Lisa Marie Presley knew what a magical childhood looked like. She was Elvis and Priscilla’s only child, and she grew up with Graceland all around her.
When she became a mom, she wanted her own kids to have some of that magic too.
Lisa Marie had two children with her husband at the time, Danny Keough. First came Riley, and then her little brother Ben. Riley is the one who tells this story, in her chapters of “From Here to the Great Unknown.” That’s the memoir built from tapes her mother recorded, and it came out on Oct 8, 2024.
The family’s home was in Hidden Hills, California. The London Review of Books, in its review of the memoir, calls it “a rustic idyll.” There were fruit trees and horses. There were goats and chickens and even peacocks wandering around. And out in the yard stood a 600-year-old oak tree with a swing hanging from it.
For two little kids, it was heaven. Riley remembers days spent “crashing bikes and running off finding snakes and getting cuts and falling into rosebushes.” Sounds like a normal childhood, scraped knees and all.
Sundays were big. The family sat down to large Sunday suppers with Priscilla’s mother and “loads” of cousins around the table.
Then there’s the part of Riley’s story that sounds like it belongs in a different family altogether. It happened on an ordinary afternoon. Then again, it happened every afternoon.
At four o’clock, the nanny rang a bell.
That was the signal. Riley and Ben came in from outside for tea and crumpets with jam. It was a very British teatime, in a California home full of goats and chickens, in the family of the King of Rock and Roll.
It wasn’t an accident, either. Riley gives her mom all the credit. “My mom curated all that for us,” she says. And then she sums it up in a way any Elvis fan will love: “it was her version of Graceland.”
Lisa Marie couldn’t give her kids the exact childhood she’d had in Memphis. So she made them one of their own, right down to the bell at four o’clock.
“From my point of view, we were a close, normal family,” Riley says.
Riley sat down with TODAY to talk about her mother’s memoir, and it’s worth watching to hear her speak about her mom in her own voice.
Riley Keough opens up about her mom on TODAY
Years later, after her twin girls Harper and Finley were born, Lisa Marie went looking for that same kind of magic again. She moved the family to England, to a home in Rotherfield, East Sussex. There, as the book puts it, she wanted to give the twins “a sort of fairytale life.” She cooked and gardened and made a home.
It’s easy to see the same mom in both houses. In California and in England, Lisa Marie kept trying to hand her children a little of the wonder she’d felt growing up as Elvis’s girl.