Every mom knows the moment. Your grown daughter has a new boyfriend, and suddenly everybody wants to know what you really think of him.
For Lisa Marie Presley, that question came from a newspaper reporter.
It was March 2014. Lisa Marie, Elvis Presley’s only child, was getting ready for her first tour shows a very long way from Memphis. She had built a career of her own as a singer, and she sat down with The Canberra Times, a newspaper in the city of Canberra, to talk about the music and the trip.
But the paper also knew a little about her family.
Lisa Marie’s older daughter is Riley Keough. She was 24 back then, and she’s Elvis’s granddaughter. And she was dating a stuntman named Ben Smith-Petersen.
So the reporter asked the question every mom of a grown daughter gets sooner or later. What did Lisa Marie make of him?
A famous mother could easily have dodged that one. Lisa Marie had spent her whole life with the world curious about her family, and she knew how quickly a few words can turn into a headline. She could have changed the subject or given a careful little statement about privacy.
She didn’t. Her answer was short and warm.
“He’s a sweet kid. I like him.”
That’s the whole thing. You can almost hear the smile in it. It’s the kind of thing a mom says when she’s already decided the young man is all right and doesn’t feel any need to make a fuss about it.
Later that month, on March 16, the same paper ran a longer story about her and her family. This time Lisa Marie said a bit more about Riley, and it’s clear which one of the two she thought had fallen harder. Her daughter, she said, was “completely smitten” with Ben.
Then she added something that tells you a lot about the kind of young woman Riley was.
“Riley is so independent, she wants to do her own thing, she stays low-key.”
If you’ve raised a daughter who knows her own mind, you’ll recognize that tone. It’s part pride and part a mom accepting that her girl is going to make her own choices. Lisa Marie seemed perfectly happy about this one.
Riley has told the other side of this love story herself, and in this clip she looks back on the very first time she met Ben.
Riley remembers meeting Ben for the first time
As it turned out, Lisa Marie had read the young man right.
Riley and Ben married in February 2015, less than a year after that interview ran. They’re still together today. And they’re now parents themselves, to a little girl named Tupelo, who was born in August 2022.
So the stuntman Lisa Marie called a sweet kid back in 2014 became her son-in-law, and later the dad of her granddaughter.
What stays with you is how little fuss she made. She had every reason to guard her words around a reporter. Instead she gave the kind of quick and honest answer plenty of moms give at the kitchen table. Then she let Riley’s happiness do the rest of the talking.