Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(112)

In one rehearsal, puzzled, he recited the line:

“Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul: even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.”

He asked Jack Good what exactly that meant.

Good told him.

“Aw, hell,” Jerry Lee said, “I know all about that.”

Other lines were so true they needed no explaining.

Who steals my purse steals trash, ’tis something, nothing;

’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands:

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.



Good’s greatest worry was that Jerry Lee, being a rock-and-roll star, might not make the curtain on time, since running late is a rock-and-roll certainty. So—not wanting to make Jerry Lee mad, by insisting he be there—he had the entire cast arrive at the theater at two o’clock in the afternoon for the evening performance. But he should not have worried. Jerry Lee took that aspect of the production seriously, too. He was, he says, honored to be part of it. It was—at least at first—wicked fun.

“I liked the costumes. I liked the little goatee I had. The makeup was superb, and my hair was perfect,” he says, and for a moment it appears as if his body has been invaded by some alien species.

Graham Knight, a computer salesman from Aberdeen, Scotland, is one of Jerry Lee’s biggest and most loyal fans. He has seen him perform hundreds of times since they first met in 1962, when he used to drive him to his shows in Britain. So of course he was sitting in the Ahmanson on opening night. It was surreal, he said, seeing Jerry Lee inside a part yet still unmistakably him. Jerry Lee was not a schemer like Iago—he did his meanness straight on—but the danger in Iago, the malice for those he suspected of wronging him, fit him well. But “I expected him to go into ‘Great Balls of Fire’ at any moment.”

It was the first time, he says, that he didn’t see Jerry Lee do an encore. “Jerry would always do another number,” as long as the people were applauding, said Knight. “In this, he stuck to the format and bowed with the other actors” at the close, almost humble.

The applause was not as wild as Jerry Lee was used to, but it rolled on and on.

“It was first-class,” he says. “I looked out there and saw all those big stars looking at me.”

On that opening night, Hollywood turned out for this most unusual spectacle. Angie Dickinson was there, being stunning. Steve Allen was there, applauding wildly, next to renowned composer Burt Bacharach, and Jerry Lee’s devoted fan Tom Jones, at that moment one of the biggest sex symbols in the world. Sammy Davis Jr., the timeless song-and-dance man, clapped in the front row. Zsa Zsa Gabor was there, dripping in diamonds, her platinum hair piled high. They all lined up with reporters to get backstage.

Andy Williams shook Mamie’s hand. She had always liked Andy Williams.

“I never knew whether to go on before or after your son,” he told her. “If I went on before him, they shouted for Jerry, and if I went on after, they booed me.”

Jerry Lee remembers, especially, Angie Dickinson. “I mean, she was on top of it.”

Mercury sent a bottle of champagne. Sam Phillips sent a case.

It was not Laurence Olivier’s Othello, this production, but it was by God a show. “Jerry Lee Lewis, Louisiana-born genius, with fiddle, drum, and piano, played a unique Iago,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “He read the lines extremely well. But his big coup was the way he played the psychedelic green and gold grand to punctuate his attack on Othello’s susceptibilities.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote: “When Lewis tells a wiggling Chorine, ‘Shake and break it and wrap it up and take it,’ it fits the play better than, ‘Oh, mistress, villainy hath made mocks with love!’”

Variety wrote that Jerry Lee’s stage acting debut “makes of Iago an often chilling contemporary schemer, despite a singsong recital of lines.”

Several reviewers noted that Jerry Lee did not even try to mask his Southern accent, and sometimes would “garble the lines,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “which was exactly the intent.”

The response was so strong that Jerry Lee moved Mamie and Linda Gail to Los Angeles for the duration of the play. It ran for five weeks and grossed some $500,000, and there was talk of Broadway.

“I just didn’t have any interest in that,” says Jerry Lee, and it is one of the few times in his life when he made a decision about his career that he has genuinely regretted later. “I mean, I knew I could handle it, but I never was so glad when something was over. [Jack] wanted to take it to Broadway, but I told him, ‘I can’t do it, Jack, I’m sorry.’ It could have been one of the biggest plays that’s ever been, if I had stuck with it. But me with my hard head. . . . Now I wish I’d gone ahead and done it, for Jack. I let him down.” The play, he says, drew other acting offers. “Some people in Hollywood, they begged me. They begged me to go to France and do a movie with Kim Novak. I had my chance at Hollywood, but doing that play had showed me how hard it was. It was work.”

The truth is, he missed being the genuine Jerry Lee Lewis.

“They didn’t understand . . . I play piano and sing songs. I loved that.”

He had proved that he could do it and make a dollar doing it, and nothing gave him more pleasure than showing people he could do a thing they thought was beyond him, too complicated for the country boy. But as Elvis had so feared, there is always a risk for a performer, if you disappeared for too long from your stage, from your true calling. But Shakespeare and Iago would linger in his mind. He left Los Angeles with a healthy respect for the words, and even months later, taping a TV show called Innocence, Anarchy, and Soul in London—Shakespeare’s own backyard—he was able to interrupt a scorching rendition of “Whole Lotta Shakin’” to smite the audience with Shakespeare: