When Elvis played for Lisa Marie Presley

He chose a life of fanfare and notoriety. But his daughter, nine when he died, was thrust into it.

Elvis and Lisa Marie Presley. Picture: Getty Images

It might have been the smallest audience for which Elvis Presley ever performed. Just a few hotel housekeepers and his young daughter, Lisa Marie.

“We would come through the back door every morning,” one of those housekeepers, Imelda Saulog, told me in the summer of 1989.

Elvis had been dead for 12 years. I was doing some writing about his life, and the managers of the Las Vegas Hilton, on whose stage he had always performed when he was in town, were allowing me to stay in his old suite for a week.

It was more of a house constructed for him atop the building than a hotel room: 1500sq m, four bedrooms, a sun deck on the roof. There was a large white piano near a window that overlooked the Vegas skyline.

Ms Saulog, who was assigned to take care of the suite, told me about those private concerts, with Elvis singing just for his daughter and the housekeepers who would come in each day to tidy up.

“Elvis’s bodyguards would be asleep in their rooms,” she said. “Elvis’s daughter would visit” – this was after he and his wife, Priscilla, had divorced in 1973 – “and we would walk into the living room, and there would be Lisa Marie, colouring in her colouring book, all alone.

“Elvis would come out of his bedroom in his blue pyjamas and check on her. He’d ask if she was all right, and she would always say yes, and he would tell her to come into his room if she needed him.

“Sometimes he would sit and play the piano. We would listen, and Lisa would keep colouring.”

The image has long haunted me. People would fly to Las Vegas from all over the world to see Elvis sing – but there he had been, performing in his pyjamas at the break of dawn for his daughter and a couple of housekeepers who would sit on the couch and listen in silence.

Mostly, I was told, he played and sang gospel tunes for them.

With the news of Lisa Marie Presley’s death after a cardiac arrest on Thursday at 54, I found myself thinking about that again, and about what her young life must have been like.

Elvis’s isolation came from professional necessity; one of the hotel’s bellmen told me Elvis once said: “I’d give a million dollars if I could be a bellman for just one week.” Why? “Just so I could go downstairs and walk through the lobby.” But he had chosen the life he ended up living. His child hadn’t.

She was nine and staying with him at Graceland in Memphis on the day he died aged 42 in 1977.

I was present the next afternoon to report on the story; I remember seeing a security guard driving a baby-blue golf cart around the grounds of the property. Painted on the side of the cart was one word: “Lisa.” On the back was a half-peeled sticker with the slogan, “I’m Just Crazy About Elvis Presley”.

The Wall Street Journal

Bob Greene’s books include When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams