On Tuesday night, Priscilla Presley and her daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, sat side by side at their table at the Golden Globes and watched with emotion as Austin Butler won an award for his portrayal of Elvis in the Baz Luhrmann film of the same name.
“Thank you for opening your hearts, your memories, your home to me,” Butler said in his acceptance speech, as mother and daughter looked on. “Lisa Marie, Priscilla, I love you forever.”
Just two days later, Priscilla Presley shared a wrenching message about her daughter on social media, along with a photo of the two of them together. “My beloved daughter Lisa Marie was rushed to the hospital,” she wrote on Thursday. “She is now receiving the best care. Please keep her and our family in your prayers. We feel the prayers from around the world, and ask for privacy during this time.”
A few hours later came the announcement that Lisa Marie Presley had died at the age of 54. It was another loss for Priscilla, 77, in what has been a lifetime punctuated with extreme highs and lows, almost always playing out in the public spotlight.
Priscilla Beaulieu, who was born in Brooklyn, met Elvis Presley when he was stationed with the Army in West Germany in 1959. He was already an international superstar — his first No. 1 single on the Billboard Top 100, “Heartbreak Hotel,” had been released in 1956. She was barely a teenager, living in several states before her family moved overseas with her stepfather, also a military man.
The move was rough, she wrote in her 1985 autobiography, “Elvis and Me.” She had just been voted queen of her junior high in Texas, she said, and the prospect of leaving had left her “crushed”: “Germany was on the other side of the world.”
She had not been there long before encountering Elvis Presley, who was 10 years her senior. “When we met, I had just turned 14,” she wrote. “The first six months I spent with him were filled with tenderness and affection. Blinded by love, I saw none of his faults or weaknesses. He was to become the passion of my life.”
Elvis returned to the United States shortly after, but the couple kept in touch; in 1963, she joined him in Memphis, where she would complete her high school education.
In 1966, they got engaged. In 1967, they were married in Las Vegas. In 1968, Lisa Marie was born.
“The nurse brought her into my room and I cradled her in my arms,” Priscilla Presley wrote in her autobiography. “I couldn’t believe she was mine, that I had borne this child.
“She was so tiny, so beautiful. Elvis came into the room and kissed me, thrilled that we had a perfectly normal, healthy baby. He was already in love with her. He watched me holding her and his eyes misted with happiness. Then he took us both in his arms and held us.”
The pair divorced in 1973, four years before Elvis died at age 42 of heart failure, but they remained very close. “Elvis was still an essential part of my life,” she wrote in her book. “Over the last years, we’d become good friends, admitting the mistakes we’d made in the past and just beginning to laugh at our shortcomings. I could not face the reality that I would never see him alive again. He had always been there for me.”
Priscilla would go on to become an actress, appearing as Jenna Wade for several years on the long-running CBS prime-time soap “Dallas” and then opposite Leslie Nielsen in the three “Naked Gun” films, a role which won her praise from critics for her comic touch.
In 1985, she gave birth to her son, Navarone Garibaldi, with her longtime partner, Marco Garibaldi. (They later split.) And she became a grandmother in 1989, with the birth of Lisa Marie’s daughter, the actress Riley Keough, and again in 1992 with the birth of Benjamin Keough, who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020.
“These are some of the darkest days of my family’s life,” Priscilla Presley wrote on Facebook after his death. “The shock of losing Ben has been devastating. Trying to put all the pieces together of all the possible whys has penetrated my soul. Each day I wake up I pray it will get better. Then, I think of my daughter and the pain she is going through as she was a doting mother.”
A representative for Priscilla Presley said she would not immediately comment after Lisa Marie’s death. On Sunday, during a Globes interview with Billy Bush of “Extra,” she was asked what Elvis, who would have turned 88 last Sunday, said to her that she would never forget: “I love you,” Presley replied.
