The Presleys’ Unfinished Lives

Less than four weeks after New York magazine published its buzzy piece about the rise of the nepo baby in December 2022, Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley, unexpectedly died of a heart attack at 54. She was in the middle of awards season appearances for Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster Elvis with her daughter, actress and film director Riley Keough. Losing one’s mother young is tragic enough, but Keough was still reeling from the suicide of her brother, Benjamin, back in 2020.

Keough could have spiraled, but, instead, she kept on working, wowing Sundance with her performance in A24’s ribald Florida-set comedy Zola and winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d'Or with her directorial debut, War Pony. Then came her Emmy-nominated role as a Stevie Nicksish rock frontwoman in Amazon’s hit miniseries Daisy Jones and the Six. 

Right now, Keough doesn’t want to talk about her impressive resume. She’s at Belmont this autumn Monday evening to discuss a project she never intended to undertake: completing her mother’s memoir. And, given the tumult of the last few years, she’s clearly not happy about this whole child of privilege thing. “My mom’s perspective on nepo babies is that it was embarrassing, " she told the standing-room-only crowd. “You can’t just be a dilettante. I’m really grateful to her for that.”

Since her breakout role in Mad Max: Fury Road, Keough has proven herself a calm and subtle presence amid worlds gone bonkers. She’s equally at home playing Chris Pratt’s wife in the espionage series The Terminal List as a nonverbal bigfoot in last spring’s bizarrely beautiful Sasquatch Sunset. In the wake of a childhood that saw her mother become a tabloid fixture when she left musician Danny Keough for the already embattled Michael Jackson, Keough has maintained a lowkey life, marrying young after she met Aussie stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen on the set of Mad Max and remaining out of the gossip columns in her day to day as much as possible

When Presley died, no one knew Keough had her first child–a daughter she named Tupelo–five months prior. They also didn’t know about the severe Lyme disease that forced her to use a surrogate, a secret she first revealed in a 2023 Vanity Fair profile. Ditto the details of the lawsuit her grandmother, Priscilla, filed over the future of Graceland, which Keough settled to protect her 16-year-old twin sister's inheritance.

So, when Keough has something to say, she’d rather do it her own way than inspire the clickbait headlines her second-gen celebrity contemporaries garner whether they want to or not. During her talk, Keough never excoriated the onslaught of tabloid storms she’s endured or the silver spoon pejoratives. But she did design her entire book tour around conversations with the spawn of rock and country greats, a series of stops that began at Graceland on Sunday with TMZ staple and Paris Hilton compatriot Nicole Richie.  

Keough went a bit more low-profile in Nashville as she discussed her experiences with Holly Williams—Hank Jr,’s daughter and proprietor of White’s Mercantile. Yet, the message was the same: the psychological weight of that nepo baby privilege is as unique as it is potentially debilitating—especially for the offspring of legends who died young. “When I walk into a room, everybody already knows everything. As a little girl, my mom was asked about ‘it’ so much, I don’t know if she ever processed it,” Keough said. “The way she was interviewed was always an interrogation. I never experienced that until I started press for this book tour.”

In Lisa Marie’s last days, she began a loose draft of the book and hours of audio notes nowhere resembling a completed project. Though she’s proven herself a deft but infrequent writer, Keough felt compelled to will the book into being. The result is From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir, a collage of Lisa Marie’s life in her own words and Keough’s interjections. Separating each voice with different fonts, the book comes off less as the newest celebrity nonfiction cash cow than a multigenerational play steeped in Southern traditions that Tennessee Williams could have written if he lived a bit longer. 

While Keough didn’t grow up in the South, her visits to Graceland were a frequent and necessary stop that she credits with serving as a foundation for her own family. As a child, she just longed for the right kind of banana pudding unavailable in L.A., but soon realized that her mother’s dedication to preserving family traditions in the face of dissolving marriages and rehab stints was a direct result of her enduring Southern values. “We had Easter baskets into our twenties and huge family celebrations for every holiday. That’s not something people really do who aren’t from here,” Keough said. And Lisa Marie went all out for every occasion. “The parties were like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so much. Lisa’s given my kid a goat.’”

These moments of extreme tradition sharply contrasted with Lisa Marie’s personal life and her children’s unorthodox upbringing. After Presley's breakup with Jackson, Keough’s father sacrificed his love life to ensure he could be there for his children. Danny Keough lived in Lisa Marie’s house and never left her side—even as she drew her last breaths. “The universe kept them together,” Keough said. “Her boyfriends had some issues when they found out. This is my house. These are my children. This is my ex-husband who lives over there.”

Keough never shied away from discussing the unique set of hard knocks that influenced her upbringing during her conversation with Williams; she remained focused on how she and her mother got through the most trying parts of their lives—especially dealing with the aftermath of her brother’s suicide. “People ask if my family’s cursed. No,” Keough said. To combat such self-defeatism, Presley made sure that her children knew how to handle the pitfalls of a fame they didn’t ask for with a sense of optimism. “She just wanted us to feel joy,” Keough said.

After her son’s death, Presley began hosting support groups in her home with Danny’s help. That strength and a large gap in resources about how to mourn led Keough to seek her own certification as a grief doula so that she could repurpose the tragedies that made such profitable tabloid fodder. For Keough, her mother’s approach to healing was outright defiant. “I don’t feel that her life was a failure,” Keough said. “All that matters is the trying part.”

Though Keough could have easily ridden the success of Daisy Jones and her increased public profile to a career of Marvel movies and showpony cable series, she’d rather keep doing what she’s been doing for the last decade: attempting to stay out of the spotlight and enjoying time with her family unless a project speaks to her like Sasquatch Sunset, Noah Baumbach’s upcoming  follow up to Barbie and White Noise, or a new indie drama with Elle Fanning and Pamela Anderson. Regardless, the weight of grief and her newfound Graceland responsibilities are heavy in ways lost on people who use terms like nepo baby.  “I’m still navigating,” Keough said.