Fact-checking “From Here to the Great Unknown”: Lisa Marie Presley ultimate refusal of having children with Michael Jackson
We went back and forth for years. He had wanted me to have his children so badly
During their post-divorce relationship, Michael still wanted to have children with Lisa.
“When asked if Lisa Marie has ever expressed second thoughts about not having been the one to bear his son, Michael insists, "She regrets it. She said so." Would she still consider having a kid with him? "She'd like to, yes," he says putting a mischievous finger to his lips. "Shh."
— “The King As Pop” for LIFE Magazine (December 1997)
TV-Guide: Okay, well, now that you bring up Lisa Marie, I read that you said she regrets not having had your son and that she may still want to have a child with you. Is that true?
MJ: Well, I remember that’s how she felt at the time. [Laughs] No matter what I say, I’m in trouble with this question — the next issue [of TV-Guide] will probably say, “Well, Lisa said she doesn’t ever want to see him again!”
— “The Once and Future King”: TV Guide Interview (December 4, 1999)
This even made it’s way into the tabloids:
and I didn't want to.
“I did want to [have children with Michael]. I just kept… I wanted to make sure, I was looking into the future and I was thinking I don’t ever want to get into a custody battle with him, I don’t want to go head to head with him. So I need to make sure that everything around is good. I know, I’ve had children I knew that bringing children into certain circumstances you have to make sure that everything is safe and secured and okay and I wanted to make sure that he and I were really really united because we were gonna be up against so much.”
— Lisa Marie Presley Oprah Interview (2010)
Now, we are entering dangerous territory (no pun intended), because we know, for a fact, this wasn’t the autobiography Lisa was working on at the time of her death. Her manuscript with Neil Strauss was tossed aside and replaced by this, with Danny Keough taking over the project, while pretending to be Riley. And this “memoir” (whose full tapes the public has no access to), is supposed to be “2020s Lisa”, shaped by grief and with a different understanding of Michael after his death, grieving him since 2009, and free from Scientology. Yet, here we have “early 2000s Lisa”, fully under the control of, yes, Scientology, as she described in 2012.
Between 1997 and 1999 something happened, that Michael acknowledges. By December 1999, Lisa was already dating John Oszajca, after all (and that’s a whole lot of drama). However, the narrative in the “memoir” is misleading, because it makes it look as if Lisa never wanted to have children with Michael, when that’s false.
I knew he ultimately wanted to be the only caretaker of the children. Michael wanted to control things. He didn't want a mother influence, or any other influence, in fact. I figured that Michael would have me have the children and then dump me, get me out of the picture.
Keough has Lisa comparing herself to Debbie Rowe, but Lisa was very much aware of the arrangement between Michael and Debbie:
PLAYBOY: Do you want more kids? I...] And if you don't have someone to be the father--
PRESLEY: Are you kidding me? No, I will not go to a sperm donor. I could ask Debbie Rowe to be a surrogate for me.
— Lisa Marie Presley; Playboy Interview, June 6, 2003 (via elvis.com.au)
In the same interview, Lisa is asked if Michael just wanted to find someone to have his children. To which she replies “I think so, but I don't know.”
However, this was what Lisa believed in the early 2000s, since that’s pretty much the meaning of her song “Disciple” (guilters love to weaponize and take out of context), where she compares herself to a sex worker (“You’re renting how was I for the hour”), which changes the meaning of the chorus: “Tell me, were you honing in on me or my protection?” (meaning birth control) because Michael considered she would make a “good disciple” like Debbie (“Took me a while, but I have your number”). What Lisa is, basically, saying in this song is that Michael’s motivations to have sex with her were only to get her pregnant, and not out of love for her.
And, unfortunately, she did have a reason to believe this, because of what Michael told Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, in 2000/2001 (when he was feeling petty and swearing off romance and love, as Lisa wasn’t answering his calls):
SB: So the women you have dated, the ones who were smart enough not to throw themselves at you, were they the ones that you were more interested in, the ones who weren't always available and you had to chase them a bit?
MJ: The ones who were classy and quiet and not into all the sex and all the craziness because I am not into that.
SB: They are the ones that you are more interested in?
MJ: Aha. I don't understand a lot of things that go on in relationships and I don't know if I ever will. I think that is what has hurt me in my relationships because I don't understand how people do some of the things they do. […] Mean things and vulgar things with their bodies. I don't understand it and it has hurt my relationships.
SB: So for you love is something very pure?
MJ: Very pure. It shocked me some of the things.
And, of course, Michael saying he was heartbroken because Lisa didn’t give him children (not because he lost her) and doesn’t even answer when the Rabbi asks him if the divorce was hard on him; among other unflattering things he says about Lisa, while elevating Brooke Shields, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa.
We don’t know this for a fact, but with all things considered, Lisa was made aware of what Michael said to Shumley, because these sessions weren’t secretive, and the plan was for Judith Regan to publish a book with the transcripts in 2003/2004 to help the public understand Michael, his motivations, etc. Her songs “Disciple” (“It’s too bad I gave you myself then”) and “Gone” (“You with the advisors in your ear”) seem direct replies to things Michael says to Shumley.
Coincidentally (or not), Howard Stern, does mention Shumley (and Uri Geller) during his interview with Lisa, on April 8, 2003, when asking what mutual friend arranged for her and Michael’s first meeting. Later, he (like several interviewers and journalists) would ask Lisa if she was aware of how much she was used by Michael.
And this is exactly what Priscilla Presley will say on Oprah, on March 29, 2005; a mother-daughter appareance which also worked as a “reply” to the allegations made on “The National Enquirer” by someone from Michael’s camp, on June 12, 2004. And because antagonizing another music empire is never a good idea, the answer from the Elvis Estate, to accusations of racism, would come at the worst time for Michael, when he was on trial.
Not only Priscilla conjures up a story about how Michael wanted to meet Lisa when she was sixteen and she refused because her daughter was “kind of young”, she straight up says Michael had a whole agenda in pursuing and wanting children with Lisa (she was Elvis’ daughter), calling him manipulative and calculating. She doesn’t shy away from saying her daughter was used. When asked if Michael ever loved Lisa as a wife, Priscilla becomes cynical, and her wording is weirdly similar to Michael’s in 2001:
“It’s just hard for me to believe that, you know, that people do that [use others]. I mean, she’s really lovable!” (Priscilla, 2005)
“I think that [sex] is what has hurt me in my relationships because I don't understand how people do some of the things they do. […] Mean things and vulgar things with their bodies.” (Michael, 2000/01)
But these conversations with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach were part of a PR strategy, because the general public saw Michael as bizarre and eccentric, especially his “Peter Pan” persona, but also to justify his marriage to Debbie Rowe (not even mentioned at all); similar to the disaster that was the Martin Bashir doc (also facilitated by Uri Geller). Of course, the 2005 trial would obliterate this narrative of Michael being “shocked” by whatever sex acts he’s talking about, when his porn collection gets exposed (all about adult women). By then, Lisa herself, and in her pettiness, had already done him a huge favor, in 2003, by saying he was the one who initiated everything sexual between them, and discussing her own sexual preferences.
But this was when Lisa believed Michael had never truly loved her, and her feeling used was not about PR; she felt their entire relationship, and especially the intimacy they shared, was a ploy on Michael’s part to get her pregnant, and nothing more. We don’t know any (legit) details about their sex life, but given Lisa said on Oprah in 2010, she loved to “take care of him” (plus those lyrics in “Morphine”: “Always to please daddy”), it’s very likely she went above and beyond to, yeah, please him, in every way. Only to be confronted with Michael saying she wasn’t included “in the ones that he was more interested in” and his hypocrisy.
However, after his death, Lisa no longer felt this way, and, in 2012, she would say that, in the early 2000s, she was trapped in a “draconius web”, meant to control her, without knowing it. Which means Scientology, and perhaps more.
O: Did [Michael] have to die for you to recognize that he loved you?
LMP: I think so, sadly.
— Lisa Marie Presley Oprah Interview (2010)
Michael wanted to control things. He didn't want a mother influence, or any other influence, in fact.
Speaking of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, but also Martin Bashir; this will be a major “selling point” for both of these shady characters. In the transcript, Michael doesn’t mention Debbie Rowe, but Shmuley assures the reader they had off-the-record conversations about her, and the children:
“Michael and I many times discussed his marriage to Debbie Rowe because I thought it horrible, not to mention untenable, that she should have no interaction with Paris and Prince, her two children. This was a permanent sore point between Michael and me. He basically told me that I did not understand the nature of his relationship with Debbie and that it was better for Prince and Paris not to have a relationship with a mother they have never known. (For their part, when asked, Prince and Paris simply replied that they had no mother.) | responded that a relationship with one's mother is not a luxury that one could do without. It was an absolute necessity.”
— Rabbi Shmuley Boteach; from “The Michael Jackson tapes : a tragic icon reveals his soul in intimate conversation” (2009)
However, when under the influence of heavy sedatives in May 10, 2009, Michael says this to his doctor-murderer Dr. Murray: “My babies. They walk around with no mother. They drop them off, they leave — a psychological degradation of that.”
While most of what Michael is saying is somewhat coherent, he’s in a sort of delirious state. But It seems he did, in fact, valued a mother influence, which makes complete sense since he, himself, was extremely close to his own mother. And Lisa, being very close to Katherine Jackson, would never draw a conclusion like this.
