Actress Riley Keough discussed her mother's death in depth for the first time in an interview with Oprah Winfrey at her family's Graceland residence in a special that aired on CBS on October 8, the same day. From here to the Great Unknown, the posthumous memoir of Keough's late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, the only daughter of rock icon Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, has gone on sale. Keough finished the book by listening to hours of tapes that his mother had recorded for the book before she died on January 12, 2023, from an episode of cardiac arrest at age 54.
In An Oprah Special: The Presleys – Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley, Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie and actor and musician Danny Keough, became emotional listening to audio of her mother talking about her relationship with Michael Jackson, to whom she was married from 1994 to 1996.
“I can only speak to my experience with Michael and my experience was that he was kind and loving to me and my family, and I saw them in a seemingly happy and loving relationship,” she told Winfrey.
However, much of Lisa Marie's life is filled with sad memories, starting with her father's death in 1977, when she was only 9 years old. Despite the sudden nature of Lisa Marie's passing: she had attended the Golden Globes just two days earlier to celebrate the 2022 biopic Elvis – Keough recalled being concerned about her mother's health in the days leading up to it.
“In the last three weeks that she was alive, I was with her a few times where I felt worried,” she said. “I think there's always been some sort of undercurrent in me because of this feeling of having borrowed time with her. But there were a couple of interactions with her where she felt somewhat detached, a sort of resignation.
Asked by Winfrey if she felt as if her mother, who had temporarily developed an opioid addiction after giving birth to twin daughters Harper and Finley in 2008, was using drugs again, Keough replied: “It didn't feel like drugs. I have a lot of experience with medications. I felt like a tired person.
The idea of borrowed time with her mother stemmed from the death of Keough's younger brother, Benjamin, Lisa Marie's only child. In July 2020, Benjamin died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 27. The memoir details how Lisa Marie kept her son's body in a casket in their home for weeks before taking him to Graceland to be buried, preserving his remains with dry ice. “What would happen, would she just sit with the body,” Winfrey asked, to which Keough responded in the affirmative.
“The moment my brother died, I thought, 'this is the end of him,' because they were so close. They were as close as Elvis was to his mother, and I just couldn't imagine a world in which she would have made it without him,” he recalled.
Keough also recounted the anger he once felt toward his grandfather, Elvis, as he watched his mother live in a perpetual state of grief over his death.
“I had a mother who thought how could you leave me in a way, and I lived with that,” he said. “I was young, but I kind of connected it to him causing pain to my mom, so I remember being young and getting frustrated with what he did.”
It's one of the many reasons Keough has a difficult relationship with Graceland, the estate to which she is now the sole heir.
“I usually don't want to come here, and I have to force myself to come,” he admitted. “And then once I'm here, I really feel a sense of closeness when I go and sit in the meditation garden.”
Elvis, his brother Ben and his mother Lisa Marie are all buried in Graceland's meditation garden, where his grandmother Priscilla says she also wants to be buried. As for the future of the tourist attraction, which sees more than 2,000 visitors a day, Keough says he plans to honor what he believes would have been his mother's wish.
“My instinct with everything is always to do what my mother would have wanted, which is to keep it as a home,” Keough said. “It was our family home.”