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When do you think Michael and Lisa last spoke?
- Thread starter Shamonee
- Start date
mandy543
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I think so. This was at EuroDisney.
LOL, I think they're feeling awkward with the photographer taking their pics.
indranee
Proud Member
elmari, that looks like it could be around 1993, so yeah, pre-wedding. cute pics! they look happy but cautious LOL!
ladies, I have some information that I got from another board about these two but I don't think I should share it here. we don't want this thread to get it deleted like the other one lol! I'll PM it to some of you, if you want. I'll just say this, their relationship was complicated as hell and went on far longer than the general public is led to believe (we know that already)... AND the end definitely something to do with the birth of one of Mike's children.
I am not surprised at all at the intensity of that blogpost by Lisa.
elmari
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swirl0
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I want to know... Can you tell me?
mandy543
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Yeah, I don't believe that either. It's probably just pure coincidence. LOL! Lisa wasn't stalking MJ lmao
mlg2804
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I think these pics are after their wedding, in fact I am gonna hazard a guess that it is their honeymoon, at least the Disney pics. If it is Eurodisney as another poster said, then I think they were taken on their honeymoon/first trip to Europe after getting married.
indranee
Proud Member
aww Mikey took Lisa to Disney for their honeymoon? bet she LOVED THAT!! :lol:
Blackcat
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Could you plaese PM me. Thx.
By the way...
I'm trying to find the oprah interview (LMP + her mother)...does anyone have it?
CTU
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Mandy post it on page 54
http://www.presleyspride.com
interview w/Oprah pt. 1 and Lisa's interview w/Oprah pt. 2
I just watched it this morning...
http://www.presleyspride.com
interview w/Oprah pt. 1 and Lisa's interview w/Oprah pt. 2
I just watched it this morning...
Blackcat
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Thank you very much.
Ok...were they still in contact in 2005?
:doh:
She sounds like a woman who's very pissed, guess it ain't easy to live with MJ..but what did she expect,
+It's very unfair to call it manipulation...because she used him , he wanted children and she broke her promise.
But we don't have the right to judge her, because we'll never know how it is to be with MJ, I mean we love him, but we weren't with him.
Oh and her mother....so she liked every husband of LMP, except of MJ? Only he was manipulative? :smilerolleyes:
LOL LMP was very pissed at her...and felt very uncomfortble all through this interview.
She loved MJ all the time...you can see it, even if she acts like she doesn't care. Now of course she totally regrets it...I mean the blog says it all.
Ok...were they still in contact in 2005?
:doh:
She sounds like a woman who's very pissed, guess it ain't easy to live with MJ..but what did she expect,
+It's very unfair to call it manipulation...because she used him , he wanted children and she broke her promise.
But we don't have the right to judge her, because we'll never know how it is to be with MJ, I mean we love him, but we weren't with him.
Oh and her mother....so she liked every husband of LMP, except of MJ? Only he was manipulative? :smilerolleyes:
LOL LMP was very pissed at her...and felt very uncomfortble all through this interview.
She loved MJ all the time...you can see it, even if she acts like she doesn't care. Now of course she totally regrets it...I mean the blog says it all.
Hi girls. I love this tread I`m not so good in english but I try so much.
I`ll tell you, that for me they were a great couple, and I think, that they loved each other.
But relationship at the spotlight always is difficult. Especially, when you are the most known person in the world and your wife is Elvis Daughter.
The media was always opposite them, people don`t even belive in this marriage.
For me it`s so sad.
Yeah, I think the same way.
Ohh... please.. PM me too...
< Sorry if i made many mistakes >
I`m not so good in english but I try so much. I`ll tell you, that for me they were a great couple, and I think, that they loved each other.
But relationship at the spotlight always is difficult. Especially, when you are the most known person in the world and your wife is Elvis Daughter.
The media was always opposite them, people don`t even belive in this marriage.
For me it`s so sad.
Yeah, I think the same way.
Ohh... please.. PM me too...
< Sorry if i made many mistakes
>BRUSTER21
Proud Member
PM me please))))))
Ohood
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you're right.
King_of_Pop
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PM me too.
elmari
Proud Member
Got this off of LSA. It's an excerpt from a book about Priscilla Presley published in 1997.
EXCERPT FROM CHILD BRIDE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF PRISCILLA BEAULIEU PRESLEY © 1997
Author: Suzanne Finstad
Below is an excerpt from chapter 33 in the book “CHILD BRIDE” by Suzanne Finstad, which gives a detailed account on Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson’s first real encounter, the events leading up to it, and how and why they actually ended up together.
Sometime in 1991, after she had been married to musician Danny Keough for three years, 23 year-old Lisa Marie Presley telephoned longtime family friend and artist Brett Livingstone Strong. It was not the first time Lisa had turned to Brett to commiserate about her life. “She used to call me now and then when the relationship with Danny wasn’t working out to the effect that she wanted, love-wise.”
In 1991, and by the third year into her marriage, Lisa was restless and unfulfilled. “She wanted to do more with her life than just have her life go by,” Brett said. She and Danny were arguing mildly about his career versus hers, and Lisa was clearly in a struggle to find her identity. In just the year before, Lisa had telephoned a young producer’s office by mistake, thinking that she was dialing Priscilla’s boyfriend—Marco’s production company.
According to the producer’s girlfriend, she opened her soul to a perfect stranger. Lisa apparently confided in the producer about her marital woes, discussed the possibility of aborting another child by Danny, and talked about writing a book about her life, as if she had dialed a crisis hotline. The astonished producer would not comment on the bizarre experience later, except to say, “Even to this day I’m sort of at a loss at what exactly happened, so I think it’s best to just let it go. It’s really, you know, a mystery to me, the whole thing….I’m sure Lisa’s totally got her life together at this stage.”
She was, by all appearances, deeply troubled. Lisa still had a desire to be in show business, to be famous in her own right, and she turned, that year to Jerry Schilling, who had been close friend of Elvis and was one of the original members of his entourage, for guidance. Having decided to become an actress, she enlisted Jerry as her manager. She wanted, he recalled, to be a star. Jerry went along with it, not so secretly hoping she would switch to singing. “I managed her as an actress,” said Jerry, “but I kept saying, ‘Lisa, you are going to sing.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ ”
Lisa’s acting career fizzled, going no further than a false press report in May of 1991 saying that she would costar with Vanilla Ice in his next movie. She took a few acting lessons and became bored and discouraged because she was not an instant success.
During the summer or early fall of 1992, Jerry Schilling received the green light from Lisa that he had been hoping for since the day she was a child. “She called me from the car phone one day and said, ‘I can sing!’ And I knew what that meant.” Lisa Marie Presley had suddenly decided, for whatever reason, that her voice could be compared to her famous father’s and she was ready to withstand the media scrutiny and aim full-tilt for a recording career. Jerry Schilling again became Lisa’s manager. “Jerry would tell me,” recalled Brett, ‘If only Lisa would practice, she would be as good as her father.’ Jerry always wanted to be the manager, I saw that.” Jerry thought Lisa had, “a great voice—a cross between Aretha Franklin and Bonnie Raitt.” Once Lisa’s decision was made, Jerry took her through the normal process of getting her a record deal. She engaged her husband, Danny, as her producer and began writing songs with him, recalled both Jerry and Brett. “We went to the studios and got the musicians,” said Jerry. “When we got there, Aretha Franklin was the first thing she did on demo.”
