Lisa Marie Presley's Son Looked Almost Identical To His Grandfather Elvis

Some sort of resemblance between Elvis and Benjamin is not too surprising. After all, Lisa Maria's parents — and Benjamin's grandparents — are Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Lisa Marie came into the world on February 1, 1968, exactly nine months after Elvis and Priscilla got married. And when Lisa Marie was born, Priscilla apparently couldn't have been happier.

Priscilla wrote about Lisa Marie's birth in a 1985 piece for People. “Our daughter, Lisa Marie, was born at 5:01 p.m. on Feb. 1, 1968,” she explained. “The nurse brought [Lisa Marie] into my room, and I cradled her in my arms. She was so tiny – so beautiful.” And Elvis was pretty pleased with the new arrival, too.

Priscilla continued, “Elvis came into the room and kissed me, thrilled that we had had a perfectly normal, healthy baby. Then he took us both in his arms and held us.” This was a marked change of attitude from how he’d apparently felt about the baby just a few months before. Priscilla revealed that Elvis had asked for a trial separation while she was seven months pregnant.

Priscilla wrote of this period, “I don’t think Elvis really intended to leave me. It wasn’t his style. I later realized he had questions about how a baby would affect his life. Would his public accept him as a father? He wasn’t even sure if his fans had adapted to his becoming a husband. How loyal would they be?” Luckily, the decision to split was soon reversed.

She went on, “Within a short time, Elvis’ sensitive nature brought him back to his senses. Two days had passed. The idea of a trial separation was never mentioned again. We both acted as if nothing had been said.” Unfortunately, though, the happiness brought by Lisa Marie's birth was not to keep the family together forever.

As Lisa Marie grew, Elvis started spending more and more time on the road. Priscilla wrote in her 1985 book, “Lisa and I visited him in Vegas for her birthdays, having huge parties in the suite where she received everything from slot machines to two Saint Bernard puppies... to an entire room filled with balloons — everything, in short, a 2- or 3-year-old shouldn't have and couldn't appreciate.”

Priscilla went on for People, “I realized that now that I was a mother, Elvis was uncertain how to treat me. He had mentioned before we were married that he had never been able to make love to a woman who’d had a child.” And, sadly, the couple’s problems continued to grow from there. Finally, then, Elvis and Priscilla officially divorced on October 9, 1973.

Both parents would go on to share custody of their young daughter, and the two were seemingly fine with this arrangement. "Our principal concern was Lisa, whose custody we agreed would be mutually shared," Priscilla wrote. Then, just four years after the end of the marriage, Elvis tragically died. Lisa Marie was just nine years old when her father passed away.

Yet despite the turmoil that racked Elvis’ life, his daughter would always remember him as a good parent. For instance, during a 2007 appearance on Good Morning America, Lisa Marie told Diane Sawyer, “He’d always wake me up to sing in the middle of the night — get on the table and sing. I remember him as my dad, but he was a very exciting dad.”

Lisa Marie also explained that, after Elvis had passed away, she “couldn’t really process what was happening.” And, apparently, one moment was a real struggle for the young Lisa Marie: the time when she had had to view her father’s body. Lisa Marie said, “I did a lot of strange things that day because it didn’t really settle in. I rode my golf cart. I ran around and smoked cigarettes at nine, in the guard shack somewhere. I was crazy. I don’t know, I did, like, wacky things.”

So there’s no doubt that Lisa Marie’s childhood was far from ordinary. For one, owing to all the money that her famous father had amassed throughout his life, she grew up as the heir to a vast fortune. And after her grandparents, Vernon and Minnie, passed away and she turned 25, the young woman was worth $100 million.

Lisa Marie’s childhood was unconventional, but her adulthood saw her embark on a common rite of passage: marriage. And in the end, Elvis would have four grandchildren whom he would never know. The first two came from Lisa Marie’s relationship with musician Danny Keough, whom she wed in 1988. These children were Danielle Riley Keough, born in 1989, and Benjamin Storm Keough, who entered the world in 1992.

