The glamorous facade of rock royalty shatters completely in Chapter 7 of Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir, exposing a chilling, drug-fueled descent that dragged her entire family into an inescapable nightmare. A prescription for Norco at age 40 unlocked a devastating opioid addiction, transforming the sole heir of the King of Rock and Roll into a prisoner of her own despair. What started as a fleeting escape from the unbearable emptiness of life rapidly spiraled into a horrifying daily regimen of up to 80 pills a day, plunging her into a world of isolation, paranoia, and physical decay.
Seeking refuge from the Hollywood spotlight, Lisa uprooted her family to a haunted 15th-century estate in England—a chilling property where a former resident’s husband had famously shot himself in the barn. In a shocking twist of dark humor and erratic behavior, she purposely assigned her mother, Priscilla Presley, to the mansion’s notoriously active “ghost room” just to see what would happen. But the real horrors were entirely flesh and blood. Lisa’s addiction deepened dangerously in the isolation of the English countryside. She began mixing heavy opioids with cocaine and tequila, her body deteriorating so rapidly that her heart rate plummeted to a terrifying 30 beats per minute. Riley Keough recounts the sheer trauma of finding her mother crying in a bathtub with a bloody nose and a black eye, completely broken and overwhelmed by the shame of being an addict with young children.
Perhaps the most haunting revelation is Lisa’s desperate search for safety at Graceland. Deep in the throes of her crippling addiction, she would frequently drive 200 miles just to sleep in Elvis Presley’s bed, hiding under the covers alongside her children while oblivious tourists walked through the museum directly below them. It was a tragic, desperate prayer for connection to her late father—a stark contrast to the grim reality of her daily life, where severe withdrawal symptoms left her spitting up blood, unable to keep anything down but yogurt, and suffering from catastrophic heart failure.
The bombshell family dynamics exposed in this chapter also reveal massive, undeniable cracks in the Presley clan’s united front. A desperate, terrifying text thread shows Riley and Benjamin begging their mother to see a doctor while she flatly refused, terrified the state of Tennessee would seize custody of her twins. Furthermore, glaring contradictions emerge between Riley’s and Priscilla’s accounts of the grueling custody battle that followed Lisa’s separation from Michael Lockwood. While Priscilla claimed in her own book that she was the designated court monitor for the twins, Riley drops the ultimate truth bomb: Riley herself was the court-mandated monitor, forcing Lisa, Benjamin, and the twins to all move into Riley’s home under strict supervision just to satisfy legal mandates.
Tragically, the darkest shadow of Lisa’s spiraling addiction fell directly upon her son, Benjamin. Bound by a profound, almost paralyzing empathy for his mother, Ben essentially sacrificed his own future, appointing himself as her lifelong caretaker. He watched her wither away in a heavily medicated haze, trapped in a Calabasas home that both siblings believed was cursed with a deeply oppressive, dark energy. The ultimate breaking point came when Lisa suffered a violent seizure right in front of him. While the medical emergency finally served as Lisa’s ultimate wake-up call to get sober, the trauma completely broke something inside Ben. He became terrifyingly detached and silent, retreating heavily into his own binge drinking and drug use to cope with the pain of watching his queen fall apart. The chapter ends on a profoundly ominous cliffhanger: a late-night birthday party at the Calabasas house, a chilling text from Lisa begging him to “come home,” and Ben retreating upstairs at 3:30 a.m. for “just a beer”—setting the tragic stage for the unimaginable horror that would forever destroy the Presley family.