

“I’ll be right there next to him someday,” she said, according to Kessler, motioning to the empty space next to where Ben had been laid to rest. If she could do it, so, maybe, could you. Everybody yearns to carve out a life for themselves apart from their parents, and here was someone trying to do that against absurdly overwhelming odds. They just walk a little different than other stars, and Lisa Marie was so interesting too - there was something dark about her, a mystery around her.” The mere fact that she soldiered on was inspiring. “Keith Richards has it, Courtney Love and Harry Styles have it. “There’s a genuine swagger to a star,” says producer and songwriter Linda Perry, who also worked with Presley.

“I can’t imagine what it would have been to carry the responsibility of her father’s legacy.”īut Presley - or Lisa Marie, as Elvis fans always called her - had a charisma of her own. “She had so much weight on her shoulders,” Harlow says. Stepping onstage for her set, Harlow observed a house packed with women older than her, pressed against the stage, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the daughter of the King. Singer-songwriter Samantha Harlow beheld the expectations for herself when she opened for Presley at a show at Nashville’s Exit/In club in 2012. As she well knew, the comparisons to her dad were inevitable. Her mother Priscilla’s porcelain beauty was also apparent. It was impossible to look at her and not see her father’s smoldering sensuality and sultry gaze, along with hints of his curled lip. That she had ventured into music at all was remarkably gutsy. As producer Glen Ballard, who worked on one of them, would note, “It was never an easy journey for her.” Some of that upheaval and angst was documented, or alluded to, on the three albums she’d made. “I’m a tabloid queen … princess … whatever you want to call me,” Presley told Rolling Stone in 2003.

Since then, the woman who friends called “LMP” had endured a turbulent ride of her own: four marriages, four divorces, battles with addiction, family loss, and the airing of her train-wreck finances for the world to judge.
#Lisa marie presley series#
That tragedy felt like the latest in a series of upheavals in her life, starting with the loss of her father, Elvis Presley, in 1977, when she was only nine. Kessler, a friend and grief specialist based in Los Angeles, had met Presley in summer 2020, shortly after the death of her son, Ben. It was time to visit her father and one of her children. 8, David Kessler was in his room at a hotel near Graceland when he heard a knock on his door.
