Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  In summer of ’79, Elmo quietly went into the hospital in Memphis with a burning in his own stomach, and while he hoped it was an ulcer, it was not, and the once magnificent man wasted away from the disease that had taken his wife and so many there along the river, where it was said the chemical plants and industry and the agricultural runoff had poisoned the swamps and rivers and backwater and through them had seeped into the people and left them with the disease that so often had no cure.

  He died on the twenty-first of July, 1979. His obituary described him as a retired carpenter and a member of the Church of God. He was buried with Mamie in the cemetery in Clayton. The laws of man, of divorces and such, did not count for much when it was all preached and done, and so he joined her in the earth, right beside her, as his son insisted. Their first son, Elmo Kidd Lewis Jr., rests between them, and their second son was more alone than he had ever been. He knows most people remember their daddies by the things they said, but he loves his daddy for a silence, a silence that lasted for decades. When Jerry Lee thinks of his daddy now, he thinks of that long-ago day at the piano when Elmo sat down to show him how to play a song and inadvertently broke his son’s heart.

  Two months later, Jerry Lee was arrested for possession of pills. At a fitness hearing before the Board of Health, Dr. Nick told his judges that it was better to manage an addict’s intake professionally than to have him satisfy his habit on the streets. In 1980 he was indicted for overprescribing medications to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and nine other patients, including himself. He was acquitted but later had his license revoked. Jerry Lee always believed it was wrong to blame him for Elvis’s death. “Dr. Nick was a good man, a remarkable man,” he says now. “If I thought I could get some blues and yellows out of him, I’d call him up right now.” Then he grins, to tell you he is just goofing—or maybe he just grins.

  In early 1980, the IRS seized Jaren’s home. “I am poor and destitute,” she told reporters, as she showed up at the Department of Human Services to apply for food stamps. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to the beauty shop.” The divorce action was still pending when the IRS auctioned off her home for $102,000. “They’ve sold it all,” she said. “There’s nothing else they can take.”

  Jerry Lee was not in the country. He was on another British tour, including a pair of solo piano appearances on the British television shows Old Grey Whistle Test and Blue Peter, but he was thin and his voice seemed rusted out. It was clear he wasn’t feeling well, but again that summer he held off the creeping decay with a new song. In the middle of his grinding tour schedule, he went back into the studio for Elektra and cut a beautiful rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” His voice, even charred as it was, and his tremulous piano gave the song a gritty vulnerability it had never enjoyed, and it became an almost instant classic for him. “It had a certain feeling to it,” he says now, “like a religious undertone. A something that you very seldom ever can hear.” It seemed almost impossible that this one man—the same man who reeled through his life with so little regard for caution or consequence—could create something so purely beautiful. If you ask him how that can be, he merely looks at you with satisfaction and waits for you to figure it out.

  In November he appeared in a TV special called Country Music: A Family Affair, playing a piano duet with Mickey Gilley that still has stagehands sweeping up the ivory. Playing side by side, the cousins blistered through a version of “I’ll Fly Away” that gave the audience a taste of what it must have been like years ago when they battled to beat the old church piano to death. Jerry Lee took the lead and Mickey, smiling, just tried to catch up. “We got this song in the wrong key,” Jerry Lee announced after a few choruses. “We gonna modulate up to G and do it.” And he sang:

  Just a few more weary days, and then

  I hope to God I’ll fly away

  “Mickey’s a good person, too. He wanted to be just like Jerry Lee Lewis. He did great, but you can’t get by with just one hit record,” or however many he had. “That boy’s livin’ in a dream world, if he thinks he’s . . .” in the same league as his cousin. But like him, “he knows how to go to church on a song.”

