Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s eldest granddaughter, is familiar with Graceland, his renowned Memphis residence. She has spent a lot of time in the mansion since she was a child, albeit not all of it was intentional.
The actress disclosed during her Wednesday appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers that she and her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, and brother, Benjamin Keough, would frequently find themselves stranded in Elvis Presley’s bedroom while they were at the estate waiting for the daily tours to conclude.
We were stranded until around five o’clock if we didn’t leave before the excursions started,” Keough said to host Seth Meyers. “The tour does not include my mother’s room or Elvis’ room. Thus, we would essentially have to wait upstairs. And until the excursions ended, we would be stuck.
Keough laughed when Meyers questioned them about what they feared would occur if they went around. It’s amusing because, I suppose, they could have temporarily halted the tours to allow us to run out of time, but they never did. “They never made an offer,” she remarked.
In From Here to the Great Unknown, her mother’s postmortem memoir, which Keough helped finish after Lisa Marie’s death in 2023, she went further into her most treasured Graceland memories.
In the book, Keough writes, “You can truly feel Elvis’ presence upstairs at Graceland—it’s exactly as he left it.” We would all occasionally sleep in his bed. My mother adored lying on her father’s bed because it made her feel close to him, and we felt the same way. However, if we got up late and the trip had already begun, we would be stranded in Elvis’s room until late afternoon because his bedroom isn’t included in the tour and no guests are permitted upstairs.
“We’d have employees bring food up, usually McDonald’s, and just hang out all day,” she adds. stuck in Elvis Presley’s bedroom.
Keough and her brother would frequently pretend to be at a salon while sitting beneath their grandmother’s hair dryer as a way to kill time. Their mother enjoyed looking through the books on Elvis’ shelf in the interim.
“It was evident that he was seeking a more profound understanding of the world—the majority of the books had spiritual or self-help titles,” Keough noted. “Elvis would scribble “AMEN!” next to phrases and underline them. You could sense the very wounded emotions he shared with my mother when you observed the undertones and the spiritual exploration. He was looking for self-healing and a higher purpose, which she would subsequently look for in her own life.
According to her, her mother would go “line by line,” seeking significance in all that Elvis had emphasized. She remembers that once security would knock on the door, they would serve us biscuits and sausage, which we would then devour. “He’s still there in that room. It bears the imprint of his spirit.