Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(143)
New Orleans
1986
The Airline Highway in New Orleans is not a place you meander through or go to sightsee. If you have no business there, then you have no business there. Prostitutes work some of the cheap hotels, and much darkness occurs here. In Room 7 at the sad Travel Inn, a variety of men came to visit with the woman there for an hour, a half hour, or so. One of the men was familiar, a tall, elegant man. He spoke from the sky itself and lived on the air. From a parked car nearby, his enemies took his picture to document his sin.
For Jerry Lee and his cousin Jimmy, the road had forked long ago, way back in the gravel and ragweed and flattened bottle caps of Ferriday, as the blues called to them from a propped-open window on Fifth Street. Jerry Lee knew that much even as a little boy, as he tried to drag Jimmy by his overall strap into Haney’s Big House to hear it better. Sometimes he says he actually succeeded in getting him inside, for a very little while, but other times he says his cousin held strong, hands clasped in front of him. Jimmy would see it as a plain choice between heaven and hell, but little Jerry Lee had a different idea, and left Jimmy in the high Johnson grass to pray for his soul. Jimmy would backslide as a teenager, during the great scrap-iron heist of ’47, but he kept to his path, mostly, begging forgiveness, then marching onward. Jerry Lee sinned and prayed for forgiveness, too—not so different, when you think about it, except perhaps in the arithmetic—and danced and boogied down his own twisting fork, always hoping that in a faith founded on redemption, the two divergent paths might somehow lead to the same destination.
“I think Jimmy saw me doin’ things that he couldn’t do,” says Jerry Lee.
By the 1980s, Jimmy Swaggart was in a battle with the devil on many fronts. He led a national crusade against sexual immorality. He called rock and roll “the new pornography” and wrote a book called Religious Rock & Roll: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, to condemn even Christian-themed rock music. He exposed and preached against fellow Assembly of God minister Marvin Gorman, who then admitted committing an immoral act with a woman who was not his wife. He led a purification of the denomination after televangelist Jim Bakker had an affair with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, then used more than $250,000 of ministry money to cover it up. He called the scandal a “cancer that needed to be excised from the body of Christ.” He made himself the guardian of sexual morality, not only within the denomination but among all Christians and everyone else. He was already one of the most visible men in America. His church in Baton Rouge held 7,500 people for services, but his tearful sermons could also be seen in Africa and Central Asia, as satellites beamed his message out of the sky to 143 countries. He filled stadiums, and couldn’t walk across a parking lot without being handed a prayer request on a scrap of paper. His ministry sold Bibles with his name on the cover, and his untold followers defended him against all questions, all criticism, simply pointing to the multitudes he had helped bring to Christ.
The big fish was still out there. He had preached of his cousin’s sin from the hood of a ’58 Oldsmobile, at tent revivals and big city cathedrals and finally from the heavens themselves. It seemed, at times, as if his great crusade would be incomplete until he turned this one final soul away from the devil’s music toward a place where God rewarded his faithful with everlasting life. His path of righteousness had led to Learjets and a wealth beyond even the standards of rock and roll, which allowed him to do God’s will in ever widening circles, but he could never reach quite far enough to bring his cousin to him, on his knees.
“Jimmy called down here one time and got Kerrie,” says Jerry Lee, “and he said to her, ‘What’s this I hear about Jerry Lee having two and three or more women at once? Ain’t no way he can handle that.’ And Kerrie told him, ‘Believe me, he can handle it.’”
His own life continued to sway between accolade and addiction, despite the precipice his drug use had carried him to, twice, three times. In June of that year, he won a Grammy, his first—a spoken-word Grammy, for the interviews he gave in support of Class of ’55—for telling the story of the very music his cousin had spent a lifetime condemning. In December he checked himself into the Betty Ford Center for treatment of an addiction that would not die. After a week, he walked out. You had to get up too early, and you had to do chores. “Don’t nobody tell me what to do,” he says.
The choices Jerry Lee and Jimmy Lee had made in life were not so drastically different, he believes. “I never stopped prayin’,” he often says, even when it was a long-distance call. “I pray before I go to sleep. I bless my food. I pay my tithes. I think God takes that into account. I guess I have to wait and see.”
On January 28, 1987, Jerry Lee Lewis III was born in Baptist Hospital in Memphis, at six pounds three ounces. His mother, Kerrie, was twenty-four. Jerry Lee was fifty-one. He was still battling the federal government, still being picked at by the IRS; he would spend much of his fifties waiting outside courtrooms or standing before judges and the lawyers for his creditors. But again, that seemed not to be real life to him; it seemed like something other people suffered. In July, a photograph in the Memphis Commercial Appeal captured him sitting on a bench beside Kerrie and the baby, whom they called Lee, waiting outside a Shelby County courtroom to testify in a real estate lawsuit. Jerry Lee looks skeletal yet buoyant, as if he had not a care in the world. Kerrie, dressed in a tight leopard-print pantsuit, is striking, her hair big and fluffy. She is feeding the fat, healthy baby from a bottle, and Jerry, beaming, is wiggling his finger in the baby’s face to make him smile.