Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(138)
“You know they call me the Killer,” he said to the audience. “The only thing I ever killed in my life was possibly myself.”
Shawn Stephens was twenty-three, a small, pretty, honey-blond cocktail waitress at the Hyatt Hotel, trapped in the inertia of Dearborn, Michigan. In February 1981, Jerry Lee was playing the Hyatt lounge, part of the truncated road schedule he had been forced into since his surgery and convalescence. There was no record money coming in; he had no record deal, at least not one producing any new songs. But he was glad to be alive, and he picked the vivacious Shawn out of the throng of pretty cocktail waitresses at the hotel lounge. He sang a song to her and smiled; women like a good-lookin’ rock-and-roll singer, especially a wounded one.
A girlfriend of Shawn’s was keeping company with J. W. Whitten, Jerry Lee’s road manager, and that led to a visit by Shawn and the girlfriend to Jerry Lee’s ranch, with its piano-shaped pool and sprawling lake. The IRS had taken most of the cars, but it was still an impressive estate. Jerry Lee fell in love with her; it had never taken a whole lot for that to happen, anyway. “I was bad to get married,” he says. “But she was a real good woman,” one who bounced into a room and lit it up. He needed that. She came to visit him again in Nesbit, and he gave her a gold bracelet and some other expensive presents, and they talked of getting married after his divorce from Jaren was final. His life then seemed glamorous still. In April he jetted off to London to appear at the great Wembley Stadium for the first time since his illness; he told the audience he was “probably not exactly all the way up to full par,” but they gave him a hero’s welcome, and he sliced through the keyboard with an almost casual defiance.
Shawn’s family told her to stay away from the man, that he could be dangerous. She told them he needed her.
His performing life was still almost charmed, in some ways, able to survive long droughts in the studio and even increasingly erratic live shows, but tragedy in his private life seemed to rattle and clank behind it all, the way tin cans do when tied to the bumper of a car.
On June 9, 1982, Jaren Pate was sunbathing at a friend’s house in Collierville, Tennessee, outside Memphis. The owner of the house where she was staying, Millie Labrum, looked out the window and did not see her, and sent her son to check on her. He found her floating in the aboveground pool, dead. She was still married to Jerry Lee; they had been scheduled to appear in divorce court later that month. The coroner ruled that her death was an accident. Jerry Lee would never accept her child as his, and no one would ever launch any legal proceeding to prove his parentage. Some people of long memory in Memphis still call it a case of abandonment, the one thing they cannot forgive. But friends of Jerry Lee would say that the marriage had existed mostly on paper, finally ending in a great sadness. And if there was any kindness in it, it was that Jerry Lee would never loudly denounce either the mother or the child.
Two months later, in a haze of new pain from his stitched-together stomach, he stood weakly on the deck of a riverboat as Elmo’s long-ago prophecy come true: with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, and assorted other country swells, he sang and played aboard the Mississippi Queen for a television special. He played his piano and sang his songs as the big river rolled, as people watched from the banks, but there was no one there, with him, no one who remembered that it was ever said.
His ability to bounce back from almost anything was intact. He left in April for another European tour, and in stops in London and Bristol, England, put on shows that seemed to defy or ignore all that had happened to him in the last two traumatic years. Gone, or mostly so, were the runaway ego and erratic behavior. He was gaunt, perhaps more introspective onstage, but he smiled with genuine pleasure at the tightness of the band, of Kenny Lovelace’s guitar licks, as his own piano went ringing through the Hammersmith Odeon in London. He asked for a drink, and they brought him a Coca-Cola; he looked ruefully at the bottle and then played them “Mona Lisa.”
A few days later, in Bristol’s historic Colston Hall, lucky fans witnessed a loose and sustained performance from a pure music man, chatting warmly with the crowd and the band. “I thought it was Wednesday! Thought we were off tonight,” he said when he took the stage, dressed in a simple red turtleneck. He gave them “Chantilly Lace” and “Little Queenie” and “Trouble in Mind,” a roaring “I Don’t Want to Be Lonely Tonight,” even Jimmie Rodgers’s “The One Rose That’s Left in My Heart,” and more, the whole time seriously intent on his piano, on his craft. “Glad to have a sober audience for a change,” he said, sipping from a bottle of Heineken sitting on the piano; later, when he sipped again, it foamed over when he set it back down on the piano lid. He could have nursed one beer all night. He complimented his band again and again. “Them boys are gettin’ pretty good,” he said, a kind of mantra for him in good times. “I can play guitar just like that—well, I wish I could.” But this new, almost modest Jerry Lee still brought them the rock and roll on “Little Queenie,” singing about how “I need a little lovin’—won’t you get your little . . . self . . . back home? . . . Pick it, Kenny!” He was still hurting then, but it was nothing he could not stand; the show he gave them was satisfying, hopeful, and if it was just a window, a glimpse of what things might have been, well, how lucky those people were to get to see it.