The world knew Elvis Presley as the King of Rock n’ Roll, the man in the gold suit who could fill any room the moment he walked in. At home, behind the gates of Graceland in Memphis, he was something simpler. He was the guy who wanted everybody around him to be laughing.
His only child knew that side of him better than anyone.
Lisa Marie Presley was Elvis’s daughter, born in 1968 and raised for her early years inside Graceland. She passed away in 2023, and before that she had been working on a memoir about her life and her father. Her daughter, the actress Riley Keough, finished the book after her. It came out in October 2024 and it’s called “From Here to the Great Unknown.”
In it, Lisa Marie describes a dad who was warm and goofy and full of energy at home. She put it plainly.
“My dad loved to have fun and he loved everybody else to have fun with him, and he loved to laugh,” she said.
That love of fun had a mischievous streak, and the people closest to Elvis were usually the ones it landed on. He kept a tight circle of buddies around him at Graceland, the friends and helpers who were always nearby. If you spent your days with a man who got bored easily and loved a good prank, you learned to keep one eye on the door.
Graceland’s basement is where a lot of the downtime happened. Down a staircase lined with mirrors, there’s the Pool Room, a cozy space with a billiard table and fabric pleated across the whole ceiling. Right next to it sits the TV Room with its wall of screens. This was the hangout, the spot where the guys would settle in for the evening.
That’s exactly where Elvis liked to strike.
Her memoir reportedly tells how Elvis would throw stink bombs into the Pool Room while his friends were down there, and then lock the doors on them. The guys were trapped inside with the smell, and Elvis was on the other side of those doors having the time of his life. It’s the kind of trick a kid would dream up, pulled off by a grown man who happened to own the house.
That was the fun he meant. Not a show for the cameras, just a dad and his pals and a joke that nobody could escape.
Halloween is this weekend, so it feels like the right time to picture Elvis the prankster instead of Elvis the legend. The stink bombs are only one story out of many. Lisa Marie filled her book with the father she remembered, the quiet moments and the loud ones, the man the public never got to sit beside.
If you want the rest in her own words, the full story is in Lisa Marie’s memoir. Read it and meet the Elvis who lived at home.