Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  “That broke it all loose, that night,” said Jerry Lee. “Steve Allen asked me back for the next week, and then asked me back for a third time, and it just busted wide-open. The records started selling forty, fifty thousand copies in a single day. We were a smash. Steve Allen put us back on top, and I never forgot that.

  “The second one I did, Jane Russell came back to the dressing room. She asked me, ‘What’s it like, to go out in front of a live audience and a live microphone?’ I said, ‘Honey, you got no problem. Just do it.’ And she kissed me on the cheek.”

  Apparently the gatekeepers of American morality were willing to crack the gate a little if the money was right. “Everybody lifted the ban on it,” he remembers. “We was on top of the world, man.” Back at Sun Records, Cash and Orbison and Perkins sulked. Billy Lee Riley got drunk and, in a jealous rage, tried to tear up the studio until he was restrained.

  Jerry Lee walked to Memphis on the clouds.

  He did not know at the time how far out on the lip of disaster Sam Phillips had come in sending his boy on that trip to New York. He had pressed and shipped hundreds of thousands of records all around the country so they’d be ready in the stores immediately after the Steve Allen appearance. By September, “Shakin’” was the number-one record on the R&B and country charts and was kept off the top of the pop charts only by the megahit “Tammy” by Debbie Reynolds. Sun Records siphoned time, attention, and money away from other projects to focus on its new star, and when reporters asked Sam Phillips if he had any plans to sell his new boy away like he had Elvis, Phillips told them to go to hell. The record that had been chained down by censors still had its detractors, as the movement against rock music ebbed and flowed, tiring in some cities, flaming up in others, “but when one station would ban it, two more would pick it up,” says Jerry Lee.

  He truly did not understand what it all meant, any better than Elvis had. He had seen Elvis in stardom from the outside looking in. He had no idea what lurked inside it, good and bad. But there was one difference between them: while Elvis sometimes looked helpless, Jerry Lee helped himself.

  “I knew I had been making a hundred dollars a night, and suddenly I was making five thousand, then ten thousand a night,” says Jerry Lee. “Do I know what people were thinkin’? Man, I don’t even think they knew what they were thinkin’. And if you didn’t like it, I just laughed, just gave you the finger and went on.”

  There had always been women, pressing up between the footlights, waiting backstage, but now they climbed the stage, rushed it. The first time was in Nashville. “I was on this little bitty stage, but I remember, man, I was just gettin’ with it. We were playin’ the National Guard Armory, and suddenly here comes these girls, a mob of girls. I thought to myself, I don’t like the look in these girls’ eyes, and the cops couldn’t do nothing about it. They was kissing me and pulling at my clothes, and pulling at my hair. . . . Man, I mean they just mobbed me. They tore off clothes, tore ’em off down to my underwear. I had these ol’ stripedy shorts on. . . . After that, I started wearing boxer shorts, in case this happened again. I was hollering, ‘Wait a minute, baby! Hold on!’” The girls ran off with pieces of his clothing like trophies.

  “One scrap of it caught on this metal bracelet and it dug into me and like to pulled my arm off. It scared me, a little bit,” he says. “It was a set-up deal. The girls planned it. They got together and planned it all.

  “Had a leopard-skin suit on. I liked that suit.”

  But later, when someone had given him some pants and he was being escorted to safety by police, a photographer caught him grinning. “You can’t kiss three hundred girls at one time,” he says, so it was just a great waste of exuberance.

  But if they had devoured him, he thought, “what a way to go.”

  Quickly he supplanted Elvis as public enemy number one in the eyes of the moralists who railed against rock and roll. Elvis was out in Hollywood making Westerns and love stories. Jerry Lee said he knew that Elvis still knew how to rock—“he was a rocker, oh, man”—but he was also the man who did “Love Me Tender,” bought a pink Cadillac, and still seemed even now genuinely surprised at the big, wide world and a little lost in it. Elvis, when he was asked about his music, always said, No, sir, or No, ma’am, he wasn’t going to apologize for his rock and roll, because he did not believe he did a thing wrong by singing it and dancing like he did. Jerry Lee knew that he and Elvis had some of the same fears and doubts, but Elvis pushed his down deep and lived with them, the way a child lives with an invisible friend. He might talk to it sometimes, but not when the grown-ups were around. At least, that was how it seemed to Jerry Lee. “Elvis cared what people thought,” he says, almost puzzled.