Lisa, aware of all the pressure on her, was inhibited, remembered Jerry. The only person she would allow inside the studio—was Danny. “Danny started working with her and did a great job. A lot of it was confidence and pulling her along.”
Jerry then sent Lisa’s demo tapes to a large record company, but didn’t tell them who it was. “She got three major deals,” said Jerry. Lisa became pregnant in the process of recording her demos and gave birth to a son name Benjamin in October 1992, putting a temporary halt to her plans to record. Jerry was, by his recollections, finalizing plans to close a record deal for Lisa with Epic when things suddenly shifted course. Unbeknownst to Jerry, Lisa was impatient with the conservative, traditional route he was taking as her manager, representing her as an “upcoming new young talent,” taking the steps he would have followed for any other beginning artist. She phoned Brett throughout the summer of 1992 expressing her dissatisfaction. “That didn’t set well with Lisa,” as Brett put it. “She was like, ‘Hey, hang on a second! I’m Elvis Presley’s daughter!...Separate me from any other young and upcoming singer.’ But she obviously didn’t say that to Jerry.”
Lisa’s phone calls gave rise to an inspiration on Brett’s part. He had become a successful artist, famous for a million-dollar portrait he had painted of Michael Jackson, who had become his personal friend. Brett, the great connector, considered introducing Lisa to Michael. “She had the talent as well as the beauty and the name, so I thought Wow! The sky is the limit. What an image! I had known Michael for six years or more, and I thought maybe I could introduce Lisa to Michael Jackson. I thought, Hey, the person to get is Michael Jackson, because he’s an artist, instead of dealing with businessmen who would just categorize her and work her way up.” Michael had a new record label, Brett knew, and was looking for exciting, undiscovered talent. Who better than Lisa Marie Presley? “I didn’t discuss this with anyone,” said Brett. “I just thought about it and went about my business and thought that sometime in the future Lisa would like to have a conversation with Michael. From what I could see, Lisa was disenchanted with Jerry’s representation because she didn’t like what the head guy at Sony in New York had told her about where she had to begin and what she had to do—that she had to crawl before she walked.” Lisa wanted to emerge a full-blown star, and Michael Jackson, Brett believed, could help her.
Several months after the idea occurred to him, Brett telephoned Lisa, who was taking courses at the Scientology center in Clearwater, Florida. He said, “Lisa, if you’re really serious about your career, why don’t I put you in touch with Michael Jackson?....I think you should meet him and play your music and sing for him, and I think he could really encourage and inspire you on a direction you could take.” Brett told her that Michael had his own company, Nation Records, sponsored by Sony, and that he could “really launch her big time.” Lisa was intrigued.
Brett’s next step was to telephone Michael Jackson. “I said, ‘Michael, what would you say if I found talent for you that had the potential to be number one in the world in the recording industry—beautiful girl, great voice and also a reputation that would be a public relations dream come true?’ and he said, ‘Who are you talking about?’ So I said, ‘Lisa Presley.’ And he said, ‘What? She can’t sing!’ and I said, ‘She can.’ And then I asked, ‘Have you ever met Lisa?’ and he said no.” The conversation, recalled Brett, was brief, followed by lots of other conversations about it. Michael was “amazed at first, and then said, ‘Well get her to send me a tape.’ ”
At the time, neither Michael nor Lisa recalled their fleeting meeting introduction backstage, at the Sahara Tahoe when Lisa was six and Michael was sixteen. Lisa’s close childhood friend Myrna Smith, who was with Jerry and Joe Esposito when they took Lisa to that long-ago concert, confirmed this. “Lisa didn’t even remember meeting Michael as a child,” Myrna said. “She asked me, ‘Did I ever meet Michael Jackson?’ and I said, ‘Don’t you remember? We took you to see the Jacksons.’ ”
When Brett told Lisa about his conversation with Michael, she was offended that she would have to send a demo. She told Brett, “Forget it, I’ll play the tape for him in person.” Lisa called Brett constantly afterward, inquiring about the meeting with Michael. She told Myrna excitedly that Brett had arranged to have Michael and her get together at his house in Pacific Palisades and for Lisa to play her demo tape. Lisa took her husband Danny, along to that meeting, and the group gathered in Brett’s living room. “Michael…was blown away by her music,” according to Brett. “She played the tape and was really excited that Michael Jackson was here, and at that point, she looked like a fan of his. And he was really tickled to see that she had a lot of potential, but he didn’t think too much more than ‘Wow, Brett is onto something here.’ ” There was, according to Brett, not even the slightest suggestion of anything romantic between Lisa and Michael at that meeting. “Her husband was here.”
Michael carried on with his own career interests after that meeting, but Lisa, recalled Brett, “kept calling me after that. Constantly calling me. And she wanted to get together with Michael more.” Lisa met with Brett a few times to talk about it, remarking that she had “a few things in common with the Jacksons and maybe she should pursue a friendship with Michael.” Brett, still their intermediary, offered to represent Lisa in a business contract with Michael for a recording deal, even though he had an art partnership with Michael and had been his friend for years. Brett had worked up some figures and talked to Michael, who arranged for Brett to take Lisa to meet with Michael Greenberg, the head of Jackson’s company, Nation Records in Santa Monica. Lisa brought Danny along with her attorney, John Coale. “I didn’t know anything about that business,” said Brett, “but I wanted to make sure that Lisa made a deal at the top level…by saying, ‘Hey, Elvis is the King and she’s the Princess. She’s got the talent. All she needs is Michael to help record at the highest possible level and help her choose the songs and teach her some presence on stage. I was trying to get Michael to…make a deal with Lisa at the top—the deal that the other recording companies were making with Madonna and Barbara Streisand. And he was like, ‘Are you crazy? They have proven themselves.’ And I said, ‘No, make the same deal; a deal over a period of time…based on performance as the records sell. And not only will you make the deal with Lisa, you’ll promote the company.’ And I knew that’s what Lisa would love, if she was put on a pedestal.”
EXCERPT FROM CHILD BRIDE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF PRISCILLA BEAULIEU PRESLEY © 1997
Author: Suzanne Finstad
Below is an excerpt from chapter 33 in the book “CHILD BRIDE” by Suzanne Finstad, which gives a detailed account on Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson’s first real encounter, the events leading up to it, and how and why they actually ended up together.
Sometime in 1991, after she had been married to musician Danny Keough for three years, 23 year-old Lisa Marie Presley telephoned longtime family friend and artist Brett Livingstone Strong. It was not the first time Lisa had turned to Brett to commiserate about her life. “She used to call me now and then when the relationship with Danny wasn’t working out to the effect that she wanted, love-wise.”
In 1991, and by the third year into her marriage, Lisa was restless and unfulfilled. “She wanted to do more with her life than just have her life go by,” Brett said. She and Danny were arguing mildly about his career versus hers, and Lisa was clearly in a struggle to find her identity. In just the year before, Lisa had telephoned a young producer’s office by mistake, thinking that she was dialing Priscilla’s boyfriend—Marco’s production company.
