Lisa's man must love like Elvis

No one in Hollywood is the least surprised that Lisa Marie Presley, only child of rock 'n' roll legend Elvis, and Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage have broken off their 10 month relationship - in spite of rumours that they were about to get engaged. Their publicists confirmed yesterday that the couple - one of Hollywood's hottest - split up two weeks ago.

Indeed, insiders say the turning point came when Cage, 38, star of The Rock and ConAir, whose divorce from actress Patricia Arquette was finalised less than a year ago, flatly refused to agree to Presley's insistence that they set a date to wed.

The daughter of the King of Rock 'n' Roll has long told friends privately that she would never consider a long-term relationship with a man unless he agrees to marry her. She'd even hoped to announce their engagement on her 34th birthday - last Friday.

Meanwhile Cage, the half-Italian, half-German son of a literature professor and nephew of Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, "won't be browbeaten into doing anything he doesn't want to do," according to a friend.

The insecure and self-centred Presley "just demands that every man she meets worships her in the same way that her father did," one of her old friends told me yesterday. "She just wasn't prepared to accept that a man she was involved with wouldn't commit himself to her.

"Lisa is one the world's little princesses," the friend added. "Worshipped by her father, over-protected by her mother Priscilla, she's only had three boyfriends besides Nic, and she married two of those within weeks of meeting them."

But even apart from Cage's reluctance to name the day, the other reasons for the split lie in Presley's complex attitude to sex, and her commitment to Scientology.

The sad truth is that Lisa Marie Presley has always found relationships with men close to torture. Angry with her mother for betraying her father with karate instructor Mike Stone in 1969 (Lisa Marie remained convinced that it hastened her father's death in August 1977, when she was just nine), she then watched in horror as her mother endured a string of broken relationships.

Lisa grew distrustful of men, "and with good reason', Patricia Maxwell, who attended the Apple private school in Los Angeles with Lisa, explained later. "As she grew older, she was also afraid she would fall in love with someone only to lose him, in the same way that she lost her father."

The tragic reality is that this poor little rich girl, who is thought to be worth $300 million, learned early on that it could be threatening to trust any man.

"Yet Lisa still hoped that the perfect man - a man like her father had been in her eyes - would one day sweep her off her feet, and carry her off into the sunset as his wife," Patricia Maxwell added. In the grip of this conflict, Lisa Marie resorted to keeping men at arm's length.

When she first met Nicolas Cage at a birthday party in Los Angeles in October 2000, for example, she was typically cautious - even icy - towards him. The star, who earned $20 million for the action-adventure movie Gone in 60 Seconds in 2000, and a similar fee for the upcoming Windstalkers, nervously told her how much he admired her father.

As she sat sipping iced tea, he went on to explain how excited he'd been to emulate him in his 1992 movie Honeymoon in Vegas. "Is that the best you can do to have a conversation with me?" she snapped. "Talk to me about my father?" "I can't win with you," Cage, who won an Oscar for his role in Leaving Las Vegas, muttered as she stalked off.

Three months later, however, Presley called him to apologise and invite him to her birthday party on 1 February last year. She told him how much she liked his movies, and how "impressed" she'd been to meet him.

Cage accepted the invitation, and turned up at her party with his co-star from Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the striking Penelope Cruz. But Presley sidelined Cruz within minutes of her arrival, as she ushered Cage around the room. "I can't compete with Elvis's daughter," the Spanish-born actress barked, "so I'm not even going to try."

At the time, Presley had just broken off her engagement to 27-year-old Hawaiian-born musician Johnnie Oszajca, whom she'd met in 1999 in the wake of a failed attempt to rekindle her relationship with her first husband, Danny Keough, with whom she'd had two children, Danielle, now 12, and Ben, nine.

In fact, Keough was a safe port of call. He was Presley's first serious boyfriend. She was a wild child who'd fallen in with bad company as a teenager. Her descent into cocaine addiction had only halted when John Travolta introduced her mother to Scientology in 1987.

