The night Graceland threw a party for the “Elvis” movie, one guest didn’t want to stay downstairs with everybody else.
Lisa Marie Presley was Elvis’s only child, the little girl who grew up in that house in Memphis. By then she was a grown woman, there to celebrate the big film about her father. Austin Butler, the actor who played Elvis in it, was at the party too. So was Lisa Marie’s oldest daughter, Riley Keough, an actress in her own right.
At some point that evening, Butler walked over to Angie Marchese, who runs the archives at Graceland and knows the place better than just about anyone.
“Austin actually came and got me, and he goes, ‘Lisa needs you,'” Marchese remembered. “I met her, and she asked for the key to upstairs.”
Upstairs is the one part of Graceland no tourist ever sees. Hundreds of thousands of people walk through the mansion every year, but the staircase stays roped off and the rooms up there are kept just the way Elvis left them. Lisa Marie had the key. And that night she wanted to take two people up with her.
She took Riley, and she took Austin Butler.
Butler told Jimmy Fallon about those few quiet minutes not long after, and it’s worth hearing him say it himself. He describes what Lisa Marie whispered to him on the way up, and the simple thing she said about her dad that he’s never forgotten.
Austin Butler tells Jimmy Fallon about the night Lisa Marie took him upstairs at Graceland
What she said to him was “I want to show you something.” And then this, about the rooms up there: “up there, he’s not Elvis, he’s just dad.”
Months after Lisa Marie passed away, Marchese went up to pull a few of Elvis’s things for an exhibit heading to London. The carpet up there is so old and fragile that the staff won’t even run a vacuum over it, so in all her years she had never once looked beneath the bed.
“And I never looked under the bed,” she said. This time she did.
“…there’s a pair of blue slippers right under the bed, and they’re still there.”
They were Elvis’s own slippers, sitting right where he’d left them all those years ago. And Marchese is sure Lisa Marie knew they were there. That night with Riley and Austin, she showed him his slippers, and they were left right where they belong. To Marchese, that was the reason Lisa Marie had wanted the key so badly in the first place.
“Discovering those and knowing the fact that she knew they were there was kind of a comfort thing for [Lisa],” she said.
Butler has said that same night changed how he saw the man he’d been playing on screen. Go back up and watch him tell Fallon the rest, in his own words.