Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(73)
It was mostly music, anyway, that movie. Fats Domino did “Wait and See.” Carl Perkins was in it, and Frankie Avalon, with Connie Francis, The Four Coins, Jimmy Bowen, Jodie Sands, Lewis Lymon, and even Slim Whitman, who had told Jerry Lee, “Don’t call us. . . .” There were eighteen acts in all, but of course it was Jerry Lee, a late addition to the cast because of the phenomenon of “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” who stole the show, again, with “Great Balls of Fire.” But it felt all wrong as the cameras focused on him, because the microphone was muted, and the piano was just a prop, anyway, an empty box, its ivory nothing more than a row of shiny dead teeth.
“This piano ain’t got no notes,” he shouted, and the director told him of course it didn’t, this was show business, told him to just pretend he was playing it and mouth the words like he was singing it for real. And while he saw that as an abomination unto his craft and every honest sound that some man had ever coaxed out of a piano or a guitar or even a comb and tissue paper, he got through it, because the pretending he was doing was for the movies, and he loved movies. At least he finally understood how Gene Autry had sung all those cowboy songs while riding his horse, Champion, how he sang without sounding like he was hiccuping or biting his tongue clean off. “Ooohhhh, I said to myself, so that’s how he did it.” If it was good enough for Gene Autry, it was good enough for him.
It was not a good movie, but Sam Phillips knew it would mean night after night of free publicity on the big screen, and for fans of rock and roll, fans who might never make a show to see a Fats Domino or a Jerry Lee Lewis, it was a godsend. It would run for years in places like Birmingham and Atlanta and Knoxville, and on TV shows like Dialing for Dollars, which played old movies sandwiched between Rawhide and reruns of I Love Lucy.
At home in Ferriday, his personal life had taken an even grimmer turn. Jane had given him a second son, but he looked at the child and could not see himself in his face, and claimed Jane had taken up with another man while he was on the road. In September he filed for divorce, accusing Jane of adultery and other acts of lewdness and wildness, including excessive drinking and public profanity. Jane responded in a cross-claim that it was all untrue and asked for a divorce on grounds of nonsupport, inhuman treatment, and abandonment. She alleged that Jerry Lee had left them with no money and little to eat and that the baby was too his progeny, which led Jerry Lee, through his own lawyers, to say that was a crock, and the unhappy and violent marriage would eventually be dissolved—but, as was Jerry Lee’s habit, not in time.
But the messy divorce, miraculously, remained mostly an intensely local matter and did not torpedo his rise at the time, and he did rise, and rise again. Sam was so filled with the promise of Jerry Lee that he bought a full-page ad in Billboard, touting him and Jamboree. Jerry Lee took on a manager named Oscar Davis, a genteel old flack who had worked with his idol, Hank Williams, back in the day and had been a front man for Colonel Tom Parker, who handled Elvis.
He was not afraid of being handled right out of his natural self, as the Colonel had handled Elvis, handling him until he had wrung just about all the rock and roll out of his soul.
“Don’t nobody—nobody—manage Jerry Lee,” he says. “Don’t nobody handle Jerry Lee. I can’t be handled.”
But so far, he liked what was happening to him at Sun and in his career in general. The money kept getting better and better, and Jud had stayed on in his usual, vaguely defined role, to help guide the bookings. It was Jud, the gambler, who decided to wrench Jerry Lee from the stigma of hillbilly music altogether. It was not that he would not play country and western again—in fact, for the B side of “Great Balls of Fire,” he was about to record one of the greatest, most enduring country hits of his career—but Sam and Jud believed, as did the national magazines, that he was becoming the face of rock and roll. As if to seal the matter for good, they decided to send him to a place where no hillbilly would tread. They sent him to 253 West 125th Street, on the island of Manhattan. They sent him to Harlem.
“They sent me,” Jerry Lee said, “to the Apollo.”
“This boy can play anywhere,” said Jud to the theater’s promoters.
Then he crossed his fingers and had a tall drink.
It was not just the Apollo. It was the Apollo in the time of the Little Rock Nine. On September 4, 1957, members of the 101st Airborne Division walked nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School as mobs outside screamed racial slurs and threatened murder in one of the ugliest public displays of racism in United States history. The South had shown its true self in Little Rock, thought black citizens around the country.
It was in this climate that Jerry Lee Lewis and his little band took off for New York.
“I walked out on that stage, me and J. W. and Russ, and there was not one white face in the whole crowd.” Their footsteps boomed in the place, as if the stage was a drumskin stretched tight across all the rich history here. “They looked,” Jerry Lee recalls now, “like they wanted to kill me.” No one yelled or booed; it was oddly quiet. Rock and roll might have been a bridge for the races, but right now the very sound of a Southern accent was shorthand for meanness and racism and even murder, and no one sounded more Southern then in modern music, perhaps, than Jerry Lee Lewis.
The old theater had been built in the Harlem Renaissance, as blacks in the Northern cities regained their footing in the wake of Jim Crow and World War I. Ella Fitzgerald sang here when she was seventeen. Billie Holliday sang here. Cab Calloway shouted here in his white tuxedo, great jazz combos arrived from Kansas City and Chicago and Paris, and big bands and orchestras made it the nation’s jewel of black music and music in general—a jewel that newer performers, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and Chuck Berry, could only polish.