The following article is Copyright © 1996, Vogue magazine.

VOGUE

I saw a television program in London just after Christmas about Elvis and food. The show was obviously timed to hit its holiday audience at their most bloated. Mary Jenkins, one of Elvis’s cooks, was filmed at Graceland demonstrating how she made a King-size banana sandwich. She thickly buttered two slices of bread, spread them with honey, and piled them up with a couple of mashed bananas. Then she picked up the sandwich and deep-fried it. In two pounds of boiling butter. "Tastes rilly good," she said. "He maybe would have two of these before his breakfast." Two of these. Each one contained 7,000 calories. Elvis Presley snacked heroically. Mythically. Nutritionists fall silent in awe.

Mary Jenkins still cooks for Elvis’s daughter when Elvis’s daughter goes to Graceland. In the evening, when the lines of visitors are gone. "Southern food," says little size-two Lisa Marie Presley, dreamily. "I’m very Southern. It’s embedded in me. Fried catfish. Fried chicken, black-eyed peas. Biscuits. Gravy. Collard greens." "And fried squirrel?" I prompt, remembering a particularly revolting passage from the program. She looks at me as though I’ve gone crazy. "Fried squirrel? Fried squirrel?" she says with ringing scorn. "We never have fried squirrel." She can get very Southern when she’s miffed, so I leave Presley eating habits for the moment.

All her life she’s been somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife -- and the somebodies who made her are so globally notorious that they beggar belief. Graceland, Neverland: These are cosmic myths, not places for human beings to live. Gazing at the girl ( and everyone does gaze ), we find it hard to remember that she’s on the inside looking out, not -- like the rest of us -- on the outside goggling in. Everything that happens to Lisa seems normal to her. "Why wouldn’t we have a lot in common?" she asked the sweating Diane Sawyer, as El Bizarro smiled his sweet, rosy-lipped smile and held her hand on Primetime Live. Sawyer left it dangling, but for my money it was the smartest question of the evening.

The luckiest thing about her uniquely star-crossed birth was that she was born in the USA. It’s a priceless inheritance, worth maybe more to her than even Graceland’s $100 million, because it gives her the God-given right to do what every American celebrity -- indeed, every American citizen -- does when they wake up in the morning, think about yesterday, and don’t like what they see. Think positive. Start over. Don’t dwell on the past: Focus on the here and now.

In January Mrs. Lisa Marie Presley filed for divorce in California, instructing her lawyers to ask only for costs and for the restitution of her maiden name. ( Is there a more famous maiden name in the entire world? ) In February she turned 28. It’s a grown-up sort of age, 28, especially for a child bride ( she married her first husband, Danny Keough, at 21, but she was already firmly entrenched in the relationship at nineteen ). At 28, you’re looking at a "woman," not "girl"; you’re staring at 30. "I dread it. I absolutely dread it," says Lisa. "I still feel like a child. Like a kid. Even at 25, I thought I was dying. And being 30 will definitely make me feel like I’m no longer a baby." She is curled up in a big armchair, feet tucked under her, looking about twelve, relaxed in a black shirt and custom-made pinstriped black pants.

Lisa is doing all the age-old feel-good things women classically do when they suddenly face the future as single women. New look, new diet, new hairdo. ( "I’d already thought about cutting it shorter a month ago. So when Steven Meisel asked me, I was totally ready." ) New York’s favorite hairdresser, Garren, sliced her newly black locks into a chinlength bob, and when he’d finished, the roomful of people went weak at the knees because it was Lisa’s daddy’s unforgettable young face that stared back at them from under the Presley cowlick. She tilts her head and grins a slow grin, and you’re irresistibly reminded of Madonna’s line about k. d. Lang: "Elvis is alive -- and she’s beautiful."

Is Lisa happy with her face? "God, no. NO! How could I like what I see in the mirror?" she asks. "I wouldn’t hang out with a human who woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror and said, 'I look beautiful.'" But she’s content. She’s not about to go run off to a cosmetic surgeon like some people we could mention. And if she does, it will be for routine repair, not rebirth as a different person. "I’m pretty vain. And I don’t like things falling without my permission. If something does, then I’ll get it fixed."