  For Jerry Lee, fame was a thing that sometimes flogged him and sometimes let him be; he was capable, in the dark times, of losing all sight of the good in his music, of believing it was evil, until suddenly things would just clear and he’d see it all so much better. The thing about rock and roll, he said, was that it made people crazy bad, but more often it made them happy, made them forget life for a while, as another singer would sing it, and if a young woman scaled a stage to fling herself on a good-lookin’ rock-and-roll singer from Louisiana every now and then, squeezing on him like to break his back, what harm did that do?

  “I knew Mama was proud, and I knew Daddy was proud,” and armed with that, he did not greatly care whom he offended in the world of strangers. His mama’s pride grew as he got further and further from the bars, from Sodom, and that meant the world to him. “She backed me, one hundred percent. She knew I had to do these things. Then she watched me on the television . . . and she thought it was just the greatest thing she had ever seen.”

  And television kept calling—including a call from a young DJ from Philadelphia with a show called Bandstand. “He called me and said, ‘You don’t know me, but my name is Dick Clark,’ and I told him, ‘No, I don’t know you.’ And he said, ‘Well, I have a small TV show . . .’ And I said, ‘Look, you need to talk to Sam and Jud.’” Clark told them that his sponsors said they’d give him a nationwide nighttime show if he could get Jerry Lee Lewis. There was only one catch: the producers wanted Jerry Lee to lip-synch the song, as other guests had done.

  Jerry Lee played the show, but he didn’t play by the rules. “They didn’t want me to do it like I do it, but I did it out loud, and I didn’t skim over nothin’,” he says. “I did it all.”

  It was about then that Sam Phillips gave him his first big royalty check for “Shakin’.”

  It read: $40,000.

  Jerry Lee wasn’t sure for a while if that meant four thousand or forty thousand, and he was just about as happy either way. He put it in his pocket and just carried it around with him, for weeks, months, till the ink faded and it was so creased, it was almost cut in two. He went to Taylor’s Restaurant and had some steak and gravy and black-eyed peas and turnip greens, and he might have even had some beets, though he didn’t even really like beets, and, man, it was good, and as a goof he tried to pay with his forty-thousand-dollar check.

  “Uh, I don’t think we can cash this,” the waitress told him.

  He went home and went about the business of keeping his promises. He bought his mama a nice new house in Ferriday, not a mansion on a hill but a good, clean house with hot and cold running water and wiring that didn’t glow red in the walls and burn the place down, with lights that didn’t flicker when the refrigerator clicked on. He bought his daddy some land, a farm, because a man was nothing without land, just a borrower.

  “I bought Mama a new Fleetwood Cadillac,” he said. “And I bought her a new one every year, and she got to expecting it. If I didn’t, she’d just take one of mine. She drove off one time in a white one with red leather interior. I had to call her and say, ‘Mama, you got my car?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I got it.’ She got to where, if I saw her walking around one in the yard, I knew she was gonna take it.”

  He bought his daddy a big Lincoln. He gave his sis
ters a thousand dollars at a time, for shopping sprees. If other kin had a crisis and needed help, they came to him, and he dug in his pocket and gave them cash.

  “They accepted it, and they wanted it,” says Jerry Lee, and they deserved it, for the faith they had in him, so early and for so long. If he ever had any doubts about that, all he had to do was shut his eyes and imagine that piano on back of his daddy’s old truck as it got bigger and bigger coming down that dirt road, till it was so big in his mind and his eyes that it was all he could really see, for years and years.

