All the Scientology allowed by Riley Keough in her mother Lisa Marie Presley’s ‘memoir’

In her preface to From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir, Riley Keough explains that her mother Lisa Marie Presley had tried to write an autobiography, and that she had recorded herself talking about her past on audiotapes, but she had been unable to complete the project.

Then, just before her tragic death in January 2023 at only 54, Lisa went to her daughter and asked for help. The result of that, Riley writes, was this book, which contains alternating passages from the two women, each telling the story of Lisa’s life from their own perspectives. As she prepared the manuscript, Riley says she left what her mother said on tape relatively intact, with some editing for clarity.

The result is a very short book, especially for how many years are covered, coming in at only 287 pages. It became available online Tuesday morning at midnight, and we devoured it pretty quickly yesterday, struck by how little Lisa had managed to get down. Riley says, for example, that there was an entire decade — from Lisa’s divorce from Michael Jackson in 1996 until her marriage to Michael Lockwood in 2006 — about which she had said or written virtually nothing, and Riley had to fill that entire chapter of the book herself.

We were especially interested in what Riley would leave in that Lisa might have said about her Scientology involvement and her fiery exit from it in 2014, a story that Lisa had told your Proprietor and Mike Rinder personally. We also know that our audience is interested in what Scientology content might have made it in. So fair warning right now: If you don’t want spoilers, you might skip this story and wait to read the book for yourself.

OK, still with us? Let’s go through each mention of Scientology in the book, and compare it to what we know from the record.

Chapter One: Upstairs at Graceland is a poignant, funny, and very revealing look at Lisa’s childhood, her bond with her famous father Elvis Presley, and what Elvis was like at home. It’s pretty much everything readers will be looking for in this book, and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then, in Chapter Two: He’s Gone, Lisa takes us through the death of her father, and how devastating it was for her at only nine years old. In part it was so difficult to take because it meant she would then be spending more time with her mother Priscilla (who does not come off well, especially in these early chapters.)

Then comes the first mention of Scientology.

When I turned ten years old, my mom met John Travolta and arranged for him to meet me for that birthday — he was having a hot moment with Welcome Back, Kotter. He talked to her about Scientology, and a few days later, she joined. I was in the car with her and she was describing it to me, saying that it can help you become really powerful. I was always obsessed with Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie — I wanted to have superpowers.

Okay, I thought, that's really cool. I want to do that.

So now we were members of the Church of Scientology.

My mom would drop me off after school at their building in Hollywood. I felt like she was dumping me there so they could handle me, and she didn't have to. Scientology actually helped. It gave me someplace to go, and somewhere I could be introspective, somewhere to talk about what had happened and some way to deal with it. I took to it quickly and I really liked it.

I got the idea that we weren't just our brains, we weren't just our bodies, we weren't just our emotions. We had those things, but that wasn't all that we were. We were spirits. I would ask myself, "Why are we here? Why am I here? What's the point of everything?" At that point the church felt radical in an exciting way — it didn't feel like an organized religion, really. It attracted cool, unusual, artistic people.

It became my tribe.

Spanky Taylor (who worked for Travolta at this time) remembered things a little differently, but her account doesn’t actually contradict what Lisa says here. In Spanky’s version, Priscilla (who had been divorced from Elvis for four years when he died), found some Scientology books in Elvis’s possession. (Elvis didn’t like Scientologists, but he read widely, particularly about arcane matters, and may have been curious about L. Ron Hubbard’s writings.)

Spanky said that when Priscilla became curious about the books, she called the only Scientologist she knew, Travolta, and he then sent Spanky to talk to Priscilla to gauge her interest. And that’s how Priscilla ended up joining Scientology. But she might not have told all this to her daughter.

When Lisa described her childhood to us, she also talked about being “dumped” at Scientology by her mother, and less about being inspired by its teachings.

But roping in ten-year-olds with the promise of someday becoming like Samantha Stephens? Yeah, that tracks.

In Chapter Three: The Wall, Lisa describes her school years at a series of Scientology schools and what a hellion she was, experimenting recklessly with drugs.

But still, over the next few years, I started to develop a really bad attitude and I was getting heavily into drugs. They kicked me out of the Culver City school. Scientology didn't want to fully kick me out, though, so they sent me to the Apple Scientology school in Los Feliz. They thought this new school would be more capable of handling me, but I failed everything every fucking time.

