by Rick Bragg
So Jerry Lee stepped away.
This was not how he had imagined it, not how he wanted it.
“I wasn’t likin’ this,” he says, thinking back.
He wanted to be thought of as the best rock and roller there was, but he wanted to take it one hit record at a time.
Finally, Elvis dried his eyes and just walked out the door.
“Sally Wilbourn and the rest of them people hung their heads. They wouldn’t even look at me.”
“It was . . . a sad thing, a sad scene. Not something I would ever care to go through again.” Both young men were embarking on great and uncertain journeys, Elvis to Germany, and Jerry Lee on a trip to England that would change his life. It was devised by his manager, Oscar Davis, and the William Morris Agency, designed to expand his overseas fan base through some thirty-six theater shows over six weeks. It would put some serious cash in his pocket—he was said to be pulling fees upwards of $30,000 a show—and Sam and Jud were hoping the tour would make him a true star overseas, just as Sun released his first long-playing album at home. “Whole Lotta Shakin’” and “Great Balls of Fire” had already been hits in England, “Breathless” was moving strong into the top ten there, and “High School Confidential” had just landed. The timing, it seemed, was perfect.
The only foreseeable complication was Jerry Lee’s new bride, Myra—whether the British would take to her. Sam and Jud urged him not to bring her along on the trip, to keep her a secret at least a little longer. But he said no, he would not do that; Myra deserved the trip, and he had nothing to be ashamed of and neither had she. Besides, his fame was growing so swiftly and surely that he ought to be able to absorb a little bad publicity if it came. He really believed there were things in his life that were the world’s business and things that were his business, like the things that happened between a man and his wife. He believed it.
After all, he was the king of rock and roll. Elvis had said so. And one thing was for sure: he would never give it up, never just hand it off in tears. They would have to take it from him.
8
ENGLAND
London
1958
It was quite a sendoff, that May. They followed him cheering through the streets of his hometown, hundreds of them, which was a lot in a place the size of Ferriday. It had been decreed by an act of the city council to be Jerry Lee Lewis Day, May 17, 1958, and instead of the quiet ceremony and polite applause that usually followed such things, there was a great upheaval in the low, flat land. They came walking in their overalls and oil-stained khakis and faded flower-print dresses to take a small part in celebration of the fearless boy who dangled from the high iron, who took the music from their dirt and made it something the rich folks and even the Yankees paid money to hear, and if that was not by God a trick, they didn’t know what was. They left their little wood-frame houses and hurried across the crawfish dirt that had soaked up a thousand years of floods, queuing up for a city block. Then the drum major struck up the band and they marched, through the good smells of Brocato’s Restaurant, by the little church where he forgot which song he was to play, and along streets where he walked coming home from the late-night show, watching for werewolves. They marched past the cotton buyers in their bow ties and the boys dumping ice on the catfish, buffalo, and gar at the fish stand, marched behind the black and gold of the Ferriday High School Marching Trojans, which blared out “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And at the head of it all, reclining in his chariot, was the shining man, golden hair tousled and gleaming. He rode in a new 1959 Cadillac convertible, fins so sharp you could hurt yourself. “The last really pretty car,” he says. “Hasn’t been a really pretty car, since the fifties.”
Just a few days before, on the thirteenth, Jane Mitcham Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis had been officially and finally divorced. Immediately afterward, Jane stood on the steps of the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis and told a reporter with the Press-Scimitar not only that she was still in love with Jerry Lee but that she planned to do everything she could to reconcile and rekindle their romance. It was not an unusual thing, such a declaration; there is just something about a divorce that gets people to thinking of romance. Jerry Lee just knew he was down to one wife again, at least, and did not think on it anymore. He couldn’t see how it had much bearing on this day or any of the perfect days to come.
