Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  On the last night of a ragged, exhausting tour, Kenny says, “Jerry and I would hop in the backseat, and he’d get the guitar and I’d get the fiddle, and we’d play all the way into Memphis.”

  “He’s like a brother to me,” Jerry says. “We’ve shared so many things.” And no matter how ugly things got, “he always bounced back.” He joined the band in bad times; somehow he knew they were temporary. “He’s as good on guitar as I’ve ever heard. He can play the melody of a song on the guitar. I mean, very few people can do that. He gets deep into the music. . . . If he ever missed a lick,” he says, he can’t recall it now.

  He had spent years wondering whether he’d have to fire a drummer in the middle of a set or tell a guitar player to pick up the tempo or else. “That’s where the Killer part comes in,” he says, smiling but not really. But with Kenny in place, he says, he put together a road band “that nobody could ever touch.”

  During one show, somewhere, he looked up from the keyboard to see a young singer named Janis Joplin sitting next to him on the piano bench. “Might have been Port Arthur,” her hometown, he says. He never really liked visitors onstage unless they were invited. Later, in his dressing room, Janis asked him if he thought her sister was attractive. Jerry Lee responded honestly. “She might be all right if she’d do something with her hair.” She slapped him, hard, and he slapped her back. “And she come across that desk after me and I was fixin’ to knock her brains out.” But that was the way it was. The stage was for the music—there was a purity to it then—and the dressing room was for the foolishness, the fighting, and everything else.

  Lovelace, who would play behind him almost half a century, will always remember the nights in those mean, beginning years, and the tiny dressing rooms before the show. Jerry Lee always hung back until the last minute, till the band members began to wonder if he would show. “The band would go get him. ‘It’s time, Jerry Lee,’ we’d tell him,” said Lovelace. And Jerry Lee would answer:

  “Okay, Killers. Y’all hang in there with me.”

  Killer: It was the highest compliment he knew how to give, say the people who have known him the longest, but it is complicated. It draws people into his tightest orbit, lets them know that he considers them worthy to be there. It is also genuine fondness, his way of sharing some of whatever it is that sets him apart from other men. But it is also a way of binding people to him, a kind of brand, and he will bestow it on a whole room, if he needs to. And sometimes it is just his way of being friendly, to a young man, or a child, who stumbles up half scared with an old album in his hands. In time the name would almost haunt him, as people started to use it to describe a certain viciousness, a label for a man they suspected might be capable of anything, even killing. But when Jerry Lee looks you in the eye and calls you that, he is cutting off a little piece of himself and giving it away. It makes people grin like they’ve gone goofy and want to thank him, or at least run and tell someone, quick, as if it might fade away.

  On the road, he had the band of his dreams. In the studio, he had one of the most talented soundmen in the business and the best session men Nashville had to offer. All he needed was some poetry.

  Jerry Lee was done with Mercury, and the executives there were pretty much done with him, quietly waiting for his contract to expire. Between gigs and with no intention of cutting another record for those tin-eared Poindexters as long as he lived, he was back home in Ferriday, to maybe catch a fish with Cecil Harrelson, whom he had made his new manager. When he had rested up a bit and drawn sustenance from the low earth and his mama’s cooking, he would get back on the road and sing those old songs again. It was January 1968, a decade since the fall. “It got better,” he says. “It had to get better.”

  What happened next varies greatly from one account to the next, but it went something like this: In Nashville, a sometime rodeo rider named Eddie Kilroy had gone to work for Mercury as a promotions manager. Kilroy, who had played in a country band with Mickey Gilley, had sipped some whiskey with Jerry Lee a few years before and believed he was country at heart, real country, not one of those guys who was all hat and no cow. He called Jerry Lee and asked him if he would consider driving to Nashville’s Columbia Studio to cut an original country song, and Jerry Lee told him he would study on it. He had lost any love he ever had for Nashville but decided it couldn’t hurt to hear a song. He called Kilroy back and said he would give it a try for old times’ sake.

  Mercury’s big bosses had little faith it would work, though Jerry Kennedy had been trying to take Jerry Lee country for some time. But when Kilroy started calling writers and asking for material, there were few takers; people in Nashville like to do things according to formula and didn’t think boogie-woogie Jerry Lee was a bankable country artist.

  The song Kilroy had in mind had been written by Jerry Chesnut and sung by Del Reeves. Reeves didn’t sing it right, and it hadn’t been released. But it was a good song, with brown liquor and lost love pooling between the lines.

  Jerry Lee looked at the words—real words, the kinds of words a man felt when he held a woman he could not truly have, could only even hold for as long as a jukebox played. But could he sing it in a way that would make other people feel it?

  He stayed up all night learning it, sipping a little whiskey, and the next morning he sang it, this song every woman and every man already knew. Who knew the sound of a heart breaking could be so pretty?

  I just put in my last dime

  Heard you whisper we’d meet again

  Another place, another time

  “I remember we did it in two takes, and I picked the first one. ‘That’s your record,’ I told ’em, ‘right there.’”

  At first, he wasn’t sure he thought much of it. Often a song has to grow on him. “This is ridiculous,” he thought. “I know I’ve had better records than this.” But the more he listened to it, the more real, the more human it became. He listened to the words. In a wide world of phony and sissy music, this was something different.

  “It was a real song.”

  Jerry Lee thought he might have a hit, but there had been so many disappointments. He would have to wait and see, as country disc jockeys around the nation introduced the song to the working people who mostly made up that base. In the meantime, he had to make a living. But with few recording prospects, his contract with Mercury limping to a close, and the businessmen apparently glad to see it happen, he had a choice.

  He could return to the road, where bookings were becoming bleaker.

  Or he could do something else, something he had never considered before.

  That year he also had a different kind of offer to play his music on a stage, but not as Jerry Lee Lewis, not even as the Killer, but as a villain of a different age. Jack Good, the Oxford-educated producer who had welcomed Jerry Lee to Shindig!, had long dreamed of directing a rock opera based on Shakespeare’s dark Othello, and he had decided more than a decade before that his villain had to look and sound and strut and leer just like Jerry Lee Lewis.

  Jerry Lee received a seventy-page script from Good, whom he liked and trusted, and a guaranteed $900 a week for as long as the play would run.

  And so it was that, at the age of thirty-five, Jerry Lee Lewis started training to become a Shakespearean actor.

  11

  “HE WHO STEALS MY NAME”

  Los Angeles

  1968

  Iago draws the darkness to him. Swathed in robes of green velvet and blood red, he leers from within a thin black beard, a great cigar jutting from his white teeth. He is a fetid breath of pure evil, a thing beyond conscience, who believes himself wronged and will destroy the whole world in recompense. He controls and traps those around him, baiting them to act on their jealousies and their rage. If Mephistopheles himself had risen to walk across the boards, he could not have conjured a more perfect and lovely meanness than this villain, this Iago with the oddly lyrical Southern drawl. He strews his evil seeds, planting them in the weak, dark places in stro
ng men, and rejoices as they take hold and grow.

  In the medieval gloom, Othello, the Moor of Venice, watches his beautiful new wife Desdemona exit the stage. He says to Iago, his trusted soldier:

  “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee! And when I love thee not, chaos is come again.”

  “My noble lord—” Iago says.

  Iago inserts a worm of doubt. “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, know of your love?”

  A storm crosses Othello’s face. Iago has lit the fuse. Later, cigar glowing, he strolls to a lush green-and-gold grand piano, vines snaking around its legs, and begins to play, in a stop-time blues cadence:

  Cassio loves her, I do believe it

  She loves him, ’tis of great credit

  I hate the Moor! Yet I am sure

  He’ll satisfy his wife, every day of her life

  With lust of the blood, permission of the will

  Oh, that’s what you call love, she’s going to have her fill

  I love her, too, you know I do—

  Not out of lust, but ’cause I must

  For I suspect the lusty Moor

  Between my sheets has done my office more than once before

  With lust of the blood, permission of the will

  That’s what you call love, he’s already had his fill

  The piano pumps out his malice.

  I’ll even with him, wife for a wife

  Make him jealous, plague his life

  The thought of that gnaws my inside

  And never will—no, never shall my soul be satisfied

  By lust of the blood, permission of the will

  I’ll have my revenge, and I’m gonna have my fill

  He stops playing.

  “Let me see, how, how, how, how? Let’s see. . .

  He slams his hands on the keys, hard.

  “Oh! I have it! . . .”

  The Moor is noble, the Moor is free

  He thinks men honest—ha!—that seem to be

  I’ll plague him with flies, poison with lies

  And everywhere he goes I’ll lead him gently by the nose. . . .

  Then he breaks into a rolling piano solo of glee. Before the end, he brings up one golden boot and plays with his heel, in case there was ever any doubt who really lived inside Iago’s diabolical schemes.

  Later, when enough people had died, when Iago has been led away to the dungeons to rot and the curtain falls, Mamie Lewis rose in the front row of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles to applaud, and the whole theater rose with her. The other actors took their bows, but Mamie, wearing the white evening gown her son bought for her, knew whom the acclaim was for. Jack Good’s long-ago idea of a rock opera based on Shakespeare’s most complex villain had finally come together in this play called Catch My Soul, starring veteran stage actor William Marshall as Othello, Julienne Maris as the doomed Desdemona, and Mamie’s son as Iago. Why would it even be a surprise that he would steal this show, too?

  “Never thought I’d do anything like this,” Jerry Lee would say. He never knew there were so many words, twisting around like kudzu, working their way into people’s very hearts the way the vines back home wound their way through a rusted car. “That Shakespeare,” he says, “was somethin’.”

  The songs were no problem—though, he would admit, he did not always know what some of the words meant—but sometimes he found the spoken parts, in their early modern English, almost nonsensical. He bought a portable tape recorder and recorded the dialogue of all the other actors, leaving gaps where he would recite his own lines. He spent months at it, only to receive a phone call from Good telling him that the theater that had booked the play, in Detroit, had canceled. Then, on Christmas of ’67, Good called again to tell him the play was on again, at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles, and rehearsals would begin in January.

  He headed off to Los Angeles in his Lincoln limousine, with Myra and Phoebe in tow, and the fate of “Another Place, Another Time” hanging in the air. In the furnished apartment they rented off Sunset Boulevard, he played the new record over and over, sure it would be a hit.

  “It better be,” said Cecil, who’d taken an apartment across the commons, “or they’ll drop you off the label.”

  But there was nothing more he could do about that now. He had a play to learn.

  Some wondered if he would take it seriously. “I did,” he says now. He worked twelve hours a day on rehearsals.

  In one rehearsal, puzzled, he recited the line:

  “Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul: even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.”

  He asked Jack Good what exactly that meant.

  Good told him.

  “Aw, hell,” Jerry Lee said, “I know all about that.”

  Other lines were so true they needed no explaining.

  Who steals my purse steals trash, ’tis something, nothing;

  ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands:

  But he that filches from me my good name

  Robs me of that which not enriches him

  And makes me poor indeed.

  Good’s greatest worry was that Jerry Lee, being a rock-and-roll star, might not make the curtain on time, since running late is a rock-and-roll certainty. So—not wanting to make Jerry Lee mad, by insisting he be there—he had the entire cast arrive at the theater at two o’clock in the afternoon for the evening performance. But he should not have worried. Jerry Lee took that aspect of the production seriously, too. He was, he says, honored to be part of it. It was—at least at first—wicked fun.

  “I liked the costumes. I liked the little goatee I had. The makeup was superb, and my hair was perfect,” he says, and for a moment it appears as if his body has been invaded by some alien species.

  Graham Knight, a computer salesman from Aberdeen, Scotland, is one of Jerry Lee’s biggest and most loyal fans. He has seen him perform hundreds of times since they first met in 1962, when he used to drive him to his shows in Britain. So of course he was sitting in the Ahmanson on opening night. It was surreal, he said, seeing Jerry Lee inside a part yet still unmistakably him. Jerry Lee was not a schemer like Iago—he did his meanness straight on—but the danger in Iago, the malice for those he suspected of wronging him, fit him well. But “I expected him to go into ‘Great Balls of Fire’ at any moment.”

  It was the first time, he says, that he didn’t see Jerry Lee do an encore. “Jerry would always do another number,” as long as the people were applauding, said Knight. “In this, he stuck to the format and bowed with the other actors” at the close, almost humble.

  The applause was not as wild as Jerry Lee was used to, but it rolled on and on.

  “It was first-class,” he says. “I looked out there and saw all those big stars looking at me.”

  On that opening night, Hollywood turned out for this most unusual spectacle. Angie Dickinson was there, being stunning. Steve Allen was there, applauding wildly, next to renowned composer Burt Bacharach, and Jerry Lee’s devoted fan Tom Jones, at that moment one of the biggest sex symbols in the world. Sammy Davis Jr., the timeless song-and-dance man, clapped in the front row. Zsa Zsa Gabor was there, dripping in diamonds, her platinum hair piled high. They all lined up with reporters to get backstage.

  Andy Williams shook Mamie’s hand. She had always liked Andy Williams.

  “I never knew whether to go on before or after your son,” he told her. “If I went on before him, they shouted for Jerry, and if I went on after, they booed me.”

  Jerry Lee remembers, especially, Angie Dickinson. “I mean, she was on top of it.”

  Mercury sent a bottle of champagne. Sam Phillips sent a case.

  It was not Laurence Olivier’s Othello, this production, but it was by God a show. “Jerry Lee Lewis, Louisiana-born genius, with fiddle, drum, and piano, played a unique Iago,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “He read the lines extremely well. But his big coup was the way he played
the psychedelic green and gold grand to punctuate his attack on Othello’s susceptibilities.”

  The Los Angeles Times wrote: “When Lewis tells a wiggling Chorine, ‘Shake and break it and wrap it up and take it,’ it fits the play better than, ‘Oh, mistress, villainy hath made mocks with love!’”

  Variety wrote that Jerry Lee’s stage acting debut “makes of Iago an often chilling contemporary schemer, despite a singsong recital of lines.”

  Several reviewers noted that Jerry Lee did not even try to mask his Southern accent, and sometimes would “garble the lines,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “which was exactly the intent.”

  The response was so strong that Jerry Lee moved Mamie and Linda Gail to Los Angeles for the duration of the play. It ran for five weeks and grossed some $500,000, and there was talk of Broadway.

  “I just didn’t have any interest in that,” says Jerry Lee, and it is one of the few times in his life when he made a decision about his career that he has genuinely regretted later. “I mean, I knew I could handle it, but I never was so glad when something was over. [Jack] wanted to take it to Broadway, but I told him, ‘I can’t do it, Jack, I’m sorry.’ It could have been one of the biggest plays that’s ever been, if I had stuck with it. But me with my hard head. . . . Now I wish I’d gone ahead and done it, for Jack. I let him down.” The play, he says, drew other acting offers. “Some people in Hollywood, they begged me. They begged me to go to France and do a movie with Kim Novak. I had my chance at Hollywood, but doing that play had showed me how hard it was. It was work.”

  The truth is, he missed being the genuine Jerry Lee Lewis.