Lisa Marie Presley 'Felt This Desire to Be Alone' When She Left Scientology, Riley Keough Reveals (Exclusive)
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10/17/2024 03:30 PM
"I don't know if she did this mass exodus thing because she started taking drugs, or if it was other way around," Riley Keough tells PEOPLE
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Lisa Marie Presley in 2015.Riley Keough is opening up about her late mom Lisa Marie Presley's relationship with Scientology.
In her posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, which Riley, 35, completed for her mom after her death in 2023, Lisa Marie writes about first joining Scientology with her mom, Priscilla Presley, when she was 10.
After several stays in Scientology's Celebrity Centre as a teen, Lisa Marie ultimately distanced herself from the church in 2013, years into her addiction to opioids. (She started taking them following the birth of her twins Finley and Harper Lockwood in 2008).
"She left everything," Riley tells PEOPLE of her mother. "She left her friends, her house, Los Angeles. She had this life that was very big, and she just wanted to run away and disappear."
When her twins were born, Lisa Marie and her then-husband Michael Lockwood decided to move from L.A. to England, after she found out that her staff had been overcharging her cards. She also bought a house in Calabasas, Calif., for Riley and her brother Benjamin Keough to live in.
"Her community was gone," Riley writes. "She was in the countryside with two babies and no friends."
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Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley at the "Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone" launch party on April 27, 2012 in West Hollywood, California.While Lisa Marie was in England, Riley writes that she had "no idea" her mom's "pill use was slowly increasing." Lisa Marie went to rehab in Mexico but made an excuse to cut her stay short in order to be back in England when the twins started school.
After another stay in rehab, Lisa Marie moved to Nashville with Michael and the twins. Two weeks after she moved, Riley writes her mom was back on opioids, and the "addiction got worse."
"After I left Scientology, I started upping pills," Lisa Marie writes in the book, adding that "it escalated to 80 pills a day."
Speaking of that time in her mom's life, Riley tells PEOPLE, "I don't know what came first, the chicken or the egg."
"I don't know if she did this mass exodus thing because she started taking drugs, or if it was other way around," Riley continues. "She felt this desire to be alone with her children and her husband and away from everything. And then that, I feel, maybe lent itself with the isolation of that, to the drug problem becoming worse."
After Lisa Marie sent Riley and Benjamin a series of concerning texts asking them to get her out of Nashville, they rented an RV for Benjamin to pick her up in and bring her to L.A.
When they arrived back in L.A., Lisa Marie was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was sent to court-ordered rehab but continued getting high "on the post-rehab cocktail," Riley writes in the book. At the same time, she told Lockwood she was leaving him.
Lisa Marie finally decided to get sober when she was hospitalized again, this time for a seizure. "She had been very chastened by the seizure," Riley writes.
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Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley in 2017.During Lisa Marie's struggles with addiction, Benjamin's own addiction troubles began growing in private, as did his depression. He died by suicide at age 27 in 2020.
"My brother was just an incredibly sensitive person, and there was addiction there with him," Riley says. "But it's something I am constantly replaying in my mind going, 'What happened?' Because it felt like everything was fine and extremely normal for many years. So it was very destabilizing and shocking. I think my brother's addiction was his way of coping with his own discomfort and emotional pain. And it was a few years that got just really incredibly difficult."
Following Benjamin's death, Riley knew her mom wouldn't survive long. She died three years later, at age 54 of a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery.
Despite the hard times in recent years, Riley hopes From Here to the Great Unknown shows that her family isn't only defined by tragedy.
"A lot of our life was very happy," she says. "The tragedy within my family has been so heartbreaking, but we also had an incredible amount of fun and these beautiful experiences that I don't know if people get to have very often. I feel extremely grateful for that."
From Here to the Great Unknown is available now.
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