According to the producer’s girlfriend, she opened her soul to a perfect stranger. Lisa apparently confided in the producer about her marital woes, discussed the possibility of aborting another child by Danny, and talked about writing a book about her life, as if she had dialed a crisis hotline. The astonished producer would not comment on the bizarre experience later, except to say, “Even to this day I’m sort of at a loss at what exactly happened, so I think it’s best to just let it go. It’s really, you know, a mystery to me, the whole thing….I’m sure Lisa’s totally got her life together at this stage.”
She was, by all appearances, deeply troubled. Lisa still had a desire to be in show business, to be famous in her own right, and she turned, that year to Jerry Schilling, who had been close friend of Elvis and was one of the original members of his entourage, for guidance. Having decided to become an actress, she enlisted Jerry as her manager. She wanted, he recalled, to be a star. Jerry went along with it, not so secretly hoping she would switch to singing. “I managed her as an actress,” said Jerry, “but I kept saying, ‘Lisa, you are going to sing.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ ”
Lisa’s acting career fizzled, going no further than a false press report in May of 1991 saying that she would costar with Vanilla Ice in his next movie. She took a few acting lessons and became bored and discouraged because she was not an instant success.
During the summer or early fall of 1992, Jerry Schilling received the green light from Lisa that he had been hoping for since the day she was a child. “She called me from the car phone one day and said, ‘I can sing!’ And I knew what that meant.” Lisa Marie Presley had suddenly decided, for whatever reason, that her voice could be compared to her famous father’s and she was ready to withstand the media scrutiny and aim full-tilt for a recording career. Jerry Schilling again became Lisa’s manager. “Jerry would tell me,” recalled Brett, ‘If only Lisa would practice, she would be as good as her father.’ Jerry always wanted to be the manager, I saw that.” Jerry thought Lisa had, “a great voice—a cross between Aretha Franklin and Bonnie Raitt.” Once Lisa’s decision was made, Jerry took her through the normal process of getting her a record deal. She engaged her husband, Danny, as her producer and began writing songs with him, recalled both Jerry and Brett. “We went to the studios and got the musicians,” said Jerry. “When we got there, Aretha Franklin was the first thing she did on demo.”
Lisa, aware of all the pressure on her, was inhibited, remembered Jerry. The only person she would allow inside the studio—was Danny. “Danny started working with her and did a great job. A lot of it was confidence and pulling her along.”
Jerry then sent Lisa’s demo tapes to a large record company, but didn’t tell them who it was. “She got three major deals,” said Jerry. Lisa became pregnant in the process of recording her demos and gave birth to a son name Benjamin in October 1992, putting a temporary halt to her plans to record. Jerry was, by his recollections, finalizing plans to close a record deal for Lisa with Epic when things suddenly shifted course. Unbeknownst to Jerry, Lisa was impatient with the conservative, traditional route he was taking as her manager, representing her as an “upcoming new young talent,” taking the steps he would have followed for any other beginning artist. She phoned Brett throughout the summer of 1992 expressing her dissatisfaction. “That didn’t set well with Lisa,” as Brett put it. “She was like, ‘Hey, hang on a second! I’m Elvis Presley’s daughter!...Separate me from any other young and upcoming singer.’ But she obviously didn’t say that to Jerry.”
Lisa’s phone calls gave rise to an inspiration on Brett’s part. He had become a successful artist, famous for a million-dollar portrait he had painted of Michael Jackson, who had become his personal friend. Brett, the great connector, considered introducing Lisa to Michael. “She had the talent as well as the beauty and the name, so I thought Wow! The sky is the limit. What an image! I had known Michael for six years or more, and I thought maybe I could introduce Lisa to Michael Jackson. I thought, Hey, the person to get is Michael Jackson, because he’s an artist, instead of dealing with businessmen who would just categorize her and work her way up.” Michael had a new record label, Brett knew, and was looking for exciting, undiscovered talent. Who better than Lisa Marie Presley? “I didn’t discuss this with anyone,” said Brett. “I just thought about it and went about my business and thought that sometime in the future Lisa would like to have a conversation with Michael. From what I could see, Lisa was disenchanted with Jerry’s representation because she didn’t like what the head guy at Sony in New York had told her about where she had to begin and what she had to do—that she had to crawl before she walked.” Lisa wanted to emerge a full-blown star, and Michael Jackson, Brett believed, could help her.
Several months after the idea occurred to him, Brett telephoned Lisa, who was taking courses at the Scientology center in Clearwater, Florida. He said, “Lisa, if you’re really serious about your career, why don’t I put you in touch with Michael Jackson?....I think you should meet him and play your music and sing for him, and I think he could really encourage and inspire you on a direction you could take.” Brett told her that Michael had his own company, Nation Records, sponsored by Sony, and that he could “really launch her big time.” Lisa was intrigued.
Brett’s next step was to telephone Michael Jackson. “I said, ‘Michael, what would you say if I found talent for you that had the potential to be number one in the world in the recording industry—beautiful girl, great voice and also a reputation that would be a public relations dream come true?’ and he said, ‘Who are you talking about?’ So I said, ‘Lisa Presley.’ And he said, ‘What? She can’t sing!’ and I said, ‘She can.’ And then I asked, ‘Have you ever met Lisa?’ and he said no.” The conversation, recalled Brett, was brief, followed by lots of other conversations about it. Michael was “amazed at first, and then said, ‘Well get her to send me a tape.’ ”
At the time, neither Michael nor Lisa recalled their fleeting meeting introduction backstage, at the Sahara Tahoe when Lisa was six and Michael was sixteen. Lisa’s close childhood friend Myrna Smith, who was with Jerry and Joe Esposito when they took Lisa to that long-ago concert, confirmed this. “Lisa didn’t even remember meeting Michael as a child,” Myrna said. “She asked me, ‘Did I ever meet Michael Jackson?’ and I said, ‘Don’t you remember? We took you to see the Jacksons.’ ”
When Brett told Lisa about his conversation with Michael, she was offended that she would have to send a demo. She told Brett, “Forget it, I’ll play the tape for him in person.” Lisa called Brett constantly afterward, inquiring about the meeting with Michael. She told Myrna excitedly that Brett had arranged to have Michael and her get together at his house in Pacific Palisades and for Lisa to play her demo tape. Lisa took her husband Danny, along to that meeting, and the group gathered in Brett’s living room. “Michael…was blown away by her music,” according to Brett. “She played the tape and was really excited that Michael Jackson was here, and at that point, she looked like a fan of his. And he was really tickled to see that she had a lot of potential, but he didn’t think too much more than ‘Wow, Brett is onto something here.’ ” There was, according to Brett, not even the slightest suggestion of anything romantic between Lisa and Michael at that meeting. “Her husband was here.”