  With “Rockin’ My Life Away” and “Over the Rainbow,” it appeared as if there was hope for Jerry Lee and Elektra. Sometime in 1980, he went to the Caribou Ranch recording studio in Colorado to cut a marathon list of songs, more than thirty in all, everything from “Lady of Spain” to “Tennessee Waltz” to “Autumn Leaves” to “Fever.” He did songs he knew from childhood, like “I’m Throwing Rice” and “Easter Parade,” and a whole passel of gospel numbers, including “On the Jericho Road,” “Old-Time Religion,” “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” There were even a few moving new ballads, including a soaring performance on “That Was the Way It Was Then.” And once again he did them all for nothing. Deemed subpar by Elektra executives, the recordings were shelved for decades, available even today only as bootlegs. Many fans would come to consider the Caribou recordings one of the best albums that never was—though actually there was enough material for two or three albums and certainly one of pure gospel. He thought it was good music and one more example of the moneymen messing up an otherwise fine effort.

  His relationship with Elektra quickly soured. “I said, ‘It’s not workin’. I don’t feel it workin’, and it’s not happenin’.’ I didn’t want to stay. I wanted away from all of ’em.”

  His only solace was on the highway with his road-tested band, including guitarists James Burton and Kenny Lovelace, bassist Bob Moore, and drummer Buddy Harman. “And that’s all we needed,” he says. “You had yourself a band there nobody could ever touch. They followed me. They were such great musicians. It’s a one-time-around deal. You’ll never have it again.”

  What happened next has become a legend in the family, though the cousins still disagree on the details. Jerry Lee was doing a show in Dayton, but he was drunk and sick. He had challenged the disgruntled crowd to fight him, and things were going south. Then suddenly Jimmy Swaggart, who was doing a crusade in Ohio at the time, walked onto the stage, told the crowd he was taking his cousin away to take care of him—some cheered at that—and told Jerry Lee he would fight him if he had to, to save his life.

  “He didn’t let me know he was gonna be there,” Jerry Lee recalls now. “I don’t recall bein’ in that bad a shape. I kinda just went along with it. I couldn’t just kick him off the stage. I stood up, we shook hands, and we left.”

  When they got offstage, there was business to attend to. “You want to take me in your plane, or you want me to have mine come get us?” Jerry asked his cousin.

  “Naw, we’ll take mine,” Jimmy Lee answered.

  It was a long way from stealing scrap iron in Concordia Parish.

  On the way out, Jerry Lee says, his cousin “invaded my dressing room and flushed all my pills down the commode. It made me mad. I said, ‘Jimmy, you didn’t have no right to do that.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I did.’

  “I went and stayed at his house for five or six days,” he says, down in Baton Rouge. Swaggart administered a cure that seemed to consist mostly of boiled shrimp. “I must have ate a tub,” he laughs. “They were real nice to me while I was there. There’s no doubt about that.”

  After a few days, Swaggart told him, “I can’t see as how there’s really that much wrong with you,” and let him go.

  Looking back, Jerry Lee has little inclination to second-guess his cousin. “I think he was . . . he was right. He was right in what he was doing and what he thought and what he thinks.”

  But what was wrong with Jerry Lee could not be cured with a few days of clean living.

  On the twenty-eighth of June, 1981, after a show in Chattanooga, he complained that his stomach was on fire. But he felt better by morning, and the next day he was back in Nesbit, lounging at his pool, which had been impossible for the IRS to haul away. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, not some puny man, and a stomachache was nothing to fret a
bout.

  On the morning of June 30, he awoke with a pain like nothing he had ever felt before and began spitting up blood.

  “I was standin’ in front of the mirror in the bathroom. And I had an old gal back there, KK was her name,” he says. “I had a bad case of indigestion. Heartburn. And I said, ‘Man!’ I said, ‘Give me a glass of water with some bakin’ soda in it. That’ll knock this heartburn out. And everything will be all right.’ And I did that, and when I did, immediately, my stomach—I saw it open up! It just . . . hit me. And I fell to the floor.

  “And I . . . I know how it is if you’re gonna die. I can feel that, you know?

  “And I called KK in there. I couldn’t move a finger. And I told her, ‘KK, if you could get an ambulance here in the next five to ten minutes, I believe I can get to the hospital and I believe I’ll be all right. But if you don’t do that, I’m gon’ be dead here in the next fifteen minutes.’”