Lisa Marie divorced Danny in 1994 when Benjamin was still a toddler — although the former couple remained good friends. In 2003 she told the Star Tribune, “I don’t know how, but we’ve managed to stay close… There’s others that I have pain or betrayal associated with that I won’t have anything to do with. But [Danny] and I had a special thing.”

During her 2007 Good Morning America interview, Lisa Marie considered the similarities that Benjamin and Riley — the name Danielle Riley chose — shared with their famous grandfather. She said, “They both have traits. My son has got this very regal thing about him. He’s just got this dynamic energy that is familiar. And then my daughter, just — the humor, you know. She’s got the intelligence, and she’s smart — although I find her more like my mother than I do [Elvis].”

After splitting from Danny, Lisa Marie went through a chaotic period in her life. A mere 20 days after the divorce went through, she married Michael Jackson — a decision that she would later claim to regret. In a 2007 interview with Marie Claire, when asked what her biggest mistake so far had been, the star said, “Leaving my first marriage for the person that I left it for.”

Lisa Marie even considered having kids with Jackson, although she ultimately decided against it. In 2010 she told Oprah, “I was looking into the future, and I was thinking I don’t ever want to get into a custody battle with [Jackson]… I don’t want to go head to head with him, so I need to make sure that everyone around is good. I know; I’ve had children. I knew bringing children into certain circumstances — you have to make sure everything’s safe and secure and okay.”

In 2002 Lisa Marie married for the third time to actor Nicolas Cage — who is reportedly a massive Elvis fan. The then-13-year-old Riley served as the flower girl, while Benjamin along with Cage’s young son Weston were pageboys. At the time, the media also speculated that Lisa Marie was pregnant with Cage’s baby. But she was not.

However, the marriage lasted barely any time at all. The pair were wed in August, and in November of the same year Cage filed for divorce. In fact, the divorce proceedings ended up lasting longer than the couple’s union: it was May 2004 when the paperwork finally went through. But Lisa Marie wasn't through with finding love.

Seemingly undeterred, Lisa Marie married her fourth husband, producer Michael Lockwood, in 2006. The wedding was held in Japan, with Danny Keough as the best man. Then, two years later, the 40-year-old Lisa Marie announced that she was pregnant with twins after newspapers had started criticizing her weight gain.

By the time the two new children were born in October 2008, Riley was 19 years old and Benjamin was 15. The babies, both girls, were named Harper Vivienne Ann and Finley Aaron Love. In fact, twins are common within the Presley family: Elvis had a stillborn twin brother, and Priscilla has a half-brother who was a twin, too.

Lisa Marie now had a big family of her own. In 2009 she spoke about her life and her children on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She was still very close to Danny, she revealed, saying, “I knew that no matter what happened, we would always be connected. And I don’t know how I knew that at such a young age, but I instinctively knew that and had those children with him. And we are like best friends: brother and sister.”

In the interview, Lisa Marie explained that Danny actually lived on the same property as her. She added, “It’s hard to have that kind of relationship with your ex… but I think it’s very important if you have children with somebody to keep your responsibility. You don’t need to put what you guys went through or what you had with each other on the children.”

Oprah asked Lisa Marie, “What do you think you’re best at as a mother?” She answered, “Just overwhelming [my children] with affection and love. They need to push me off of them… And then having that versus being their friend – trying really hard to be their friend as well as be a mother. That’s the fence you walk, which is important because you can’t go too much on one side or the other.”

Oprah also asked, “How do you instill in [your children] what’s important as a human being? As a citizen of the world, your community, when you’ve got everything?” Lisa Marie replied, “You have to be an example. I’m not somebody who sits around. I’m not happy unless I’m helping other people. And they watch me, and they see that.”

That same year, there were rumors that Benjamin was going to try and make it in the music industry — just like his grandfather. In October 2009 the Daily Mail reported, “The slicked-back hair, full lips, and rock star swagger are all present and correct. All [Benjamin] needs now is a pair of blue suede shoes.”

