by Rick Bragg
“I was a young fool when I married at fourteen and sixteen,” he told them. “My father should have put a foot on my neck and beaten a worm out of me.”
It seemed like plain talk to him, the way men talked to men. Surely they would understand.
They did not. They went almost giddy when Jerry Lee told them that he married bigamously. The headlines grew uglier, and he became not a singer with a few secrets but an international incident. He played a second show, this time in London proper, to a four-thousand-seat theater, but it was less than half full. Outside, newsboys waved the late edition.
CLEAR OUT THIS GANG!
As Jerry Lee will tell you, the fans still lined the sidewalks of the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair, just hoping to get a look at him. He does not believe they had turned on him.
“The newspapers did all they could to destroy us,” he said. “The things they wrote . . .”
In the papers, he was presented as some kind of serious threat, an example of the unlettered Southern American at his virulent worst. Oscar Davis, apparently believing it was his reputation he was supposed to safeguard instead of his star’s, abandoned Jerry Lee completely, announcing that he was as surprised by the news of Jerry Lee’s marital tangles as everyone else and that he knew nothing of any marriages or of Myra’s age, making him perhaps the least-informed manager and acting publicist in rock-and-roll history. Even the British government took a hand in the affair, sending officers from the Home Office to inspect Jerry Lee’s and Myra’s passports and immigration status. The headlines screamed:
BABY SNATCHER!
‘GO HOME’
CROWD SHOUTS AT SINGER
‘WE HATE JERRY’
SHOUT EX-FANS
Spokesmen from the theater chain that had hired Jerry Lee said that if they had known of his past, they never would have hired him. Columnists called for his arrest and deportation and for an investigation by the child welfare office. Even Parliament weighed in. Sir Frank Medlicott, of the constituency of Norfolk Central in the House of Commons, questioned why a man of such nefariousness was granted a permit to work, prompting this exchange between the lord and the minister of labor, Iain MacLeod:
MEDLICOTT: “Is my right honorable friend aware that great offense was caused to many people by the arrival of this man, with his thirteen-year-old bride? Will he remember also that we have enough ‘rock and roll’ entertainers of our own without importing them from overseas?”
MACLEOD: “This was, of course, a thoroughly unpleasant case.”
Young women who had once professed to love him announced they were going home to smash his records. At a show in Tooting, South London, fans chanted “We Hate Jerry!” and cried “Cradle Robber!” from the audience. Offstage, Jerry Lee kept talking to reporters, and they only wound the noose tighter; by now several theaters had canceled and the tour was in jeopardy. Jerry Lee refused to quit. He was convinced that the bad press would die down and he could go back to the stage with audiences untainted. But the taint was overwhelming. Reviewers described him as a drooling bumpkin making more noise than music. Even the most highbrow critics in the States, even the ones who despised his genre, had often been forced to admit that, whatever danger to society he might pose, the music was there, the music was good. But the British appreciation for American music was not yet deeply ingrained, and such matters were easily overlooked.
Oscar Davis, perhaps believing that the press might be distracted by some sleight of hand, went to the American embassy to ask if Jerry Lee and Myra could be married there—on American soil, so to speak—but the officials at the embassy said that was impossible. So he promised the press that Jerry Lee and Myra would be married again, legally, as soon as the couple got back to Memphis, but nothing would placate the papers; the stories grew more and more strident, and calls for Jerry Lee’s ouster, even arrest, grew louder. Four days into the tour, theater owners bowed to the pressure from the newspapers and the growing hostility in the government itself and canceled all his remaining engagements because of “unfavorable audience reaction and for other reasons.”
Jerry Lee and the others packed their bags for home. Oscar Davis stayed behind to try to collect some of the money they were owed. “I will stay behind until this arrangement has been made,” he told reporters. “I think I shall keep Jerry back home in the States for some time.”
Jerry Lee remembers looking out the window of the hotel and seeing throngs of people but not an angry mob. He does not remember any signs with ugliness scrawled on them or any catcalls or anything like that, only a crowd of people gathered as other crowds had gathered, to cheer or to get a look at the man the magazines had called the future king of rock and roll. As he and Myra and the others departed through a side door into a waiting limo, people flung themselves on the car, not cursing, not trying to hurt them, only behaving as other half-crazy fans had done. He will never understand how what he saw and what the newspapers insisted were such different things.
“I’ll be back,” he told them, through the glass.
It would have been better to just fly off immediately. But instead he and the others were trapped at the airport for eight long hours, as reporters, inexhaustible, tried to pick at his fears, tried to get him to admit that the events of the past four days were just the beginning of a kind of awful landslide for his career. Jerry Lee, also inexhaustible, just kept talking about the good life that awaited them, once he got home to where people appreciated and understood folks such as him. “Look, I make money, not lose it, see,” he told reporters. “There’s plenty of work back home. I’m well breeched, you know, and I don’t have to worry about money. . . . I shall be glad to get home. I just bought a six-hundred-dollar lawn mower that I want to ride around.”
