“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 about.
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.
His ability to bounce back from almost anything was intact. He left in April for another European tour, and in stops in London and Bristol, England, put on shows that seemed to defy or ignore all that had happened to him in the last two traumatic years. Gone, or mostly so, were the runaway ego and erratic behavior. He was gaunt, perhaps more introspective onstage, but he smiled with genuine pleasure at the tightness of the band, of Kenny Lovelace’s guitar licks, as his own piano went ringing through the Hammersmith Odeon in London. He asked for a drink, and they brought him a Coca-Cola; he looked ruefully at the bottle and then played them “Mona Lisa.”
A few days later, in Bristol’s historic Colston Hall, lucky fans witnessed a loose and sustained performance from a pure music man, chatting warmly with the crowd and the band. “I thought it was Wednesday! Thought we were off tonight,” he said when he took the stage, dressed in a simple red turtleneck. He gave them “Chantilly Lace” and “Little Queenie” and “Trouble in Mind,” a roaring “I Don’t Want to Be Lonely Tonight,” even Jimmie Rodgers’s “The One Rose That’s Left in My Heart,” and more, the whole time seriously intent on his piano, on his craft. “Glad to have a sober audience for a change,” he said, sipping from a bottle of Heineken sitting on the piano; later, when he sipped again, it foamed over when he set it back down on the piano lid. He could have nursed one beer all night. He complimented his band again and again. “Them boys are gettin’ pretty good,” he said, a kind of mantra for him in good times. “I can play guitar just like that—well, I wish I could.” But this new, almost modest Jerry Lee still brought them the rock and roll on “Little Queenie,” singing about how “I need a little lovin’—won’t you get your little . . . self . . . back home? . . . Pick it, Kenny!” He was still hurting then, but it was nothing he could not stand; the show he gave them was satisfying, hopeful, and if it was just a window, a glimpse of what things might have been, well, how lucky those people were to get to see it.
The following month, he played the Memphis Cotton Carnival, a kind of Mid-South Mardi Gras for the river city, and it was a different story. He took the stage in dark glasses and a black sleeveless T-shirt, as if he were a punk rocker, and appeared wired, mumbling some of the lyrics, and not just for effect. At the end of the show, barreling without interruption through “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” into “Meat Man” and then into “(Hot Damn!) I’m a One-Woman Man,” he started pushing the band to go faster, faster, till even he could barely keep up, and wouldn’t stop until three girls rushed the stage to distract him with a kiss.
While it’s hard to place an exact moment when it happened, it was about this time that a new downward spiral began, a descent into a whole new hell.
He should have toned down his lifestyle, should have slowed his consumption of the chemicals that put him in such shape. He did not. He was in constant pain, and painkillers replaced amphetamines; eventually it was needles.
“When you get those shots and things, you get addicted to ’em,” he says of the painkillers he took. “I thought it was helpin’ me. I thought I was gettin’ pretty high out of it. And I thought it was helpin’ me onstage.” He laughs, but there is no humor in it. “It wasn’t helpin’ me onstage. It was all in my mind. I got to thinkin’ it was very necessary to have, but I was wrong.”
Instead, he seemed to withdraw inside himself onstage, breaking off a song midstream, often running off to chase a thing inside his head and leaving his band behind—the band he had been so proud of, for the way they meshed, for the good music they had played across thousands of miles. It was that way in the hotel lounges and bigger venues, too.
“I was—kinda got addicted. I liked them shots. But the shots didn’t like me. There’s no way you can make it work. It don’t work. It’ll kill you.”
He was shooting the painkiller directly into his stomach—the only way, some nights, he could climb the steps to the stage.
Now forty-seven, he was starting to miss shows and to be sued by club owners and promoters when he did. The IRS waited at his concerts to take the receipts to pay off his debt. “They were all after me,” says Jerry Lee. “I didn’t pay no attention to ’em. I just kept on rockin’.”
He was free to marry now, and he did not worry about propriety. Jaren and he had not lived as husband and wife for years before her death, so to him it didn’t seem too soon to marry again. On June 7, 1983, he put on a white tuxedo with a ruffled red shirt and a big white bow tie and said “I do” for the fifth time, to Shawn Stephens, now twenty-five. The National Enquirer took photographs, covering the event as if it was some kind of royal wedding, as if the editors somehow knew this story would be gold for them, now or at some time in the future.
It was not, of course, a storybook life there in northern Mississippi. It was much less glamorous than it seemed there in the Dearborn Hyatt. The couple argued. Jerry Lee was fully addicted to the painkillers now. His new wife soon began to soften her own reality with her own drugs, barbiturates. “But she done it to herself,” he says now. He never asked her to take anything and never forced her to take anything, he says. “I never hurt her.”
