Some of Lisa Marie’s warmest memories of her dad didn’t happen in the daytime. They happened when the rest of Graceland was fast asleep.
She talked about it on ABC back in February 2012. Elvis would wake her up, she said, just to do things together. One of those things was a ride. He’d get her into his golf cart and off they’d go into the dark.
“It was always really special for me to get in the car, you know, golf cart with him, be alone with him,” she said.
Think about that for a second. Here’s a man the whole world wanted a piece of, and the one person who got him all to herself was a little girl in her pajamas after midnight.
So where was he taking her?
Lisa Marie remembers her dad, in her own words
She’s talking here about those late-night memories and what her father was really like when the cameras and the crowds were gone. Her voice tells you as much as her words do, so turn the sound up for this one.
For years fans wondered where that golf cart was headed on those quiet nights. The answer finally came in her memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” the book she started and her daughter Riley Keough finished in 2024.
Elvis was driving her across the pasture.
On the far side of the Graceland grounds, in a house on Dolan Drive, lived his father Vernon. That was Lisa Marie’s grandfather. So those midnight rides weren’t just a daddy-daughter adventure. They were three generations of Presleys, out together in the dark, while the rest of the world slept.
A little girl, her father and her grandfather waiting at the end of the ride. You can see why she never forgot it.
It’s the kind of story that makes Graceland feel less like a landmark and more like what it really was for them. A home. A place where a dad could scoop up his kid at two in the morning and go check on Grandpa just because he felt like it.
And it says something about Elvis too. For all the noise around his life, the thing he reached for in the quiet was family. His little girl beside him. His father a short ride away.
Lisa Marie is gone now, and she passed away far too soon. But she left these stories behind, and this one is pure warmth from the first word to the last. Watch her tell it and you’ll understand why fans hold these memories so close.