The reporters watched with great regret as he checked his tickets and prepared to leave their island. As Jerry Lee and Myra looked through a newspaper, Myra exclaimed, as if with disappointment, that there were no pictures of them on the front page. One of the last pictures had been a mug shot of Jerry Lee with the caption “Lewis: Bigamist.”
“Who is this De Gaulle fella, anyway?” Jerry Lee joked, looking at the newspaper. “He seems to have gone over bigger than us.”
Now and then, a teenager would come up and ask for his autograph.
“I’ve lost nothing,” he told the reporters who hung on to the end.
He boarded the plane with Myra clinging to him, with the British government believing it had chased away an undesirable and a threat to the very fabric of England itself. “The thoroughly unpleasant case,” the minister of labor reassured Sir Medlicott, “was ended by the cancellation of the contract and the disappearance of the man.”
He would not concede, ever, that he was wounded by it, not as he waited to board the plane, not as he touched down in New York, and not now. It would have an undeniable effect on his life and career, but a man is wounded, Jerry Lee says, only when he lies down, “and I don’t.”
In New York, with Myra by his side, he confronted the phalanx of waiting television cameras not as prying eyes, but as a welcoming party. “I stepped off the plane in New York and some news reporter said I had a bigger crowd than Clark Gable,” he says.
Asked, leeringly, about London, he seemed completely unfazed. “We had a very nice time,” he replied. “People treated us real nice.”
“Why did you leave?” the reporter asked.
“Well . . . I don’t answer those questions, sir,” he said, then joked: “My manager might knock my head off or something.”
“When were you married?” the reporter pressed.
“Pardon?”
“When were you married?”
He wrapped his arm around Myra’s shoulder protectively and smiled again. “Why don’t we leave our personal questions out of this, sir?”
“When we got to Memphis, I went to see my lawyer, and he told me if I wanted to get married, I could,” says Jerry Lee. So he took Myra home to Ferriday, and with his people looking on, he marri
ed her again, with a legal license procured from the Concordia Parish Courthouse. But the ugliness followed them across the ocean even before they could say their vows in his parents’ house, as newspapers and magazines here retraced the agony of his London ordeal. It was not as intense here, but it rolled on, and before long some radio stations bowed to pressure from sponsors not to play his music. Other threats would surface, from people who had hated his music all along and from inside his circle of friends and business associates. Dick Clark had already written him off. And it was only beginning.
Sam and Jud Phillips seemed unsure how to respond, at least publicly, to the attacks on their marquee star. They knew the threat was serious, potentially career-ending, but they seemed unsure whether to try to laugh it off or treat it as a serious matter requiring stern action. Oscar Davis was no longer in the equation—or in the country, for that matter. Having remained behind, ostensibly to collect money owed to Jerry Lee, he was last heard from somewhere in France or Italy or some damn place, and he watched the saga of Jerry Lee Lewis play itself out from across the waters. Conspiracy theorists would say it was all a plot, that Oscar was in league with his old friend Colonel Tom Parker to torpedo Jerry Lee’s career, but Sam Phillips would later say the man had merely been given an impossible job. “Jerry Lee can’t be managed.”
In the end, Jud and Sam decided to treat the scandal as both threat and farce. First, Jerry Lee signed his name to a long letter that seemed intended to be contrite, but was in its final draft neither apology nor explanation nor defiance, but a rambling and confusing mixture of all three. Published as a full-page ad in Billboard, it merely rehashed parts of the scandal for American audiences, while leaving Jerry Lee sounding like anyone but Jerry Lee.
Dear Friends:
I have in recent weeks been the apparent center of a fantastic amount of publicity and of which none has been good.
But there must be a little good even in the worst people, and according to the press releases originating in London, I am the worst and not even deserving of one decent press release.
Now this whole thing started because I tried and did tell the truth. I told the story of my past life, as I thought it had been straightened out and that I would not hurt anybody in being man enough to tell the truth.
I confess that my life has been stormy. I confess further that since I have become a public figure I sincerely wanted to be worthy of the decent admiration of all the people, young and old, that admired or liked what talent (if any) I have. That is, after all, all that I have in a professional way to offer.
If you don’t believe that the accuracy of things can get mixed up when you are in the public’s eye, then I hope you never have to travel this road I’m on.
There were some legal misunderstandings in this matter that inadvertently made me look as though I invented the word indecency. I feel I, if nothing else, should be given credit for the fact I have at least a little common sense and that if I had not thought the legal aspects of this matter were not completely straight, I certainly would not have made a move until they were.
I did not want to hurt Jane Mitcham, nor do I want to hurt my family and children. I went to court and I did not contest Jane’s divorce actions, and she was awarded $750.00 a month for child support and alimony. Jane and I parted from the courtroom as friends and as a matter of fact, chatted before, during, and after the trial with no animosity whatsoever.
