Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(145)

Before filming even began, the filmmakers asked Jerry Lee to relinquish his own music, his own sound, to the actor who would play him. Quaid disliked the notion of lip-synching the lyrics and wanted to record the music himself with his own band.

“I said, ‘You can forget it. I’m not giving up the soundtrack. Dennis can never sing and cut these songs the way I did it. You can forget about that, or it ain’t gon’ work.”

He took Quaid for a walk down by the Mississippi River.

“Jerry Lee told me that if he didn’t do the songs, only one of us was coming back up that bank,” Quaid told the Austin American Statesman.

“That boy came to his senses,” said Jerry Lee.

Executives insisted that he audition his own music for the story of his own life, which insulted him. But the results proved that he could do himself better than anyone. “What you hear is me,” he says of the film, and it was worth the trouble: In the songs on that soundtrack, critic Greil Marcus later noted, Jerry Lee sounded “as if decades were minutes.”

But the movie itself was weak, from its simplistic script to Quaid’s overeager portrait of Jerry Lee. Signed on as an executive producer, Jerry Lee was aghast when he first visited the set. “They wanted me to come up and watch them shoot a scene. I went up and watched them, and I washed my hands of it right there. I said, ‘This isn’t right.’”

Quaid’s comical portrayal made Jerry Lee sound more like Foghorn Leghorn—“a mud-dumb bumpkin,” wrote the Washington Post—and even casual fans realized how badly it missed the mark. Jerry Lee Lewis, the real man, was always deeper and more dangerous than the goofy-eyed hillbilly the film showed. Jerry Lee hadn’t expected to see his story whitewashed, cleansed of its flaws, but he hadn’t expected it to come out looking like that, either.

In public, he gritted his teeth and supported the film. “I was hooked in on the thing. And I’d been paid for it, you know? What can you do?” But he knew it was a shame. “They really fouled it up, the way they did it,” he says.

The film fizzled at the box office, but it would loop endlessly on cable television, introducing newer generations to the music, but also to a portrait of the man that did not fit him. He hates the fact that a generation of younger people first encountered the image of Jerry Lee Lewis as such a cartoonish character, though the Internet has since been flooded with images of the young and dangerous Jerry Lee, the genuine man, playing his music in all his sharp-edged glory.

The movie also made Myra seem like a pure child, stuffing her clothes into that dollhouse as she leaves home, reluctant to marry her cousin, trapped in a situation she couldn’t quite control. Jerry Lee remembers it differently, remembers much more than the film’s few lampoonish details. “If they ever do another movie about me,” he says now, “I want all my wives in it. It would be about piano playin’, and singin’, and women. . . . Women, the one thing I might change.”

He wonders sometimes about his wives, especially after Myra’s movie. “It’s funny. I never talked about any of them the way they talked about me. I could have, but I didn’t,” he says, and grins to let you know that he does not expect the wider world to ever see him as anything more than the Killer, where some things are concerned.

“Being the great humanitarian that I am.”


The film, which premiered in the early summer of 1989, did have one benefit: it brought renewed interest in the real live Jerry Lee. He did a tour of Scandinavia before its release, then Australia in September, then Paris and London. In Melbourne, looking older but sturdy in a light but somber business suit, Jerry Lee rode a revolving stage into a rolling thunder of applause and put on a clinic in rock-and-roll piano. Scowling with concentration as if determined to outstrip even his usual casual perfection, he banished memories of the wired, manic character who had appeared and reappeared throughout the decade. Even his voice seemed stronger, clearer, as he hollered:

Well, give me a fifth of Thunderbird, and write myself a sad song

Tell me, baby, why you been gone so long?



He was going on fifty-four and did not climb the piano to survey his kingdom. But at the end of an extended, freewheeling “Great Balls of Fire,” he picked up the piano bench, flung it across the stage, and smiled. “You give ’em what they want,” he says, and this time he gave them something lasting and fine.

The following year, he returned to 706 Union Avenue to record two versions of a song called “It Was the Whiskey Talkin’ (Not Me),” for the soundtrack of the new Warren Beatty movie Dick Tracy. Many of the film’s original songs were written by Andy Paley, who had written “Whiskey” a decade before with Jerry Lee in mind. The old studio had been resurrected, saved from dereliction and remade as a tourist destination; inside it looked close to how it had in the days when it was the incubator of rock and roll.

The writer Jimmy Guterman would later describe a tiny studio with about a half-dozen people inside, musicians and technicians who were achingly deferential to Jerry Lee. He terrorized one young man, the studio manager, with questions about religion. The young man had the misfortune to be a Baptist, and Jerry Lee told him the only thing wrong with Baptists was they needed to get saved, and that made the young man stammer and claim he was saved, till Jerry Lee told him he was only joking, son. “Baptist folks are good,” Jerry Lee said, “they just don’t preach the full gospel.