Did The King destroy Lisa Marie's marriage?

A couple of weeks ago, Lisa Marie Presley and her husband of three months, actor Nicolas Cage, watched on TV news the disturbing footage of Michael Jackson - her ex-husband - dangling his infant son from a balcony in Germany.

Afterwards, Elvis's only daughter, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her father, had a furious row with Cage.

Nicolas, like most people, thought it a bizarre and careless thing to have done - the clumsy way Jackson held the baby, Prince Michael II, so precariously over a ledge, with a cloth thrown over its head.

However, Lisa Marie felt that Michael's actions were not at all disturbing and maintained the incident had been blown out of proportion. 'Michael would never hurt one of his children,' Lisa Marie said. 'It was the camera angle that made it look so dangerous.'

But, as she later recounted to one of her friends, Nicolas demanded to know why she was always so protective of Michael.

'What is that about?' he asked, trying to dig to the core of her feelings for her second husband. 'I know you're not still in love with the guy. Or are you?'

Six years after her divorce from him, Lisa Marie Presley does have strong feelings for Michael Jackson - though probably not of the romantic variety.

She speaks to him often and visits him at his Neverland home in California at least once a month.

For Nicolas to even comment on the long-standing, albeit odd, relationship was not a good idea. Lisa Marie loathes it when others attempt to probe her psyche. 'Stop trying to analyse me,' she told him, angrily.

'It went on from there, a disagreement about Lisa not wanting Nicolas to delve into the reasons for her friendship with Michael,' said Monica Pastelle, a friend of Lisa Marie's.

'Throughout his relationship with her, Nicolas was always asking Lisa questions and trying to figure her out. I think, though, that he learned what many people already know: you can't figure out Lisa Marie Presley.'

Two weeks after that row, Cage filed for divorce. It was his second marriage and her third.

Those who have watched Lisa Marie endure the ups and downs of life in her father's shadow are now wondering if she will ever find a man who can lay the ghost of Elvis to rest.

She has been married to a little known musician, her first husband, Danny Keough; a global superstar, Michael Jackson; and now an Oscar-winning actor. And she hasn't found happiness with any of them.

Married just 107 days, Lisa Marie and Cage spent most of their time as newlyweds at her $2 million estate in Hidden Hills, outside Los Angeles. However, Nicolas continued to maintain his $7 million home in Bel-Air.

Though they planned to take a one year lease on a seven-bedroom home next door to actress Michelle Pfeiffer, they changed their minds at the last minute. So the couple never officially moved in with one another.

'I'm really crushed by the way things have turned out,' said Jerry Schilling, a longtime friend of the Presley family. 'I know Lisa loved Nicolas. I saw them together. The way she felt for him was obvious. I thought this would last. None of us saw it coming.'

Perhaps they should have done. But basic personality differences between Lisa Marie and Nicolas Cage were obvious from the start - highlighted by a bitter row just before the wedding. In July, during a trip on Cage's yacht, the Weston - named after his ten-year-old son by actress Patricia Arquette - Lisa threw her $65,000 engagement ring overboard.

The couple made it up and the marriage ceremony went ahead in Hawaii on August 10. In a strapless cream gown with a 6ft train, Lisa looked both vulnerable and innocent that day. And in a moving exchange before she spoke her vows, she reassured her mother, Priscilla Presley, that she was doing the right thing.

'I promise you, Mom,' she said, 'I will not have three failed marriages.' She didn't dream that she and Cage would turn out to have so little in common or that it would matter so much.

Lisa Marie, 34, is a loner and a committed follower of Scientology, the controversial religion which numbers many of Hollywood's elite as members.

She likes her solitude and enjoys long walks during which she can clear her head. She's moody, too. One moment, up. The next, down. Way down. In contrast, Cage is an altogether bouncier individual: out of bed at five in the morning, ready for the new day, anxious to discuss big plans and new ideas.

Lisa Marie is also an early-riser, but only to see her two children, Danielle, 13, and Benjamin, ten (by her first husband) off to school.

She then drags herself back to bed until she feels like waking up again.

'Lisa is such a sour-puss in the morning,' Cage once complained. 'She's so negative it brings me down and ruins my morning.'

Their interests are also profoundly different. The more cerebral Cage enjoys reading about philosophy and has deep discussions with friends. Lisa Marie prefers romance novels, mysteries and other works of fiction.

'Nicolas can spend hours with a book that doesn't interest me at all,' she once said, privately. 'That's all fine and good - except for the fact that he then wants to explain it to me and he wants me to enjoy hearing about it. Forget it! That's not going to happen.'

He watches educational television. She prefers soaps and sitcoms. He's usually charming and handles himself with diplomacy. She's blunt, speaks her mind and doesn't care what people think about it, or her.

