Actress Riley Keough discussed her mother’s death in depth for the first time in a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey at her family’s Graceland residence in a special that aired on CBS on Oct. 8, the same day From Here to the Great Unknown, the posthumous memoir of Keough’s late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of rock icon Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, went on sale. Keough finished the book by listening to hours of tapes her mother had recorded for the book before she died on Jan. 12, 2023, from a cardiac arrest episode at the age of 54.
In An Oprah Special: The Presleys – Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley, Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie and actor and musician Danny Keough, teared up listening to audio of her mother talk about her relationship with Michael Jackson, whom she was married to from 1994-1996.
“I can only speak to my experience with Michael and my experience was that he was only kind and loving to me and my family, and I saw them in a very seemingly happy, loving relationship,” she told Winfrey.
Much of Lisa Marie’s life was filled with sad memories, however, beginning with her father’s death in 1977 when she was just 9 years old. Despite the sudden nature of Lisa Marie’s passing — she attended the Golden Globes just two days prior in celebration of the 2022 biopic Elvis — Keough recalled being concerned about her mother’s health in the days prior.
“The last three weeks that she was alive I was with her a few times that I felt worried,” she said. “I think there was always sort of an undertone for me because of this feeling that I was on borrowed time with her. But there were a couple interactions with her that she just felt detached in a way, a kind of a resignation.”
Asked by Winfrey whether it felt like 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 answered, “It didn’t feel like drugs. I have a lot of experience with the drugs. It felt like a tired person.”
The notion of borrowed time with her mother stemmed from the death of Keough’s younger brother Benjamin, Lisa Marie’s only son. 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 coffin in their home for weeks before bringing him to Graceland to be buried, preserving his remains with dry ice. “What would happen, she would just sit with the body,” quizzed Winfrey, to which Keough replied in the affirmative.
“The moment my brother died, I was like, ‘this is the end of her,’ because they were so close. They were as close as Elvis was with his mother, and I just couldn’t imagine a world where she would make it without him,” she recalled.
Keough also recounted the anger she once felt toward her grandfather, Elvis, seeing her mother exist in a perpetual state of grief over his death.
“I had a mother who was kind of feeling like how could you leave me in a sense, and I lived with that,” she said. “I was young, but I kind of related him to causing my mother to feel pain, so I remember being young and feeling frustrated that he did that.”
It’s one of many reasons Keough has a difficult relationship with Graceland, the estate of which she is now the sole inheritor.
“I don’t want to come here usually, and I have to sort of force myself to come,” she admitted. “And then once I’m here, I really feel a sense of closeness when I go sit in the meditation garden.”
Elvis, her brother Ben, and her mother Lisa Marie are all buried in Graceland’s meditation garden, where her grandmother Priscilla says she also wants to be laid to rest. As for the future of the tourist attraction, which sees some 2,000-plus visitors daily, Keough says she plans to honor what she believes would’ve been her mother’s wishes.
“My instinct with everything is always to do what my mother would have wanted, which is to keep it a home,” said Keough. “It was our family’s home.”