Lisa Marie: Attraction to Jackson was real
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Presley and Jackson in 1995, but their happiness was short-lived
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LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- It was one of the oddest mergers in showbiz -- the furtive 1994 marriage between the self-proclaimed King of Pop and the daughter of the King of Rock 'n' Roll.
But Lisa Marie Presley said her attraction to Michael Jackson, the second of her three husbands, was real. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine released on Thursday, she said she was turned on by his mysterious ways, wanted to protect him from child-abuse accusations and thought they could save the world together.
Yes, she did sleep with him. And no, she's not proud of the whole experience.
"I can't say what his intentions were, but I can tell you mine was that I absolutely fell in love with him and fell into this whole thing which I'm not proud of now," Presley, 35, said in a cover story to promote the April 8 release of her debut album, "To Whom It May Concern."
For a while Presley said she played the good wife -- kissed Jackson on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1994 at his manager's behest, and defended her husband during a 1995 TV joint interview with Diane Sawyer.
For his part Jackson would disappear for weeks on end, leaving her to deduce his whereabouts from the press, and he annoyed his wife by claiming in a TV Guide interview that she had said her father, Elvis Presley, had a nose job.
By the time of the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, it was all over for the world to see. Fed up with what she claimed were his calculating and manipulative ways, Presley glared at Jackson from the audience as he performed a medley of hits.
"It just got really ugly at the end," Presley said.
She demanded a divorce, and he gave her the silent treatment for a few more weeks.
The trauma sent her into a two-year mental and physical breakdown. She took to writing songs, and refers to Jackson in the track "Disciple," referring to his "masturbative ways."
"I'm not into Michael-bashing at all," Presley said of the track. "I know people want to know what that was about, and I'm trying to say it without making him a bad guy, you know ... It's hard to do, because it was such a bad situation and it was so f---ed up."
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