Michael carried on with his own career interests after that meeting, but Lisa, recalled Brett, “kept calling me after that. Constantly calling me. And she wanted to get together with Michael more.” Lisa met with Brett a few times to talk about it, remarking that she had “a few things in common with the Jacksons and maybe she should pursue a friendship with Michael.” Brett, still their intermediary, offered to represent Lisa in a business contract with Michael for a recording deal, even though he had an art partnership with Michael and had been his friend for years. Brett had worked up some figures and talked to Michael, who arranged for Brett to take Lisa to meet with Michael Greenberg, the head of Jackson’s company, Nation Records in Santa Monica. Lisa brought Danny along with her attorney, John Coale. “I didn’t know anything about that business,” said Brett, “but I wanted to make sure that Lisa made a deal at the top level…by saying, ‘Hey, Elvis is the King and she’s the Princess. She’s got the talent. All she needs is Michael to help record at the highest possible level and help her choose the songs and teach her some presence on stage. I was trying to get Michael to…make a deal with Lisa at the top—the deal that the other recording companies were making with Madonna and Barbara Streisand. And he was like, ‘Are you crazy? They have proven themselves.’ And I said, ‘No, make the same deal; a deal over a period of time…based on performance as the records sell. And not only will you make the deal with Lisa, you’ll promote the company.’ And I knew that’s what Lisa would love, if she was put on a pedestal.”
elmari
Proud Member
CONTINUED
Lisa was torn. Part of her was in “turmoil,” recalled Brett, “on her mind was ‘I have my kids,’ and she was in turmoil with her husband and what should she do? If she wanted to be a star, she had to really want to live and breathe that.” Michael Jackson also advised Lisa similarly: If she wanted to pursue a singing career, she would have to dedicate herself to it. During the following weeks, Brett found herself the hapless man in the middle, caught between a balking and busy Michael, and an ambivalent yet driven Lisa. Brett made arrangements for Lisa to visit Michael in Japan while he was on the tour for Dangerous, and tried to facilitate other plans, some of which occurred while others dissipated. According to Brett, Lisa was, “in relentless pursuit of Michael Jackson,” and phoned [Brett] constantly to find out whether the deal would occur. Michael, in Brett’s characterization, was obviously intrigued by the thought of signing Lisa Presley, “but there was more desire on Lisa’s part for something to happen.” Lisa, he recalled, finally said to him, “It doesn’t seem like I can make that deal with him, and I don’t want to push him too much.” Brett, who was still hoping to bring them together for a record deal, finally arranged for a representative from Michael’s office to send a formal letter to Lisa stating that Michael was still interested in keeping things going. At the same time, Prince also began pursuing Lisa to sign a recording contract.
Lisa celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday with a huge party, planned by Priscilla, at Six Flags Magic Mountain. Prince was among the guests, along with a sprinkling of celebrity Scientologists such as Kirstie Alley, Nicole Kidman, and Juliette Lewis. Lisa invited Michael Jackson as her special guest, “and he would have loved to have gone,” said Brett, “but he had other things.” Brett suggested to Michael that he should at least send Lisa a birthday gift, “so he told me, ‘Well you go get it!’ ” Brett selected, as Michael’s gift to Lisa, an art book on Michelangelo and a silver picture frame in which he placed a photograph of Michael and Lisa’s original meeting in his living room. Brett, attempting to be gallant on Michael’s behalf, wrote sweet birthday inscriptions in the art book and on the birthday card, making them appear to be from Michael. “I was just trying to be a good friend for him,” said Brett. “I went to the party with my son Jason, and when I got there, Lisa was like, ‘Oh! Where’s Michael? I hope it’s all right that Prince is here.’ I said, ‘Michael just couldn’t make it, but here is a gift from him.’ And I didn’t say anything [else].” Lisa, he recalled, “latched onto the gifts excitedly and immediately opened them to check them out.”
He later figured out, said Brett, that he had inadvertently played matchmaker to Michael and Lisa by buying the birthday gifts, for Lisa, seeing the card and the inscription in the art book, both of which she believed to have been written by Michael, misinterpreted Brett’s affectionate words as an indication that Michael Jackson had feelings for her. “I wasn’t trying to bring two people together to get married. I look back on it now as a sign that [she was thinking], Wow! He really cares about me. And she secretly wanted a relationship with him, because I always talked about him as a passionate man [who was] extremely loving…and that attracted Lisa, that loving part, and loving children.” Lisa never knew that Brett wrote the birthday card and signed her book. “I can’t recall what I wrote exactly in the book or card,” said Brett, “but that might have been something she read over and over again and thought, Jeez! And afterwards, Lisa kept calling me, and eventually, after the many calls and pursuits and my little bit of fairy dust that I sprinkled about the place, hey, those guys [got] together, and I thought, ‘Maybe they’ll record something,’ And I remember Lisa saying, ‘Brett, what do you want out of this?’ and Michael Jackson asked me the same thing, and I thought, ‘Boy, there must be something happening here.’ I told Lisa, ‘You can give me whatever you think is fair,’ and I told Michael the same. I thought up the idea and executed it, and I stayed on top of it. Any other business person would be claiming something, but since I am an artist, I told them, ‘If you do record something, give me a job at art direction instead of hiring somebody else.’ So we didn’t think anything else or more about that other than that it was going to happen.”
In late February, a few weeks after her 25th birthday, Jerry Schilling received a mysterious phone call from Lisa. “Something is going on,” she told Jerry, “but I can’t tell you what. And it has nothing to do with you, but I’m not going to continue with this record contract right now.” Lisa told him, said Jerry, that she was busy with her new baby and wanted to put the Epic deal on hold. Jerry, who had no idea Lisa had even met with Michael Jackson, simply said fine and puzzled over what might be happening in Lisa’s life.
Mike Edwards, who had also remained close to Brett after his breakup with Priscilla, began getting phone calls from an amazed Brett about this time. “He’s saying, ‘Gosh, Lisa’s calling me and Lisa’s really interested in Michael!’ ” Brett’s impression, said Mike Edwards, was that Michael was absorbed in his work, but that Lisa was really interested in him. “And I said, ‘Come on! What do you mean?’ [Brett] said, ‘You haven’t met him, but he’s very charismatic.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I can’t believe it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, she’s kind of pursuing him.’ And I went, ‘My God! What’s gonna happen?’” “I could see that Lisa fell in love with him,” confirmed Brett. What attracted her in part, he felt, was that Michael was not after her money. “I think she didn’t know him very well, though. She didn’t know his quirks and eccentric lifestyle, and she thought, This guy is going to be great. A stepfather for my kids.”
Lisa, according to Brett, was the one who was in pursuit. “I think it was the passion of a woman who fell in love. And Michael wasn’t even interested at all. And he is a gentleman, he wouldn’t have wanted to pull her away from her marriage to Danny. And she pursued him. Family friend Bob Wall, who heard about it after the fact, confirmed this. “I know that Lisa is the one who pursued the relationship.” She did it, Bob felt, to create an identity separate from the Presley name, to be known as something other than “the daughter of.” “Lisa really wants to be credible,” said Bob. “You’ve got her father, who’s a genius. Her mother’s done incredibly well. And all she’s got is a lot of money. So maybe that’s important to her, to create her own identity.”
