Celebrity, tabloid fodder, would-be rock star, nepo baby — who went on to have her own movie star, nepo baby (Riley Keough) — Lisa Marie Presley packed so much of our collective cultural id into her tiny frame over her 54 years that it was hard to know who she was beneath it all. She had the sleepy eyes of her father, Elvis, and the delicate bone structure of her mother, Priscilla, and was famous from the moment she was born: part of the story of the damage and joy the spotlight can wreak and how it can trickle down over generations. She struggled to define her own identity even as she embraced her birthright (and various equally headline-grabbing men, including Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage), landing on the cover of Vogue in 1996 with a story entitled “Daddy’s Girl.” Inside, Steven Meisel captured her trying on different selves, literally, to see how they might fit — including one shot of her grinning in a khaki Prada camp shirt and tie, cropped black hair in a rockabilly bouffant, channeling her father during his army days when he was still a fresh-faced twentysomething riding the crest of his talent. In the end, she was heir not just to his looks and estate, but the myth too.
