Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(70)
The one bleak spot was his marriage to Jane. She was still living back in Ferriday while he bunked with the Browns in Coro Lake, and sometimes he could forget he was married at all. He knew his boy was being cared for, there so close to his people, but Jane was sick of the distance between them and was insisting that she bring Jerry Lee Jr. to stay with him in Memphis. But Jerry Lee was still living with his cousin J. W. and his family and was in no hurry to live anywhere else. More and more, he was spending time with his cousin Myra, who didn’t look thirteen a bit, not to him. He believed she was of age, by all the customs and standards of his history, his experience, and, after a failed reunion with Jane in Memphis, he felt even less married than he ever had, and was becoming suspicious that she didn’t feel married, either. But she was no longer fighting, no longer hurling the whole world at him, and it all just died, what love there might have been, in a kind of indifference, and he knew that ducking was all there had ever been. But as always, he hated to drag the laws of man into his life, so he just let it be, as he disappeared into the studio for the crucial follow-up record to “Shakin’.”
The sky over Memphis was full of falling stars. He had seen Carl Perkins stall after one big hit, watched Roy Orbison and Billy Riley and the others grasp at straws, and he was determined to do better, recording and discarding song after song, never finding just the right thing. But “Shakin’” was far from done, and he had time, still, to relish it. People were already daring to say what he had known all along. In August, a story clattered across the United Press wire claiming that Jerry Lee Lewis was on his way to usurping Elvis Presley as the king of rock and roll.
He remembers, as “Shakin’” held strong on the charts, sitting with Johnny Cash in the studio at Sun. Cash and Perkins and Billy Lee Riley and the other Sun artists were still rankled over Jerry Lee’s New York trip, and Sam’s ongoing sponsorship of Jerry Lee to the exclusion of all else, so they just sat, sharing the silence. Jerry Lee was reading Superman.
“How many records have you sold?” Cash suddenly asked Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee looked at the secretary, Regina.
“It’s sold about seven hundred thousand,” she said.
“How many has mine sold?” Johnny asked.
“About two hundred thousand,” she said.
Johnny, in that taciturn way he had, thought on that for a minute.
“Gee, whiz,” he said, in that baritone voice. “I wish I was a teen idol. It must be nice.”
Jerry Lee told him, yes, it was, and went back to his funny book.
Photographic Insert 1
With his parents, Elmo and Mamie Herron Lewis.
Courtesy of Jerry Lee Lewis
As a boy, at around the time his father took him out to the levee to see the party boats on the Mississippi. “That’ll be you on there someday,” Elmo told him. “That’ll be you.”
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The young conqueror loose on the streets.
The bar at Haney’s Big House, with proprietor, Will Haney, second from right. “I just introduced myself to the atmosphere,” says Jerry Lee.
Concordia Sentinel
With Sun Records founder Sam Phillips (above), who tried to convince Jerry Lee that he could save souls as a “rock-and-roll exponent,” and Sam’s brother Jud (below)
who served, at various times, as manager, drinking partner, and mentor.
Pictorial Press; Colin Escott
Jerry Lee with (left to right) Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash, around the piano at Sun, December 4, 1956: the afternoon jam session that went down in history as the Million Dollar Quartet. “I knew there was something special going on here,” Jerry Lee says.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’: The Steve Allen Show, July 28, 1957.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Shining down from above: a mysterious Sun promotional photo.
Debuting “Great Balls of Fire” in the jukebox film Jamboree.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Signing autographs for fans at the Bell Auditorium, Augusta, Georgia.
Museum of Augusta
The Great Ball of Fire on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
“I thought to myself, I don’t like the look in these girls’ eyes, and the cops couldn’t do nothing about it.”
ValdoSta, Georgia, probably early 1958.
Courtesy of Pierre Pennone
With fan club president Kay Martin and a fan backstage at the Loews Paradise Theater in the Bronx, New York, March 31, 1958.
Courtesy of Kay Martin/Pierre Pennone
At the Granada Theatre in Tooting, South London: his last concert before leaving England, May 26, 1958.
Pierre Pennone
“Why don’t we leave our personal questions out of this, sir?” Greeting the press with Myra upon his return from England, Idlewild Airport, New York City, 1958.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Steve Allen Lewis, who died before his fourth birthday.