  Elmo grabbed hold of the rock-and-roll dream with both big hands, and Jerry Lee loved every minute of it, seeing his daddy’s dreams come true through him. A more traditional family, one from a Norman Rockwell painting, might have dreamed it differently, might have hoped to see their child go off to college and come home a doctor or a lawyer or a captain of industry, but what Jerry Lee’s people had stirring in their blood was music, and when you make it in music, their kind of music, no one hands you a sheepskin and one of those funny flat hats. So Jerry Lee handed his daddy the keys to a new Lincoln, and Elmo got drunk not long after that and drove it into something that did not move, and so Jerry Lee bought him another one, because he loved him, and because that piano tilted the world.

  He tells how he bought Elmo a brand-new Cadillac, and how his daddy, flying drunk through Mississippi, “just didn’t make a curve, and turned it over about three times, and he just got out and took off walking. ‘Where’s your car, Daddy?’ I asked him, and he looked at me and said, ‘Son, I have no idea.’ Well, that day I bought him one just like it, red with white leather—I mean, a sharp car—and parked it in his driveway. And he just come out the door and got in it and drove off, like he never had a wreck. I don’t think he even knew the difference. I don’t think he ever did. I said to him, ‘Looks like your car’s goin’ good, Daddy,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, son, it’s going all right.’

  “In California, I bought him a new Harley. He drove it all the way back, and he was going a hundred and ten in Greenville, Mississippi, when they finally run him down. The phone rang, and it was the police chief, and he said, ‘Is this Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, it depends.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a fellow here who says he’s your daddy, and he’s coming through here doing a hunnert-ten, and said he’s had just one beer.’ And I heard Daddy in the background, saying, ‘Honest to God, son, just one beer.’ And I said to the police chief, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ I asked if he could let him go, and he said to me, ‘Tell him to slow down.’

  “Them was good days, too,” says Jerry Lee.

  In the studio, as he searched for another hit, there was time to record some more fine old music, the kind he’d heard as a boy. One day, he says, “Jack Clement caught me at the right time, in the right mood,” and he sat down at the piano alone and cut a version of “That Lucky Old Sun,” a number one hit by Frankie Laine in 1949. The song was one of those pieces of music that just ride easy in your head, and Jerry Lee’s piano gave it a barroom, blue-collar undertone. In a voice that was smooth and easy—in great contrast to the shakin’ and shoutin’ music he became famous for—he sang about a workingman, burned and wrinkled by the sun, sweating for his wife and children.

  While that lucky ol’ sun ain’t got nothin’ to do

  But roll around heaven all day.

  “That’d make the hair stand up on the back of your neck,” says Jerry Lee.

  The one bleak spot was his marriage to Jane. She was still living back in Ferriday while he bunked with the Browns in Coro Lake, and sometimes he could forget he was married at all. He knew his boy was being cared for, there so close to his people, but Jane was sick of the distance between them and was insisting that she bring Jerry Lee Jr. to stay with him in Memphis. But Jerry Lee was still living with his cousin J. W. and his family and was in no hurry to live anywhere else. More and more, he was spending time with his cousin Myra, who didn’t look thirteen a bit, not to him. He believed she was of age, by all the customs and standards of his history, his experience, and, after a failed reunion with Jane in Memphis, he felt even less married than he ever had, and was becoming suspicious that she didn’t feel married, either. But she was no longer fighting, no longer hurling the whole world at him, and it all just died, what love there might have been, in a kind of indifference, and he knew that ducking was all there had ever been. But as always, he hated to drag the laws of man into his life, so he just let it be, as he disappeared into the studio for the crucial follow-up record to “Shakin’.”

  The sky over Memphis was full of falling stars. He had seen Carl Perkins stall after one big hit, watched Roy Orbison and Billy Riley and the others grasp at straws, and he was determined to do better, recording and discarding song after song, never finding just the right thing. But “Shakin’” was far from done, and he had time, still, to relish it. People were already daring to say what he had known all along. In August, a story clattered across the United Press wire claiming that Jerry Lee Lewis was on his way to usurping Elvis Presley as the king of rock and roll.

