Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(135)
If it was a warning, he ignored it. He continued to party hard, playing at night, traveling in the day. Two months after his short hospital stay, he appeared on the Country Music Awards telecast, throwing the cover off “Rockin’ My Life Away,” his piano outrunning an overmatched studio orchestra. “Me and Elvis Presley never won an award,” he told the audience, “but we know who the kings of rock and roll are.” Some who watched the performance said he appeared fairly well drunk, that he treated the entire performance with the boozy disregard of a night at Bad Bob’s. He says only that he cannot be expected to recall every show or every night he had a drink of liquor.
In the spring of 1979, he finally filed for divorce from Jaren Pate, pointing out that they had not lived together as husband and wife since October 21, 1971. She countersued, accusing him of years of cruelty and drunkenness, and they awaited a court date to end the marriage that never was.
In the last days of his great country stardom—and of the dwindling wealth it had engendered—he and Elmo raved across the country. His mama and sons had perished, the troubadours he cherished had all gone silent, but Elmo was forever. If ever a man was born to live in the rock-and-roll dream, to eat it with a spoon, it was his ol’ daddy. He was not the fierce man he once was, not indestructible; age had stooped him some, till he looked downright kindly. But he would still fight you, and more than one drunk nitwit regretted saying something ugly to him about his boy. He walked the runways of the world with a glass of whiskey in his hand, smiling, ever smiling. He even charmed the pretty girls, in a kindly way, or so it seemed; the old bull still had some horn on him right up until the end. Then he would go home to Ferriday to farm, to walk the dirt that his son’s music had bought for him and drive his tractor around in circles, sometimes mildly intoxicated, and when he grew tired of it, he called his boy, and the next time you saw Elmo, he would again have a glass in his hand, a smile on his face, and one ill-intentioned eye on the women. It pleased Jerry Lee to see his daddy living out this life—a form of payment, somehow, for the snakes he killed and the love he gave his boy.
In summer of ’79, Elmo quietly went into the hospital in Memphis with a burning in his own stomach, and while he hoped it was an ulcer, it was not, and the once magnificent man wasted away from the disease that had taken his wife and so many there along the river, where it was said the chemical plants and industry and the agricultural runoff had poisoned the swamps and rivers and backwater and through them had seeped into the people and left them with the disease that so often had no cure.
He died on the twenty-first of July, 1979. His obituary described him as a retired carpenter and a member of the Church of God. He was buried with Mamie in the cemetery in Clayton. The laws of man, of divorces and such, did not count for much when it was all preached and done, and so he joined her in the earth, right beside her, as his son insisted. Their first son, Elmo Kidd Lewis Jr., rests between them, and their second son was more alone than he had ever been. He knows most people remember their daddies by the things they said, but he loves his daddy for a silence, a silence that lasted for decades. When Jerry Lee thinks of his daddy now, he thinks of that long-ago day at the piano when Elmo sat down to show him how to play a song and inadvertently broke his son’s heart.
Two months later, Jerry Lee was arrested for possession of pills. At a fitness hearing before the Board of Health, Dr. Nick told his judges that it was better to manage an addict’s intake professionally than to have him satisfy his habit on the streets. In 1980 he was indicted for overprescribing medications to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and nine other patients, including himself. He was acquitted but later had his license revoked. Jerry Lee always believed it was wrong to blame him for Elvis’s death. “Dr. Nick was a good man, a remarkable man,” he says now. “If I thought I could get some blues and yellows out of him, I’d call him up right now.” Then he grins, to tell you he is just goofing—or maybe he just grins.
In early 1980, the IRS seized Jaren’s home. “I am poor and destitute,” she told reporters, as she showed up at the Department of Human Services to apply for food stamps. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to the beauty shop.” The divorce action was still pending when the IRS auctioned off her home for $102,000. “They’ve sold it all,” she said. “There’s nothing else they can take.”
Jerry Lee was not in the country. He was on another British tour, including a pair of solo piano appearances on the British television shows Old Grey Whistle Test and Blue Peter, but he was thin and his voice seemed rusted out. It was clear he wasn’t feeling well, but again that summer he held off the creeping decay with a new song. In the middle of his grinding tour schedule, he went back into the studio for Elektra and cut a beautiful rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” His voice, even charred as it was, and his tremulous piano gave the song a gritty vulnerability it had never enjoyed, and it became an almost instant classic for him. “It had a certain feeling to it,” he says now, “like a religious undertone. A something that you very seldom ever can hear.” It seemed almost impossible that this one man—the same man who reeled through his life with so little regard for caution or consequence—could create something so purely beautiful. If you ask him how that can be, he merely looks at you with satisfaction and waits for you to figure it out.
In November he appeared in a TV special called Country Music: A Family Affair, playing a piano duet with Mickey Gilley that still has stagehands sweeping up the ivory. Playing side by side, the cousins blistered through a version of “I’ll Fly Away” that gave the audience a taste of what it must have been like years ago when they battled to beat the old church piano to death. Jerry Lee took the lead and Mickey, smiling, just tried to catch up. “We got this song in the wrong key,” Jerry Lee announced after a few choruses. “We gonna modulate up to G and do it.” And he sang: