Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(151)

The show, a fanciful re-creation of that long-ago December day in 1956, was the brainchild of Sun historian Colin Escott, who had written with authority about Jerry Lee for decades, and director and writer Floyd Mutrux. In giving the role to Kreis, the show’s creative team selected a Southerner from Oliver Springs, Tennessee, and a piano pounder who had grown up on Jerry Lee’s music after his mother handed him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis 45s when he was still in elementary school. “I cut my teeth . . . on Jerry Lee Lewis music,” he told one interviewer. He also played the hymns of Jimmy Swaggart, and was at the time enrolled in ministerial school, as Jerry Lee had been. It was almost like fiction, how his story dovetailed with Jerry Lee’s own.

The story of Million Dollar Quartet revolved around a few slender subplots—Johnny Cash’s departure from Sun, Sam’s dream of luring Elvis back from RCA—but all the energy came from the blond-haired figure behind the piano. He had never been an appropriate man, but in old age much had been forgiven, it seemed, and the very idea of Jerry Lee Lewis was enough to carry a show in what they used to call the legitimate theater. And besides, everyone said the music was the true star, just as it had been in 1956.

On a visit with his younger self in New York, Jerry Lee showed none of his characteristic gruffness or ego at the idea that someone else could play him. Wearing slippers on his feet, he merely told the young man he did a splendid job.

Then, in an almost surreal time-machine moment, the real Jerry Lee later joined the actors playing his now-departed friends onstage for an encore after the final curtain. He played “Shakin’,” rewriting the lyrics there, too, as he liked, without telling anyone beforehand. Kreis just sat close by and watched.

“There’s no stopping him,” he told the interviewer. “I want to be kickin’ ass and takin’ names at his age, like he is.”

In covering the meeting between Lewis and Kreis, the New York Times noted that it was made poignant by the older man’s “unmistakable frailty.” It was true: he was weaker that year, even as a man playing his younger self took home the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.


Last Man Standing had been such a success that there seemed little reason not to do it again, and while the album that followed had fewer blockbuster guests, it was crammed with fine music.

It was his fortieth album, called Mean Old Man.

This time the music was mellower but perhaps more meaningful, the artists more soulful.

He sang “Life’s Railroad to Heaven” with Solomon Burke, “Release Me” and “I Really Don’t Want to Know” with Gillian Welch, and “You Are My Sunshine” with Sheryl Crow and Jon Brion. He did a pair of well-chosen songs from the best corners of the Rolling Stones’ catalog: the heartbreaking “Dead Flowers” with Mick Jagger and the spiky, mournful “Sweet Virginia” with Keith Richards.

One of the jewels of the album was its title song, by his old friend Kris Kristofferson:

If I look like a voodoo doll, that’s what I am

If I look like a voodoo doll

Who takes his licking standing tall

Who’d rather bite you back than crawl

That’s what I am



The album would enter the Top 100 too, peaking at number 72—and putting Jerry Lee Lewis back in the charts for his seventy-fifth birthday.

He seemed to be having a good time on the album, with its easy tempos and warm ambience, but perhaps what he enjoyed most was shooting the cover photo. Dressed in a dark suit, his blond hair completely silver now, he steps out of a limousine into a waiting bevy of beautiful young women.

“They changed clothes right in there,” he says, motioning to a small room off his bedroom, “and they didn’t shut the door.”

A man is not meant to be alone.

He would fix that, in time.


He was in demand again, but even as he celebrated this latest triumph, he knew something was different this time. His phone rang with offers that year, but he could not take them, or at least not most of them. In the middle of this latest comeback, his body failed him again, this time not violently, as it had before, but in a creeping betrayal. Arthritis in his back all but crippled him, making it nearly impossible to sit on the piano bench for more than a few songs, a few minutes. Pneumonia hit him again and again, leaving him weak. Shingles left him in agony. Still he wasn’t convinced that he would not rise one day from his sickbed in the big house in Nesbit and walk into a studio or climb a stage. “I would like to record some new songs,” he said that summer, “but I guess that’s in God’s hands.” He had beaten his addictions and walked cold turkey away from his old friend Calvert Extra just in time to be beset by the ravages of age, as if he were any other man. The phone rang, and he promised, weakly, to do it if he could, when he could.

He needed a caregiver.

Judith Ann Coghlan was his ex-brother-in-law Rusty’s wife, and Myra’s sister-in-law. She came to Nesbit to cook and help care for him, and to talk about times better than these. They had much in common. She was the daughter of sharecroppers, too, from the tiny town of Benoit, Mississippi. She was a tall blonde, a star athlete as a young woman who had played basketball for the Memphis Redheads professional team, whose players took the court in satin outfits and jumped for rebounds in big hair.

She was living at the time in Monroe, Georgia, but said she moved to the Lewis house at her husband’s urging. She arrived to find the house and the man in need of attention.