In the belief that for once my life was straightened out, I invited my mother and daddy and little sister to make the trip to England. Unfortunately, mother and daddy felt that the trip would be too long and hard for them and didn’t go, but sister did go along with Myra’s little brother and mother.
I hope that if I am washed up as an entertainer it won’t be because of this bad publicity, because I can cry and wish all I want to, but I can’t control the press or the sensationalism that these people will go to to get a scandal started to sell papers. If you don’t believe me, please ask any of the other people that have been victims of the same.
Sincerely,
Jerry Lee Lewis
Then, as if replacing the mask of tragedy with that of comedy, Sam had Jack Clement and Memphis radio personality George Klein piece together a novelty record that used snatches from Jerry Lee’s records to make fun of the whole thing:
KLEIN: “How does it feel to be home?”
Oooohhh, it feels good!
It was called “The Return of Jerry Lee,” and it didn’t work either.
Jerry Lee himself had always put his faith in the music, but the tide was still washing out, and even great performances couldn’t pull it back in. Charlie Rich, a new Sun artist, gave Jerry Lee a rueful raver called “Break Up”; it shot to number 50 on the Hot 100 but then slid quickly down. Its flip side, a mournful ballad called “I’ll Make It All Up to You,” hit the country charts for a blink in time. Then he reached back to Moon Mullican and covered “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone”—by now every song title seemed a self-portrait—but it went nowhere.
To Jerry Lee, it seemed like Sam Phillips had lost confidence in him almost overnight. He had been the artist on whom Sam’s hopes were pinned, he had played and sung his heart out, and for a time he’d been rewarded with Sun’s almost exclusive promotional attention while other artists smoldered. Now, only five hundred days since his first big hit, he was falling fast. Sam was a millionaire by this point, or close to it, and he was taking the money he’d made from Sun and his song publishing business and investing it elsewhere, in radio stations and zinc mines and other ventures. Jerry Lee kept recording singles, and Sun kept pressing them, but precious few radio stations would play them; he wondered whether Sam even sent them out to disc jockeys anymore. Sam would never again risk significant money on his prodigal son.
“People ask me what effect England had on me, and mostly the effect was on Sam Phillips and distribution,” Jerry Lee says now. “He just was not puttin’ my records out there.”
Sam was in a corner. In the eyes of his harshest critics, his boy had committed not one offense but two, simultaneously: bigamy and cradle robbing. Marrying a cousin was also frowned on by most in the wider world, even if it was a third cousin and even if it was culturally commonplace. Phillips could have simply fired him, of course, cut his losses, and moved on. Instead, he kept recording him. Sun had more than a hundred Jerry Lee recordings in the vaults by 1960, and in the years to come he would cut nearly a hundred more. But most of them would linger unreleased for years. Jerry Lee has long suspected there was some ulterior motive behind Sam’s fading interest, fueled perhaps by old loyalties.
“I’m not crazy by a long shot,” he says, but he wonders, sometimes, whether Sam was halfway glad his boy no longer posed a threat to Elvis’s throne. “I think that’s . . . a dead cat on the line, somewhere.”
Sam himself later tried to explain to Sun researcher Martin Hawkins why he kept so much of Jerry Lee’s work in the vault. “I was always very cautious about putting out a lot of product on my artists just to ensure a certain level of income. I think that opportunity has been abused, always has, by the major record companies. . . . You only have to look at some of the crap they put out on Elvis Presley, just because he was in some picture show or something. I think each record should be for the good of the artist’s long-term career, not for short-term gain, and didn’t want to wear Jerry out with an over-abundance of availability.”
Sam acknowledged—how could he not?—that Jerry Lee’s scandal stayed his hand. “When Jerry took a beating from the press it would have been stupid to try to cram product down people’s throats. Believe me, just before that happened, Jerry was the hottest thing in America. The press tore him up in England over his marriage to Myra and it rebounded back home. It was a devastating, unnecessary, stupid damn thing, but what could we do about it? I think Jerry’s innocence back then . . . backfired. They scalped him. It turned out to be a very ghastly and deadly thing. So many people wanted to do in . . . rock and roll, and
this is just what they were looking for.
“It should never have played a role of such significance in Jerry’s life.”
Finally, Jerry Lee became so frustrated with Sam’s refusal to release and promote his records that he forced his way into Sam’s office. What happened next has been told countless times by countless people who were not there, but the one who was there, the one still alive to tell, tells it this way:
“People said I punched Sam. I never punched Sam. I snatched him across the desk by his necktie, and I told him, ‘You’re gonna release my record. It’s gonna happen, or I’m gonna whip your butt.’ He told Sally to call the law, and she called the law. He said, ‘Now wait a minute, I’ve got as much right to decide when . . .’ and I think I slapped him. But he released the songs,” or at least some of them.
Shortly after returning from England, he cut a session’s worth of solo performances at Sun, including a song Elvis loved, “Come What May,” the Hank Williams standard “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” and several moving takes of the country ballad “Crazy Heart.”
We lived on promises we knew would fall apart