…I was always in the ethics office, which was essentially the principal's office. (I can't tell you how many people I've met since who say, "I met you in ethics...") I'd joined that school on probation and never got off of it.

...I felt like my mom was always actively trying to figure out how to send me away — beyond Switzerland and Israel she had mostly jumped me off into Scientology because she thought they could handle me. Scientology kind of raised me for her.

...But now, I was on my way to be a boarder at Happy Valley School in Ojai, and I was mortified. The school was clearly designed for parents who wanted to just send their kids away.

At the time, Lisa says, her mother was seeing actor Michael Edwards, who today is 80. Lisa accuses him of abusing her for months, including touching her sexually. (She apparently also referenced this in a 2003 Playboy interview.) Later, Lisa said she lost her virginity at 14 to a 23-year-old actor she doesn’t name.

My mom made me live with her again — but again I was miserable, so I was a terror. It was clear she didn't want me there. She tried to make me go to other boarding schools, but it never worked out, so in the middle of the night she made me pack my bags and she took me to the Scientology Celebrity Centre and dropped me off.

The woman who ran the place took me to a tiny room on the third floor. I was just glad to be out of my mom's house.

The first morning I removed the large mirror from the wall, called my coke dealer, and invited him and about six or seven other people over. We proceeded to have a four-day bender in that room.

I woke up at one point and everyone was asleep. I had a moment where I was just done. I yelled, "Everyone wake up, get the fuck out, out, get out!" I took all the rest of the blow and flushed it down the toilet.

I went down to where they audit people, and I was shaking, sweating, crying. "Help me," I said, though I could barely speak.

They moved me to a really nice room on the sixth floor — it was a luxury palace with a kitchen and a dining room and everything. They made me promise to behave myself and study, create, actually do shit. For some reason, it worked. For the next few months, I actually started to do really well. Then my mother tried to make me move back into her house. And that's when fucking DEFCON 3 started.

...My mom got me home that night, and heavy negotiations started the next day. She agreed to let me go back to the Celebrity Centre but I would have to go to their Narconon office and enter their rehab.

In Chapter Four: There’s a Bluebird in My Heart, Lisa describes meeting rock bassist Danny Keough (he was 21, she was 17), and how obsessed with him she became. They initially got pregnant, but she got an abortion and then regretted it. Then she plotted to get pregnant by him again to convince him to marry her. It worked, and Riley was the result. They then had their son Ben, and Lisa began her singing career.

In Chapter Five: Mimi, Lisa describes getting to know Michael Jackson (called “Mimi” by her kids).

We just clicked. Phone numbers were exchanged, and he'd call me. I was living in Clearwater at the time, really working hard at Scientology, making progress. Back then I wouldn't even take Advil, which is crazy. But Michael would call.

...This went on for a few months, and then the molestation accusations hit. Michael disappeared, went into hiding. Nobody could find him, I put the word out that I was there for him if he wanted to talk to me. He called me pretty much every other day. I was one of only a handful of people who he talked to or who knew where he was.

Lisa later leveled with Keough that Jackson had asked her to leave her marriage and join him. Keough, to his credit, stepped aside without complaint and divorced Lisa, asking for little. (He would remain a supportive friend to the end of her life.)

Lisa and Michael Jackson were married in the Dominican Republic in 1994 just days after she got her divorce from Keough. She describes being at her happiest, and something she never felt again for the rest of her life. But after a while Michael developed a drug problem which he was hiding from her. Lisa was very anti-drug at this time, and Riley, in one of her passages, mentions that Lisa had taken part in an anti-drug march in DC at this time (but she doesn’t add that it was a march put on by Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology front).

Eventually, Michael had asked Lisa to leave him alone while he was recovering from drug abuse in a hospital, and she filed for divorce soon after.

Riley adds this:

Somebody had told my mom that Michael was planning on filing for divorce but that it would be better for her if she did it first. My mom told Oprah in 2010 that she made the decision to walk because she saw the drugs and the doctors coming in, and they scared her and put her back into what she went through with her father.

So, she filed. But the truth was, Michael never intended to file. It was Romeo and Juliet, the poison mistakenly drunk.

This is the first instance in the book when we noticed Lisa, or maybe it was Riley, or maybe both, overtly erasing Scientology’s presence in an important development in Lisa’s life.

Lisa insisted to us that she loved Michael very much, but that it was Scientology which insisted they break up.

