Every parent of a grown kid knows how it goes. They show up for a hug and a kind word, and then they’re halfway out the door before you’ve caught your breath.
Turns out Elvis Presley’s daughter got the very same treatment.
In 2013 Lisa Marie Presley was on tour singing her own songs. Elvis’s only child had put out her third album, “Storm & Grace,” in 2012. She’d even shot the video for her song “Weary” at Sun Studio in Memphis, the little studio where her father made his first recording.
And she didn’t hit the road by herself. Her twin girls, Harper and Finley, were 4 and came along. In a 2013 interview published by HuffPost, she sounded happy about it: “They’re with me and I get to take them to all these different places. And every day they love waking up in a new place.”
This Entertainment Tonight report catches Lisa Marie getting ready for the road during her “Storm & Grace” years, so you can see the tour life she was talking about.
Lisa Marie Presley getting ready to go on tour
The twins were little. Her oldest wasn’t.
Riley Keough was 24 that year. Today she’s an actress and a producer and a mom of two herself. Back then she was a young woman with a full life of her own, and her mom knew it.
In that same HuffPost interview, the person asking the questions admitted their own grown kids never took much interest in their work. Lisa Marie got it right away. “Yep, I know, they get like that,” she said.
Then she told a story about Riley.
“Like the other night, Riley came to the show, and she had to go right after the show. She said, ‘That was good, mom, I gotta go’.”
That was the whole review. Lisa Marie laughed as she told it. “I was like, ‘OK, great!'”
She wasn’t hurt one bit. Kids that age, she said, always have somewhere to be. “They always have something pressing going on at that age, like late teens, early 20s,” she explained. “They cannot be bothered with you.”
But she didn’t stop there. “It ebbs and flows, but they are very supportive.”
That same year Lisa Marie also sat for an interview made for Graceland’s own YouTube channel, and it’s a good way to hear her voice from this stretch of her life.
Lisa Marie Presley’s 2013 interview for Graceland
Here’s where the story gets sweet. The interviewer brought up a tabloid story that had tried to paint Riley as wild. Lisa Marie laughed it off.
“Riley is not wild or out of control,” she said.
Then she turned the whole thing around. “I go to Riley for advice.”
She described reading that kind of story and thinking the exact opposite: “I’m sitting there going, ‘No, actually she kind of keeps me together’.”
So Elvis’s daughter, a mom of four, said her grown girl was the steady one. The same daughter who dashed off after the show was the person she went to when she needed help sorting something out.
This fan upload from 2012 has Lisa Marie talking about her kids in the same years as that tour.
Lisa Marie Presley talks about her children
There’s something very ordinary about the whole thing, and that’s what makes it fun. Elvis’s daughter had a 24-year-old who couldn’t stick around after the show, same as plenty of moms out there. She laughed about it and still told a reporter how much she leaned on that girl.