Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  “I finally got their attention pretty good. But he . . . really done it. He should have closed that show.”

  But there was no time to be humble in ’57. A great and fearful void had suddenly opened in rock and roll as Elvis prepared for his induction. And swaggering into that frightening place came that boy from Black River, playing his piano on a flatbed truck, but this time on a Hollywood set, and it all made the fans fall out on the floor and the promoters smile that crocodile smile, till it was clear that the only person who could stop Jerry Lee from ascending the throne was Jerry Lee himself. The acclaim was not universal, but detractors were hooted down or their criticism dismissed as snobbery. Some critics sneered at him outright—not his music, but him, chided him for combing his hair onstage and other loutish behavior, while admitting, even though he beat the piano to death, he beat it in perfect key. “I didn’t care one way or another, ’cause I wasn’t doin’ the show for them, anyway,” he says.

  Even Liberace, who could play the instrument with great skill beneath all that Old World lace and powder and Vegas glitter, marveled at this untrained boy’s native ability. “He said, ‘Nobody can play a piano, that fast, and hit the right notes . . . and sing at the same time,’” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said there must be another piano somewhere, hid.” Finally, in Hot Springs, he came to see for himself. “He went backstage, where I was playing, and he set back there and watched and listened to me play. He didn’t believe it till he saw it with his own eyes.”

  At Sun, the usually tightfisted Sam Phillips packed up thousands of records to give away at disc-jockey conventions, and Jud laid the groundwork for promoting the next record, another Otis Blackwell sure thing called “Breathless,” with a campaign unlike anything the industry had ever seen before. They were men he trusted then, handling parts of the business he could not even pretend to care about. “I was paid to play piano and sing,” he said, repeating another mantra he would hold to all his life, “not any of that other stuff.” The business part of it—the production and bookings and all that junk—took something natural and bled the fun out of it. Playing piano, he would stress, was like making love to a woman, but he seduced everybody.

  “Elvis, he charmed the women, and he leaned more toward the women in his music,” he says. “The women was his deal. But I had the women and the men going crazy for me, because my music had guts.”

  In Graceland, Elvis watched Jerry Lee’s hits march relentlessly past his on the charts, and when hangers-on talked a little too much about the new boy, because they had all come to think of Jerry Lee as Elvis’s friend, Elvis said to shut up.

  The darker side of rock and roll was yet another thing he shared with Elvis. Since the days at the Wagon Wheel and Blue Cat Club in Natchez, he had been taking pills, pills to keep him sharp, keep him awake in the endless nights. He ate them like M&M’s, those amphetamines. “People would just give me a handful—I’d put ’em in my shirt pocket, and reach in and get one.” It became a kind of magic shirt with a bottomless pocket. People, believing they were helping him, would continue to do that for years, till “I had a full pocket of ’em, all the time. I don’t think I ever was a full-fledged addict,” he says, but that reliance on pills to make a show or get through one would deepen, worsen. At the time, in the mid- to late 1950s, he was indestructible, seemingly bulletproof. “But it was easy to get hooked on them pills, especially them pain pills,” and the slow process of destroying his body, night after unrelenting night, had begun.

  He was hardly the first. Country music stars had been hooked on amphetamines forever—for Hank Williams, it was morphine—and blues and jazz musicians had made the needle and reefer part of their national persona. But with Jerry Lee that kind of thing was more dangerous. As his daddy had discovered, he had no governor. He was quickly becoming known as not a rock-and-roll singer but a wild man who would outplay, outdrink, outfight and, well, out-everything anybody. He’d steal your girlfriend or your wife, in front of you, dare you to make something of it, and then leave you at the emergency room and her at the motor court.

  Most of that is true, he says, but not so much the drinking. “I never drank that much liquor,” he says, knowing that will probably make some people shake their heads and grin at the audacity of it. He did, he says, come to have a taste for Calvert Extra, “and I’d buy a fifth and set it on the piano lid. It kind of cleared my voice, usually.” But it did not take a lot of liquor to coax him into bad behavior. He was a fighter by nature—he liked the thrill of it then, when another man meant to cause him harm—and a lover, he says, by design.

