Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(76)

He had befriended him and accepted his friendship in return, and now, as his own career bloomed and his own records climbed the charts, was more determined than ever to take the crown. But in ’57, after he had gotten to know him, gotten to see the good, almost guileless person he was underneath the stardom and the insecure boy who lived even deeper inside all that, it was complicated. One night, Elvis asked Jerry Lee if there was a song of his he wanted to hear. “I said, ‘Yeah, “Jailhouse Rock,”’” half joking, because that was a big production number that a man does not begin to sing in a rumpus room. “But he did it live, did the whole thing. He did the dance and everything. All he was missing was the pole. And I was starting to think, Dang, how long is this gonna go on?” till finally Elvis had done the whole show, and there was nothing to do but applaud. It was one of the odder things Jerry Lee had ever seen, Elvis standing there, taking his bow in an almost empty room.

The tension that Jerry Lee sensed between them would never go away and would grow over the years as their lives, in both similar and wildly different ways, grew more and more bizarre. But they remained friends as ’57 vanished into history. Almost always, they wound up together at the piano; almost always, it was old love songs, generations old, or gospel that they sang. There was no tape this time. He was welcomed, Jerry Lee said, even after Elvis began to withdraw from the world of normal men, in part because among the armies of ass kissers who surrounded him, Jerry Lee never fit in.

“What do you think of my acting?” Elvis asked him.

“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “you ain’t no Clark Gable.”

They talked about everything young men talk about—everything but the one thing that, as it turned out, both of them wondered about in the deepest parts of the night. Finally, Jerry Lee asked him the same thing he’d been bothering Sam Phillips about: “Can you play rock music . . . and still go to heaven? If you died, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?”

Elvis looked startled, trapped. “His face turned bloodred,” remembers Jerry Lee.

“Jerry Lee,” he answered, “Don’t you never ask me that. Don’t you never ask me that again.”

There is religion, and there is faith, in Jerry Lee’s eyes. Religion is just religion; anyone can put a sign or symbol on a door, and claim it as faith, pray to it. But true faith is beautiful, and terrible. He and Elvis understood that. “We was raised in it,” he says, “in the Assembly of God. . . . Him being Elvis, I thought he was the one person I could ask. Seems like sometimes we didn’t have no one to talk to but each other.

“You’ll be judged by the deeds you done. . . . And people don’t want to believe all this kinda stuff, ’cause they’re looking for . . . they’re searching for a way out.” But there is no way, he says. There is only the judgment, in the end.

“I think it stuck with him a long time. I fought that battle myself. I do know Elvis cared for me. I know.” They were true friends then. “He didn’t come around much, after that. I could tell he was scared. So I never did ask him that again. And I never did get an answer, neither.”


It would be hard to make up the life he briefly had, in ’57 and into ’58, a life ripped from the pages of one of his funny books, in which all the women were breathtaking, all the men heroic.

One day, on a trip to Los Angeles, he spent the afternoon with Elizabeth Taylor on the lot at MGM. She smiled at him with those otherworldly eyes, the most beautiful woman in the universe, and when he apologized for not being much of a talker, she told him it was all right, she was beset with talkers.

“Well, what do you think of it?” she asked Jerry Lee of the studio.

“I don’t know. . . . What do you think?” he asked.

“I think it’s pure shit,” she told him (though he spells out the word when he tells the story now).

“I’m glad my mama didn’t hear you say that,” he said.

He met her because her husband, Mike Todd, knew his agent, Oscar Davis. The four of them went to dinner, and afterward, in their hotel room, “Elizabeth was sittin’ right by me. . . . I ain’t never seen a woman that beautiful in my life. I’ve seen a lot of other women, but that one took the cake. And Michael Todd said, ‘Jerry, would you mind settin’ here with Liz while me and Oscar go downtown here to a bar I know? We’ll go have a couple drinks. We’ll be right back.’ He says, ‘Will you kind of, just, look after her for me?’

“There I was, a boy from Louisiana, I didn’t even know what was goin’ on. All I knew was, Elizabeth Taylor was sittin’ right by me. And I was her guardian. I don’t think I had enough sense at that time to be nervous. We talked for a long time.”

He shared a marquee with Sam Cooke, who called him “cousin,” a pure singer whose words seemed to linger on the stage even after he took his bow, like smoke rings in the air. He toured a circuit of all-black venues with Jackie Wilson, watched him glide across the planks like there was Crisco underneath his alligator shoes. “Jackie Wilson could blow you away, I tell you. He could do anything. Oh, man, what a singer.” The two of them stayed friends till Wilson’s death.

On the road, Patsy Cline pushed him into a bathroom and told him a dirty joke, sang “Walking After Midnight” like a honky-tonk angel just before he went onstage, then took a seat in the front row and wolf-whistled like a sailor. He saw a man named Ellas Otha Bates tuning an odd, box-shaped Stratocaster guitar with more unnecessary mess on it than a Shriner’s hat turn into “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Bo Diddley” and lay down a beat onstage that was the bedrock of rock and roll. And he heard it, right there.