Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(118)

After Shawn’s death, on April 24, 1984, he married Kerrie McCarver.

Zuma Press



Getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With him is Dennis Quaid, who played Jerry Lee in the 1989 motion picture Great Balls of Fire.

AP Photo/Doug Pizac



At home in Nesbit, Mississippi, with his Sun gold records.

LFI/Photoshot



With Chuck Berry and Ray Charles at the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, January 23, 1986.

? Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis



At the Great Balls of Fire premiere party, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, 1989.

AP Photo/Todd Lillard



Back at the Hall of Fame, 1995.



Onstage with Levi Kreis at Million Dollar Quartet, 2010.

? Neal Preston/Corbis; Bruce Glikas/WireImage/Getty Images



Frankie Jean.



Linda Gail.



With Judith, 2014.

Steve Roberts





12


JET PLANES AND HEARSES




Around the World

1970

The locust years had come to pieces on the ground. He had cast them down at the close of the last decade, along with everything else that reeked of small time. “I was still what they had been waiting for, and they still loved it, and they still knew I loved doin’ it.” He still fought the old devil, the one that swirled in the liquor and rattled around in pill bottles, the demon Satan who lived on the painted lips and swam in the made-up eyes. He still feared the cost, but not enough to cast down the music or all it had given him, and in a way, all it demanded in return. His mama had told him not to give up when things were bad, Mamie standing there in her always modest dresses, hair pulled back severely, still no makeup or lipstick on her face or lace at her neck or cuffs to offend her God. She had stood thus, her big black purse held before her like a shield, and told him to use his gifts to lift the people’s hearts, and if she had worries or doubts, she buried them deep down, like some lost hairpin in the bottom of that purse.

In the midst of his comeback, Mamie Lewis fell ill. The doctors said it was cancer, and he could not stand it. It is one of those things people often say, in heartbreak, but in his case it was true. He did not weep and he did not curl up in a ball and refuse to face the world, but he took every step, every breath, with the knowledge of her impending death. “I worshipped her,” he says now. “I didn’t even know a thing could be like that.” His kin said he could not even bear to see her weak and hurting, and so he went home less and less as her condition worsened. “You don’t question God. Whatever comes. I never did.”

But if ever a man had a right to believe he was being punished, to believe a terrible price was being exacted from him, it was Jerry Lee in 1970. He had conquered the world again, only to see what was most precious to him threatened by something he could not buy off or change. He had seen the ravages of the disease in the face and body of his uncle Lee Calhoun, seen the great man reduced to skin, bones, and pain, and now the same curse had taken hold of his mama, whose strength had carried the family through awful times, even death. He had once believed it was his daddy, Elmo, who had the steel in his spine, who could stand against the world and spit in its eye, but as he had gotten older, he came to see it was Mamie’s strength, more than anything, that bound the family together, even when the State of Louisiana through divorce said it was legally dissolved. He knew his Bible—it was the only book he had ever truly read—and knew it to be the Word of God and therefore the last word. He had lived his whole life in terrifying closeness to it, especially in those verses that warned of the cost, the parts that asked what it profits a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul. It is easier for a man to live in ignorance than in such closeness; the preachers say God will be more merciful to the ignorant.

“I never stopped praying for her,” he says. “Never was a time I didn’t pray for her.” He did wonder if his prayers had the weight they might have had if he’d lived as a better man, but still he prayed on. Jesus washed the feet of a beggar and forgave a whole world of sin; surely he would hear Jerry Lee pray for his mama.

His cousin Jimmy continued to remind him of the cost of his sins in front of untold thousands. His ministry was growing. He had gone from a traveling tent preacher in a two-tone ’58 Oldsmobile to a man whose words challenged and condemned sin across the land, his voice thundering from a syndicated radio show called The Camp Meeting Hour. He told the faithful and the seekers, their hands pressed to the warm plastic of their Philcos, that they could be healed if they prayed and if they believed, and they did believe, not just in the Word and the Law but in the man who came to them through the electric air, and they rewarded him with an ever swelling audience and did send him money so that his ministry could grow. Now he rode in new leather, and his own closets poured forth fine garments. The Camp Meeting Hour had swelled to include more than 550 stations, the largest daily gospel program on earth. He was destined for television, the key to the whole world, where his charisma would be as a sounding bell.

It did not hurt that Jimmy Lee was tall and good-looking, with a voice that seemed to drop from the pages of Deuteronomy itself, or that he could play the unabashed hell out of a piano. By the 1970s, he was already a force among Assembly of God officials, who had once refused to ordain him because, he believed, his cousin was that rascal Jerry Lee Lewis. He was a recording star in his own right now, with hit after hit album of gospel, many comprised of songs he had played with his cousins back when you could hear the pianos ringing halfway across town. He told his listeners that God spoke to him directly, and so his flock knew he was a prophet, because God did not often speak to them in that way. Jimmy preached both for Jerry Lee and against him, warned of the wages of sin, and wept.