Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(139)
The following month, he played the Memphis Cotton Carnival, a kind of Mid-South Mardi Gras for the river city, and it was a different story. He took the stage in dark glasses and a black sleeveless T-shirt, as if he were a punk rocker, and appeared wired, mumbling some of the lyrics, and not just for effect. At the end of the show, barreling without interruption through “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” into “Meat Man” and then into “(Hot Damn!) I’m a One-Woman Man,” he started pushing the band to go faster, faster, till even he could barely keep up, and wouldn’t stop until three girls rushed the stage to distract him with a kiss.
While it’s hard to place an exact moment when it happened, it was about this time that a new downward spiral began, a descent into a whole new hell.
He should have toned down his lifestyle, should have slowed his consumption of the chemicals that put him in such shape. He did not. He was in constant pain, and painkillers replaced amphetamines; eventually it was needles.
“When you get those shots and things, you get addicted to ’em,” he says of the painkillers he took. “I thought it was helpin’ me. I thought I was gettin’ pretty high out of it. And I thought it was helpin’ me onstage.” He laughs, but there is no humor in it. “It wasn’t helpin’ me onstage. It was all in my mind. I got to thinkin’ it was very necessary to have, but I was wrong.”
Instead, he seemed to withdraw inside himself onstage, breaking off a song midstream, often running off to chase a thing inside his head and leaving his band behind—the band he had been so proud of, for the way they meshed, for the good music they had played across thousands of miles. It was that way in the hotel lounges and bigger venues, too.
“I was—kinda got addicted. I liked them shots. But the shots didn’t like me. There’s no way you can make it work. It don’t work. It’ll kill you.”
He was shooting the painkiller directly into his stomach—the only way, some nights, he could climb the steps to the stage.
Now forty-seven, he was starting to miss shows and to be sued by club owners and promoters when he did. The IRS waited at his concerts to take the receipts to pay off his debt. “They were all after me,” says Jerry Lee. “I didn’t pay no attention to ’em. I just kept on rockin’.”
He was free to marry now, and he did not worry about propriety. Jaren and he had not lived as husband and wife for years before her death, so to him it didn’t seem too soon to marry again. On June 7, 1983, he put on a white tuxedo with a ruffled red shirt and a big white bow tie and said “I do” for the fifth time, to Shawn Stephens, now twenty-five. The National Enquirer took photographs, covering the event as if it was some kind of royal wedding, as if the editors somehow knew this story would be gold for them, now or at some time in the future.
It was not, of course, a storybook life there in northern Mississippi. It was much less glamorous than it seemed there in the Dearborn Hyatt. The couple argued. Jerry Lee was fully addicted to the painkillers now. His new wife soon began to soften her own reality with her own drugs, barbiturates. “But she done it to herself,” he says now. He never asked her to take anything and never forced her to take anything, he says. “I never hurt her.”
The maid at the Nesbit ranch found Shawn Stephens Lewis dead in a guest bedroom about noon on August 24, 1983, seventy-seven days after she and Jerry Lee were wed. Jerry Lee, who had slept in his own bedroom, had arisen early that morning and had assumed she was sleeping in.
DeSoto County sheriff Denver Sowell said a preliminary autopsy found that the cause of death was pulmonary edema, or fluid buildup in the lungs, a condition that often accompanies pneumonia or a heart condition. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy concluded that Shawn Lewis had not been the victim of a violent death. But later, a full autopsy conducted by Dr. Jerry Francisco—who had also performed the procedure on Elvis Presley, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.—found the painkiller methadone in her system at ten times the normal dose.
“Although you never feel like you know everything everybody did, exactly,” said Bill Ballard, the DeSoto County prosecutor, “I think we made a thorough investigation of this case and nothing has pointed to homicide.”
Francisco told the prosecutor that he found no evidence that the dosage was forced into her mouth or throat. A DeSoto County grand jury reviewed the case and found no grounds for indictment.
But Shawn’s family in Michigan hired a private attorney to investigate her death, unwilling to accept that it was a self-administered overdose. “They feel if Shawn had never met Jerry Lee Lewis, she would probably be alive today,” said Michael Blake, the attorney. Months later, Rolling Stone magazine published a long, dark, ominous article headlined “The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis,” written by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Richard Ben Cramer. The story raised questions about law enforcement’s handling of the investigation, suggesting that public officials had been covering for Jerry Lee for years. Cramer also suggested that investigators did not pursue some facts in the case, including reports of blood at the scene and questions about the integrity of the evidence.
Both Cramer and ABC News 20/20 reporter Geraldo Rivera cited a violent altercation between the couple the night before her death as evidence suggesting foul play. A bodyguard told 20/20 that he saw Jerry Lee slap her “a time or two.” Rolling Stone reported that an ambulance attendant saw bruises on her arm and scratches on the back of Jerry Lee’s hand. Rolling Stone also wrote that Jerry Lee had struck Shawn’s sister, Shelley, and that he had threatened Shawn. The magazine cited Shelley as the source. They all used his own nickname against him: the Killer.