Brett, seeing the progression of the friendship, suggested that Michael take Lisa to the Oscar ceremony that March, just as he had escorted Madonna the year before, but Michael balked, since Lisa was a married woman. The relationship intensified on Michael’s part that fall however, after 13 year-old Jordan Chandler accused him of child molestation, causing a scandal to erupt worldwide. Later, Michael would quietly escort Lisa to the Jackson Family Honors. Lisa, who was then spending time with Myrna Smith, a childhood friend who use to sing with Lisa when Lisa was a child, told Myrna about her secret romance with Michael Jackson. Myrna perceived that Lisa felt sorry for Michael because of the sexual molestation charges and the devastating effect the scandal had had on his career and his image. Myrna also believed Lisa had sincere feelings for Michael. “Yes, she did, according to what she told me. She did. She’s like her father—they like the underdog…she did it for her own reasons, but she didn’t do it because Michael coerced her. She genuinely cared about him and she thought he cared for her.” Myrna, who knew and knew of Michael through music circles, tried to warn Lisa about the relationship, which she considered both dangerous and absurd. “I can only guess what his motives were, and I could only tell what I thought, what a smart businessman he was, and that he was only pursuing her for what she could do for him, and that he wasn’t interested in women. And she told me he was.” Lisa did not tell Myrna whether she and Michael had sex, though Brett believed they did. “Yeah, sure, I think, because of what happened. I didn’t want to ask any questions. I could have asked Lisa the nitty-gritty.”
By Christmas 1993, Lisa was discussing with Myrna the possibility of marrying Michael Jackson. “He told her,” said Myrna, “that she was the only woman he could see himself marrying. And I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ ” Myrna recalled that Lisa responded, “Myrna, you don’t understand.” Myrna reminded Lisa that she was married and tried to convince her that Michael’s motives were not, in her opinion, pure. “When she was telling me what was going on, I was thinking: This is a plan. He’s got this calculated plan, and [he has] thought this all through—‘This is the girl who is going to make me....Elvis is the King of Rock and Roll, and I’m going to be bigger than that.’ And that was his whole purpose. And she did not want to believe it.” Lisa asked Myrna not to tell Jerry or her mother about her romance with Michael. Priscilla did not have a clue that her only daughter was being courted by Michael Jackson.
In February 1994, Lisa and Michael stayed at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Springs with Donald Trump and Marla Maples. Then they moved into one of the millionaire’s luxury condominiums at the Trump Tower in New York while Michael cut a new album. There were a few Michael-and-Lisa sightings in the press that early spring, but no one thought much about it, for no journalist would have imagined there was a romance. The next step in the strange progression of the relationship was Lisa’s public announcement in April that she was ending her marriage to Danny Keough. That very same month, Michael’s Beverly Hills attorney Robert Kaufman, reportedly placed a call to a judge in the Dominican Republic, inquiring about the procedure for his client to be married on the island. Divorce papers for Lisa and Danny were quietly filed and finalized in Santo Domingo in early May. On May 24, 1994, Lisa and Michael flew on Sony’s private jet to La Romana in the Dominican Republic and checked into the Casa de Campo resort accompanied by Lisa’s brother and sister-in-law, Thomas and Eva Keough, both Scientologists like Danny. Lisa and Michael checked into separate suites. That day, Michael’s lawyer telephoned Francisco Alvarez Perez, the same judge he had spoken to earlier, to confirm plans for the wedding, which would take place at Perez’s house on May 26. His client, Kaufman told the judge, had requested the ceremony to be “short and fast,” like Elvis and Priscilla’s.
Lisa’s marriage to Michael took place in La Vega, as her mother’s had been in Las Vegas, in a ceremony performed, as Priscilla’s had been, by a judge arranged through a third party. By mid-July rumors were flying wildly in the press about a suspected wedding between Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, who were reported to be—and were—ensconced in the Trump Tower in New York. Priscilla, who knew nothing of her daughter’s marriage, questioned Brett Strong about the newspaper accounts, for she knew he and Michael were friends. “And I told Priscilla that Michael had told me once when I was at his home years ago, that he always wanted a son and a daughter, but didn’t know how he was going to get it, because who was he going to marry? But he always wanted that, and had a room full of dolls and other toys…He had a train set rigged up so that you thought he already had a kid somewhere.” Priscilla, Brett recalled, laughed nervously and said, “Oh my God! He’s going to get his son and daughter by marrying my daughter!” Priscilla seemed embarrassed, said Brett, and “didn’t want to let on to anybody that she didn’t know anything.” Lisa informed her mother she was married to Michael two weeks before she announced it publicly. Priscilla, by everyone’s account, was appalled at the news of her daughter’s marriage. Priscilla’s boyfriend, Marco Garibaldi, would later compare Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and his and Priscilla’s feelings about it, to “a mole on the end of somebody’s nose. Everyone knows it’s there, and nobody’s happy about it, but you just don’t say anything about it.” Although upset about her daughter’s marriage, Priscilla found some comfort in the fact that Lisa and her ex-husband, Danny, still kept in touch, even continuing to vacation together in Hawaii throughout her marriage to Michael, and afterward, patterning their relationship, said Priscilla, on “my relationship with Elvis. They are very good friends. [Danny’s] around a lot. He’s always around the children, which is great.”
In the ever unusual world of Elvis and Priscilla—and now Lisa, there were some bizarre parallels between Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and Priscilla’s marriage to Elvis. In addition to their similarly secretive weddings in Las Vegas and La Vega, Lisa married a man she would discover had little interest in taking her to bed, just as Elvis rarely had intercourse with Priscilla. Lisa had wed, by an obvious Freudian motive, the Nineties equivalent of her staggeringly successful superstar father: Elvis was the King of Rock; Michael was the King of Pop. Both singers, oddly, had pet chimpanzees at one time; both shared an interest in UFOs. Elvis lived in semi-seclusion at an estate called Graceland. Michael lived a reclusive life at Neverland. Elvis often rented amusement parks, one of his favorite forms of entertainment; Michael had re-created Disneyland on the grounds of his estate, and took Lisa, incognito, to the California them park on their honeymoon. Both men had married to avoid scandal in their careers: Elvis, either to erase the stigma of his live-in relationship with 17 year-old Priscilla, or to avoid the revelation of her parents’ illicit arrangements for Priscilla to live with him; Michael, to rehabilitate his shattered image following the molestation charges. Michael and Elvis entertained small groups of fourteen-year-olds in their bedrooms for slumber parties. The two music legends were notorious eccentrics trapped in an arrested adolescence, existing on unorthodox diets.
As Lisa and Michael prepared to do their much-publicized, hugely anticipated and widely watched July 14, 1995 interview with Diane Sawyer on Primetime Live answering questions about their bizarre marriage, Lisa was seen coming out of the president’s office at the Celebrity Centre in the Hollywood Hills the afternoon before, where she was being advised on how to handle the questions and answers. Another one of Lisa’s childhood friends, Dana Rosenfeld, watched the interview, along with most of America, and was stunned. “My only take on that is that for so long she was hidden from everybody and nobody knew anything, and what better way to just catapult yourself to the center of the media’s attention than to marry someone like that?”
Brett Strong’s response to Michael and Lisa’s Primetime Live interview was, quite simply, anger, for both created the illusion—the lie—that they had been friends for years, ever since their initial meeting at a Jackson Five concert when they were children. Michael and Lisa did not even name the correct city where the concert was held: They said Las Vegas, when in fact it was Lake Tahoe. Michael and Lisa told the world, on television, that Michael had lusted after Lisa ever since she was six, that they had been in frequent contact over the years, and that it was always in his mind to marry Lisa one day. Brett, who knew the truth—that he had orchestrated the meeting not two years before, for the express purpose of getting Lisa a record contract with Michael’s company—was deeply offended, particularly since Scientology is founded on truth. The interview was, he realized, classic media manipulation. “Michael thought that was the way he should present it, as if it had always been in the background, whereas…the truth [was] that I did it as a business thing….He was trying to defend his life [after going] through this traumatic period of being a child molester, and now [he’s] married to Lisa Marie Presley—and is that a beard or what? So he says, ‘Well, I’ve known her all my life,’ when the truth of the matter is that they had briefly met one another, but Lisa had never considered it a real meeting, and Michael exaggerated it out of all proportions.”
Lisa’s ill-founded marriage to Michael came tumbling down within six months of the Diane Sawyer interview, when Lisa filed for divorce in January 1996. The inside word was that, before the marriage, Michael had promised Lisa a recording contract with his company and had later reneged. “That’s what he might have been promising her,” commented Myrna, who disapproved of the marriage from the outset, “but that might not have been his intention.” Lisa, she revealed, was devastated by the experience. Both Myrna and Brett believed that Michael did not want the competition from his wife. “He’s very much top of the pile in his world, and that’s probably one reason why Lisa filed for divorce,” said Brett. “And the things she asked for from Michael, he wasn’t willing to do.”
Priscilla’s response when she heard that Lisa had filed for divorce, said Rick Stanley, Elvis’ stepbrother, was “Praise the Lord!” Marco said simply, “The mole has been removed.”
Lisa was torn. Part of her was in “turmoil,” recalled Brett, “on her mind was ‘I have my kids,’ and she was in turmoil with her husband and what should she do? If she wanted to be a star, she had to really want to live and breathe that.” Michael Jackson also advised Lisa similarly: If she wanted to pursue a singing career, she would have to dedicate herself to it. During the following weeks, Brett found herself the hapless man in the middle, caught between a balking and busy Michael, and an ambivalent yet driven Lisa. Brett made arrangements for Lisa to visit Michael in Japan while he was on the tour for Dangerous, and tried to facilitate other plans, some of which occurred while others dissipated. According to Brett, Lisa was, “in relentless pursuit of Michael Jackson,” and phoned [Brett] constantly to find out whether the deal would occur. Michael, in Brett’s characterization, was obviously intrigued by the thought of signing Lisa Presley, “but there was more desire on Lisa’s part for something to happen.” Lisa, he recalled, finally said to him, “It doesn’t seem like I can make that deal with him, and I don’t want to push him too much.” Brett, who was still hoping to bring them together for a record deal, finally arranged for a representative from Michael’s office to send a formal letter to Lisa stating that Michael was still interested in keeping things going. At the same time, Prince also began pursuing Lisa to sign a recording contract.
Lisa celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday with a huge party, planned by Priscilla, at Six Flags Magic Mountain. Prince was among the guests, along with a sprinkling of celebrity Scientologists such as Kirstie Alley, Nicole Kidman, and Juliette Lewis. Lisa invited Michael Jackson as her special guest, “and he would have loved to have gone,” said Brett, “but he had other things.” Brett suggested to Michael that he should at least send Lisa a birthday gift, “so he told me, ‘Well you go get it!’ ” Brett selected, as Michael’s gift to Lisa, an art book on Michelangelo and a silver picture frame in which he placed a photograph of Michael and Lisa’s original meeting in his living room. Brett, attempting to be gallant on Michael’s behalf, wrote sweet birthday inscriptions in the art book and on the birthday card, making them appear to be from Michael. “I was just trying to be a good friend for him,” said Brett. “I went to the party with my son Jason, and when I got there, Lisa was like, ‘Oh! Where’s Michael? I hope it’s all right that Prince is here.’ I said, ‘Michael just couldn’t make it, but here is a gift from him.’ And I didn’t say anything [else].” Lisa, he recalled, “latched onto the gifts excitedly and immediately opened them to check them out.”
He later figured out, said Brett, that he had inadvertently played matchmaker to Michael and Lisa by buying the birthday gifts, for Lisa, seeing the card and the inscription in the art book, both of which she believed to have been written by Michael, misinterpreted Brett’s affectionate words as an indication that Michael Jackson had feelings for her. “I wasn’t trying to bring two people together to get married. I look back on it now as a sign that [she was thinking], Wow! He really cares about me. And she secretly wanted a relationship with him, because I always talked about him as a passionate man [who was] extremely loving…and that attracted Lisa, that loving part, and loving children.” Lisa never knew that Brett wrote the birthday card and signed her book. “I can’t recall what I wrote exactly in the book or card,” said Brett, “but that might have been something she read over and over again and thought, Jeez! And afterwards, Lisa kept calling me, and eventually, after the many calls and pursuits and my little bit of fairy dust that I sprinkled about the place, hey, those guys [got] together, and I thought, ‘Maybe they’ll record something,’ And I remember Lisa saying, ‘Brett, what do you want out of this?’ and Michael Jackson asked me the same thing, and I thought, ‘Boy, there must be something happening here.’ I told Lisa, ‘You can give me whatever you think is fair,’ and I told Michael the same. I thought up the idea and executed it, and I stayed on top of it. Any other business person would be claiming something, but since I am an artist, I told them, ‘If you do record something, give me a job at art direction instead of hiring somebody else.’ So we didn’t think anything else or more about that other than that it was going to happen.”
In late February, a few weeks after her 25th birthday, Jerry Schilling received a mysterious phone call from Lisa. “Something is going on,” she told Jerry, “but I can’t tell you what. And it has nothing to do with you, but I’m not going to continue with this record contract right now.” Lisa told him, said Jerry, that she was busy with her new baby and wanted to put the Epic deal on hold. Jerry, who had no idea Lisa had even met with Michael Jackson, simply said fine and puzzled over what might be happening in Lisa’s life.
Mike Edwards, who had also remained close to Brett after his breakup with Priscilla, began getting phone calls from an amazed Brett about this time. “He’s saying, ‘Gosh, Lisa’s calling me and Lisa’s really interested in Michael!’ ” Brett’s impression, said Mike Edwards, was that Michael was absorbed in his work, but that Lisa was really interested in him. “And I said, ‘Come on! What do you mean?’ [Brett] said, ‘You haven’t met him, but he’s very charismatic.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I can’t believe it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, she’s kind of pursuing him.’ And I went, ‘My God! What’s gonna happen?’” “I could see that Lisa fell in love with him,” confirmed Brett. What attracted her in part, he felt, was that Michael was not after her money. “I think she didn’t know him very well, though. She didn’t know his quirks and eccentric lifestyle, and she thought, This guy is going to be great. A stepfather for my kids.”