“I was in love with Michael, believe it or not. I didn’t want to leave him. He was in trouble and I wanted to help him. And they made sure that I left him,” she said in our 2015 interview.

Throughout their two-year marriage, she said, Scientology had been a constant presence.

“There was always someone here. Even when we did that ABC prime time interview, there was always a Scientology handler right there.”

And then it was Scientology leader David Miscavige who wanted her to break up with Jackson.

“DM [David Miscavige] facilitated my divorce with MJ,” she said, claiming that Miscavige and a Scientologist attorney, John P. Coale, pressured her to file for divorce.

“One morning I got a call from John Coale. He said, ‘Michael’s going to make a move. He’s going to file.’ So I filed.”

She explained that she felt pressured to be the first to file for divorce, but then regretted it.

According to Lisa, it was definitely Scientologist attorney John P. Coale (husband of Greta Van Susteren, also a Scientologist) who had pressured her to file first. But in the memoir, Riley has changed that to an unnamed “somebody.” And Miscavige’s influence also isn’t mentioned.

(When we prepared our story about that 2015 interview with Lisa, Coale denied that he had done any such thing, that it was “absurd” that he would have told her to file first.)

In Chapter Six: Ten Years, Riley explains that her mother had left behind almost nothing about the decade between her divorce from Jackson in 1996 and her marriage to musician Michael Lockwood in 2006. So Riley tells this story, about how happy they all were living in California in a group, with a large entourage and lots of endless gatherings. But then, after the marriage to Lockwood and the 2008 birth of their twin girls Harper and Finley, something changed, Riley writes.

At the end of that idyllic ten years, virtually overnight, my mother had let everybody go at Hidden Hills — friends, security, assistants, people she had known and loved for years. Her religion. She just suddenly wanted everything gone.

One by one, they were sent away. The only people who remained were her children, Michael Lockwood, and, of course, my dad [Danny Keough].

Riley now begins advancing the story rapidly, and almost never with dates to help keep track of just how much time is passing. Her mother, she says, had become addicted to opioids that were prescribed to her at the birth of her twins.

Throughout my life she would often say, "If I tried drugs, it would be over for me." I see now that that was such a strong hint to an addiction issue she had an intuition about. I think it was subconscious, but it stalked her. She had been holding it back with Scientology, with raising children, with marriages, with spirituality. But it was there, like a shadow, the whole time. She'd say, "My dad was forty-two when he died. I'm thirty-nine..."

We never could have imagined it would be something that would come for her so viciously, so late in life.

Riley says that her mother began to pull away from people she had known, and this was exacerbated by moving to England after the twins were born.

...My mom had originally thought about living in Ireland — we would go to Ireland a lot when we were younger. My mom was friends with the Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein, and we'd stay at his castle, Castle Gurteen de La Poer, in Kilsheelan, a few miles east of Clonmel. We'd all go to the local pubs and dance to the music, and then when closing time came, we'd head back to Gurteen and run around the castle grounds, or climb a spiral tower to the top and lay under the stars, me drunk at seventeen, until the sun peered through the crenellations.

What Riley doesn’t mention here is that Helnwein is an important, longtime Scientologist.

What she also doesn’t mention at all is that during this time, Lisa had gone through a fiery exit from Scientology in 2014.

She told us in our 2015 interview, and she also told Mike Rinder, about being appalled at the way Ron Miscavige, Scientology leader David Miscavige’s father, was being treated after he decided to leave Scientology. By October 2014 she was so unhappy about it, Lisa went to Scientology’s Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida to have a showdown with David Miscavige about it. Instead, he sent his two sisters, Denise and Lori, to see her. The two women screamed at her, Lisa told us, accusing their father Ron of abusing them.

At that moment, she said that she was finally done with Scientology for good — and she insisted that Riley and Priscilla come out with her. And they had, at least according to Lisa in 2015 when we had this conversation.

In fact, when Lisa called Rinder after returning to Nashville to tell him about the showdown in Clearwater, she put Riley on the phone. Mike said it was the first time he had ever spoken to her. Mike remembers that Riley said to him, “You’ve got to take these motherfuckers down.”

But today, Riley doesn’t have a word in the memoir about Lisa’s exit from Scientology and this showdown in Clearwater.