The Daily Mail quoted Benjamin as saying that his “music will be nothing like Elvis — nothing like him at all.” An unnamed spokesman was reported to have said of the young man, “He’s a typical 17-year-old. He doesn’t get up before midday and then grunts at you.” It was reported, too, that Benjamin’s record deal was worth a whopping $5 million.

Yet that turned out in the end to be a false story. That same month, the Daily Mirror reported that Peter LoFrumento, the executive vice-president of the company Universal Music, had told the media, “This story is totally untrue.” And indeed no music by Benjamin — Elvis-like or not — was ever released. But he did appear in a very intimate music video.

In 2012 Lisa Marie released a music video for the track “I Love You Because” that featured footage of her parents and all of her children. Benjamin — who was 19 at the time — particularly caught people’s eyes. In October of that year, CMT asked Lisa Marie about her son: “He looks so much like Elvis. Does he get that reaction a lot?”

Lisa Marie answered, with a laugh, “He does! He was at the [Grand Ole] Opry and was the quiet storm behind the stage! Everybody turned around and looked when he was over there. Everybody was grabbing him for a photo because it is just uncanny. Sometimes I am overwhelmed when I look at him.”

And the family resemblance never went away. In June 2019 Lisa Marie posted an Instagram picture of herself and all four of her children, captioned “Mama Lion with cubs.” People were seemingly awestruck at how much Benjamin looked like Elvis. One commenter wrote, “Your son is almost a twin to your dad! Thanks for sharing this pic!”

Newsweek wrote of the snap, “Following a family picture posted Thursday by Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Presley, Twitter users had to do a double-take after seeing her son, Benjamin” and declared that the young man “looks to be a spitting image of his famous grandfather.” Benjamin himself, however, said nothing about the viral pic.

In fact, despite his family’s fame, Benjamin kept a very low profile. He seemingly had no social media and gave no interviews. Over the years, he only really popped up on his mother’s Instagram and in a 2005 documentary called Elvis by the Presleys. The only snippets about his life that people knew were mostly revealed by his mother or older sister.

Sadly, though, Benjamin never got the chance to show the world his full potential. On July 12, 2020, Benjamin died by suicide. At the time, Lisa Marie’s manager, Roger Widynowski, shared that the mother was “heartbroken, inconsolable, and beyond devastated.” Lisa Marie would expand upon her overwhelming loss in an essay she wrote for People in 2022.

She wrote, “My and my three daughters' lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death. We live in this every. Single. Day.” But, she said, she carried on because that's what Benjamin would have wanted. “I keep going because my son made it very clear in his final moments that taking care of his little sisters and looking out for them were on the forefront of his concerns and his mind,” she wrote.

The death still hurt her, too. “I've dealt with death, grief, and loss since the age of 9 years old,” she wrote. “I've had more than anyone's fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I've made it this far. But this one, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible being that I have ever had the privilege of knowing, who made me feel so honored every single day to be his mother? Who was so much like his grandfather on so many levels that he actually scared me? Which made me worry about him even more than I naturally would have? No. Just no ... no no no no.”

Lisa Marie's own life would be tragically cut short on January 12, 2023. She was only 54 years old. “It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla said in a statement. “She was the most passionate strong and loving woman I have ever known. We ask for privacy as we try to deal with this profound loss.”

Other members of Lisa Marie’s family released a separate statement that said they were “shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Lisa Marie. They are profoundly grateful for the support, love, and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time.” Other tributes were quick to come in, too.

Rita Wilson — Tom Hanks' wife — said, “Our hearts are broken with the sudden and shocking passing of Lisa Marie Presley tonight. Tom and I had spent some time with the family during the Elvis movie promotional tour. Lisa Marie was so honest and direct, vulnerable, in a state of anticipation about the movie. She spoke so eloquently about her father.”

Lisa Marie had last been seen only two days before her death at the Golden Globes. She had been there to see Austin Butler pick up an award for playing her grandfather in Elvis. Lisa Marie had been a fan of his performance. She said, “I really didn’t know what to do with myself after I saw it. I had to take, like, five days to process it because it was so incredible and so spot on and just so authentic.”