Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(111)

Jerry Lee received a seventy-page script from Good, whom he liked and trusted, and a guaranteed $900 a week for as long as the play would run.

And so it was that, at the age of thirty-five, Jerry Lee Lewis started training to become a Shakespearean actor.





11


“HE WHO STEALS MY NAME”




Los Angeles

1968

Iago draws the darkness to him. Swathed in robes of green velvet and blood red, he leers from within a thin black beard, a great cigar jutting from his white teeth. He is a fetid breath of pure evil, a thing beyond conscience, who believes himself wronged and will destroy the whole world in recompense. He controls and traps those around him, baiting them to act on their jealousies and their rage. If Mephistopheles himself had risen to walk across the boards, he could not have conjured a more perfect and lovely meanness than this villain, this Iago with the oddly lyrical Southern drawl. He strews his evil seeds, planting them in the weak, dark places in strong men, and rejoices as they take hold and grow.

In the medieval gloom, Othello, the Moor of Venice, watches his beautiful new wife Desdemona exit the stage. He says to Iago, his trusted soldier:

“Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee! And when I love thee not, chaos is come again.”

“My noble lord—” Iago says.

Iago inserts a worm of doubt. “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, know of your love?”

A storm crosses Othello’s face. Iago has lit the fuse. Later, cigar glowing, he strolls to a lush green-and-gold grand piano, vines snaking around its legs, and begins to play, in a stop-time blues cadence:

Cassio loves her, I do believe it

She loves him, ’tis of great credit

I hate the Moor! Yet I am sure

He’ll satisfy his wife, every day of her life

With lust of the blood, permission of the will

Oh, that’s what you call love, she’s going to have her fill

I love her, too, you know I do—

Not out of lust, but ’cause I must

For I suspect the lusty Moor

Between my sheets has done my office more than once before

With lust of the blood, permission of the will

That’s what you call love, he’s already had his fill



The piano pumps out his malice.

I’ll even with him, wife for a wife

Make him jealous, plague his life

The thought of that gnaws my inside

And never will—no, never shall my soul be satisfied

By lust of the blood, permission of the will

I’ll have my revenge, and I’m gonna have my fill



He stops playing.

“Let me see, how, how, how, how? Let’s see. . .

He slams his hands on the keys, hard.

“Oh! I have it! . . .”

The Moor is noble, the Moor is free

He thinks men honest—ha!—that seem to be

I’ll plague him with flies, poison with lies

And everywhere he goes I’ll lead him gently by the nose. . . .



Then he breaks into a rolling piano solo of glee. Before the end, he brings up one golden boot and plays with his heel, in case there was ever any doubt who really lived inside Iago’s diabolical schemes.

Later, when enough people had died, when Iago has been led away to the dungeons to rot and the curtain falls, Mamie Lewis rose in the front row of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles to applaud, and the whole theater rose with her. The other actors took their bows, but Mamie, wearing the white evening gown her son bought for her, knew whom the acclaim was for. Jack Good’s long-ago idea of a rock opera based on Shakespeare’s most complex villain had finally come together in this play called Catch My Soul, starring veteran stage actor William Marshall as Othello, Julienne Maris as the doomed Desdemona, and Mamie’s son as Iago. Why would it even be a surprise that he would steal this show, too?

“Never thought I’d do anything like this,” Jerry Lee would say. He never knew there were so many words, twisting around like kudzu, working their way into people’s very hearts the way the vines back home wound their way through a rusted car. “That Shakespeare,” he says, “was somethin’.”

The songs were no problem—though, he would admit, he did not always know what some of the words meant—but sometimes he found the spoken parts, in their early modern English, almost nonsensical. He bought a portable tape recorder and recorded the dialogue of all the other actors, leaving gaps where he would recite his own lines. He spent months at it, only to receive a phone call from Good telling him that the theater that had booked the play, in Detroit, had canceled. Then, on Christmas of ’67, Good called again to tell him the play was on again, at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles, and rehearsals would begin in January.

He headed off to Los Angeles in his Lincoln limousine, with Myra and Phoebe in tow, and the fate of “Another Place, Another Time” hanging in the air. In the furnished apartment they rented off Sunset Boulevard, he played the new record over and over, sure it would be a hit.

“It better be,” said Cecil, who’d taken an apartment across the commons, “or they’ll drop you off the label.”

But there was nothing more he could do about that now. He had a play to learn.

Some wondered if he would take it seriously. “I did,” he says now. He worked twelve hours a day on rehearsals.