Riley Keough on Growing Up as Elvis’s Granddaughter, Losing Lisa Marie, and Inheriting Graceland

Back in Switzerland, the sun is setting, and Keough has wrapped herself in a sweater. We’re so many hours ahead of LA that, when we started talking inside, the only birthday wishes she’d gotten were automatic emails from her doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Ever since we sat in the grass, though, her phone has been singing with alerts from friends.

Keough smiles. “Oh my God, so many texts, I must be special,” she jokes.

We say goodbye for the day in the lobby. As Keough slips away to join her husband and daughter, the pianist, in all seriousness, starts playing “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”

Too late. Riley has left the building.

The world first discovered that Keough and her husband had welcomed a daughter at Lisa Marie’s funeral at Graceland in January. Keough wrote a eulogy but was too overcome to deliver it, so her husband read it for her. It included these lines: “I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters. Thank you for giving me strength, my heart, my empathy, my courage, my sense of humor, my manners, my temper, my wildness, my tenacity. I’m a product of your heart.”

On a hot June afternoon, Keough hugs me hello outside the unassuming ’70s tract house that she and Smith-Petersen have been renting at the end of a cul-de-sac in Calabasas. “Don’t judge, this isn’t my aesthetic,” she says. “After my mom died, I needed to be close to my sisters. There were only three houses available out here, so we just moved in. We were stuck.”

The family’s moving to a more private place tomorrow—even now, there’s a paparazzo parked at the end of the street—and Smith-Petersen is packing boxes in the garage. The family will still be close to Keough’s 14-year-old half sisters, Harper and Finley Lockwood, which is imperative: Luhrmann remembers Keough at Lisa Marie’s funeral “physically holding the twins as people filed past in the garden.”

I ask if the new place is her ideal home.

“No, but I love suburbia,” she says. “This is my dream: normalcy. I’m happy out here.”

Keough ushers me inside and, over the barking of the family’s dogs, Zushi and Grubs, I hear an infant’s cry.

“Hi, baby,” she says. Then to me: “This is Tupelo.”

Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen arrived via surrogate in August 2022. Keough says of surrogacy, “I think it’s a very cool, selfless, and incredible act that these women do to help other people. I can carry children, but it felt like the best choice for what I had going on physically with the autoimmune stuff.” As for her daughter’s name: Tupelo, of course, was the King of Rock and Roll’s birthplace in Mississippi. “It’s funny because we picked her name before the Elvis movie,” Keough says. “I was like, ‘This is great because it’s not really a well-known word or name in relation to my family—it’s not like Memphis or something.” A big laugh at her naivete. “Then when the Elvis movie came out, it was like, Tupelo this and Tupelo that. I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ But it’s fine.”

Her daughter’s middle name is a tribute to her late brother, Benjamin Storm Keough, who died when he was 27.