  The ambulance made it on time, but the crisis wasn’t over. “Headin’ out to the freeway,” he says, “they had a blowout. And it was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And the nurse in the ambulance said, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re gonna get you there all right. Don’t you worry!’ So they called another ambulance, and, um . . . it took him quite a while to get there.”

  He was taken to Methodist Hospital South in Memphis, where he was met by Dr. James Fortune.

  “He says, ‘I’m gon’ operate on you, Jerry Lee, but I’m tellin’ you, there’s no use in it. ’Cause, you know, you don’t have a chance.’”

  “I said, ‘Well, in that case, could you just give me a pain shot?’” and he laughs.

  “He told the nurse, ‘Give him whatever he wants. It don’t make no difference now, anyway.”

  The surgery took four hours to repair a ruptured stomach. Something—a lifetime of pharmaceuticals or whiskey, or suppressed worry and anger, or a cocktail of it all—had eaten a hole clean through it.

  “I really overshot my runway,” he says now.

  He lay close to death for a week. Doctors kept him in intensive care into the next. Ten days later, he began running a high fever. An X-ray showed that the eight- to ten-inch incision made in his stomach wall during the surgery was leaking, and fluids and stomach acids were infecting his abdominal cavity.

  Dr. Fortune and a team of surgeons rushed him to the operating room. Doctors told members of his family that his chances were fifty-fifty. Dr. Fortune told them his condition was a “minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour proposition.”

  Fans crammed the hospital lobby that hot summer and sneaked into the waiting rooms to sob and wait and pray for mercy. Some carried flowers. Some held hands and prayed for deliverance in this world or the next. Reporters milled outside. Camera crews set up for the inevitable, sad stand-up when the news finally came. The newspapers touched up his obit; some had had it on standby for years.

  Jerry Lee survived the four-hour operation but remained in critical condition. He lay in the third-floor ICU on a respirator. Myra came, and she and Phoebe were allowed to visit his bedside for fifteen minutes every four hours. Sam Phillips called the hospital and spoke to Jerry Lee’s cousin, handsome old Carl McVoy.

  “Old Jerry is in pretty bad shape,” McVoy told him. “It’s in the hands of the Good Lord.”

  Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash came to the hospital to say good-bye, but they did not tell him that.

  “I told Jerry that I didn’t come down here to start praying over him,” said Johnny, hoping that he was right. “I believe Jerry Lee has a lot more songs to sing.”

  Kris Kristofferson interrupted a tour to come and sit at his bedside. He considered him one of the greatest singers of all time, comparing him with the legends of opera, and he told him so again. Even Elizabeth Taylor, his old friend from Oscar Davis days, called the hospital to wish him well.

  The great threat, doctors feared, would be an onset of pneumonia. They pumped him full of antibiotics to try to ward it off. He spent most days in darkness.

  He looked up one day and saw his Aunt Stella standing over the bed.

  He winked. She leaned in close.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he whispered.

  He improved, slowly.

  “I’s in the hospital ninety-three days,” he said.

  “It was rough. People wouldn’t believe the kind of pain that I was in. A lot of pain, man. They was givin’ me pain medicine that would kill an elephant.”

  But worst of all was the simple fact of lying there, helpless.

  “I was frustrated beyond the realms of imagination,” he says, and laughs again. “God pulled me through that. And if it hadn’t been for Him, I wouldn’t have made it at all.”

  The first thing he did when he got home was sit down at a piano to make sure there was nothing wrong with his hands.

  It was fall before he was released from the hospital. He had appeared on NBC’s Tomorrow show shortly before his emergency, and in September he returned for another appearance to show America he wasn’t dead yet. Then in January 1982, he taped a show called 25 Years of Jerry Lee Lewis in the sold-out Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville. It was a tribute show, with guest stars Kris Kristofferson, Charlie Rich, Dottie West, the Oak Ridge Boys, Mickey Gilley, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Perkins did “Blue Suede Shoes.” Cash did “Get Rhythm,” and gave testimonial to the man he once battled for supremacy in the auditoriums of the frozen north, when they lived on saltines and potted meat. He was there, he told the audience, when Jerry Lee, “blond hair flying . . . came onto the scene with such a bang the entire Western world was aware of him.”

