Lisa Marie Presley on Michael Jackson: ‘Really in love’

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When Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson were together, they were ‘really in love,’ Presley told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that aired Thursday, ‘and then we had the rough patches. And I had to make a decision to walk because I saw the drugs and the doctors coming in, and they scared me. They put me right back into what I went through with my father. That ended it.’

In what was billed as ‘her one and only television interview,’ Presley talked about her marriage to the King of Pop and her reaction to his death.

After crying all day for no reason on June 25, 2009, her tears stopped, she said, when she got a text from friend John Travolta saying that Jackson had died.

‘I was floored. Honestly floored.’

In 2005, when Presley last spoke to Jackson -- whom she’d married in 1994 and divorced two years later -- she said he had asked her if she still loved him. ‘I told him I was indifferent,’ she said. ‘He didn’t like that word. He cried.’

Winfrey seemed surprised to hear that the couple had spent four years reconciling and breaking up again after their split. Other tidbits: Jackson at one point told her he feared for his life; he also told her that if she didn’t want to have a child with him, Debbie Rowe would do it -- and Presley said she considered it ‘retaliatory’ when Rowe’s pregnancy was announced shortly after their divorce.

Presley wrote about her marriage before, the day after Jackson’s death. ‘Our relationship was not ‘a sham’ as is being reported in the press,’ she wrote on her MySpace page on June 26, 2009. ‘It was an unusual relationship yes, where two unusual people who did not live or know a ‘Normal life’ found a connection, perhaps with some suspect timing on his part.’ On ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ (watch parts of the interview here), Presley explained the attraction: ‘He had something so intoxicating about him, and when he was ready to share with you and be himself -- I don’t know if I’ve ever been that intoxicated by anything. ... He was like a drug for me.’

-- Christie D’Zurilla

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