Lisa Marie Presley Said Elvis’ Memphis Mafia Were Disgusting ‘Idiots’: ‘Slithering Motherf*****s’
When Lisa Marie Presley was nine, her father, Elvis Presley, died. During his lifetime, though, she spent much of her time at Graceland with Elvis and his ever-present Memphis Mafia. The Memphis Mafia was Elvis’ entourage, and they were with him at all times. She said they made her uncomfortable as a child and infuriated her as an adult. Lisa Marie shared why she found them disgusting.
Lisa Marie Presley slammed Elvis’s Memphis Mafia
While channel surfing, Lisa Marie discovered the E! True Hollywood Story: The Last Days of Elvis. She started watching and realized that many of the former members of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia were on it, talking about the end of his life.
“I couldn’t believe they were trying to take his dignity — Sonny West, Marty Lacker, Red West, all these people that were worse than him,” she told Rolling Stone in 2003, adding, “They scared the hell out of me when I was a kid, too. I remember seeing the Playboys, the drugs, the women — I watched it all, and I watched them. I know the real story behind all of them, and I know what they’re out there doing.”
She explained that she was so angry afterward that she couldn’t sleep.
“I just thought, ‘You slithering motherf*****s have no right. None. You were responsible for this just as much as he was. His dignity was one of the most important things to him, and you are trying to take it away.'”
She wrote a song about her father’s entourage
Lisa Marie’s intense fury led her to write the song “Nobody Noticed It.”
“I wrote that to relieve myself of something I saw on TV about him, on the E! True Hollywood Story. It actually did me in, emotionally, for days,” she said, per Express. “What made me angry was the interviews with the mother******s who hung around him. These idiots were so disgusting — they helped him go down and were actually worse than he was.”
She wanted to fight back against their depiction of her father.
“I needed to strike back at that,” she said. “I happened to be going to the studio, and I got the melody in my head and started to cry.”
Priscilla Presley wanted to protect Lisa Marie from Elvis’ Memphis Mafia
Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla Presley, agreed with her daughter’s assessment, at least to a certain extent. She grew up around the Memphis Mafia, but she saw many of them as friends. Still, she took note of some of their more unfavorable behavior. While she left Elvis because of his cheating and control over her, the constant presence of his Memphis Mafia played a role, too.
“It wasn’t about not liking, it wasn’t about not loving,” she said on Larry King Live. “It was a lifestyle. I was having a daughter. It was not being able to raise a daughter and a lifestyle of bachelors, and not only that, they were married — some were married and there was a lot of unethical relationships going on.”
