Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(108)

If this was exile, he could stand it for a good while longer.

“Really, man, I lived it all,” he says. “I guess my reputation for all that stuff went ahead of me, too, and I had to live up to it, had to travel hundreds and thousands of miles a day, play good music, and take care of the women, too,” and he grinned at that, at the burden.

But Jerry Lee did not want anybody’s sympathy, certainly not a beautiful woman trying, as the country song goes, to catch a falling star. He hungered to be back on top again, on top of everything.

He took care of business, one little radio station at a time. He confronted disc jockeys who had banned his records and pumped the hands of the ones who had stuck with him, and sometimes there was a hundred in his hand as he did it.

“Greased them pockets,” he said. “I learned it from Jud. And I started gettin’ my albums on the air. . . . Three hundred, five hundred, whatever it took. ‘Money makes the mare trot,’ Mama said. It had to be a good song, but the money didn’t hurt. It wound the clock up every time,” giving him a little more time to record, to search for that big hit.

But for now it was small-time, still. Sometimes they dragged trailers behind their Cadillacs to sleep in, a kind of gypsy caravan rattling across the country. Once he was riding with songwriter Bill Taylor as his wife, Margaret, slept in another vehicle. The two men were riding, drinking, when suddenly one of the trailers broke free of its hitch and came whizzing, freewheeling, past them in the adjoining lane.

“That looked just like my trailer,” Bill said.

“That is your trailer,” Jerry Lee said.

They watched it roll down the highway.

“Wonder if Margaret’s in there,” Bill said.

It coasted to a stop.

“Guess I better go see,” he said.

It was an unusual time but a kind of life that would become less unusual over the years. He was still wandering, playing music that still made people glad to be alive. At a show in Arkansas, “my dressing room was one of those trailers, out in the back somewhere,” he says. He signed autographs there, including one for a college-age boy he would later recognize, some three decades later, on television. “He was runnin’ for president. Bill Clinton. Stood in line to get an autograph. . . . I knew I knew him.”

To his musicians, it seemed like Jerry Lee was determined to play and party his life away without interruption, and even when they saw the Memphis city-limits sign, it was no guarantee that he would turn them loose and let them return to their homes, to their own lives. He would insist on playing on and on and on into the next morning at his house outside Memphis, drinking and hopped-up, as his band’s families wondered if they would ever come home. It wasn’t so much the need to party that was driving him, but that hunger for a hit, the key to his comeback, and he believed the best way he could accomplish that was inside the craziness, singing and drinkin’ whiskey and searching for chords and taking pills and listening almost desperately for the song that would change everything. Phoebe, a little girl then, remembers it this way.

“He’d be on the road, going, going, going . . . and then he would come home and go to his office, and I’d hear records playing.”


Back in Ferriday, the hateful old racial order had begun to smoke and curl. Firebugs and bomb throwers, careful to hide their faces and not set their sheets ablaze, would turn parts of black Ferriday into kindling—which was odd, because there had been little agitation here. In ’64, Will Haney’s friend Frank Morris was burned to death in his shoe shop. The FBI descended on Ferriday, but his murderers never went to trial. Three years later, Haney’s Big House, the landmark blues club that had helped transform Jerry Lee from a talented church piano player into something more, burned to the ground. It would never be rebuilt; Haney would soon succumb to old age, and the great days of blues and R&B would drift away like smoke. It was as if the ground on which he’d built his musical life was turning to soot and ash.

The Smash label vanished, absorbed into Mercury. But Mercury, under any name, could not find him a hit, and he could not find one on his own. By the late 1960s, he was referring to his label mostly with disdain. The Beatles had drawn more than fifty thousand to Shea Stadium while he played for hundreds in auditoriums or less in the bars. Television producer Jack Good kept signing him for more episodes of Shindig!, and Jerry Lee got them to put Linda Gail on, too, to help her get her own career started. But what was there for him to play? One day he found himself on TV playing the Huey “Piano” Smith song “Rockin’ Pneumonia” on a harpsichord.

Pills melted in whiskey, whiskey infused blood, till the road and home and the rest of it were indistinguishable. Smoke, blue and swirling, shrouded it all. He had always liked a good cigar but now smoked big Cubans, the biggest and richest he could find, procured from his British contacts now that Castro was cozy with the Russians. Now and then he would stroll from his office with a bottle of whiskey in one fist, a fat Cuban in his teeth, and a big .357 or .45 in his other hand. He would aim it at the stars and fire and fire until there was just an empty click.


Jerry Lee’s marriage to Myra, and his home life in general, was strained at best. “Myra had a bad habit of surprising me. I’d look up, and she’d be at the show,” he says. “In Atlanta, in sixty-seven, after a show, someone told me, ‘Jerry Lee, Myra’s in the next room.’ And I said, ‘Well, tell her she’ll have to wait her turn.’ I was taking a lot of them pills then. Another time they said, ‘Watch out—Myra’s hiding behind the curtain in a polka-dot dress.’”