The late singer - who passed away in January 2023 - was left devastated when Benjamin Keough took his own life in 2020 at the age of 27, and revealed in her newly published posthumous memoir she’d kept his body on dry ice in a separate part of her house, and despite the news causing a stir, the Daisy Jones and the Six actress insisted her mum would have just ignored the comments.
She told People magazine: “If my mom were here, she’d be like, ‘Yeah, whatever. I don’t care. If people think that’s crazy, they can go f*** themselves’.”
Riley explained Presley made the decision so Benjamin was “in her control” amid a time of uncertainty during the Covid pandemic.
She said: “The truth is that it was Covid and the plans to bury him were really unclear.
Riley Keough said her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, wouldn't care about the reaction to the news she kept her late son's body in her home for two months. Photo / Getty Images
“We needed to get to Graceland, and it was really hard because it was [the pandemic era] and we didn’t know who was going to come, so there was a lot of planning that needed to happen.
“She didn’t want his body to be somewhere where people could mess with it.
“We come from a family that’s pretty high-profile, so I think she ultimately just felt like she wanted to be in control of the situation.”
Riley finished Presley’s book, From Here to the Great Unknown, after her death, and she wrote in the memoir that it was “really important” for her mom to “have ample time to say goodbye” to Benjamin, “the same way she’d done with her dad”, Elvis Presley, who died in 1977 when she was 9 years old.
Presley wrote: “Having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could go and spend time with him and talk to him.”
The singer enlisted the help of a compassionate funeral director to get Benjamin’s body to her house and had to keep the room where he was kept at 55F (13C) and she felt “fortunate” to be able to continue to care for him while she decided on whether his final resting place should be the family’s Graceland estate or in Hawaii.
She wrote: “That was part of why it took so long.”
“I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f***ing p*** out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.
“I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.”
Benjamin was eventually laid to rest in Graceland with his grandfather Elvis, after a funeral service in Malibu.
