Lisa Marie Presley^†

She was famous before she could walk. Elvis died when she was nine, and she inherited his entire estate at 25, roughly $100 million. She tried a music career: three albums between 2003 and 2012, a gold debut that hit No. 5 on Billboard. The records were competent, personal, and completely beside the point. Nobody bought a Lisa Marie Presley album for the single. They bought it to hear what Elvis's daughter sounded like. T Bone Burnett produced the third one, and it still barely registered. Her fame was never hers to earn. It was inherited, like Graceland.

The $100 million she inherited at 25 had dwindled to $14,000 in cash by 2018. Her business manager sold 85% of Elvis Presley Enterprises and sank the proceeds into the company behind American Idol, which went bankrupt. Elvis built the fortune. A financial adviser destroyed it. She married Michael Jackson twenty days after her first divorce, then Nicolas Cage, who filed for divorce 107 days later. She was open about opioid dependency that escalated to what she described as 80 pills a day. Her son Benjamin died by suicide in 2020 at 27. She didn't recover, and nobody who knew her expected her to.

After Benjamin died, she kept his body on dry ice in her home for two months. She'd been nine when Elvis died, old enough to remember the comfort of his body staying at Graceland before the burial. That instinct never left. A tattoo artist came to the house so she and Riley could get ink matching Benjamin's. When he asked for reference photos, she walked him to the body instead. Riley called it one of the top five most absurd moments of her life, which for Elvis Presley's granddaughter is saying something. The posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, reads less like a celebrity tell-all and more like a family trying to explain itself.

Her last public appearance was at the Golden Globes on January 10, two days before she was hospitalized. Hundreds attended a public memorial at Graceland on January 22, with Axl Rose, Billy Corgan, and Alanis Morissette performing. She was buried in the Meditation Garden next to Benjamin and her father. Priscilla Presley disputed a 2016 trust amendment four days after the funeral; she and Riley Keough settled in May 2023, with Riley becoming sole trustee of the estate.