When Elvis Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, died aged 54 last year she left behind an intimate request: for daughter Riley Keough to finish off her memoir based on recorded tapes and their time together. On Tuesday, the day of the book’s release, the BBC met Keough in New York to discuss From Here to the Great Unknown, a life story filled with trauma, addiction, loss and grief. “It made me emotional that she was sharing it with the world because it was a story that she felt very protective of,” Keough, a soft-spoken 35-year-old actress, said.
In the memoir, Lisa Marie details the toll that her legendary dad’s death – when she was just nine – took on her.
For the first time, she describes waking up on the afternoon that he died in August 1977 and sensing something was wrong, before running into her father’s room across the hallway and seeing him face down on the bathroom floor. His body was then displayed in an open casket at Graceland for two days. After the crowds left, Lisa Marie would go and “touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him”.
“There have been nights as an adult when I would just get drunk and listen to his music and sit there and cry. The grief still comes. It’s still just there,” she wrote. It is an event that Keough believes her mother never fully processed. She told the BBC that she felt angry at her famous grandfather as a child because she associated his songs with seeing her mother in pain, even so many years after his death. While there are also memories of tender, private moments at Graceland, tragedy is a constant theme in the story.
The death of Lisa Marie’s son, Benjamin Keough, who took his own life in 2020 at the age of 27, led to such intense grief that his body was kept in the family home on dry ice for two months before finally being buried. “Ben was the love of mom’s life” and they “shared a very deep soul bond”, Keough writes about her brother. She told the BBC that having more time with his body helped her mother to “get her thoughts together”. “I think that it’s pretty common in the way that we handle death in the Western world, to [keep it] very quick and there’s not really a grieving process,” she said. “The body is taken away and the doors are shut and you don’t see anything. It’s not the way that it’s done so much in other places.”
Lisa Marie’s health went downhill following her son’s death and burial. Keough writes in the book that she believed her mother was going to ultimately die of a broken heart. Lisa Marie first met pop icon Michael Jackson when she was six years old. Her father was performing at the Hilton in Las Vegas and the Jackson 5 were performing nearby. They met again in 1993 when she was 25 and hit it off, she said in the book. They worked out a secret phone call routine and began meeting regularly. During an eight-day trip to Las Vegas, she would go to his room each night and they would stay up talking and watching movies. “Nothing happened physically but the connection was so insanely strong. No-one had ever seen that side of him,” she said.
On the final night, he turned off the lights in the hotel room and proposed. “And in the darkness Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children’.” Lisa Marie agreed and they married in 1994. It was her second marriage, having divorced Keough’s father Danny. But the couple often fought over Jackson’s suspected drug use, Presley wrote. He became secretive and “awful”, and disappeared for days – behaviours that she recognised from her father.
Keough said: “It was very passionate and kind of just went up in flames. I know they both cared for each other very deeply, and there were a lot of things at play.” Presley’s short-lived and tumultuous third marriage to actor Nicolas Cage lasted only 108 days. That’s reflected in the book, with no direct mention of the actor in the tapes.
Keough writes that she “doesn’t know if they were truly in love, though she said they were”. She recalls that Cage would bring her mother diamonds, and every time he showed up it would be in a different coloured car, usually a Lamborghini. Cage said in a 2003 interview: “Sometimes I wish we couldn’t have rushed the marriage and sometimes I regret rushing the divorce.”
Seeking stability in England
Presley moved to England for “her last shot at stability” with fourth husband Michael Lockwood. She bought a historic property in East Sussex and took up gardening and cooking, and also enjoyed having tea by the fireplace.
The first couple of years of a “sweet little life in the countryside” were “magical”, she wrote, but overall the move turned out to be unhealthy for her. She was distanced from her friends, the loneliness and isolation took a toll, and her drug use increased. Lisa Marie only had two friends cited during the period: late English guitarist Jeff Beck and former Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, who shared a moving tribute at her funeral.
Unanswered questions
The book doesn’t fully tackle the reported rifts between Lisa Marie and her mother Priscilla, but it is clear they had a difficult relationship. “I was a pain in her ass immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me,” Presley wrote in the opening chapter. It also doesn’t touch on the family’s financial difficulties, including high-profile battles over the Graceland estate. However, Keough told the BBC she hopes readers will come away with an ability to relate to “very human things that happen, like addiction and grief and love and mothers and daughters and family”. “I’m aware that there’s a lot of tragedy in the book, but I think that all of us had a really wonderfully joyful, colourful, funny, crazy life as well,” she said. “I’m just grateful to be here.”
