Michael Jackson Was Afraid to End Up Like Elvis

Michael Jackson was a big fan of Elvis Presley. According to Lisa Marie Presley, whom he married in 1994, Jackson also feared ending up like Elvis. After Jackson’s death, Lisa Marie recalled a conversation with him from when they were married. Jackson told Lisa Marie that he worried about reaching a similar end to Elvis. She believed he was convinced that this would happen, though.

Michael Jackson feared he would die in a similar way to Elvis

In 2009, Jackson died of cardiac arrest caused by an overdose. The moment reminded his ex-wife, Lisa Marie, of a conversation they had while married. She said Jackson feared ending up like Elvis, who died of cardiac arrest caused by an overdose.

“Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general,” Lisa Marie wrote on MySpace (per Oprah.com). “I can’t recall the exact subject matter but he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my Fathers Death. At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did.’”

Lisa Marie said Jackson seemed convinced that this was going to happen.

“I promptly tried to deter him from the idea, at which point he just shrugged his shoulders and nodded almost matter of fact as if to let me know, he knew what he knew and that was kind of that,” she wrote. “14 years later I am sitting here watching on the news an ambulance leaves the driveway of his home, the big gates, the crowds outside the gates, the coverage, the crowds outside the hospital, the Cause of death and what may have led up to it and the memory of this conversation hit me, as did the unstoppable tears.”

Lisa Marie said she wanted to protect him

Lisa Marie said that during their marriage, she wanted to protect Jackson.

“I wanted to ‘save him.’ I wanted to save him from the inevitable which is what has just happened,” she wrote. “His family and his loved ones also wanted to save him from this as well but didn’t know how and this was 14 years ago. We all worried that this would be the outcome then. At that time, In trying to save him, I almost lost myself.”

She said that this began to wear on her emotionally and physically. 

“I became very ill and emotionally/ spiritually exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him,” she wrote. “I was in over my head while trying.”

She said that this led to the end of their marriage.

Priscilla Presley worried about Michael Jackson’s love of Elvis

Jackson’s love of Elvis concerned Lisa Marie’s mother, Priscilla. She believed he was manipulative.

“Lisa had first met him in Las Vegas as a child and reconnected years later,” she wrote in her book Softly, as I Leave You. “He was ten years older than she was, the same age difference there had been between Elvis and me. Michael had started reaching out to her when the child abuse charges went public. I think that’s how he hooked her in the beginning. She felt very sorry for him, and naturally, she believed in his innocence.”

Priscilla said that by the time Lisa Marie decided to end the marriage, she began to think Jackson was with her for her family name.

“Finally, she’d had enough,” Priscilla wrote. “She called me to tell me she wanted a divorce. She had begun to feel like the marriage was a setup. He didn’t want to be with her; he wanted to be with Elvis Presley’s daughter. If he’d wanted to be with her, he wouldn’t have been gone for most of their marriage.”

They divorced in 1996.