  “It’s rough, when they’re beggin’ to get on your bus, or on the plane. It was real life. But it seemed like a dream.”

  The women—other men’s wives, often—were another, more immediate threat. “I’d be playin’, and I’d look up and see a bullet sittin’ on top of the piano,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I wonder who left me this,’ but I had a good idea who left it there. I showed it to the audience,” further cementing his legend. He did not have a lot of respect for husbands who could not keep their women happy. He knew how to do it; if they didn’t, they should try harder.

  “I always had this dream, that I had a horse, this special horse, bullets wouldn’t hurt it, and the horse had a speedometer on it, and it’d go sixty, a hundred miles an hour, and I’d set ’er on one hundred and we’d go jumpin’ fences, wide-open across the land, and never got tired,” he says, and smiles. “And I’d have a gun, the fastest gun, and no one could touch me.” He is not certain what that dream means; he is not the kind of man to sit and wonder about dreams. But he has an idea.

  Like men do, and have since the beginning of time, he saw no reason why he could not have everything, why he could not have the wild rock-and-roll life and all its excesses, and a family life to root him, to hold him, and there was still the ghost of his raisin’ whispering always in his ear. “I was bad about gettin’ married, though. You’d run into ’em that wouldn’t turn you aloose, so you marry them. I’d just say, ‘Ain’t no use to count you out. The rest of ’em had it.’”

  In Coro Lake, the ascending monarch strolled down the street with Myra, his biggest fan. He was still living there with J. W., Lois, the boy Rusty, and Myra. He had enough money to buy a mansion, would have enough soon to buy his own Graceland, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want a mansion, didn’t want to be surrounded by yes men inside the walls and nutcases leaving love letters twisted in the iron of the gate. He liked being the richest perpetual houseguest in the history of Coro Lake, because he liked to be around Myra when he came home. She was slim, with wavy brown hair and a swan’s neck and big, big eyes, and if she was a child, he was a Russian monkey cosmonaut.

  “I’ll race you,” he said to her.

  “You’ll beat me easy,” she said.

  “I’ll run back’ards,” he said.

  She took off, giggling.

  Jerry Lee could fly, backward, a skill any man who has played some football must have and one a man who is prone to take other men’s women would perhaps need. He was going full speed when he tried to swing around, lost his balance, “oh, man, it was an adventure,” and went tumbling across the asphalt of East Shore Drive. He tried to catch himself but succeeded only in scraping much of the skin off the palms of his priceless hands. “Tore ’em up,” he says. He was not badly hurt, but he did play his next show in bandages, and if there was any kind of warning in it, any irony, he missed it, but if he had caught it, he would have ignored it anyway.

  “Myra was a twelve-year-old kid when I first got there. I paid no attention. . . . We wasn’t doin’ nothin’ at that time. But I got to watching her, and she was a grown woman all of a sudden.”

  He always got what he wanted, and he wanted Myra. He did not ask himself what it would mean to his place in rock and roll’s hierarchy or history, nor did he ask himself what society would think or demand in return—what penalty he would pay for not caring that he offended the sensibilities of more careful w
omen and men. “I wasn’t worried about my career,” he says. “If I wanted to do something, I just did it.”

  Many people have asked why someone, anyone, did not explain it all to him, that it didn’t matter whether he considered it right or wrong based on his culture. It was only that, if he was to be the new king of rock and roll, there were customs and practices he would have to hold to in order to rule in this wider world. But if anyone did see the danger in what was happening in Coro Lake, anyone with any influence, they either hoped it would go away or pretended, as money flowed in, that it was not happening at all. But even if someone—Sam or Jud or someone he trusted—had vigorously questioned Jerry Lee on his relationship with Myra, he would have merely reared his head and hitched up his pants, looked down at them from a high place, and told them nobody handled him, then taken Myra to get a milk shake in his Cadillac, the top cranked down so everyone could see.

  “I used to take her to school,” he said, wheeling up at the steps in one of his big convertibles, the rest of the girls giggling and squealing at her famous cousin. The legions who have condemned him for it, for romancing a thirteen-year-old girl, have painted a picture that had nothing to do with reality, he said. His own sister married at twelve. People celebrated it, because, as his mama said, the child knew her own mind. Marriage to a girl of thirteen or fourteen was routine in his family’s history, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. It might be offensive to some, to many, but it was what was.

  “Myra was not a baby girl. She was a woman. She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking,” he says now. He does not care how that sounds, and says it, partly, just to show he doesn’t care. “She looked like a woman to me.” She was not innocent of boys, not the way books and movies tried to make it seem, he says, and for months they had been kissing and making out. J. W. and Lois would say they knew nothing about it, that they felt betrayed by Jerry Lee, but he believes it would have been hard not to figure out that something was going on in that house, especially if they had looked outside and seen them in the car. They talked on the phone when he was on the road and disappeared in his car almost the minute he got back. “She was my third cousin, and when I talked to her on the phone, I’d say, ‘How you doin’, cuz?’

  “One night, we parked out in front of the house. . . . After we got through, she started crying. ‘Now I’ve done this,’ and it wasn’t the first time, ‘you’ll never marry me, will you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And I lived up to my bargain.

  “I thought about it,” he says now, “about her being thirteen and all, but that didn’t stop her from being a full-fledged woman.”

  Finally, J. W. did ask why he was calling the girl so much from the road, he would write in his own memoir, but it was too late to stop what was in motion.

  “I wasn’t even trying to hide her,” says Jerry Lee. “I liked to ride around in them convertibles too much, and it’s hard to hide a woman in one of those, ’specially if she’s sittin’ on my lap.”

  The fact that she was kin, his cousin, was also not troubling to him even in the least, because marriage between even first cousins was routine in his culture and certainly in his family line. If cousins had not married cousins, the great tribe in Concordia Parish would not have existed at all. It was not just accepted, it was, by all evidence, preferred. By such standards, a distant cousin was almost a rank stranger, a foreigner. “She was my third cousin. I was gonna marry her, either way,” says Jerry Lee, “even if she was my sister. . . . Well, maybe I won’t take it that far.”

  Jerry Lee’s divorce from Jane was still not final in December of ’57 and would not be for about five months, another of those ridiculous laws and conventions that should have had nothing to do with him. But he had filed his papers asking for it and so had she, so as far as he was concerned, that marriage was dead and done—Jane had kept custody of Jerry Lee Jr.—and he believed he was free to remarry. He had been taught that marriage was a covenant between a man, a woman, and God, a covenant no man could put asunder, but it was a fact of life that men and women fall in love and sometimes fall slap out, and marriages die. “I think the reason I kept gettin’ married is I couldn’t find nobody,” nobody lasting, he says. As that year wound to its close, with everything he had ever dreamed of in his reach, Jerry Lee drove due south in his Cadillac across the Tennessee state line into northern Mississippi, where marriage had always been an inexact science at best, allowable to almost anyone with a few dollars and a good story or a plausible lie. With Jerry Lee was a woman who went into the Jefferson County Courthouse that day and signed a legal document stating that her name was Myra Gayle Brown and she was twenty years old. Jerry Lee signed it too, and they drove back to Memphis with that silly little piece of red tape snipped clean in two. The real Myra was in Memphis that day, in seventh grade.

  The second week in December, in a lull in his touring schedule, he proposed in the front seat of his Cadillac. Myra would write that she was frightened and reluctant and that he pressured her, but Jerry Lee does not recall any of that. “We was in front of her house, making a little love,” he says, “and I said, ‘You want to get married?’ and she said, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and we decided to get married.”

  The next day, on December 12, 1957, he drove south again, through the Christmas shopping traffic, with a Myra Gayle Brown beside him. Again he headed into Mississippi, to the town of Hernando in DeSoto County, where the young people of Memphis had been going for years to marry in secret. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, they pulled up to the chapel. The Reverend M. C. Whitten, a Baptist, performed the short ceremony, and with no family or friends to witness, Jerry Lee and Myra were married before God. The minister, who was accustomed to such things, did not question the union. There was no honeymoon—no possibility of one—so they drove back to Coro Lake. They told no one, because Myra was afraid of what her mother and father would say. Jerry Lee did not much care if they knew or not but agreed to wait, at least a little while, before telling his cousin J. W. that he was now his father-in-law, too.

  He has been asked, a thousand times, if he loved the girl.

  “At one time,” he says, “I thought I did.”

  He thinks about it a moment, considering.

  “There was love there.”

  It lasted about a week before they were found out, before a well-meaning maid saw a marriage license in a drawer and pointed it out to her parents. Here stories drastically differ. J. W. and Lois said they were stunned, shaken to their very core, heartbroken, incensed, and of course betrayed. J. W. also said it sent him into a killing rage, said he was bent on murder and didn’t mind suffering the consequences, said he took after the boy in his car with a loaded pistol on the seat beside him. That might make for a good screenplay, said Jerry Lee, but it was not as dramatic as that.

  “I wasn’t running from J. W. I might have been drivin’ a little fast,” he said, smiling, “but I wasn’t runnin’. He said he was gonna shoot me, but he wasn’t gonna do nothin’.” He doesn’t even believe it was much of a shock to anyone except maybe Sam and Jud Phillips, who understood, immediately, the danger in it, not from J. W. but from the inevitable bad press.

  J. W. did come into the Sun studio asking if Jerry Lee was there, and he did have a pistol with him—Jerry Lee maintains it was posturing—and Sam told him to sit his pistol-waving behind down and listen to reason.

  “Now, J. W., I understand that you’re mad, and I understand you want to shoot Jerry Lee,” said Sam, intimating that there were many times he’d felt like doing it himself. “But you need to understand one thing, son. You can shoot him, but you’ll make a whole lot more money not shooting him.”

  J. W. went home, and Jerry Lee went unshot.

  “Talk is what talk is, just a bunch of yapping,” says Jerry Lee. “I done what I wanted to do,” and for J. W. or anyone else to pretend to be shocked by that, to be caught flat-footed by his courtship of Myra, by the fact that it led to a wedding, is a r
evision of the way things were in those days, he believes.

  He would be painted as a man leering over the cradle, while Myra would be depicted as either a nervous and confused little girl or a giddy, gushing schoolgirl, torn between puppy love and a great, deepening regret. In that portrait she seemed to go overnight from a child playing with dolls to a wife. Tearfully, in shame, she crammed her clothes and little girl’s belongings into her dollhouse, the closest thing she had to a grown-up suitcase, and left the sanctuary of her parents’ home. This would become the lasting and damning portrait of Jerry Lee, and many people believed no more damning than he deserved. But it was greatly exaggerated, says Jerry Lee. “When this so-called news broke, it was like I had committed an unforgivable sin,” he says. “I did not.”

  The marriage was, to the outsiders who stumbled across it, puzzling. Myra was routinely pulled over by police when she went for a drive in one of Jerry Lee’s Cadillacs, because they believed she was a teenager taking her parents’ car out for a spin. Once she was detained and her car dismantled by police after she tried to pay for a meal with a hundred-dollar bill, the same day a nearby bank was robbed by someone matching her description; the police themselves were unable to decide if she was a child joyriding in her daddy’s Caddy or a grown woman capable of sticking up a bank. But somehow the news of Jerry Lee’s marriage to Myra mostly remained bottled up in Memphis and the surrounding area, contained by the river and the bluffs on the Arkansas side, the best-kept secret in rock and roll. For their first Christmas, Jerry Lee bought Myra a red convertible Cadillac of her own, with white leather interior.

  J. W. even briefly considered filing criminal charges against Jerry Lee, but he let himself be talked out of that, too, by a prosecutor. “Talk . . . ain’t . . . nothing,” says Jerry Lee. “Me and J. W. never had no problem.” He told Myra’s mother, Lois, that he loved her daughter, and told J. W. that he would take care of Myra, that she would never want for a thing, and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned. “I’ve always tried to be nice to my women, buy ’em what they want, keep ’em satisfied, keep ’em in a pretty car,” he says. He does not care that his attitudes about such things seem frozen in the past. It was the past, where this all happened, and it is where he is happiest, much of the time.