Money was a sore subject from the start, too. Early on, Nicolas tried to advise Lisa, the sole heir to her father's $100 million plus estate, on certain Presley family investments. She wouldn't allow it.

'It was one thing after another over three-and-a-half months,' said Monica Pastelle. 'A lot of bickering and bitching, and not much sex. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that they were probably intimate only three or four times after they married.

'It might have helped if they'd actually moved in together. But Lisa said that she didn't want to live in a house that smelled of cigar smoke, and Nic was not willing to give up his cigars.'

On November 22, Lisa Marie and Cage posed for celebrity photographer Annie Lebovitz for a magazine spread. Though the couple endeavoured to maintain a civilised front, it was clear to observers that something was already wrong.

'It was tense,' said a source. 'At one point, she touched him and he recoiled, as if bitten by a snake.'

The next day, the Cages were scheduled to attend the Los Angeles premiere of Nicolas's new movie, Adaptation. The evening started out badly, according to sources close to the couple, with a disagreement over Lisa Marie's wardrobe.

'Lisa Marie walked into the living room in an over-size orange and red sweat shirt, a pair of blue combat pants and orange tennis shoes,' says a friend of the couple's.

'Nic was crestfallen. You could see a look of disbelief spread across his face. "Please tell me you're not wearing that to my premiere," he said.' Lisa Marie just threw her husband an icy smile.

Nicolas went to the bar, poured himself a brandy and threw it back. He then changed into a redstriped shirt and awful, orange jacket so that at least he and Lisa Marie would appear coordinated.

When Lisa Marie's mother, Priscilla, saw photos from the event the next day, she was alarmed at how unhappy the couple looked. In the company of a household employee, she challenged her daughter about her choice of clothes.

'I want to have a music career! I have to look hip,' Lisa Marie argued back.

'You have to dress like a movie star's wife, Lisa,' Priscilla told her. 'Not a silly rap star.'

She threw her mother a scathing look and walked away. It was the very next day that Nicolas Cage filed for divorce.

Priscilla was distraught. She had had confided to her friends that, even though the age difference between the two is negligible (at 38, he's just four years older), she was concerned that Lisa Marie may have been looking for a father-figure in Nicolas, much the way she herself had in Elvis Presley.

'I was just a kid when I married Elvis, but he really was a father-figure in so many ways, which is one of the reasons we were never intimate after Lisa Marie was born,' Priscilla has confided.

'I want more than that for Lisa. But Nicolas is so much more mature, so much more sensible - and I have seen him take her to task once or twice in a way that was a little too parental.'

Lisa likes laughing, and she likes making people laugh,' says Monica Pastelle. 'She's as much of a kid as her own kids and you can see that when she's with them.

'She has struggled for years to come to an understanding with Priscilla. And she'd managed just that. For her to now start working to try to please Nicolas was just not on. He was always telling her to grow up.'

For his part, Cage is devastated by the split. He knew Lisa Marie could be a challenge but he loved her anyway.

'He loved her indomitability, her enormous strength,' said one of his close friends. 'He wasn't crazy about the fact that she swears like a truck driver. However, he did think he could be the one for her to lean on. She wanted that, too, more than anything.'

However, Samantha Kaplan, an acquaintance of the Presley family, believes Lisa Marie had embarked on this marriage without a thought for its long-term viability.

'She loved Nicolas, yes. But was it the kind of love that would guarantee future happiness for her, or was she just living blindly in temporary ecstasy? She didn't take the time to find out,' says Ms Kaplan.

'She so much wants to be the little princess who lives happily ever after. She talked herself into believing it was true.

'Nic has a winning way with her children, and that was also a factor in her decision to marry him. I do think she's willing to compromise, to settle for less out of necessity in a belief that great love will never really happen for her.'

There are cynics who say that Nicolas Cage was following more than his heart when he began wooing Lisa Marie two years ago.

He owns a vast and valuable Elvis Presley collection - including The King's 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, worth more than £200,000. There was speculation that Lisa Marie represented nothing more than just another collectible item for him.

'Well, that's just not true,' said a close friend of Cage this week. 'It's ridiculous. Nic thought she was the woman for him. But after he really got to know her, he realised that she's not.

A few days ago, Lisa Marie was shopping for Christmas gifts with a friend in a suburban shopping mall in LA. Though her hair was pulled up under a large cap and her eyes hidden by dark shades, she still drew stares from passers-by. 'Why can't we be the way we were when we first met?' she was heard to ask her friend.

'I tried with Nicolas, I really did. Those first few weeks were so good,' she said, wistfully. 'I still love him. I wish we could go back.

'The first few weeks of love are always good, aren't they?' observed her friend.

'Well, I'll be OK,' Lisa Marie said, ignoring her friend's observation. 'I can get through it. I can handle it. I like being on my own, anyway.'

For the moment, that would seem to be where her future lies. Copyright J. Randy Taraborrelli, 2002.