Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(144)

Jimmy Swaggart was rich and powerful; Jerry Lee Lewis was having a good time.

“It just got to Jimmy, I believe.”


The scandal broke in ’88. Jimmy Swaggart confessed that he went to the Travel Inn on the Airline Highway in New Orleans to consort with a prostitute, not to have sex with her but to watch her perform pornographic acts. He came to see her again and again. His visits might not have come to light if relatives of the preacher Marvin Gorman had not photographed him for revenge. The preacher’s son, Randy, and his son-in-law, Garland Bilbo, followed Swaggart around the city and photographed him entering and leaving the hotel room rented by a woman named Deborah Murphree.

“He just weakened and fell,” says Jerry Lee. “I guess we all have our weak points.”

More than eight thousand people crowded into Jimmy Swaggart’s Family Worship Center church in Baton Rouge for the Sunday service that followed the revelation. His response, through tears, has been referred to as the “I Have Sinned” confession. He apologized to his wife, Frances. “I have sinned against you,” he said, in a whisper. He apologized to his son, Donny, and to the Assemblies of God. “Most of all, to my Lord and my Savior, my Redeemer, the One whom I have served and I love and I worship . . . I have sinned against You, my Lord. And I would ask that Your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me, anymore.” Many of the congregation wept before him. “The sin of which I speak is not a present sin,” he said, tears rolling like hot coins down his cheeks. “It is a past sin. I know that so many of you would ask, ‘Why? Why?’ I have asked myself that ten thousand times through ten thousand tears.”

“Was I surprised?” said Jerry Lee. “Naw, I was never surprised.”

It was never that one of them believed and the other didn’t, he said. They both believed.

But there was always that one difference between them. “I never pretended to be nothin’,” he says. When he looked up and saw a .45 bullet resting on the lid of his piano, he knew exactly what he had done, though not always with whom, exactly. “But I knew.”

But in the end, Jimmy was still family, bound not by paper but by blood.

“Jimmy is a human being, too, and people need to remember that. They need to stop and think about that. He never had any close sex with that woman. He never crossed that fence. I think it was something he had to get out of his mind. But it ain’t nothin’ God can’t forgive you for.”

Jimmy Swaggart’s following, his flock, not only returned, but swelled and swelled, as he became an independent, nondenominational minister, preaching to untold millions. “They just got in line and followed him,” says Jerry Lee.

To rise from ashes, like the music, was also in the blood.


The year of Jimmy’s fall and quick resurrection, Jerry Lee sat before a piano at Hank Cochran’s landmark studio, dashing off solo renditions of Jolson’s “My Mammy” and Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” but none of it was for release, and it would languish on the shelf for decades. That did not help Jerry Lee in the here and now. In 1988, he declared bankruptcy. He was more than $3 million in debt, he said, $2 million of it owed to the United States Treasury in back taxes and penalties. He listed twenty-two separate creditors, including $40,000 owed to one Memphis lawyer. He owed $30,000 to three different Memphis hospitals, hundreds of thousands to clubs for breaches of contract, and more to claimants in lawsuits. He owed payments on a Cadillac and a Corvette, and there was one unpaid hotel bill, of $119, to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, from the night he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Meanwhile, the IRS continued to raid his possessions almost as fast as he could procure them. They took more cars, a Jet Ski, and a mechanical bull.

During the worst of it, Jerry Lee went home to Ferriday and walked through the Assembly of God Church on Texas Avenue. He did not kneel and ask for anything, but noticed that the floor where his mother once knelt was caving in; the little church that had stood throughout his life seemed to sag around him. He went home, stuffed seven thousand dollars in an envelope, and sent it to Gay Bradford, who had also grown up in the church, and she and her husband used the money to restore it. Then he bought the church a new piano.

In a moment of great irony, in the summer of ’89, the bankrupt Jerry Lee received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He posed there with his wife, Kerrie, and with Jerry Lee Lewis III, who was a toddler then, and with the actor Dennis Quaid, who was about to become the face of Jerry Lee on the big screen.


The film, Great Balls of Fire, was not a full biopic but the story of his breakout in 1956 and ’57, his courtship and marriage to Myra, and the ensuing scandal, all based on a book by the same name written by Myra with coauthor Murray Silver.

The film also made hay of his relationship with Swaggart. One of its most talked-about scenes was in the film’s beginning, a shot of two little boys looking down on the debauchery of Haney’s. One little dark-haired boy, Jimmy, begs his blond-haired cousin to leave this sinful place.

“Jerry Lee, that’s the devil’s music!” he yelps.

“Yeaaaaahhhh!” says little Jerry Lee.

It did not happen just like that, but the scene was true in spirit.

The rest of it, Jerry Lee says, was not.