After the parade, after the home folks had trickled back to their homes, he would go to the new house he had bought for his mama and daddy here in Ferriday, the one with the driveway lined with gleaming Detroit steel, and he would eat his mama’s fine cooking prepared on her brand-new stove, then drive back to the high school and play a dance in the gymnasium out of the goodness of his heart. Then he would rush back to Memphis to fly away, first to the bright lights and unchecked room service of New York, then to the British Isles for a five-week tour that would make him an international star. And if he happened to see his cousin Jimmy while he was home, he’d tell him he’d decided to buy him a new car, too, a brand-new ’58 Oldsmobile for him to drive on the revival circuit even as he preached against rock and roll, so that he could better do God’s work. But for now, for just a few blocks more, he rode in that new leather, face to the sun, his future limitless, his conscience clear.
Jud met Jerry Lee in New York to try once more to talk him into keeping Myra a secret at least until the tour was over, to just not mention the marriage if he was unwilling to leave her behind altogether. Somehow Jerry Lee and Myra had remained mostly undiscovered outside Dianne Lane, but Jerry Lee had his back up about the England trip and said they would not sneak around in England. “She’s my wife,” said Jerry Lee. He would not hide her by leaving her behind. “That wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all,” he says now. “I was glad it was gonna be out in the open. I wasn’t hidin’ nothin’,” he says, something he has stressed again and again. “I was out in the open with everything.”
“If you do this,” Jud told him, “you’re gonna flush the greatest talent that this country’s ever seen right down the commode.”
He could not imagine going to Myra at the last minute and telling her that, out of fear over what might happen, he, Jerry Lee Lewis, was going to slink off to England alone. Myra and Frankie Jean were looking forward to a great vacation of shopping and sightseeing while he played his shows. To leave Myra behind, he says now, would have been to admit he was ashamed of her and what he had done by marrying her, but he was not, and in that conviction he was trapped. They all were. Jud went back to Memphis to closet himself with Sam and worry, and—it would come out later—to start planning for the fallout they knew was coming. They could feel it, the way you can feel lightning pull at the hairs of your arms before it strikes.
A harbinger of things to come waited for them in New York. Dick Clark, whose career had been greatly served by the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose Saturday evening show had been pulled from the fire by the Beech-Nut–“Breathless” collaboration, had scheduled Jerry Lee for the Saturday before he left for England. But then suddenly, after a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night warning that Jerry Lee was about to be wrapped in scandal, Clark canceled him. “After we took him nationwide,” says Jerry Lee.
To him, it was hysteria over nothing.
“Stupid,” he says.
It began on May 21, 1958. Jerry Lee, Myra, Jerry Lee’s sister Frankie Jean, the drummer Russ Smith, J. W., Lois, and the little boy Rusty arrived in New York, to be joined there by old Oscar Davis, the man who had managed Hank Williams. Jud was there, to wish them bon voyage. Jerry Lee wanted his mama and daddy to go, but they had never been on a plane before. Elmo and Mamie had traveled before to see their son, and they loved the fancy hotels—Elmo thought room service meant he had his own butler—but the New York to London flight, ten hours in all, was over water all the way, and Mamie didn’t think her nerves could take it.
They almost didn’t make it to England at all. The number two engine on the plane carrying the entourage bu
rst into flames, raining small pieces of itself down over the Atlantic, and the pilot made an emergency landing in Ireland. The group boarded another plane and finally landed at Heathrow on the evening of the twenty-second. There an immigration official looked at Myra, at her passport, at her boarding card, and back at her face. “It was noted that the date of birth shown on her passport was 11 July, 1944,” wrote A. R. Thomas in his report on the arrival of Mrs. Lewis. “This seemed to be an unusually young age for a married woman, but since both parties come from the Southeastern part of the United States, where the legal age for marriage is lower than is usual in other parts of the world, no action on my part seemed to be called for. Mrs. Lewis’ appearance was fairly well in keeping with her age, although she might have passed for a couple of years older. She was as tall as an average fully-grown woman. . . .”
