Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(83)

Buddy Holly, who was watching from a safe distance, got worried.

“He might do it, Jerry Lee,” he said.

Jerry Lee looked at him and quickly shook his head.

“Well,” Jerry Lee said to Anka, “jump.”

Anka looked down.

“Well, you gonna jump, or you gonna make us stand here all night?”

Anka hesitated. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m not gonna give you the satisfaction.”

“Son,” Jerry Lee said, “you better have some more beer.”

The boy was never in danger, says Jerry Lee. “Nawwww, you couldn’t have pushed him off. You couldn’t have got him off of there with a bulldozer.”


Buddy Holly, on the other hand, was smokin’ then, one of the driving forces in rock and roll after less than a year of making the big time, and as Jerry Lee watched him on the stage in Australia and Hawaii, he knew that the climb, the race, was never over, never really won. “Hmmmmm, I remember thinkin’, this boy’s gettin’ pretty good.” He opened for Elvis in Lubbock, caught the attention of a moneyman, and proved—even in those ugly black-frame spectacles—that he could rock it right down to the floor.

“He was my buddy.”

A few months after that night, he says, the phone rang in his house in Memphis. Holly called him about every other week, and they would talk music and the rest of it.

That night, Buddy was happy.

“Jerry, I’m thinking about marrying this girl. Now, just what do you think I should do?”

“I really can’t say, Buddy. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, you’ve experienced it pretty good.”

“Yeah, that’s very true,” Jerry Lee conceded. “That should tell you something.”

But Buddy was serious. He wanted a real answer. “What do you think?”

“If it’s what you want to do, do it.”

Buddy went on to tell Jerry Lee about the girl, a beautiful girl he’d met in New York City named Maria Elena. He’d already proposed to her, it turned out—proposed on their very first date.

“If you love her,” said Jerry Lee, “it don’t matter what nobody else thinks.”


“Breathless” sold a hundred thousand records that spring, and it climbed the charts, but it didn’t shoot up as “Great Balls of Fire” had. “‘Great Balls of Fire’ was number one for six weeks,” said Jerry Lee, and had hovered at or near the top of the country-and-western, rhythm-and-blues, and pop charts. He performed “Breathless” in prime time on Dick Clark’s evening variety show, but it still hadn’t really broken loose. The song had a break in it that left people on the dance floor just kind of frozen in midstep, one of its quirks. “They learned how,” said Jerry Lee. “I showed ’em how,” but in the meantime Jud Phillips went searching for that one big shove.

Clark’s nighttime program, The Dick Clark Show, was sponsored by Beech-Nut Gum, but Clark wasn’t selling enough chewing gum to satisfy the sponsor, and Jud, hearing Clark’s lament while they were out drinking in Manhattan, had an idea that would serve both the television host and Sun Records. For fifty cents and five Beech-Nut Gum wrappers, Clark would give away a record of “Breathless.” Beech-Nut was a strong gum that Jud said, grinning, left you “breathless.” In three weeks, there were fifty thousand takers, and the demand kept swelling until the song busted into the top ten in every chart. And Jerry Lee just kept blazing, till the real rock-and-roll star, the genuine man, began to be swaddled in myths.

“I was in the William Morris Agency one day, up in New York,” he remembers, “and there was this beautiful woman sitting behind the desk.” As the receptionist listened, rapt, he regaled her with a mile-long line of talk, full of tales of rock-and-roll wildness, and the bottomland, and anything else he thought she wanted to hear.

Then something occurred to him.

“What if I told you that none of that was true?” he asked.

The woman looked stricken. “Please don’t tell me that!” she said. “That’s the Jerry Lee Lewis I know. The one people love.”

Well, he told her, that’s all right, it’s all true. She relaxed, her dreams restored.

“Like I said, people like to remember things a certain way.”


In March of ’58, he traveled back to New York as a headliner of an Alan Freed package tour called The Big Beat, starring him, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry. Holly was almost congenial in agreeing to take third billing, but as the two other headliners came together backstage, it was like watching two trains closing in on a single track.

In some ways, he and Berry were much alike, perhaps even more alike than he and the outrageous piano player Little Richard, whom Jerry Lee had always admired. He and Berry were both natural showmen with original sounds; both took roots music and smelted and hammered it into the very design of rock and roll. Jerry Lee was a white man who could feast on traditionally black music; Chuck Berry could twang country with the white boys, could sound more Texas swing and Opry than blues and R&B, and talked between sets like a New England schoolteacher. Like Jerry Lee, he lived with demons—different ones, but demons.

The older of the two, Berry had not grown up poor in St. Louis—his daddy was a deacon and his mother a school principal—but that did not protect him from bad decisions: he did three years for armed robbery in St. Louis, leaving jail on his twenty-first birthday. He hung bumpers on cars on an automobile assembly line, worked as a janitor in an apartment building, even worked as a beautician. He had always loved music and especially loved country and western. But when he heard the blues singer and guitarist T-Bone Walker, he knew he could play it just like that and make a dollar. He was denied the big stage for years as he fought his way into the spotlight, sometimes even turned away from his own bookings when club owners learned he was a black man. Like Jerry Lee, he had been influenced by the music of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, and even bluegrass greats like Bill Monroe. He went to Chicago to make his name—recommended to Chess Records by Muddy Waters—and had a hit with a rewrite of the old song “Ida Red,” now renamed “Maybellene.” It was a little country too, and in black clubs people grumbled a bit but then got up and danced to “that hillbilly black cat.” He followed it with other hits, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and suddenly rock and roll had a songbook. Jerry Lee and Elvis and other white rock singers of the era admired Chuck, especially that “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” song, but it wasn’t until they toured together that Jerry Lee saw the man’s showmanship; he wasn’t concerned about who was the better musician—he knew that with certainty—but at least it would be a head worth taking.