While millions of people lined up to attend Elvis Presley’s shows, his eldest granddaughter, Riley Keough, and her mother, Lisa Marie Presley (Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s only child), were trapped indoors, waiting for the concerts to end. The Burning Love crooner conducted a lot of his shows at Graceland, his famous Memphis estate.
During those shows, Keough and Lisa Marie often found themselves hanging out would hanging out in Elvis’s room. On Wednesday, October 9, Keough appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers and shared an anecdote from the King of Rock and Roll’s Graceland tour days. “If we didn’t get out before the tours began, we were stuck until like 5 pm,” said the Daisy Jones & The Six actress.
Since Elvis and her mother’s room were not part of the tour, they would stay upstairs and wait. “ And we’d get stuck until the tours were over,” she added. When asked whether they were afraid of walking around amidst the crowd. Keough laughed and said, “It’s funny because, I guess they could’ve stopped the tours for a second so we could run out but they never did that.”
The actress who co-wrote and published her mother’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown delved deeper into her memories in Graceland. In the book, she revealed that Elvis’s Graceland mansion is just as he left, and his “presence” can be felt. “Sometimes we would all sleep in his bed. My mom loved being in her dad’s bed—it made her feel close to him, and we felt it, too,” she added.
Whenever they would be stuck in the room, their staff would bring up food — ”usually McDonald’s”— and hang out all day being trapped in the room. Keough revealed that to pass the time, she and her boyfriend would dit under their grandmother’s hair dryer and pretend to be in a salon.
Meanwhile, their mother would peruse Elvis’s book collection, which mostly contained self-actualization and spiritual books. “He was clearly searching for a deeper comprehension of the world,” Keough observed. She added that her late mother would go “line-by-line”, looking for meaning in everything that Elvis had underlined.
From Here to the Great Unknown is now available to purchase on Amazon.
