8
ENGLAND
London
1958
It was quite a sendoff, that May. They followed him cheering through the streets of his hometown, hundreds of them, which was a lot in a place the size of Ferriday. It had been decreed by an act of the city council to be Jerry Lee Lewis Day, May 17, 1958, and instead of the quiet ceremony and polite applause that usually followed such things, there was a great upheaval in the low, flat land. They came walking in their overalls and oil-stained khakis and faded flower-print dresses to take a small part in celebration of the fearless boy who dangled from the high iron, who took the music from their dirt and made it something the rich folks and even the Yankees paid money to hear, and if that was not by God a trick, they didn’t know what was. They left their little wood-frame houses and hurried across the crawfish dirt that had soaked up a thousand years of floods, queuing up for a city block. Then the drum major struck up the band and they marched, through the good smells of Brocato’s Restaurant, by the little church where he forgot which song he was to play, and along streets where he walked coming home from the late-night show, watching for werewolves. They marched past the cotton buyers in their bow ties and the boys dumping ice on the catfish, buffalo, and gar at the fish stand, marched behind the black and gold of the Ferriday High School Marching Trojans, which blared out “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And at the head of it all, reclining in his chariot, was the shining man, golden hair tousled and gleaming. He rode in a new 1959 Cadillac convertible, fins so sharp you could hurt yourself. “The last really pretty car,” he says. “Hasn’t been a really pretty car, since the fifties.”
Just a few days before, on the thirteenth, Jane Mitcham Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis had been officially and finally divorced. Immediately afterward, Jane stood on the steps of the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis and told a reporter with the Press-Scimitar not only that she was still in love with Jerry Lee but that she planned to do everything she could to reconcile and rekindle their romance. It was not an unusual thing, such a declaration; there is just something about a divorce that gets people to thinking of romance. Jerry Lee just knew he was down to one wife again, at least, and did not think on it anymore. He couldn’t see how it had much bearing on this day or any of the perfect days to come.
After the parade, after the home folks had trickled back to their homes, he would go to the new house he had bought for his mama and daddy here in Ferriday, the one with the driveway lined with gleaming Detroit steel, and he would eat his mama’s fine cooking prepared on her brand-new stove, then drive back to the high school and play a dance in the gymnasium out of the goodness of his heart. Then he would rush back to Memphis to fly away, first to the bright lights and unchecked room service of New York, then to the British Isles for a five-week tour that would make him an international star. And if he happened to see his cousin Jimmy while he was home, he’d tell him he’d decided to buy him a new car, too, a brand-new ’58 Oldsmobile for him to drive on the revival circuit even as he preached against rock and roll, so that he could better do God’s work. But for now, for just a few blocks more, he rode in that new leather, face to the sun, his future limitless, his conscience clear.
Jud met Jerry Lee in New York to try once more to talk him into keeping Myra a secret at least until the tour was over, to just not mention the marriage if he was unwilling to leave her behind altogether. Somehow Jerry Lee and Myra had remained mostly undiscovered outside Dianne Lane, but Jerry Lee had his back up about the England trip and said they would not sneak around in England. “She’s my wife,” said Jerry Lee. He would not hide her by leaving her behind. “That wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all,” he says now. “I was glad it was gonna be out in the open. I wasn’t hidin’ nothin’,” he says, something he has stressed again and again. “I was out in the open with everything.”
“If you do this,” Jud told him, “you’re gonna flush the greatest talent that this country’s ever seen right down the commode.”
He could not imagine going to Myra at the last minute and telling her that, out of fear over what might happen, he, Jerry Lee Lewis, was going to slink off to England alone. Myra and Frankie Jean were looking forward to a great vacation of shopping and sightseeing while he played his shows. To leave Myra behind, he says now, would have been to admit he was ashamed of her and what he had done by marrying her, but he was not, and in that conviction he was trapped. They all were. Jud went back to Memphis to closet himself with Sam and worry, and—it would come out later—to start planning for the fallout they knew was coming. They could feel it, the way you can feel lightning pull at the hairs of your arms before it strikes.
A harbinger of things to come waited for them in New York. Dick Clark, whose career had been greatly served by the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose Saturday evening show had been pulled from the fire by the Beech-Nut–“Breathless” collaboration, had scheduled Jerry Lee for the Saturday before he left for England. But then suddenly, after a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night warning that Jerry Lee was about to be wrapped in scandal, Clark canceled him. “After we took him nationwide,” says Jerry Lee.
To him, it was hysteria over nothing.
“Stupid,” he says.