The maid at the Nesbit ranch found Shawn Stephens Lewis dead in a guest bedroom about noon on August 24, 1983, seventy-seven days after she and Jerry Lee were wed. Jerry Lee, who had slept in his own bedroom, had arisen early that morning and had assumed she was sleeping in.
DeSoto County sheriff Denver Sowell said a preliminary autopsy found that the cause of death was pulmonary edema, or fluid buildup in the lungs, a condition that often accompanies pneumonia or a heart condition. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy concluded that Shawn Lewis had not been the victim of a violent death. But later, a full autopsy conducted by Dr. Jerry Francisco—who had also performed the procedure on Elvis Presley, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.—found the painkiller methadone in her system at ten times the normal dose.
“Although you never feel like you know everything everybody did, exactly,” said Bill Ballard, the DeSoto County prosecutor, “I think we made a thorough investigation of this case and nothing has pointed to homicide.”
Francisco told the prosecutor that he found no evidence that the dosage was forced into her mouth or throat. A DeSoto County grand jury reviewed the case and found no grounds for indictment.
But Shawn’s family in Michigan hired a private attorney to investigate her death, unwilling to accept that it was a self-administered overdose. “They feel if Shawn had never met Jerry Lee Lewis, she would probably be alive today,” said Michael Blake, the attorney. Months later, Rolling Stone magazine published a long, dark, ominous article headlined “The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis,” written by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Richard Ben Cramer. The story raised questions about law enforcement’s handling of the investigation, suggesting that public officials had been covering for Jerry Lee for years. Cramer also suggested that investigators did not pursue some facts in the case, including reports of blood at the scene and questions about the integrity of the evidence.
Both Cramer and ABC News 20/20 reporter Geraldo Rivera cited a violent altercation between the couple the night before her death as evidence suggesting foul play. A bodyguard told 20/20 that he saw Jerry Lee slap her “a time or two.” Rolling Stone reported that an ambulance attendant saw bruises on her arm and scratches on the back of Jerry Lee’s hand. Rolling Stone also wrote that Jerry Lee had struck Shawn’s sister, Shelley, and that he had threatened Shawn. The magazine cited Shelley as the source. They all used his own nickname against him: the Killer.
None of it prompted charges against Jerry Lee or changed the state prosecutor’s conclusions. Police in northern Mississippi and Tennessee had been responding to incidents involving Jerry Lee Lewis for years: fights, cussfights, accidents, gunfire, threats, and untold other infractions. He had been helped into police cars in handcuffs in three counties and judged and fined, usually in absentia, on a regular basis. The notion that they would give him a pass on murder did not make sense, officials here would say. It was not a storybook marriage, obviously; divorce records indicated that none of Jerry Lee’s marriages had been harmonious, but investigators would say that the evidence was a long way from proving murder.
Jerry Lee told reporters that he did not believe Shawn meant to kill herself. “We had our usual arguments, but there was no reason for that,” he said.
The Rolling Stone story was devastating to him, he says now.
“They treated me like a dog.”
He has called it ridiculous, a manufactured lie.
“I was innocent, and they never proved nothin’. . . . Never proved I hurt no one. She done it herself. She wasn’t beaten at all. There wasn’t a touch of circumstantial evidence that I done it. It was a mistake,” he says of the overdose. “But I hurt nobody.”
The worst of it, he says, was that it made him seem like he had no feelings for the young woman, that people assumed he would not grieve. “That’s the ‘Killer’ part, I guess,” he says now. “You don’t take something you can’t give, when it’s a person’s life. You can never do that.”
But his persona made the tragedy into a story people would hunger for, especially so soon after Jaren’s drowning.
“If I had done everything these people think that I’ve done, I would have been buried in the penitentiary years ago,” he says. “I never killed anything in my life.”
He believes there was another reason that story spread.
“I ain’t never sued nobody,” he says, “and everybody knows it.”
Shawn was buried in Clayton, with his people.
He retreated behind the gates of his ranch and sealed them with a padlock. But it’s hard to be a private man if you are him. In October, two months after Shawn’s death, he taped a concert for Austin City Limits, playing the show behind a set of dark sunglasses that concealed his emotions. Thin and solemn, he played the boogie-woogie in a sweat, but it would be a lie to say he did not still play it like him, did not put on a show, and when he was done, he flew home to wait for the next show and medicate himself in seclusion.
The guilt in it, in the death of his fifth wife, was in the lifestyle he lived, and had lived for so long. He was the unstable rock his blood kin leaned on, and the rock the people who loved him broke themselves against.
Record labels were not courting him. As a last resort, he signed a deal with MCA, but throughout the mid-’80s, the sessions yielded only a few memorable tunes, including yet another signature song, this time by Kenneth Lovelace, called “I Am What I Am”:
I am what I am, not what you want me to be