, 80, claims that she found the late singer to be "manipulative" and believed he was using her daughter to boost his publicity. "I was appalled by the marriage,” Priscilla wrote in the memoir, as per The Sun. "I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty."
"Michael was a manipulative man, and I think he had his sights set on her long before she realised it," she writes. "The childlike innocence he projected was part of his public mask." Lisa Marie and Michael married in 1994 after a whirlwind romance and divorced just two years later in 1996. Priscilla said: "I could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief."
The excerpt comes after another snippet from her upcoming memoir revealed Lisa Marie's final moments before her tragic death in January 2023. "It was the second saddest day of my life, other than losing Elvis," Priscilla told People. "It took a long time to come to terms with the fact that Lisa was gone."
Lisa Marie was found unresponsive at home by her ex-husband, Danny Keough, who called Priscilla and had her meet them at the hospital. "We were there all day long," Priscilla said. "Lisa really wasn't breathing, so she was on the ventilator. For hours we were there waiting, hoping and praying until the doctor came in and said, 'Priscilla, I'm so sorry, she's gone.' We just couldn't believe it – didn't want to believe it. It was hard on all of us; it still is."
In an excerpt from her memoir shared with the publication, Priscilla recounted Lisa Marie's final moments in emotional detail. "I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa's hospital room that she was already gone," she wrote. "She was hooked to a machine that was breathing for her, and she had a heartbeat. There was little brain activity. Her spirit, always so vital, wasn’t there. Riley later told us that while she was still on her flight, she had felt her mother’s spirit pass. But none of us was ready to give up yet.