It began on May 21, 1958. Jerry Lee, Myra, Jerry Lee’s sister Frankie Jean, the drummer Russ Smith, J. W., Lois, and the little boy Rusty arrived in New York, to be joined there by old Oscar Davis, the man who had managed Hank Williams. Jud was there, to wish them bon voyage. Jerry Lee wanted his mama and daddy to go, but they had never been on a plane before. Elmo and Mamie had traveled before to see their son, and they loved the fancy hotels—Elmo thought room service meant he had his own butler—but the New York to London flight, ten hours in all, was over water all the way, and Mamie didn’t think her nerves could take it.
They almost didn’t make it to England at all. The number two engine on the plane carrying the entourage burst into flames, raining small pieces of itself down over the Atlantic, and the pilot made an emergency landing in Ireland. The group boarded another plane and finally landed at Heathrow on the evening of the twenty-second. There an immigration official looked at Myra, at her passport, at her boarding card, and back at her face. “It was noted that the date of birth shown on her passport was 11 July, 1944,” wrote A. R. Thomas in his report on the arrival of Mrs. Lewis. “This seemed to be an unusually young age for a married woman, but since both parties come from the Southeastern part of the United States, where the legal age for marriage is lower than is usual in other parts of the world, no action on my part seemed to be called for. Mrs. Lewis’ appearance was fairly well in keeping with her age, although she might have passed for a couple of years older. She was as tall as an average fully-grown woman. . . .”
There was some hope that Myra might pass unnoticed through the airport and into the semiprivacy of a hotel with the rest of the entourage, some hope that Jerry Lee, with the power of his music, could somehow preempt any coming disaster or at least get through his shows and return safely to America, where the story might be, if not contained, at least spread out a little more, in the way a firecracker does less damage on a driveway than it does under a tin can. There was no hope that the British would understand, or accept. The British were not built that way, and their own rock-and-roll revolution was at the time merely in the grumbling stage. Though the young people of the British Isles hungered and clamored for American rock and roll, the politicians and ruling class were highly suspicious at best of the wild boy from the American South and were already harrumphing mightily.
England took itself quite seriously in 1958, and with every right. It seemed like just yesterday that a German madman had sent bombers across the Channel to flatten whole blocks of London. V-1 and V-2 rockets had rained upon them from space itself, and they had buried their dead and soldiered on, as if the whole ordeal had merely chipped some old crockery and run them late for tea.
But the reporters here were of a different stripe from those Jerry Lee had encountered in the radio stations and on the music beats back in the States, where a manager or studio executive might still slap a young music scribe on the back and buy him a whiskey or six to keep a rumor bottled up just a little while longer. Here, reporters joked, there had not been a really good story since the surrender, and the country’s own pioneering rock and rollers were of such a milksop variety, most of them, that they were never considered much of a threat. But the papers loved a smashing scandal, and if outrage was unavailable, then feigned outrage would do just as well.
From Customs, Jerry Lee and Myra walked straight into a battery of blinding flashbulbs and shouted questions from a small mob of reporters. One reporter broke from the mob chasing Jerry Lee and asked Myra who she was, and of course she answered him. “Jerry’s wife,” she told him, and though Oscar Davis hustled her away, it was too late.
The reporters, who are paid to dig, dug at first just a little, and Jerry Lee, sensing that what Jud had warned of was coming true, told them that Myra was fifteen, but when asked if it was his first marriage, he replied that no, sir, it was his third. That alone was enough for a scandal, and the more Jerry Lee and Myra tried to answer the reporters’ questions, the more they constructed their own gallows.
When reporters asked Myra if she didn’t think she was a tad young to be married, she replied that age doesn’t matter back in Tennessee. “You can get married at ten, if you can find a husband,” she said.
When a reporter asked Jerry Lee if Myra was too young, he replied, “Look at her.”
The morning after their arrival, the newsboys waved the headlines at the passing cars.
JERRY BRINGS WIFE NO. 3, FAIR AND 15
(Like a Well-Scrubbed Fourth-Former!)
Looking at the headlines from those few days in May of ’58, you’d think Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t a rock-and-roll singer at all, but an invader come ashore uninvited in the middle of a royal wedding, tracking mud through the Church of England. He still has trouble finding the sense in it, even after all this time. He does not agree with much of the history that has been written about it all these years, does not agree that the British people—or at least the rock-and-roll fans who had clamored for his visit there—suddenly turned on him en masse, because he remembers more chants of worship than cries of derision. He does not remember it as history does, and so it is ridiculous to waste his time or his thoughts on it for very long. He is not just being belligerent. He knows it was bad for him in the end. But he still cannot see the great sin the London press used to crucify him, cannot fathom what the big deal was and what people were so upset about, as a growing frenzy of self-righteous indignation and overinflated condemnation slammed into his marriage and career one newspaper at a time.
“It wasn’t nothin’,” he says.
He shakes his head, incredulous.
“I mean, it wasn’t nothin’.”
As scandals go, it was an odd one. There was some subterfuge in it, and considerable lying on the part of his manager and even a little himself, but not very good lying. But the fundamental fact is, it all happened because Jerry Lee was not trying to hide Myra—even if he did try to fudge her age—and when the news of it swelled into scandal, the people around him acted like they’d never met the girl, or feigned outrage of their own, or ran and hid. Instead of damage control, the people who might have rallied around him instead blundered around the Westbury Hotel, while Jerry Lee himself gave interviews in which he intended to explain himself but only poured kerosene on the roaring fire.
“They come down on us hard,” he says. Neither Jerry Lee nor Myra understood that what they said to the press would be used against them in sneering contempt, and it got worse with almost every hour. The papers painted a picture of hillbilly culture gone mad, and it seemed like every move he and his entourage made only riveted the image further in the minds of readers. One reporter wrote that he interviewed Myra’s mother, Lois, in her nightgown, clutching a sheet to herself, talking about how they would all have to get to the bottom of these charges right away. Every other story seemed to mention that a member of the entourage was in some stage of undress—even elegant old Oscar Davis, who apparently came to the door in his boxer shorts. They quoted Myra as saying that Jerry Lee had given her a red Cadillac for Christmas, but that she sure wished she had a wedding ring, though. “Gee, it’s fun being married,” she said. “The girls back at the school were mighty envious when I married [Jerry Lee].” Jerry Lee himself told the reporters, “I’m real happy with my third wife.” And all this was said before the first press conference. Oscar Davis, apparently living in some alternative universe where reporters do not recognize a diamond mine when they blunder into it, had merely pulled one reporter aside and told him not to print any of it, to respect their privacy.
Jerry Lee never doubted, even as he rode to his first show in the back of his limousine, that he would blow it all away once he took the stage, that he would just send the damning stories and the accusing headlines into scrap on the London sidewalk. The reporters had taken their efforts to be polite and twisted it into something ugly, but the reporters were not the reason he was in England. “I came to play rock and roll,” he says.
The first show was at a sold-out theater in Edmonton, in northeast London. Two thousand people waited quietly and politely for a taste of real American rock and roll. Warming up for Jerry Lee were the Treniers, identical twins Claude and Cliff Trenier out of Mobile, Alabama, a dynamic twosome who had successfully made the turn from jump blues to rock and roll and were considered pioneers of the music. They had a naughty song called “Poontang,” but they elected not to play that in Edmonton, doing their more palatable songs to polite and friendly applause before leaving the stage to make room for the main event. Unlike fans in America, those waiting for Jerry Lee neither stomped nor cheered, merely waited with polite and reserved anticipation. To Jerry Lee, it was a little off-putting. He believes it would have been a different story, a different England, if only he could have played first, before the newspapers put the bootheels to him, if the music had been the story that rocketed around the country in the first few days of his tour.
He could have acted contrite, could even have toned down his attire a little, to bow at least slightly to what was happening all around him in this foreign and hostile place, but to Jerry Lee that would have been more like a curtsy. He ascended the stage at the Regal Theater in perhaps the most written-about outfit in British history outside of a royal wedding: a hot-pink suit with sparkly lapels. As he swaggered across the stage, the people applauded with reserved vigor, which was less than he was used to but still far from hostile. He did a few songs, starting slow, and the crowd was blank and unresponsive. He took a break, as some idiot in the crowd sang a snatch or two from “God Save the Queen,” then came back to the stage and did it up right, gave them a good, hard jab of rock and roll, and he remembers that they cheered louder then, cheered the way people were supposed to cheer when Jerry Lee Lewis played the piano. He does not recall any ugliness, any jeers, any meanness, and when it was over, he figured everything in England was going to be fine.
But the press was only getting started, and now reporters in London and Memphis were digging into the near past. Some seemed content to flog Jerry Lee with opinion pieces and old news, but the Daily Mirror dug deeper, and in public records back in the United States discovered that Myra was not fifteen at all, but only thirteen, and that Jerry Lee was not divorced from Jane when he and Myra were wed, and that she was his cousin, and the sum total of all that was the hottest rock-and-roll star in the world was in London cohabiting with a thirteen-year-old relative who was not legally his wife.
That news made the British press nearly hysterical. Jerry Lee, having tried unsuccessfully to soften the matter by fudging Myra’s age and date of the marriage, now pretty much told it all to reporters who could barely believe their luck. He told about Dorothy and about the shotgun wedding to the pregnant Jane—all of it—believing that surely they would understand that it didn’t matter that he married Myra before he was divorced from Jane because, in a way, he was not really married to Jane, having still been married to Dorothy. He appealed to them as men, telling reporters about how Jane’s father and brothers came to him “with hide whips.”
“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 married 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!