Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(137)

The ambulance made it on time, but the crisis wasn’t over. “Headin’ out to the freeway,” he says, “they had a blowout. And it was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And the nurse in the ambulance said, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re gonna get you there all right. Don’t you worry!’ So they called another ambulance, and, um . . . it took him quite a while to get there.”

He was taken to Methodist Hospital South in Memphis, where he was met by Dr. James Fortune.

“He says, ‘I’m gon’ operate on you, Jerry Lee, but I’m tellin’ you, there’s no use in it. ’Cause, you know, you don’t have a chance.’”

“I said, ‘Well, in that case, could you just give me a pain shot?’” and he laughs.

“He told the nurse, ‘Give him whatever he wants. It don’t make no difference now, anyway.”

The surgery took four hours to repair a ruptured stomach. Something—a lifetime of pharmaceuticals or whiskey, or suppressed worry and anger, or a cocktail of it all—had eaten a hole clean through it.

“I really overshot my runway,” he says now.

He lay close to death for a week. Doctors kept him in intensive care into the next. Ten days later, he began running a high fever. An X-ray showed that the eight- to ten-inch incision made in his stomach wall during the surgery was leaking, and fluids and stomach acids were infecting his abdominal cavity.

Dr. Fortune and a team of surgeons rushed him to the operating room. Doctors told members of his family that his chances were fifty-fifty. Dr. Fortune told them his condition was a “minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour proposition.”


Fans crammed the hospital lobby that hot summer and sneaked into the waiting rooms to sob and wait and pray for mercy. Some carried flowers. Some held hands and prayed for deliverance in this world or the next. Reporters milled outside. Camera crews set up for the inevitable, sad stand-up when the news finally came. The newspapers touched up his obit; some had had it on standby for years.

Jerry Lee survived the four-hour operation but remained in critical condition. He lay in the third-floor ICU on a respirator. Myra came, and she and Phoebe were allowed to visit his bedside for fifteen minutes every four hours. Sam Phillips called the hospital and spoke to Jerry Lee’s cousin, handsome old Carl McVoy.

“Old Jerry is in pretty bad shape,” McVoy told him. “It’s in the hands of the Good Lord.”

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash came to the hospital to say good-bye, but they did not tell him that.

“I told Jerry that I didn’t come down here to start praying over him,” said Johnny, hoping that he was right. “I believe Jerry Lee has a lot more songs to sing.”

Kris Kristofferson interrupted a tour to come and sit at his bedside. He considered him one of the greatest singers of all time, comparing him with the legends of opera, and he told him so again. Even Elizabeth Taylor, his old friend from Oscar Davis days, called the hospital to wish him well.

The great threat, doctors feared, would be an onset of pneumonia. They pumped him full of antibiotics to try to ward it off. He spent most days in darkness.

He looked up one day and saw his Aunt Stella standing over the bed.

He winked. She leaned in close.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he whispered.

He improved, slowly.

“I’s in the hospital ninety-three days,” he said.


“It was rough. People wouldn’t believe the kind of pain that I was in. A lot of pain, man. They was givin’ me pain medicine that would kill an elephant.”

But worst of all was the simple fact of lying there, helpless.

“I was frustrated beyond the realms of imagination,” he says, and laughs again. “God pulled me through that. And if it hadn’t been for Him, I wouldn’t have made it at all.”

The first thing he did when he got home was sit down at a piano to make sure there was nothing wrong with his hands.


It was fall before he was released from the hospital. He had appeared on NBC’s Tomorrow show shortly before his emergency, and in September he returned for another appearance to show America he wasn’t dead yet. Then in January 1982, he taped a show called 25 Years of Jerry Lee Lewis in the sold-out Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville. It was a tribute show, with guest stars Kris Kristofferson, Charlie Rich, Dottie West, the Oak Ridge Boys, Mickey Gilley, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Perkins did “Blue Suede Shoes.” Cash did “Get Rhythm,” and gave testimonial to the man he once battled for supremacy in the auditoriums of the frozen north, when they lived on saltines and potted meat. He was there, he told the audience, when Jerry Lee, “blond hair flying . . . came onto the scene with such a bang the entire Western world was aware of him.”

Jerry Lee, first in a red crushed velvet jacket and then a rust-red tuxedo, looked waxen, ravaged, tired beyond his years. “It was severe,” he says of the recovery and the lingering pain.

“You never looked better, buddy,” Johnny Cash told him.

Jerry Lee still kicked the bench backward, but it did not go very far. He still banged the keys with his boot, but not more than a time or two. But he seemed genuinely touched by the crowd, which gave him standing ovations, and by the words of his old friends. It was a scripted show, but he knew they meant it. To the tune of “Precious Memories,” he summed up his life and his recent ordeal, and said he wished he could go home to his boyhood days in Ferriday, that he would give “five million dollars, if I had it . . . to spend five minutes with my mama again. . . . She’d straighten me out.” He reached out to Jimmy Swaggart, telling of their boyhood and the life they lived, “but we went separate ways.” He seemed glad to be alive inside that sewed-up body. “My blessings,” he testified, “far exceed my woes.”