Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(66)

He remembers now, mostly, not the towering buildings but the crosstown sidewalks. “Amazing,” he says, “the longest blocks I ever walked. But that’s the city, man, that’s New York. You don’t jump from there, then you don’t go.”

They moved through the throngs of people from one great edifice to another, asking for a chance to show the powerful people, the kingmakers, what he could do. “I wasn’t nervous a bit,” he says now, though he might have been, if he had lived long under the Cyclops of television. But few people back home even had one; his Uncle Lee, of course, had been about the first to get one back in Ferriday, but his mama and daddy had only recently gotten a set, believing, as they had always believed, that one day they would turn the thing on and wiggle the wires and turn the antenna toward some far-off tower, and there would be Jerry Lee, sittin’ at a piano. It seemed like just yesterday he and his mama sat with their heads tilted at that tiny transistor radio to hear the Grand Ole Opry, praying that the battery would hold at least through “Walkin’ the Floor over You.”

Jud’s old contacts and fast talk got them in the door at the networks, but not an audition.

Jerry Lee watched Ed Sullivan throw him out from a distance. “Get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want any more of this Elvis junk.”

It embarrassed Jerry Lee; it was too much like begging. “Come on, Jud, I don’t think he wants us, to even hear us,” he said.

So Jud reached out to Henry Frankel, an old acquaintance who was now talent coordinator for NBC, and Frankel reached out to Jules Green, who was Steve Allen’s manager. Steve Allen’s show, which ran opposite Ed Sullivan’s on CBS, was willing to take greater risks to steal a few ratings points from the competition. They featured everything from comedians to ventriloquists to people who spun plates on sticks—and of course, music, as Allen himself was a pianist of the cocktail variety.

Green did not even get up from his desk, just sat there with his wingtips on his desk as Jud walked in. Green was unimpressed by the number of records Jerry Lee had sold and generally unimpressed by the notion of another hillbilly rock and roller. It wasn’t too long since they’d had to camouflage Elvis in order to bring him on the show, to keep the public outcry down to a manageable number of decibels.

“Where’s your tape?” he asked Jud.

“Ain’t got no tape,” Jud said.

“Pictures?”

He told Green he had his product in the lobby, holding up a wall.

Green got up and looked through the window of his office.

“All I see,” he said, “is a guy chewing bubblegum and reading a funny book. You say he can do something. I don’t know.”

The kid, with more blond hair than was appropriate, leaned against a post, engrossed in the adventures of Mickey Mouse. He popped a big bubble and looked bored. He had already been through a Superman.

“If you got a piano,” said Jud, “he can show you what he can do.”

It was one of those rare times when being unknown saved a performer. Green did not know about any ban, about all the stations and sponsors lined up against him, and Jud did not volunteer. Why open the door on a mean dog when it’s only going to bite you?

“Jerry Lee,” Jud said, “come on in here.”

This part, Jerry Lee remembers exquisitely.

“I took my bubblegum out and stuck it on the top of the piano, and I laid my Mickey Mouse funny book down, and I did my thing.”

He played “Shakin’” all the way through, hot and perfect.

By the time he was done, Green was reaching for his wallet. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars right now,” he told Jud, for a promise that he take Jerry Lee back to the hotel, lock the door, talk to no other television producers of any kind, and bring Jerry Lee back to audition for Steve Allen tomorrow at 9:00 a.m.

The next morning, Allen stood right in front of Jerry Lee as he played it again.

“He played drums with his pencil on the piano,” recalled Jerry Lee. “I can still see it. It’s funny, how somethin’ as little as a tapping pencil can change your whole life, change everything.”

Jud told Steve Allen that if he would give Jerry Lee three minutes of air time, there would not be one viewer who would get up to change the channel, or do anything except sit there enthralled. Allen did not see how a man could keep a promise like that, but this was not his first hootenanny, and in a time when people were still feeling their way blind through this new medium, he could see for miles.

“I want you to do that song, Jerry Lee, do it just like that on my show tonight,” Steve Allen told him. Years later, when asked why he gave the boy his chance, Allen would say only that he loved quality and knew it when he saw it.

“He even liked the talking part of the song,” the part that so frightened other people, said Jerry Lee. “He heard that, and he knew we had a serious record. He knew we had something to sell.”

Jerry Lee shook his hand and thanked him for the opportunity. It was July 28, 1957.

“I wasn’t nervous,” Jerry Lee says.

Steve Allen waited onstage for the signal.

Three . . . , two . . . , one . . .

Allen, benign and bespectacled, welcomed America to step out from behind its TV trays and coffee tables and join him for a solid hour—give or take a commercial or two—of variety-show entertainment, with Shelley Winters, Tony Franciosa, the Four Coins, Jodie Sands, singer Jerry Lee Lewis, pantomimist Shal K. Ophir, and “our regular cast of crazies, Tom Poston, Don Knotts, and Louis Nye.”