First marriage
In May 1994, Jackson married the daughter of Elvis Presley, Lisa Marie Presley. They had first met in 1975, when a seven-year-old Presley attended one of Jackson's family engagements at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, and were reconnected through a mutual friend. According to a friend of Presley's, "their adult friendship began in November 1992 in Los Angeles" They stayed in contact every day over the telephone. As the child molestation accusations became public, Jackson became dependent on Presley for emotional support; she was concerned about his faltering health and addiction to drugs. Presley explained, "I believed he didn't do anything wrong and that he was wrongly accused and yes I began falling for him. I desired to save him. I felt that I could do it." She eventually persuaded him to settle the allegations out of court and go into rehabilitation to recover.
Jackson proposed to Presley over the telephone towards the fall of 1993, saying, "If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?" They married in the Dominican Republic in secrecy, denying it for almost two months afterwards. The marriage was, in her words, "a married couple's life ... that was sexually active". At the time, the tabloid media speculated that the wedding was a ploy to prop up Jackson's public image. The marriage lasted fewer than two years and ended with an amicable divorce settlement. In a 2010 interview with Oprah, Presley admitted that they spent four more years after the divorce "getting back together and breaking up", until she chose to stop.
Second marriage and fatherhood
The album was promoted with the successful HIStory World Tour. The tour began on September 7, 1996, and completed on October 15, 1997. Jackson performed 82 concerts in 58 cities to over 4.5 million fans, and grossed up a total of $165 million. The show, which visited five continents and 35 countries, became Jackson's most successful in terms of audience figures.
During the tour, Jackson married his longtime friend Deborah Jeanne Rowe, a dermatology nurse, in an impromptu ceremony in Sydney, Australia. Rowe was about six months pregnant with the couple's first child at the time. At first, Rowe and Jackson had no plans to marry, but Jackson's mother Katherine persuaded them to do so. Michael Joseph Jackson Jr (generally called Prince) was born on February 13, 1997; his sister Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson was born a year later on April 3, 1998. The couple divorced in 1999, and Jackson got full custody of the kids. The divorce was comparably amicable, but a subsequent custody suit was not settled until 2006.