Priscilla Presley forced Lisa Marie into drug treatment at the Scientology Centre in Hollywood. Several months afterwards Lisa announced that the treatment had "saved her life" and she'd become a committed Scientologist.

It was at the Scientology Centre that Lisa met Danny Keough, whom she married in October 1988 at the age of 20. They were together for five years, although just before their divorce in April 1994, he was to complain bitterly that she could be "cold, distant and aloof".

"Warmth was always a problem for Lisa," says an old friend. "Her mother wasn't exactly a perfect role model, and her father was this remote figure high on drugs most of the time."

Perhaps predictably, after the collapse of her marriage, Lisa Marie turned to a man who was as remote and eccentric as her father - another music legend, Michael Jackson, whom she met at a dinner party in the autumn of 1993. Within months they were dating, and in May 1994 they married secretly in the Dominican Republic.

Lisa's friends insist that she thought she could help the eccentric rock star, who had just been accused of child molestation by dentist's son Jordan Chandler - and also revealed that he was addicted to prescription drugs.

Sex was not, however, a central part of their relationship. Though they insisted on American television in June 1995 that they were a "normal married couple" and "didn't sleep in separate rooms", their suggestion that they would like to mix two of music's most famous gene pools to make a child came to nothing.

Sex with Jackson, or lack of it, was "not an issue for Lisa", said one friend at the time. "If they were never intimate, that would probably have been fine for her." But sex was always an important part of Nicolas Cage's life.

To illustrate the differences between them you need look no further than the evening in March last year when Cage telephoned Lisa Marie to ask if she would go out to dinner with him.

Presley refused - point blank. He was still going through his divorce from Patricia Arquette, she told him, and she knew that he'd changed his mind about it before. "I've been around a lot of men who say they're getting divorced only to reconcile with their wives," she told him. "Call me when the ink is dry."

Sex with a married man, on the brink of divorce or not, was not on Lisa Marie's Scientology-led agenda.

Indeed, it wasn't until May last year - when the ink was finally dry - that the couple actually went out together, to a Tom Jones concert in Las Vegas. All that night, Cage told his friends later, he "had a compelling urge to make love to her". And when he did he called the experience "pretty magical", adding, "She's one hell of a woman."

There's no doubt of that. Lisa Marie is "self-confident, tough, and prepared to break any man's balls," in the words of one friend yesterday.

Within weeks of that first date, Cage and Presley became a hot Hollywood item. They attended the premiere of Captain Corelli's Mandolin together, her triumph over his co-star Cruz. She wore a hot-pink Versace dress and Jimmy Choo shoes, and cooed to a reporter: "I kinda like this guy."

Since then they've spent their spare time together at her $2 million estate in the Hidden Hills outside Los Angeles and his $7 million home in Bel Air, looking after her two children and his son Weston, nine, by actress Kristina Fulton, whom, significantly, he never married.

Everything appeared to be going well. At the end of last year her uncle, Elvis's brother, the Reverend Rick Stanley, even reported that they wanted to "get married right away - they don't want to wait another minute". But that was a Presley speaking, not a Cage.

Friends of the star, who collects sports cars and has made 47 films, maintain that he wasn't in nearly so much of a hurry to tie the marital knot again. And the more Cage delayed, the more Presley's Scientology preyed on her mind, until finally it cost her the man she'd told her mother she hoped would "be there for the long haul".

In the past fortnight Nicolas Cage has gone back to doing what any rich and single all-action movie star does after the day's shooting is over. At a Maxim magazine party in New Orleans last weekend to celebrate the Superbowl he was to be found surrounded by a horde of beautiful women anxious to know him better. And he wasn't trying very hard to beat them off.

Meanwhile, Elvis's little princess has returned sadly to her gated Los Angeles home, consoling herself by confiding in her ex, musician John Oszajca, with whom she's been seen out in the past two weeks.

The poor little rich girl's attitude to sex and Scientology has cost her dearly.