Riley Keough says Michael Jackson’s Neverland felt more like home than Graceland
Riley Keough has shared some insight into her extraordinary childhood and growing up as the first grandchild of Elvis Presley.
The Daisy Jones and the Six actor is the first of Lisa Marie Presley’s four children. Singer-songwriter Lisa Marie died in January aged 54 due to complications of weight-loss surgery.
In a new Vanity Fair profile interview, published on Tuesday (8 August), Keough went into detail about some of the most curious elements of her life in the public eye.
In the early Nineties, Lisa Marie had a close friendship and later marriage with Michael Jackson, following allegations that he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old boy. (Jackson settled the case in 1994 for an undisclosed amount.)
As Keough was a young child at the time, she was unaware of the media commentary about the superstar singer, and now acknowledges that her entire childhood was “probably very extreme”.
“In hindsight, I can see how crazy these things would be to somebody from the outside,” she noted. “But when you’re living in them, it’s just your life and your family. You just remember the love, and I had real love for Michael.”
After recalling a memory when the “Dirty Diana” vocalist shut down a toy shop to get her a teddy bear, Keough stated the similarities that existed between Jackson and her grandfather, Elvis.
“I think he really got a kick out of being able to make people happy, in the most epic way possible, which I think he and my grandfather had in common,” she said.
Both singers also had their own sprawling estates: Elvis’ Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee and Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara, California.
“Which one did I like better?” she asked herself, before continuing: “I spent more time at Neverland than Graceland, to be honest. That was a real home, whereas Graceland was a museum in my lifetime.”
Since the “Suspicious Minds” singer’s death in 1977, aged 42, Graceland has been a place of pilgrimage for his fans, with daily tours showing a closer look at how he lived.
Keough explained that she and her family would occasionally stay the night there, on the second floor – a level always restricted from public access due to Elvis’s fatal heart attack there.
“The tours would start in the morning, and we would hide upstairs until they were over,” she told the publication.
“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.”
Last week, it was announced that Keough is now the sole trustee of Lisa Marie’s estate, following a dispute with her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, over its future.
As a result, Keough is now the sole custodian of Graceland and the family shares of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which is rumoured to be worth around $500m (£392m).
