Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(103)
But mostly, she will never forget his face. “The look on his face . . . it was worth everything,” she said, worth the kidding she would take, worth the tiny scandal if her people ever found out. “He was happy. You could see it. You could tell he loved it, tell that he just loved being there.”
He was still big in Memphis, would always be big in Memphis, and his fans there knew what he had endured and what he had lost. They thought he might be jaded by now, tired of the old hits that were only a reminder of how great he had been. They thought he might be sick of the endless road and constant newspaper stories of scandal and excess, sick of the eternal comeback, of every grubby little part of it. But the man Gail Francis saw in the Oriental that night was flying above all that, or maybe just flying, still desperately in love with the music. After the show, he invited her and some of the girls to a party with the band, and she said no, but a few girls said yes, they might.
“She told me that story a million times,” said her daughter, Alicia. “She told me, ‘Jerry Lee Lewis lifted me up on his piano, and I just weighed ninety-eight pounds.’ A million times.”
But even that neon glow winked out eventually. The man who couldn’t be handled had a falling out with Frank Casone, as with every manager he ever had, and of course lawyers were involved, and those days at the Oriental blended and blurred into a kind of lost decade. It is not that he did not sing and record good songs or that he slipped from sight; he only slipped, again, from fame.
It felt, sometimes, like he was the only one who remembered, and he was not even in his late twenties yet. It seemed like the good songs were bound up in logging chain and padlocks. The cradle itself, the original Sun Studio, went still. Technically outmoded, it became a storage room for brake pads, fan belts, and antifreeze. Sam Phillips stayed in the business, building one new studio in Nashville and another on Madison Avenue in Memphis, but he would never regain such luster. Then again, as an original investor in a chain of Memphis-based hotels called Holiday Inn, he didn’t have to; he had gotten the best of it, anyway. Would there ever be another night when men drank great gulps of whiskey and argued about God?
He was playing Hot Springs, Arkansas, in late August 1963, when Myra went into labor again, this time with a baby daughter. Jerry Lee jumped in his Cadillac and headed south—not to be with his wife and new baby, but back home to Ferriday, where another family member was in need. “People got mad at me because I wouldn’t drive from Hot Springs to Memphis when she was born. . . . But my Uncle Lee was dying of stomach cancer,” and he went down, then.
Lee Calhoun had always been good to him, even if he’d let him sit and worry a little while in that St. Francisville jail; he had left a check on the table when Jerry Lee needed a car, and looked after his mama, twice, when his daddy was sent off for making liquor. He’d given them a place to land, his mama and daddy, when they were adrift in the Depression, when the whole country all but rolled over and died. He had to go home and pay his respects; his new life would wait till the old one was done, and was respectfully laid down.
Phoebe Allen Lewis was born on August 30, 1963. She would always say that her daddy would have been there if she had been a boy. “I was glad to have her,” says Jerry Lee. “I called her My Heart. She was beautiful. I picked her up and held her. She favored me.”
The little girl toddled through some of the darkest days of her father’s legend. At first, she was just too young to know. Having Jerry Lee Lewis as a father had, at times, great benefits.
“I had an enchanted childhood,” said Phoebe. She would creep out of her crib and later her bed and sneak into the bedroom of her parents.
“Get out of here, Phoebe,” her father would roar, “and shut the door and go to bed.” But he would always give in, and she would snuggle up between her mother and father.
“I slept every night between my mama and my daddy,” she said, between a mama who tried to raise her within the rules and a daddy who had never recognized, let alone followed, a rule in his life.
“I’d be drinking from a bottle and Mama would say, ‘Phoebe, you’re too big for that bottle,’ and took it away, and then Daddy would take it to the store and fill it with Coke or chocolate milk.”
She remembers living on bologna sandwiches on white bread with mustard, but her parents always watched her around the pool, made her stay out of the pool for at least thirty minutes after eating “so I wouldn’t get the cramps.” Their house outside Memphis was filled with famous and almost famous musicians, most of them in various stages of drunkenness or chemical dependency, people she came to know only as “Daddy’s drinking buddies.” The one constant was music; there was always music, pouring from the piano and the record players scattered throughout the house. Men, half drunk or fully so, picked guitars barefoot on the sofas, in the yard, all of them, every one, looking for a hit.
Late that summer, Jerry Lee did make it into Sam’s new studio on Madison to cut eight songs, this time reaching back to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Hong Kong Blues,” from 1939, and even further back, to “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginia,” a Reconstruction-era ballad by the African American minstrel performer James A. Bland. They were the last songs he would record for Sun Records. He was fed up with the label’s inability to move his records and needed a change. The Sun session was by that point just an obligation; he had already signed a five-year contract at Smash Records, a subsidiary of Mercury, which wanted to record him in Nashville, in the heart of a country music establishment he had despised since it first condescended to him as a younger man. Memphis, the beating heart of rock and roll, had given him everything, and now he was driving away from it, due east into the rising sun, into a place where people really did, here and there, hang steer horns on their Cadillacs.