There was some hope that Myra might pass unnoticed through the airport and into the semiprivacy of a hotel with the rest of the entourage, some hope that Jerry Lee, with the power of his music, could somehow preempt any coming disaster or at least get through his shows and return safely to America, where the story might be, if not contained, at least spread out a little more, in the way a firecracker does less damage on a driveway than it does under a tin can. There was no hope that the British would understand, or accept. The British were not built that way, and their own rock-and-roll revolution was at the time merely in the grumbling stage. Though the young people of the British Isles hungered and clamored for American rock and roll, the politicians and ruling class were highly suspicious at best of the wild boy from the American South and were already harrumphing mightily.
England took itself quite seriously in 1958, and with every right. It seemed like just yesterday that a German madman had sent bombers across the Channel to flatten whole blocks of London. V-1 and V-2 rockets had rained upon them from space itself, and they had buried their dead and soldiered on, as if the whole ordeal had merely chipped some old crockery and run them late for tea.
But the reporters here were of a different stripe from those Jerry Lee had encountered in the radio stations and on the music beats back in the States, where a manager or studio executive might still slap a young music scribe on the back and buy him a whiskey or six to keep a rumor bottled up just a little while longer. Here, reporters joked, there had not been a really good story since the surrender, and the country’s own pioneering rock and rollers were of such a milksop variety, most of them, that they were never considered much of a threat. But the papers loved a smashing scandal, and if outrage was unavailable, then feigned outrage would do just as well.
From Customs, Jerry Lee and Myra walked straight into a battery of blinding flashbulbs and shouted questions from a small mob of reporters. One reporter broke from the mob chasing Jerry Lee and asked Myra who she was, and of course she answered him. “Jerry’s wife,” she told him, and though Oscar Davis hustled her away, it was too late.
The reporters, who are paid to dig, dug at first just a little, and Jerry Lee, sensing that what Jud had warned of was coming true, told them that Myra was fifteen, but when asked if it was his first marriage, he replied that no, sir, it was his third. That alone was enough for a scandal, and the more Jerry Lee and Myra tried to answer the reporters’ questions, the more they constructed their own gallows.
When reporters asked Myra if she didn’t think she was a tad young to be married, she replied that age doesn’t matter back in Tennessee. “You can get married at ten, if you can find a husband,” she said.
When a reporter asked Jerry Lee if Myra was too young, he replied, “Look at her.”
The morning after their arrival, the newsboys waved the headlines at the passing cars.
JERRY BRINGS WIFE NO. 3, FAIR AND 15
(Like a Well-Scrubbed Fourth-Former!)
Looking at the headlines from those few days in May of ’58, you’d think Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t a rock-and-roll singer at all, but an invader come ashore uninvited in the middle of a royal wedding, tracking mud through the Church of England. He still has trouble finding the sense in it, even after all this time. He does not agree with much of the history that has been written about it all these years, does not agree that the British people—or at least the rock-and-roll fans who had clamored for his visit there—suddenly turned on him en masse, because he remembers more chants of worship than cries of derision. He does not remember it as history does, and so it is ridiculous to waste his time or his thoughts on it for very long. He is not just being belligerent. He knows it was bad for him in the end. But he still cannot see the great sin the London press used to crucify him, cannot fathom what the big deal was and what people were so upset about, as a growing frenzy of self-righteous indignation and overinflated condemnation slammed into his marriage and career one newspaper at a time.
“It wasn’t nothin’,” he says.
He shakes his head, incredulous.
“I mean, it wasn’t nothin’.”
As scandals go, it was an odd one. There was some subterfuge in it, and considerable lying on the part of his manager and even a little himself, but not very good lying. But the fundamental fact is, it all happened because Jerry Lee was not trying to hide Myra—even if he did try to fudge her age—and when the news of it swelled into scandal, the people around him acted like they’d never met the girl, or feigned outrage of their own, or ran and hid. Instead of damage control, the people who might have rallied around him instead blundered around the Westbury Hotel, while Jerry Lee himself gave interviews in which he intended to explain himself but only poured kerosene on the roaring fire.