The face in the mirror is one thing; the naked body showed with Michael Jackson’s pasty flesh in the "You Are Not Alone" video is another. I wanted to know how she saw her public image. "That’s a hard one." You bet it is -- only partly through her own fault ( she presumably chose to make those videos ) but mostly because of the fatal star that made her Elvis’s only child. In person, she is reserved and private -- "terribly shy," she says -- but she’s been a honey pot in the press since the day she was born and lives fenced in by minder staff, and security that beat anything I’ve ever seen. Elvis’s daughter. Think about it. Wackos are out there, buying his sweat and making a living as look-alikes. She tries to live a real life ( going to see Sense and Sensability, Waiting to Exhale, taking the kids to Phantom of the Opera, reading USA Today, keeping frogs, and cooking stir-fry ) inside an astronomical bubble of privacy that’s bought and paid for. She and her children ( "I never travel without them" ) stayed in a New York hotel for Vogue’s photo shoot. I met her in a private room. Her assistant escorted her from floor to floor, and Lisa wouldn’t leave to return to her own place until her assistant arrived back at the door to get her.

She has to see the same picture of herself used over and over again in the press. ( "There’s this one photo that they continue to show of me running through the water when I was twelve years old. When I’m pudgy. I hate that photo! They’ve run it all my life since I was twelve, you know? People are pudgy at twelve -- they’re just coming out of being a kid." ) She tries to protect her own children from stolen snapshots, and why wouldn’t she? ( "I always look around. I never leave anywhere without looking around. I look in the trash; I look in the leaves; I look in the windows. I’m always looking. I can sense them when they’re around me. I work about it. I don’t want my children photographed. I don’t like their pictures all over the place. Making a decision to be a public figure isn’t their choice right now. I don’t think it’s fair. Even though they’re beautiful and I love them, they haven’t made that decision yet. I’ve been chased through airports with a screaming baby because the photographers are ruthless, you know, and they want the picture."

She’s pretty ruthless herself, but who can blame her? "If someone knocks them out or something when there’s a baby in the arms as well, I don’t blame them. I don’t. I’ve told them I don’t want my picture taken with the children. When they were babies -- teeny babie babies all look the same."

She came into Vogue’s offices to try on the clothes for the photo shoot. She was as nervous as a two-year-old colt at the thought -- "of talking" -- even about clothes. She doesn’t talk to the press. She’s done only one other press interview in her life, though her tabloid clippings could fill a room. The clippings will be doubling and redoubling as the divorce -- about which she will not say one word -- goes through. She stands in the doorway, tiny and grave, wearing a knockout plain black coat, designed by the Neo-modernist Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester. It almost reached the floor, over a plain white T-shirt. It was an envible coat, and she looked wonderful in it. "I had to struggle to keep it on me," she says, laughing suddenly. "My mother was trying to grab it off me when she was in New York in December -- 'I want that coat!' It was cold, so I wouldn’t let her."

Somehow I hadn’t imagined Lisa would look so chic and spare. You can’t forget the precious Southern baby princess that Elvis showered with diamonds and furs. "The white fur coat," she says, rolling her eyes. "And my father had these rings especially made for me when I was four -- one was shaped like a rose. I loved them, but they were all too big for me. I had a fur bed, too. I had a special yellow bedroom at Graceland with a fur bed, and I had to climb up steps to get into it. Even the steps were covered in fur. Black-and-white fur. It’s all still there. Totally wrong, in that yellow room. It’s -- gaudy." What do you do with a white fur in Memphis? I wonder. "Keep it in cold store. And my mother wouldn’t let me have those rings until I was eighteen."

Then there was her teenage rock-chick look. "I had this biker, vampira look. Which I hate. I’m sure everyone goes through those phases of looking like a geek." Most recently there was the Clueless image that emerged on Primetime Live, where Lisa Marie looked so tense and cross as she struggled to get a word in edgewise.

She is knowledgeable and passionate about clothes, reads every fashion magazine in print ( "Vogue is my favorite," she offers, with flattering tact ), shops carefully -- and seasonally -- four times a year, and has had a lifetime of style lessons from her mother, Priscilla Presley, to offset the showbiz overkill. "My mother’s been an incredible role model to me," she says. "She’s always had the most unbelievable closet. She used to teach me from a very young age: Never allow the clothes to wear you. You take charge of the clothes, whether it’s flipping up the sleeves, turning a hat, twisting this way, that way, whatever."

She even brought notes on a piece of paper in case she forgot any of her favorite designers. "I love Anna Sui," she says, telling me how Sui is "daring and really cool and funky and sort of rebellious," and she loves "everything about Chanel: the simplicity. And the suits. And the ads, and the makeup, and the funky jewelry and really neat accessories." Her closet runs the style gamut from rigorous minimalism ( "Jil Sander suits . . . really classic, very tailored" ) to decorated baroque ( "Vivienne Westwood jackets . . . I love the necklines, and I love those Westwood shoes. I don’t have any, but I love them." )