  Jerry Lee, first in a red crushed velvet jacket and then a rust-red tuxedo, looked waxen, ravaged, tired beyond his years. “It was severe,” he says of the recovery and the lingering pain.

  “You never looked better, buddy,” Johnny Cash told him.

  Jerry Lee still kicked the bench backward, but it did not go very far. He still banged the keys with his boot, but not more than a time or two. But he seemed genuinely touched by the crowd, which gave him standing ovations, and by the words of his old friends. It was a scripted show, but he knew they meant it. To the tune of “Precious Memories,” he summed up his life and his recent ordeal, and said he wished he could go home to his boyhood days in Ferriday, that he would give “five million dollars, if I had it . . . to spend five minutes with my mama again. . . . She’d straighten me out.” He reached out to Jimmy Swaggart, telling of their boyhood and the life they lived, “but we went separate ways.” He seemed glad to be alive inside that sewed-up body. “My blessings,” he testified, “far exceed my woes.”

  “You know they call me the Killer,” he said to the audience. “The only thing I ever killed in my life was possibly myself.”

  Shawn Stephens was twenty-three, a small, pretty, honey-blond cocktail waitress at the Hyatt Hotel, trapped in the inertia of Dearborn, Michigan. In February 1981, Jerry Lee was playing the Hyatt lounge, part of the truncated road schedule he had been forced into since his surgery and convalescence. There was no record money coming in; he had no record deal, at least not one producing any new songs. But he was glad to be alive, and he picked the vivacious Shawn out of the throng of pretty cocktail waitresses at the hotel lounge. He sang a song to her and smiled; women like a good-lookin’ rock-and-roll singer, especially a wounded one.

  A girlfriend of Shawn’s was keeping company with J. W. Whitten, Jerry Lee’s road manager, and that led to a visit by Shawn and the girlfriend to Jerry Lee’s ranch, with its piano-shaped pool and sprawling lake. The IRS had taken most of the cars, but it was still an impressive estate. Jerry Lee fell in love with her; it had never taken a whole lot for that to happen, anyway. “I was bad to get married,” he says. “But she was a real good woman,” one who bounced into a room and lit it up. He needed that. She came to visit him again in Nesbit, and he gave her a gold bracelet and some other expensive presents, and they talked of getting married
after his divorce from Jaren was final. His life then seemed glamorous still. In April he jetted off to London to appear at the great Wembley Stadium for the first time since his illness; he told the audience he was “probably not exactly all the way up to full par,” but they gave him a hero’s welcome, and he sliced through the keyboard with an almost casual defiance.

  Shawn’s family told her to stay away from the man, that he could be dangerous. She told them he needed her.

  His performing life was still almost charmed, in some ways, able to survive long droughts in the studio and even increasingly erratic live shows, but tragedy in his private life seemed to rattle and clank behind it all, the way tin cans do when tied to the bumper of a car.

  On June 9, 1982, Jaren Pate was sunbathing at a friend’s house in Collierville, Tennessee, outside Memphis. The owner of the house where she was staying, Millie Labrum, looked out the window and did not see her, and sent her son to check on her. He found her floating in the aboveground pool, dead. She was still married to Jerry Lee; they had been scheduled to appear in divorce court later that month. The coroner ruled that her death was an accident. Jerry Lee would never accept her child as his, and no one would ever launch any legal proceeding to prove his parentage. Some people of long memory in Memphis still call it a case of abandonment, the one thing they cannot forgive. But friends of Jerry Lee would say that the marriage had existed mostly on paper, finally ending in a great sadness. And if there was any kindness in it, it was that Jerry Lee would never loudly denounce either the mother or the child.

  Two months later, in a haze of new pain from his stitched-together stomach, he stood weakly on the deck of a riverboat as Elmo’s long-ago prophecy come true: with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, and assorted other country swells, he sang and played aboard the Mississippi Queen for a television special. He played his piano and sang his songs as the big river rolled, as people watched from the banks, but there was no one there, with him, no one who remembered that it was ever said.