Elvis died on August 16, 1977. The next day, thousands of mourners walked through the Graceland living room (the same room where Keough and Winfrey had their interview) to pay their respects to the king, where his body lay essentially laid out. According to the hours of tape recordings Lisa Marie recounted while preparing her memoir, young Lisa Marie visited her father in his coffin late at night. “I was so busy looking at everyone else’s grief that I couldn’t have my own yet,” Lisa Marie said. She walked up to the casket and asked her father, “Why is this happening and why are you doing this?” No wonder, Keough said, she sometimes blamed her grandfather for her mother’s unhappiness and sometimes for “chaotic” drug abuse.

After Benjamin Keough’s death, Riley Keough said, she kept her son on dry ice in a coffin at her California home for “months” until the body could be transferred to the Meditation Garden at Graceland for burial. At one point, Lisa Marie had a tattoo artist come to her home and look at the body so she could get tattoos to match her son’s. “On paper I could see how this sounds completely crazy and absurd, but my mother was completely herself… I stayed silent because she was my mother and does what she wants,” Keough said.

Boost for Graceland

Memphis tourism officials and representatives from Graceland and Elvis Presley Enterprises – including Keough, the heir to the Graceland estate – probably couldn’t have been happier with the program, which in a sense served as a link not only to the memoir but also to the Elvis tourist experience . The show began with Oprah driving through the mansion’s signature musical gates while singing Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” Winfrey described Elvis as “a larger-than-life superstar” with a “distinctive” voice and “moves that shook the world.” She called him “the undisputed and eternal King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Most of the villa looked beautiful, or at least fascinating, from the jungle room to the horse stables. The interview was conducted in the Graceland living room, with Winfrey and Keough framed by the room’s famous stained glass peacocks. Each woman was dressed in white, matching the ethereal cloud effect of the room’s white carpet and white upholstery. Winfrey shared many of her own Presley family stories and revealed a long-standing friendship with Lisa Marie; She said she and Elvis’ daughter called each other “Cuz” and “Cousin” because her maternal grandmother was named Presley.