Lisa Marie Presley detailed her two-year marriage to Michael Jackson in her posthumous memoir, revealing that the King of Pop “was still a virgin” at age 35.
“I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss,” Presley wrote in From Here to the Great Unknown, released Tuesday, October 8. “He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened. I was terrified because I didn’t want to make the wrong move.”
Presley and Jackson started dating in 1994 and got married the same year. According to the memoir, Jackson professed his love to Presley — who was 25 at the time — while she was still married to ex-husband Danny Keough. (The pair, who were married from 1988 to 1994, share two kids: Riley Keough and the late Benjamin Keough.)
“Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children.’ I didn’t say anything immediately,” Presley recalled in the book. “Then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too.”
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Presley first met Jackson when she was “about 6” years old. When she was a teenager, Jackson called her mom, Priscilla Presley, and invited her to dinner.
“I found out later that he was hoping that I’d come with her,” Lisa Marie wrote. “He didn’t say so directly because he didn’t want it to seem weird.”
Lisa Marie started hanging out with Jackson the year before they got married.
“I thought he was lonely and needed a friend. But he was pursuing me,” she wrote.
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Ahead of her split from Danny, Lisa Marie spent eight days with Jackson in Las Vegas, where he revealed his true feelings for her. Weeks after her divorce, she exchanged vows with Jackson. They were married for two years until in August 1996.
“After the divorce, I spent a few years obsessing about him and what I could have done different, in regret,” Lisa Marie wrote in a blog post following Jackson’s death. (The singer died at age 50 in 2009 from a propofol overdose. Lisa Marie, meanwhile, died at age 54 in 2023 after suffering cardiac arrest.)
From Here to the Great Unknown, coauthored by Lisa Marie’s daughter Riley, is available now.
