Most kids start out on a tricycle. Lisa Marie Presley started out with a set of keys.
Lisa Marie was Elvis Presley’s only child, and part of her childhood was spent at Graceland, her father’s home in Memphis. She and her dad shared the second floor of the house. And when she wanted to get around the grounds, she didn’t walk. She drove her own golf cart, starting when she was as young as 4.
That key didn’t get lost. It stayed in the family.
In October 2024, Riley Keough, Lisa Marie’s daughter and Elvis’s granddaughter, welcomed Oprah Winfrey to Graceland for a CBS special called “An Oprah Special: The Presleys.” Riley gave Oprah a tour of the house, and along the way she brought out some of the family’s most personal keepsakes. This CBS News clip from the special shows Oprah’s reaction as Riley shares some of those treasures inside Graceland.
Riley shares family keepsakes with Oprah inside Graceland
One of the things Riley pulled out was her mother’s golf cart key, the very one little Lisa Marie used to get around Graceland.
You might expect a sweet story about a tiny Presley princess puttering down the driveway nice and slow, waving at everybody.
That’s not the story Riley told.
When the talk turned to her mom’s driving, Riley held up the key and joked:
“She was a terror. She crashed a few.”
That’s Elvis’s daughter for you. She was barely old enough for kindergarten, she had her own set of wheels, and she wasn’t about to take it easy on them.
It’s the kind of story every family has, the one that gets a groan and a grin every time somebody brings it up at the kitchen table. Riley told it as a joke, and there was plenty of love behind it.
Lisa Marie passed away in 2023, and Riley has talked about wanting Graceland to stay what it always was for her mom. “I think, like, my instinct with everything is always to do what my mother would have wanted. Which is to keep it a home,” she told Oprah.
A home with a well-used golf cart key tucked away in it.
If you want more of that childhood, this Extra report looks back at how Lisa Marie grew up at Graceland as Elvis’s daughter.
Looking back at Lisa Marie’s childhood at Graceland
Riley is a mom herself now. Her daughter is named Tupelo, and the lesson Riley carries from her own mother has nothing to do with golf carts.
“I think that if I can just make [Tupelo] feel loved the way my mom made us feel loved,” she said in the special.
So the key is still with the family, and so is the story that goes with it, about a 4-year-old at Graceland who drove like she owned the place.