  He remembers, as “Shakin’” held strong on the charts, sitting with Johnny Cash in the studio at Sun. Cash and Perkins and Billy Lee Riley and the other Sun artists were still rankled over Jerry Lee’s New York trip, and Sam’s ongoing sponsorship of Jerry Lee to the exclusion of all else, so they just sat, sharing the silence. Jerry Lee was reading Superman.

  “How many records have you sold?” Cash suddenly asked Jerry Lee.

  Jerry Lee looked at the secretary, Regina.

  “It’s sold about seven hundred thousand,” she said.

  “How many has mine sold?” Johnny asked.

  “About two hundred thousand,” she said.

  Johnny, in that taciturn way he had, thought on that for a minute.

  “Gee, whiz,” he said, in that baritone voice. “I wish I was a teen idol. It must be nice.”

  Jerry Lee told him, yes, it was, and went back to his funny book.

  Photographic Insert 1

  With his parents, Elmo and Mamie Herron Lewis.

  Courtesy of Jerry Lee Lewis

  As a boy, at around the time his father took him out to the levee to see the party boats on the Mississippi. “That’ll be you on there someday,” Elmo told him. “That’ll be you.”

  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  The young conqueror loose on the streets.

  The bar at Haney’s Big House, with proprietor, Will Haney, second from right. “I just introduced myself to the atmosphere,” says Jerry Lee.

  Concordia Sentinel

  With Sun Records founder Sam Phillips (above), who tried to convince Jerry Lee that he could save souls as a “rock-and-roll exponent,” and Sam’s brother Jud (below)

  who served, at various times, as manager, drinking partner, and mentor.

  Pictorial Press; Colin Escott

  Jerry Lee with (left to right) Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash, around the piano at Sun, December 4, 1956: the afternoon jam session that went down in history as the Million Dollar Quartet. “I knew there was something special going on here,” Jerry Lee says.

  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  Here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’: The Steve Allen Show, July 28, 1957.

  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  Shining down from above: a mysterious Sun promotional photo.

  Debuting “Great Balls of Fire” in the jukebox film Jamboree.

  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  Signing autographs for fans at the Bell Auditorium, Augusta, Georgia.

  Museum of Augusta

  The Great Ball of Fire on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

  “I thought to myself, I don’t like the look in these girls’ eyes, and the cops couldn’t do nothing about it.”

  ValdoSta, Georgia, probably early 1958.

  Courtesy of Pierre Pennone

  With fan club president Kay Martin and a fan b
ackstage at the Loews Paradise Theater in the Bronx, New York, March 31, 1958.

  Courtesy of Kay Martin/Pierre Pennone

  At the Granada Theatre in Tooting, South London: his last concert before leaving England, May 26, 1958.

  Pierre Pennone

  “Why don’t we leave our personal questions out of this, sir?” Greeting the press with Myra upon his return from England, Idlewild Airport, New York City, 1958.

  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  Steve Allen Lewis, who died before his fourth birthday.

  Kevin Horan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

  With Don Everly (center) and Buddy Holly (right), who asked him for marriage advice. Jerry Lee remembers Holly as “a real champion” and “a true gentleman.”

  Pictorial Press

  With his parents, Mamie and Elmo, 1959.

  Bettmann/Corbis

  At El Monte Stadium, Los Angeles, with DJ Art Leboe, June 20, 1958.

  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  REX USA / Devo Hoffmann

  The conqueror returns to Europe, early 1960s.

  Marion Schweitzer/REX USA

  7

  TOO HOT TO ROCK

  Memphis

  1957

  He spent money like a Rockefeller, on cars and motorcycles and rock-and-roll clothes, and he had more pretty women chasing him than a Palm Beach Kennedy, but it is a fact of history that poor Southern boys have a problem in success just as an oddly shaped man has trouble finding a suit of clothes that does not cut, bind, and itch, till it is maddening, those clothes, and you want to tear them from you and run for home.