Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(132)

If Jerry Lee was so smart, Elvis reportedly responded, how come Elvis was playing the big room, and Jerry Lee was playing the lounge?

But Jerry Lee wasn’t thinking about that, not now. “We was just two kids when we got started. Cars, motorcycles, women . . .” The world belonged to them both then, and they had lived as if in some shared dream.

Harold Loyd, a cousin Elvis had hired to man the gate at Graceland, watched the big car, brand-new and gleaming, whip into the driveway, tires squealing, and rumble toward the gate. It did not seem to be slowing down. To him, it looked like the driver—he did not yet know who it was—was trying to ram through the gates of Graceland. The big white Lincoln just kept coming. Finally the driver hit the brakes, but too late. The car slammed into the iron gates, and rocked back on its springs.

“I hit the gate,” he says now, nodding. “The nose of that Lincoln was a mile long.” He misjudged it. “ ’Cause I’s drunk.” He did not mean to ram those famous gates, with their wrought-iron music notes.

The champagne was empty. Disgusted, he drew back the empty bottle and hurled it through the window of the Lincoln. Or at least he meant to.

“I thought the window was down. It broke the bottle and the window,” showered him in broken glass, and cut a gash across the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t know what the problem was, except I was drunk.”

Jerry Lee stepped from the car, wearing a Western vest and no shirt underneath.

“I’m here to see Elvis,” he announced.

He remembers wobbling.

“Boy,” he says, “I was drunk.”

Loyd was so frightened he hid in the guard shack.

Other accounts would claim that Jerry Lee stepped from the car brandishing a small pistol, saying he was going to see Elvis or else, even implying that he intended to do Elvis harm. “That is ridiculous,” Jerry Lee says, and patently so; if he had planned to ram through the gates of Graceland and shoot Elvis, he would have done a much better job than this. He never brandished “nothin’,” he says. The derringer he had placed on the dashboard had slipped onto the floorboard; he never pointed it at anyone, he says.

The idea that he brought the gun there to shoot Elvis is not even worth talking about, he says. It makes a good story, but a better lie. “I really didn’t mean to do nothin’ to harm Elvis. He was my friend. I was his.”

But Elvis, watching on the closed-circuit television, told the guards by phone to call the police. The Memphis police found the gun in the car and put Jerry Lee, protesting, hollering, threatening them, away in handcuffs. He was mad then.

“The cops asked Elvis, ‘What do you want us to do? And Elvis told ’em, ‘Lock him up.’ That hurt my feelings. To be scared of me—knowin’ me the way he did—was ridiculous.

“He was a coward. He hurt me. That did.”

He was charged with carrying a pistol and public drunkenness, and released on a $250 bond. When he failed to show for his hearing the next day, a Memphis judge ordered that he be arrested again, but rescinded that order when it was learned that Jerry Lee was in the hospital. The burning in his stomach had been a peptic ulcer, the first proof of a sickness that would almost kill him.

Elvis never commented publicly, and the story would not die. It became fable, told by Graceland tour guides even today. The fact still grates on him.

“I don’t know . . . everybody got carried away with that,” he says. “They wanted a big story out of that. They wanted to know the real truth about it.” And, as the years went on, the constant demands to retell the story wore on him—so much so that he couldn’t stand to tell it straight. “I’d get up to a certain extent, [then] I’d say, ‘Aw, I just can’t tell no more. That’s as far as I go.’

“I had thought one day we’d get a laugh out of all of it.” But it wasn’t to be. “I never seen him after that,” says Jerry Lee.


The studio was a desert, still. It had been since ’73. He cut songs that sounded bad even on the naked page, like “I Can Still Hear the Music in the Restroom,” and other songs that seemed like commentary on his increasingly embittered life, like “Thanks for Nothing” and “I Hate You,” and even self-pitying songs like “Lord, What’s Left for Me to Do?” His voice did not quite sound like him anymore, a bit more faded and hoarse. He was still in demand on television; he still put on his tuxedos of almost every possible color and climbed the piano. But in one appearance on The Midnight Special, two weeks before Graceland, he had gone silent after the monologue in “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and just stared off into space for a full ten seconds of airtime, as though savoring the moment. It was as if he knew the times were catching up with him. He says he cannot possibly remember every moment onstage, says that people just try to read too much into things, but it had been a while “since we had a big record.”

He was all but done with Mercury, anyway. His contract would be up soon, but in August 1977 he went back into the studio one more time, and this time he found himself cutting a hit. It was a song called “Middle Age Crazy” by a veteran songwriter from Carlsbad, New Mexico, named Sonny Throckmorton. It was a song about a man trying to stay young forever.

Today, he traded his big ninety-eight Oldsmobile

He got a heck of a deal