Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(80)

The second week in December, in a lull in his touring schedule, he proposed in the front seat of his Cadillac. Myra would write that she was frightened and reluctant and that he pressured her, but Jerry Lee does not recall any of that. “We was in front of her house, making a little love,” he says, “and I said, ‘You want to get married?’ and she said, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and we decided to get married.”

The next day, on December 12, 1957, he drove south again, through the Christmas shopping traffic, with a Myra Gayle Brown beside him. Again he headed into Mississippi, to the town of Hernando in DeSoto County, where the young people of Memphis had been going for years to marry in secret. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, they pulled up to the chapel. The Reverend M. C. Whitten, a Baptist, performed the short ceremony, and with no family or friends to witness, Jerry Lee and Myra were married before God. The minister, who was accustomed to such things, did not question the union. There was no honeymoon—no possibility of one—so they drove back to Coro Lake. They told no one, because Myra was afraid of what her mother and father would say. Jerry Lee did not much care if they knew or not but agreed to wait, at least a little while, before telling his cousin J. W. that he was now his father-in-law, too.

He has been asked, a thousand times, if he loved the girl.

“At one time,” he says, “I thought I did.”

He thinks about it a moment, considering.

“There was love there.”


It lasted about a week before they were found out, before a well-meaning maid saw a marriage license in a drawer and pointed it out to her parents. Here stories drastically differ. J. W. and Lois said they were stunned, shaken to their very core, heartbroken, incensed, and of course betrayed. J. W. also said it sent him into a killing rage, said he was bent on murder and didn’t mind suffering the consequences, said he took after the boy in his car with a loaded pistol on the seat beside him. That might make for a good screenplay, said Jerry Lee, but it was not as dramatic as that.

“I wasn’t running from J. W. I might have been drivin’ a little fast,” he said, smiling, “but I wasn’t runnin’. He said he was gonna shoot me, but he wasn’t gonna do nothin’.” He doesn’t even believe it was much of a shock to anyone except maybe Sam and Jud Phillips, who understood, immediately, the danger in it, not from J. W. but from the inevitable bad press.

J. W. did come into the Sun studio asking if Jerry Lee was there, and he did have a pistol with him—Jerry Lee maintains it was posturing—and Sam told him to sit his pistol-waving behind down and listen to reason.

“Now, J. W., I understand that you’re mad, and I understand you want to shoot Jerry Lee,” said Sam, intimating that there were many times he’d felt like doing it himself. “But you need to understand one thing, son. You can shoot him, but you’ll make a whole lot more money not shooting him.”

J. W. went home, and Jerry Lee went unshot.

“Talk is what talk is, just a bunch of yapping,” says Jerry Lee. “I done what I wanted to do,” and for J. W. or anyone else to pretend to be shocked by that, to be caught flat-footed by his courtship of Myra, by the fact that it led to a wedding, is a revision of the way things were in those days, he believes.

He would be painted as a man leering over the cradle, while Myra would be depicted as either a nervous and confused little girl or a giddy, gushing schoolgirl, torn between puppy love and a great, deepening regret. In that portrait she seemed to go overnight from a child playing with dolls to a wife. Tearfully, in shame, she crammed her clothes and little girl’s belongings into her dollhouse, the closest thing she had to a grown-up suitcase, and left the sanctuary of her parents’ home. This would become the lasting and damning portrait of Jerry Lee, and many people believed no more damning than he deserved. But it was greatly exaggerated, says Jerry Lee. “When this so-called news broke, it was like I had committed an unforgivable sin,” he says. “I did not.”

The marriage was, to the outsiders who stumbled across it, puzzling. Myra was routinely pulled over by police when she went for a drive in one of Jerry Lee’s Cadillacs, because they believed she was a teenager taking her parents’ car out for a spin. Once she was detained and her car dismantled by police after she tried to pay for a meal with a hundred-dollar bill, the same day a nearby bank was robbed by someone matching her description; the police themselves were unable to decide if she was a child joyriding in her daddy’s Caddy or a grown woman capable of sticking up a bank. But somehow the news of Jerry Lee’s marriage to Myra mostly remained bottled up in Memphis and the surrounding area, contained by the river and the bluffs on the Arkansas side, the best-kept secret in rock and roll. For their first Christmas, Jerry Lee bought Myra a red convertible Cadillac of her own, with white leather interior.

J. W. even briefly considered filing criminal charges against Jerry Lee, but he let himself be talked out of that, too, by a prosecutor. “Talk . . . ain’t . . . nothing,” says Jerry Lee. “Me and J. W. never had no problem.” He told Myra’s mother, Lois, that he loved her daughter, and told J. W. that he would take care of Myra, that she would never want for a thing, and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned. “I’ve always tried to be nice to my women, buy ’em what they want, keep ’em satisfied, keep ’em in a pretty car,” he says. He does not care that his attitudes about such things seem frozen in the past. It was the past, where this all happened, and it is where he is happiest, much of the time.