Lisa, according to Brett, was the one who was in pursuit. “I think it was the passion of a woman who fell in love. And Michael wasn’t even interested at all. And he is a gentleman, he wouldn’t have wanted to pull her away from her marriage to Danny. And she pursued him. Family friend Bob Wall, who heard about it after the fact, confirmed this. “I know that Lisa is the one who pursued the relationship.” She did it, Bob felt, to create an identity separate from the Presley name, to be known as something other than “the daughter of.” “Lisa really wants to be credible,” said Bob. “You’ve got her father, who’s a genius. Her mother’s done incredibly well. And all she’s got is a lot of money. So maybe that’s important to her, to create her own identity.”
Brett, seeing the progression of the friendship, suggested that Michael take Lisa to the Oscar ceremony that March, just as he had escorted Madonna the year before, but Michael balked, since Lisa was a married woman. The relationship intensified on Michael’s part that fall however, after 13 year-old Jordan Chandler accused him of child molestation, causing a scandal to erupt worldwide. Later, Michael would quietly escort Lisa to the Jackson Family Honors. Lisa, who was then spending time with Myrna Smith, a childhood friend who use to sing with Lisa when Lisa was a child, told Myrna about her secret romance with Michael Jackson. Myrna perceived that Lisa felt sorry for Michael because of the sexual molestation charges and the devastating effect the scandal had had on his career and his image. Myrna also believed Lisa had sincere feelings for Michael. “Yes, she did, according to what she told me. She did. She’s like her father—they like the underdog…she did it for her own reasons, but she didn’t do it because Michael coerced her. She genuinely cared about him and she thought he cared for her.” Myrna, who knew and knew of Michael through music circles, tried to warn Lisa about the relationship, which she considered both dangerous and absurd. “I can only guess what his motives were, and I could only tell what I thought, what a smart businessman he was, and that he was only pursuing her for what she could do for him, and that he wasn’t interested in women. And she told me he was.” Lisa did not tell Myrna whether she and Michael had sex, though Brett believed they did. “Yeah, sure, I think, because of what happened. I didn’t want to ask any questions. I could have asked Lisa the nitty-gritty.”
By Christmas 1993, Lisa was discussing with Myrna the possibility of marrying Michael Jackson. “He told her,” said Myrna, “that she was the only woman he could see himself marrying. And I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ ” Myrna recalled that Lisa responded, “Myrna, you don’t understand.” Myrna reminded Lisa that she was married and tried to convince her that Michael’s motives were not, in her opinion, pure. “When she was telling me what was going on, I was thinking: This is a plan. He’s got this calculated plan, and [he has] thought this all through—‘This is the girl who is going to make me....Elvis is the King of Rock and Roll, and I’m going to be bigger than that.’ And that was his whole purpose. And she did not want to believe it.” Lisa asked Myrna not to tell Jerry or her mother about her romance with Michael. Priscilla did not have a clue that her only daughter was being courted by Michael Jackson.
In February 1994, Lisa and Michael stayed at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Springs with Donald Trump and Marla Maples. Then they moved into one of the millionaire’s luxury condominiums at the Trump Tower in New York while Michael cut a new album. There were a few Michael-and-Lisa sightings in the press that early spring, but no one thought much about it, for no journalist would have imagined there was a romance. The next step in the strange progression of the relationship was Lisa’s public announcement in April that she was ending her marriage to Danny Keough. That very same month, Michael’s Beverly Hills attorney Robert Kaufman, reportedly placed a call to a judge in the Dominican Republic, inquiring about the procedure for his client to be married on the island. Divorce papers for Lisa and Danny were quietly filed and finalized in Santo Domingo in early May. On May 24, 1994, Lisa and Michael flew on Sony’s private jet to La Romana in the Dominican Republic and checked into the Casa de Campo resort accompanied by Lisa’s brother and sister-in-law, Thomas and Eva Keough, both Scientologists like Danny. Lisa and Michael checked into separate suites. That day, Michael’s lawyer telephoned Francisco Alvarez Perez, the same judge he had spoken to earlier, to confirm plans for the wedding, which would take place at Perez’s house on May 26. His client, Kaufman told the judge, had requested the ceremony to be “short and fast,” like Elvis and Priscilla’s.
Lisa’s marriage to Michael took place in La Vega, as her mother’s had been in Las Vegas, in a ceremony performed, as Priscilla’s had been, by a judge arranged through a third party. By mid-July rumors were flying wildly in the press about a suspected wedding between Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, who were reported to be—and were—ensconced in the Trump Tower in New York. Priscilla, who knew nothing of her daughter’s marriage, questioned Brett Strong about the newspaper accounts, for she knew he and Michael were friends. “And I told Priscilla that Michael had told me once when I was at his home years ago, that he always wanted a son and a daughter, but didn’t know how he was going to get it, because who was he going to marry? But he always wanted that, and had a room full of dolls and other toys…He had a train set rigged up so that you thought he already had a kid somewhere.” Priscilla, Brett recalled, laughed nervously and said, “Oh my God! He’s going to get his son and daughter by marrying my daughter!” Priscilla seemed embarrassed, said Brett, and “didn’t want to let on to anybody that she didn’t know anything.” Lisa informed her mother she was married to Michael two weeks before she announced it publicly. Priscilla, by everyone’s account, was appalled at the news of her daughter’s marriage. Priscilla’s boyfriend, Marco Garibaldi, would later compare Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and his and Priscilla’s feelings about it, to “a mole on the end of somebody’s nose. Everyone knows it’s there, and nobody’s happy about it, but you just don’t say anything about it.” Although upset about her daughter’s marriage, Priscilla found some comfort in the fact that Lisa and her ex-husband, Danny, still kept in touch, even continuing to vacation together in Hawaii throughout her marriage to Michael, and afterward, patterning their relationship, said Priscilla, on “my relationship with Elvis. They are very good friends. [Danny’s] around a lot. He’s always around the children, which is great.”
In the ever unusual world of Elvis and Priscilla—and now Lisa, there were some bizarre parallels between Lisa’s marriage to Michael, and Priscilla’s marriage to Elvis. In addition to their similarly secretive weddings in Las Vegas and La Vega, Lisa married a man she would discover had little interest in taking her to bed, just as Elvis rarely had intercourse with Priscilla. Lisa had wed, by an obvious Freudian motive, the Nineties equivalent of her staggeringly successful superstar father: Elvis was the King of Rock; Michael was the King of Pop. Both singers, oddly, had pet chimpanzees at one time; both shared an interest in UFOs. Elvis lived in semi-seclusion at an estate called Graceland. Michael lived a reclusive life at Neverland. Elvis often rented amusement parks, one of his favorite forms of entertainment; Michael had re-created Disneyland on the grounds of his estate, and took Lisa, incognito, to the California them park on their honeymoon. Both men had married to avoid scandal in their careers: Elvis, either to erase the stigma of his live-in relationship with 17 year-old Priscilla, or to avoid the revelation of her parents’ illicit arrangements for Priscilla to live with him; Michael, to rehabilitate his shattered image following the molestation charges. Michael and Elvis entertained small groups of fourteen-year-olds in their bedrooms for slumber parties. The two music legends were notorious eccentrics trapped in an arrested adolescence, existing on unorthodox diets.