In Chapter Seven: The Bus from Nashville to L.A., Lisa’s opioid addiction was getting worse, and her son Ben was developing a serious drinking problem. Lisa is finally convinced to go to rehab, and then moves to Nashville.

The narrative is finally back in Lisa’s hands, and she describes AA as being a very rough experience.

After I left Scientology, I started upping the pills. I thought, Oh my God, I've lost my religion and it's been my only pavement to walk on, my replacement family. Everything was gone — all my friends, everything.

I knew it was over.

And I was so devastated, I used the drugs as a coping mechanism.

Riley mentions that Lisa and Lockwood separated at this time, but there’s not a word about the years of their vicious custody battle. In 2020, Lisa moved to the Calabasas house with her son Ben and the twins. Lisa was still drinking post-rehab, and then she had a scary seizure.

They had to move out of the house to a rental for a while as the Calabasas place was being treated for mold. But then Ben went to the house for a party with friends. He shot himself that night.

In Chapter Eight, Ben Ben, Riley takes over and writes at length about still dealing with the grief over her brother’s 2020 suicide.

Most strangely, she and Lisa kept her brother’s body at home on dry ice for two months after his death.

In one passage about how Riley has endured the grief, she uses a very familiar Scientology mantra, which we have put in bold…

I was in the most pain I've ever been in in my life, but I also had the deeply transformative experience of surrendering to that avalanche of pain and not trying to avoid the grief. This was a huge lesson for me — the only way out is through. You must allow pain in to free yourself from it.

About the only bright spot in Lisa’s life after Ben’s death was the birth of Riley’s daughter Tupelo in August 2022.

In the final chapter, Chapter Nine: Meditation Garden, we learn that Riley was in Vancouver filming something when word came in that her mother had collapsed. She was on the flight back to Los Angeles when she heard that her mother had died.

She describes the funeral at Graceland, and that Lisa was buried next to her father. And that’s it.

We enjoyed many things in this short book, but we couldn’t help wondering why so much was missing from it. Not only the battles with Scientology that Lisa herself had told us were important to her, but the terrible fighting she went through with Lockwood near the end of her life.

Was Riley keeping that all out for legal reasons?

There’s good reason to believe that her grandmother Priscilla has returned to Scientology, has Riley? Is that why she erased so much Scientology from Lisa’s story?

We’ll give you one very important example of something that’s missing.

In 2003, one of Lisa’s best friends — who is never mentioned in the book — was raped by actor Danny Masterson. This woman would eventually go by the name Jane Doe 1 in the prosecution of Masterson, and her testimony helped put him in prison for 30 years to life.

At one point, prosecutors wanted Lisa to testify in Masterson’s first trial. Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller explained in open court that they wanted Lisa to testify that in 2003 she had been asked by Scientology to convince her friend not to go to police with her allegations. But Jane Doe 1 defied her Scientology handlers and did go to the LAPD in 2004.

Scientology managed to squelch that first investigation. But when two other women came forward and the three of them went to the LAPD in 2016, this time their allegations were taken more seriously.

The prosecutors wanted Lisa to testify as an example of how hard Scientology had worked to protect Masterson and to sabotage any investigation of him. But Judge Charlaine Olmedo ruled that such testimony would be more appropriate for the civil lawsuit against Masterson and Scientology, and not his criminal rape trial.

That trial ended up with a hung jury on November 30, 2022. Prosecutors announced that they were going to try Masterson again, and this time Judge Olmedo ruled that they could expand their testimony about Scientology. After those more expansive rulings, would she have allowed Lisa to testify in the second trial, which began in April, 2023? We’ll never know, because Lisa had died that January.

Lisa’s memoir would have been an incredible opportunity for her to talk openly about Scientology asking her to convince a rape victim not to go to the police. Or to discuss so many of the other things that she told us in our 2015 interview about Michael Jackson, David Miscavige, John Travolta, and her other concerns about Scientology.

Would she have included them if her daughter Riley was not producing the finished product? We’ll probably never know.

When we sent over these quotations from the book to Mike Rinder, he told us he wasn’t surprised that so much about Scientology had been elided from it.

“I expect it will sell well, since people are fascinated by Elvis and MJ. I bet that's what they will push. I’m not surprised there is no mention of her interactions with David Miscavige and Ron Sr. and you and me and Leah Remini. She and her publishers don't want to poke the Scientology bear — they're just looking to make as much as they can with the least amount of effort,” he said.

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