Priscilla Presley memoir Elvis late-night call and Lisa Marie Jackson

Priscilla Presley recounts in a forthcoming memoir that Elvis Presley once phoned her at 2 a.m. while she was in bed with Robert Kardashian, and she sharply criticizes her late daughter Lisa Marie Presley’s brief marriage to Michael Jackson, saying the union left her "appalled." The book, Softly, As I Leave You Life After Elvis, is due Sept. 23 and contains a series of personal revelations about life with Elvis, her postdivorce relationships and the struggles that followed within the Presley family.

Priscilla, now 80, writes that Elvis called in the middle of the night during her 1975 relationship with Kardashian, whom she began seeing after her 1973 divorce. "He would have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he had known Robert was in my bedroom," she writes, noting Elvis frequently carried a loaded gun. She describes placing the bedside receiver between herself and Kardashian so he could listen to Elvis, and recounts friends of Kardashian saying Elvis seemed controlling and would sometimes sound incoherent on late-night calls. Priscilla adds that she and Kardashian remained on friendly terms; she says they spoke one last time before his death from cancer in 2003.