Lisa Marie Presley ‘Knew’ Something Was Wrong With Elvis on the Day He Died
When Elvis Presley died in 1977, his young daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was staying with him at Graceland. Lisa Marie herself said she had been able to tell for several years that her father’s health was declining. She reportedly had an even stronger sense that something was wrong on the last night she saw Elvis. Her daughter, Riley Keough, recounted the sense of unease her mother felt on the last night of Elvis’ life.
Lisa Marie Presley had a sense that something was wrong with Elvis on the day he died
Toward the end of his life, Elvis’ drug use and self-isolation became mounting problems for him. Even Lisa Marie, who was a child when he died, could tell something was wrong.
“One night when I was five or six, we were watching TV,” Lisa Marie said in the book The Colonel by Alanna Nash. “I looked up at him and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want you to die.’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘Okay, I won’t. Don’t worry about it.’”
Keough said her mother felt a sense of foreboding when she said goodnight to him on the final night of his life.
“She said goodnight to him, and I think she knew, saying goodnight, that she had some kind of sense,” Keough said in An Oprah Special: The Presleys — Elvis, Lisa Marie, and Riley (per CBS News). “I think she had a sense many times that he wasn’t OK. You know, she would tell me that sometimes she would find him in his bathroom looking kind of out of it or holding onto the railing to stand up straight. And she also wrote these letters when she was little, saying, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.’ So there was some kind of sense there.”
Lisa Marie Presley took an item from Elvis’ room after his death
After Elvis’ death, Lisa Marie continued to spend time at Graceland as she still had family at the home. Still, Graceland maid Nancy Rooks said she mostly avoided the upstairs, where Elvis died. Rooks could only recall her going upstairs on one occasion.
“I noticed a change in her, however, whenever she came to the house after his passing,” Rooks wrote in her book Inside Graceland: Elvis’ Maid Remembers. “The only time I remember her going upstairs was one time, several years after he had died, when she asked me to go up to his bedroom with her.”
Lisa Marie took a keepsake from Elvis’ closet before leaving the room.
“She got very quiet as we entered the room, and stopped, looked around for a few minutes, and then went over and got a black and white ballcap from his closet and walked out of the room with it,” Rooks wrote. “I think that just knowing that her father had died up there was too much for her. I guess it would be for most children her age.”
Her posthumous memoir is now available
This month, Lisa Marie’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, was released. She worked on the book for years before recruiting Keough to help her. After Lisa Marie’s sudden death, Keough sifted through tape recordings to finish the book.
“This extraordinary book is composed of both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voice, a mother and daughter communicating across the transom of death as they try to heal each other,” reads the book’s official website. “Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other — the last words of the only child of a true legend.”