Her body is much better at 28 than it was when she was a teenager -- toned and lean. She’s worked for it. When she was pregnant with her daughter, Danielle ( who is now six and yearns for pick bows and no doubt white fur coats as well, "I gained 50 pounds," she says. "Fifty. Five-o. It took me a good year of learning everything about exercising and food to lose it. I had a trainer, but wasn’t eating properly. Every morning for breakfast I would have sausage and scrambled eggs and a bagel with avocado on top and then I would have pizza, you know, for lunch, and then my trainer would come and she’d go, 'WHAT ARE YOU DOING?' I’d say, 'I’m not losing any weight! I don’t know what’s wrong with you people!'" Her trainer gave her a few home truths about weight loss ( "She said, ´You’re out of your mind!’" ) and a properly rigorous diet plan: "Half a piece of toast for breakfast. A slice of turkey for lunch. Broccoli. Vegetables. I went to shock, and I learned it was exercising, exercising a lot, that would stop the weight." Three years later, when she had her son, Ben, she gained only 26 pounds. "I worked out every day. I did ten miles on the bike four days before he was born. I was running again two weeks later. And I nursed him for a year, and that brings the weight off. Somehow I managed to turn around so that the milk would come in only at night; he would sleep with me, and I would nurse in the night. They would both sleep with me. They still do."

She eats nothing at dinner: We both pick at a bit of fish in a New York Italian restaurant. The waiters whisk away our barely touched plates with forgiveness and understanding. They’re hip to size-two celebrities, even those wearing deliberately anonymous head-to-toe black. She won’t have dessert, though she does say she suffers from "sugar attacks." Sugar attacks? "Sugar fits. I don’t know how women can’t have sugar. Chocolate. I don’t see how it’s possible to stay away completely."

She tells me about her six-weak cleansing program, in which sugar attacks and fried catfish have no place at all. "It’s called Cleanse Thyself, and you clean out you intestines." How? I ask. She gives me a little sideways look and warns, "Um -- this is gross." I tell her I am ready for it. It is seriously gross. It involves a lot of activity in the bathroom area after swallowing a bushel of herbs ( 50 to 60 different kinds ), eating decreasing amounts of vegetables and fruit, and then fasting completely. "At the end, your tounge is pink like a baby’s," she says. "It cleans out everything that’s been in there for years and years." She pats her stomach, with a spanking-clean intestine nestling inside. Everybody in California Cleanses Thyself, apparently. "I’m telling you, it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. Far better than colonics. The program is unbelievable -- I know people who dropped twelve or fifteen pounds, even though it’s not designed for weight loss. That’s just from going to the bathroom [ great throty laugh ]. It’s really disgusting to have to go into detail." I make her go into detail; we both pull faces and wriggle about how gross it is, and I end up half tempted to Cleanse Thyself myself. Three quarters tempted.

I want to know her plans for the future. Fliply, she says, "To avoid cellulite and water retention at all costs." Then she says, "That’s a joke, by the way." She offers me the all-American nostrum about "just wanting to be a good mother" and bring up her children "happy and sound and sane," but she is smart enough to add, "as clichéd as that sounds." She’s on the board of the Graceland estate, which is busy at the moment with plans for corporate expansion. She has commitments to many charities, including St. Jude’s hospitals and the T.J. Martell Foundation, both leukemia and cancer charities.

But what she’s really focused on is her singing career. She’s built a recording studio in her Los Angeles home and is writing songs. But she’s diffident about going public; she’s been down this road before and suffered some humiliation: "I had a voice but I didn’t have the experience, and things got too wild. It all became a matter of deals and money, money, money: I lost my fire and I lost the urge to create. I wanted another baby anyway at the time. So I pulled back and had my son." Nothing came of it, but the desire didn’t go away: "I’m obviously not doing it for money or fame," she says. "It’s artistically important to me, and if it doesn’t work, if I can’t figure it out, then it’s not going to go any further."

I hope she does find herself as a singer; her speaking voice is rather beautiful -- dark and chocolaty. Musically, her voice would be low but big, and she has the blues in her genes, of course. She was raised with gospel and R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. "I heard it all the time, all my life, not just my father’s music, but his backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations. I played their album nonstop." She now hazards her style as "a cross between Tracy Chapman and Alanis Morissette."

I hope that she’s allowed some personal space and time to work it out by the mad media roller coaster she lives on. But I also hope, after the weirdness and lunacies of the past two years, that this rather gentle, rather vulnerable and affectionate little person can find someone as well as something in her life. I ask her if she’s dating and she practically jumps down my throat to say No! And Give her a break! and Frankly, that part of her life is over right now! You’re 28 years old, I say. It’s not over. There are Valentine’s Day dinners going on at her hotel, slushy Valentine movies on TV, and guys racing into stores to pick up last-minute Valentine gifts. Did Lisa get a valentine? She gives me a cool look and then breaks into the slow smile. "Yes," she says. "I did. From my son and my daughter."

Vicki Woods