As Lisa and Michael prepared to do their much-publicized, hugely anticipated and widely watched July 14, 1995 interview with Diane Sawyer on Primetime Live answering questions about their bizarre marriage, Lisa was seen coming out of the president’s office at the Celebrity Centre in the Hollywood Hills the afternoon before, where she was being advised on how to handle the questions and answers. Another one of Lisa’s childhood friends, Dana Rosenfeld, watched the interview, along with most of America, and was stunned. “My only take on that is that for so long she was hidden from everybody and nobody knew anything, and what better way to just catapult yourself to the center of the media’s attention than to marry someone like that?”
Brett Strong’s response to Michael and Lisa’s Primetime Live interview was, quite simply, anger, for both created the illusion—the lie—that they had been friends for years, ever since their initial meeting at a Jackson Five concert when they were children. Michael and Lisa did not even name the correct city where the concert was held: They said Las Vegas, when in fact it was Lake Tahoe. Michael and Lisa told the world, on television, that Michael had lusted after Lisa ever since she was six, that they had been in frequent contact over the years, and that it was always in his mind to marry Lisa one day. Brett, who knew the truth—that he had orchestrated the meeting not two years before, for the express purpose of getting Lisa a record contract with Michael’s company—was deeply offended, particularly since Scientology is founded on truth. The interview was, he realized, classic media manipulation. “Michael thought that was the way he should present it, as if it had always been in the background, whereas…the truth [was] that I did it as a business thing….He was trying to defend his life [after going] through this traumatic period of being a child molester, and now [he’s] married to Lisa Marie Presley—and is that a beard or what? So he says, ‘Well, I’ve known her all my life,’ when the truth of the matter is that they had briefly met one another, but Lisa had never considered it a real meeting, and Michael exaggerated it out of all proportions.”
Lisa’s ill-founded marriage to Michael came tumbling down within six months of the Diane Sawyer interview, when Lisa filed for divorce in January 1996. The inside word was that, before the marriage, Michael had promised Lisa a recording contract with his company and had later reneged. “That’s what he might have been promising her,” commented Myrna, who disapproved of the marriage from the outset, “but that might not have been his intention.” Lisa, she revealed, was devastated by the experience. Both Myrna and Brett believed that Michael did not want the competition from his wife. “He’s very much top of the pile in his world, and that’s probably one reason why Lisa filed for divorce,” said Brett. “And the things she asked for from Michael, he wasn’t willing to do.”
Priscilla’s response when she heard that Lisa had filed for divorce, said Rick Stanley, Elvis’ stepbrother, was “Praise the Lord!” Marco said simply, “The mole has been removed.”
elmari
Proud Member
So yeah, the excerpt ^^ is going to be biased on behalf of the Presleys since the book is about Priscilla and no one in the Presley camp approved nor liked Michael or the fact that they got married.
But the book shines a negative light on Lisa, as well. There were a few interesting tidbits, especially those from Brett since he was the one that knew both of them.
I just hate that everyone thinks that Michael did not love Lisa. It's obvious that these people did not know Michael at all and were just making judgements from what they knew from opinions of others.
I do believe that Lisa was the one doing the pursuing all the way. I didn't know that there was so much connection with getting a record deal. I remember her stating that she didn't marry Michael for a recording career during PTL and he smiled at that. So yah, I do believe her because it took her almost 10 more years to finally release an album.
I feel bad that no one really gave Michael and Lisa a chance or rather they didn't give Michael a chance. I do think that they rushed into marriage and could have benefited if they had dated longer to see if they were really compatible. But who knows if Michael would have gotten so involved if he hadn't been accused of those allegations. I do think he knew he had to do something to prove to the world that he wasn't a child abuser.
I'm still waiting for Lisa to write a book. I think she will, eventually. But it's definitely going to be biased.
But the book shines a negative light on Lisa, as well. There were a few interesting tidbits, especially those from Brett since he was the one that knew both of them.
I just hate that everyone thinks that Michael did not love Lisa. It's obvious that these people did not know Michael at all and were just making judgements from what they knew from opinions of others.
I do believe that Lisa was the one doing the pursuing all the way. I didn't know that there was so much connection with getting a record deal. I remember her stating that she didn't marry Michael for a recording career during PTL and he smiled at that. So yah, I do believe her because it took her almost 10 more years to finally release an album.
I feel bad that no one really gave Michael and Lisa a chance or rather they didn't give Michael a chance. I do think that they rushed into marriage and could have benefited if they had dated longer to see if they were really compatible. But who knows if Michael would have gotten so involved if he hadn't been accused of those allegations. I do think he knew he had to do something to prove to the world that he wasn't a child abuser.
I'm still waiting for Lisa to write a book. I think she will, eventually. But it's definitely going to be biased.
indranee
Proud Member
hi everybody... please give me a day or two and I'll pm you all
it's just that I can't find that particular link anymore... am looking for it. should find it soon... will PM you all in a couple days.
it's just that I can't find that particular link anymore... am looking for it. should find it soon... will PM you all in a couple days.
DeSaintRemy
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I'm going to join the list of lurking newbies requesting that PM. Pretty please
indranee
Proud Member
elmari, thanks for that post. lol! some really funny/sad stuff in it.
Michael wasn't interested sexually in Lisa?! lol. yeah right. well, we know better
Brett seems VERY pissed off, btw.
interesting.
CTU
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From that book, I think I believe the part that MJ used the DS interview to say whatever he wanted... and even make up some story base on some facts. Why now, media had manipulate him all these years, you don't think he would be smart enough to used them somehow. I also believe the fact that it might be Lisa who pursued him in the first place, he might even interested in her because of the benefit of getting her to be his wife... but later on I'm sure he did really fell for her. Otherwise, he wouldn't spent years with Lisa. Public image is very important to him, especially at that time. And it still very important to him when he let the world know when he holding Lisa's hand when he was in London and South Africa after divorce - I think then he was just didn't care if anyone would say anything about it.. he loved her and he just wanted to take her with him.
elmari, thanks for your post ...
there`s some interesting parts.. LOL
Whatever happens, that relationship was real in my opinion, but it`s just my..
This book is about Priscilla, and we all know that she hated Michael.. You know...
Oh... I can`t wait
there`s some interesting parts.. LOL
Whatever happens, that relationship was real in my opinion, but it`s just my..
This book is about Priscilla, and we all know that she hated Michael.. You know...
hi everybody... please give me a day or two and I'll pm you all
it's just that I can't find that particular link anymore... am looking for it. should find it soon... will PM you all in a couple days.
Oh... I can`t wait
Natthy
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hi everybody... please give me a day or two and I'll pm you all
it's just that I can't find that particular link anymore... am looking for it. should find it soon... will PM you all in a couple days.
Please PM too!!!
dori727
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I dont think she was a stalker at all! lol I just think they had their differences along with an on and off friendship and relationship. I do think everything else is pure coincidence too, and about the vegas birthday...idk lol that is interesting cause supposedly Lisa was REALLY mad at michael etc. hmmmm
CTU
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I love the fact that where about of MJ was widely known and Lisa was in Ireland and Las Vegas... Didn't she know that? Or she did?