“”””ITEM IS IN STOCK NOW””””PLACE YOUR ORDER WITHOUT ANY HESITATIONS””””

Riley Keough on Growing Up Presley, Losing Lisa Marie, and Inheriting Graceland

Daisy Jones & the Six propelled her to stardom even as she navigated tragedies, new motherhood, and a legal struggle with Priscilla.

By BRITT HENNEMUTH

Photography By MARIO SORRENTI

Styled By NICOLA FORMICHETTI

Her grandfather died before she was born, but his house in Memphis stayed in the family. Graceland. Years ago, Riley Keough and her mom, Lisa Marie Presley, would visit for Thanksgiving with Keough’s brother and sisters. They would stay at the official hotel, and when the tourists departed the legendary home for the day, they’d go over and hang out, drive golf carts around the grounds, and celebrate the season together. “When Elvis’s chefs were alive, they used to still cook dinner for us, which was really special,” she tells me. “It was very Southern: greens and fried catfish and fried chicken and hush puppies. Cornbread and beans. Banana pudding.”

It’s an early evening in May—Keough’s 34th birthday, as it happens—and we’re in a hotel lobby outside St. Gallen, Switzerland, hoping a waiter will materialize. The place is nearly empty. An elderly woman sleeps in a wheelchair. A bartender swats flies away from a sweating cheese plate. A pianist is attempting to enliven happy hour with a classical rendition of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” The chords reverberate around the vast, sterile rotunda.

“There were a few times that we slept there,” Keough says of Graceland, “but I don’t know if I should say that.” She pauses. The second floor has always been closed to the public out of respect for Elvis Presley’s family because the singer had a fatal heart attack there. Then again, Keough’s family was Presley’s family. Who had the right to be there if not them? “The tours would start in the morning, and we would hide upstairs until they were over,” she continues. “The security would bring us breakfast. It’s actually such a great memory. We would order sausage and biscuits, and hide until the tourists finished.”

In the coming weeks, I’ll hear Keough’s unselfconscious laugh and see the spitfire side of her that her friends adore. But today, she speaks softly and carefully, with her knees pulled up to her chest. Life has thrown a lot at her in short order, some of it joyous, some of it obliterating: the death of her brother, by suicide, in 2020. The birth of her and her husband’s daughter in 2022. The death of her mother, following complications of prior weight-loss surgery, early this year. The debut of her star-making ’70s rock series, Daisy Jones & the Six, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. A surprising legal fight with her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, over Lisa Marie’s estate and hence Graceland, as well as the family’s interest in Elvis Presley Enterprises.

Keough and I will talk about all of this. She will introduce me to her baby and tell me the girl’s name, which she’s never made public before. She’ll say, of the losses she’s suffered, that there were times it felt like something fundamental had broken inside her. But now, in the hotel lobby, she says simply, “This is not my best birthday.” It’s her first without her mother, for one thing. “Last year, I was in Greece wrapping Daisy Jones. I found out that I won the Camera d’Or, I was on the beach, and it all happened at the same time. It was very beautiful. I feel like that’ll ride me through this one.”

Keough is now the sole custodian of Graceland and the family shares of Elvis Presley Enterprises, all of which were worth just $5 million at the time of Elvis’s death and are now reportedly in the neighborhood of $500 million. She’s also a rising star, producer, and director: The award at Cannes was for the drama War Pony, which she codirected with Gina Gammell, about two Lakota boys on a reservation in South Dakota. Everything that happened to Keough this year, good and bad, happened in full public view—and will continue to.

“There’s the Kennedys and there’s the Presleys,” says the director Baz Luhrmann, who got to know Keough and her mother while working on Elvis. “They are the royal families of America. And in different ways, they both were, as Shakespeare says, ‘wedded to calamity.’ Is it genetic? Is it because they have such high standards? Is it because the world watches them? Maybe. Because to be American royalty is not just to have your country watch you. To be American royalty is to have the whole world watch you.”

Order a copy to know more……

Condition is Brand New. Shipped with USPS Media/Priority Mail as per request!!

Magazine has a Bar-Code!! Newsstand Edition!!