“They come down on us hard,” he says. Neither Jerry Lee nor Myra understood that what they said to the press would be used against them in sneering contempt, and it got worse with almost every hour. The papers painted a picture of hillbilly culture gone mad, and it seemed like every move he and his entourage made only riveted the image further in the minds of readers. One reporter wrote that he interviewed Myra’s mother, Lois, in her nightgown, clutching a sheet to herself, talking about how they would all have to get to the bottom of these charges right away. Every other story seemed to mention that a member of the entourage was in some stage of undress—even elegant old Oscar Davis, who apparently came to the door in his boxer shorts. They quoted Myra as saying that Jerry Lee had given her a red Cadillac for Christmas, but that she sure wished she had a wedding ring, though. “Gee, it’s fun being married,” she said. “The girls back at the school were mighty envious when I married [Jerry Lee].” Jerry Lee himself told the reporters, “I’m real happy with my third wife.” And all this was said before the first press conference. Oscar Davis, apparently living in some alternative universe where reporters do not recognize a diamond mine when they blunder into it, had merely pulled one reporter aside and told him not to print any of it, to respect their privacy.
Jerry Lee never doubted, even as he rode to his first show in the back of his limousine, that he would blow it all away once he took the stage, that he would just send the damning stories and the accusing headlines into scrap on the London sidewalk. The reporters had taken their efforts to be polite and twisted it into something ugly, but the reporters were not the reason he was in England. “I came to play rock and roll,” he says.
The first show was at a sold-out theater in Edmonton, in northeast London. Two thousand people waited quietly and politely for a taste of real American rock and roll. Warming up for Jerry Lee were the Treniers, identical twins Claude and Cliff Trenier out of Mobile, Alabama, a dynamic twosome who had successfully made the turn from jump blues to rock and roll and were considered pioneers of the music. They had a naughty song called “Poontang,” but they elected not to play that in Edmonton, doing their more palatable songs to polite and friendly applause before leaving the stage to make room for the main event. Unlike fans in America, those waiting for Jerry Lee neither stomped nor cheered, merely waited with polite and reserved anticipation. To Jerry Lee, it was a little off-putting. He beli
eves it would have been a different story, a different England, if only he could have played first, before the newspapers put the bootheels to him, if the music had been the story that rocketed around the country in the first few days of his tour.
He could have acted contrite, could even have toned down his attire a little, to bow at least slightly to what was happening all around him in this foreign and hostile place, but to Jerry Lee that would have been more like a curtsy. He ascended the stage at the Regal Theater in perhaps the most written-about outfit in British history outside of a royal wedding: a hot-pink suit with sparkly lapels. As he swaggered across the stage, the people applauded with reserved vigor, which was less than he was used to but still far from hostile. He did a few songs, starting slow, and the crowd was blank and unresponsive. He took a break, as some idiot in the crowd sang a snatch or two from “God Save the Queen,” then came back to the stage and did it up right, gave them a good, hard jab of rock and roll, and he remembers that they cheered louder then, cheered the way people were supposed to cheer when Jerry Lee Lewis played the piano. He does not recall any ugliness, any jeers, any meanness, and when it was over, he figured everything in England was going to be fine.
But the press was only getting started, and now reporters in London and Memphis were digging into the near past. Some seemed content to flog Jerry Lee with opinion pieces and old news, but the Daily Mirror dug deeper, and in public records back in the United States discovered that Myra was not fifteen at all, but only thirteen, and that Jerry Lee was not divorced from Jane when he and Myra were wed, and that she was his cousin, and the sum total of all that was the hottest rock-and-roll star in the world was in London cohabiting with a thirteen-year-old relative who was not legally his wife.
That news made the British press nearly hysterical. Jerry Lee, having tried unsuccessfully to soften the matter by fudging Myra’s age and date of the marriage, now pretty much told it all to reporters who could barely believe their luck. He told about Dorothy and about the shotgun wedding to the pregnant Jane—all of it—believing that surely they would understand that it didn’t matter that he married Myra before he was divorced from Jane because, in a way, he was not really married to Jane, having still been married to Dorothy. He appealed to them as men, telling reporters about how Jane’s father and brothers came to him “with hide whips.”