Riley Keough opens up about Lisa Marie Presley's death on Oprah special

Actress Riley Keough discussed her mother's death in detail for the first time in an interview with Oprah Winfrey at her family's Graceland home in a special broadcast on CBS on October 8 of the same day From here to the great unknown, The posthumous memoirs of Keough's late mother Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of rock icon Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, have gone on sale. Keough finished the book by listening to hours of tapes her mother recorded for the book before she died of cardiac arrest on January 12, 2023, 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, was moved to tears when she heard the audio recording of her mother discussing her relationship with Michael Jackson, whom she was married to from 1994 to 1996.

“I can only speak about my experience with Michael and my experience was that he was nothing but kind and loving towards me and my family and I saw them in what seemed like a happy, loving relationship,” she told Winfrey.

However, much of Lisa Marie's life was full of sad memories, starting with her father's death in 1977 when she was just nine years old. Despite Lisa Marie's sudden death, she attended the Golden Globes just two days earlier to celebrate the 2022 biopic Elvis — Keough recalled worrying about her mother's health in the days before.

“In the last three weeks that she was alive, I visited her a few times and felt worried,” she said. “I think for me there was always some sort of undercurrent of feeling like I was borrowing time with her. But there were a few interactions with her where she felt distant in a way, a kind of resignation.”

When Winfrey asked if it felt like her mother, who had briefly developed an opioid addiction after the birth of 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 medication. It felt like a tired person.”

The idea of ​​spending time with her mother came about after the death of Keough's younger brother Benjamin, Lisa Marie's only son. In July 2020, Benjamin died at the age of 27 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The memoir describes how Lisa Marie kept her son's body in a coffin in her home for weeks before taking him to Graceland for burial and preserving his remains in dry ice. “What would happen, she would just sit with the body,” Winfrey asked, to which Keough replied in the affirmative.

“The moment my brother died, I thought, 'This is the end of them,' because they were so close. “They were as close to his mother as Elvis was, and I just couldn’t imagine a world where she could make it without him,” she recalls.

Keough also recounted the anger she once felt toward her grandfather Elvis, seeing her mother in constant mourning over his death.

“I had a mother who kind of felt like I could be abandoned in a way, and I lived with that,” she said. “I was young, but I somehow associated him with causing my mother pain. So I remember being young and being frustrated that he did that.”

This is one of many reasons why Keough has a difficult relationship with Graceland, whose estate she is now the sole heir to.

“I don’t normally want to come here and I kind of have to force myself to do it,” she admitted. “And then when I’m here, I really feel a sense of closeness when I sit in the meditation garden.”

Elvis, her brother Ben and her mother Lisa Marie are all buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland, where their grandmother Priscilla says she also wants to be buried. As for the future of the tourist attraction, which attracts more than 2,000 visitors a day, Keough said she plans to honor what she believes would have been her mother's wishes.

“My instinct with anything is always to do what my mother would have wanted, which is to make sure it stays a home,” Keough said. “It was our family home.”