Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(86)

Honey, get your boppin’ shoes, before the jukebox blows a fuse.



The song, written by Ronald Hargrave, was done for another low-budget, quickly made B movie, but its singer was Midas then, and the song took hold with live audiences and appeared to be another sure hit whenever Sun got around to releasing it. Jud and Sam celebrated another freight-car load of free publicity, as the movie opened around the country with the voice and face of their star looking down from the big screen.


With such a hurricane wind at his back, how could it not last forever?

His friendship with Elvis had faded as his own star rose, as Elvis hid more and more at Graceland in the company of his family and friends and employees—when you could tell the difference—and finally shipped off to Europe. It was surprising how different their lives were starting to seem, these two boys born in the bared teeth of the Depression South, with mamas they loved above all others and daddies who drank and did time in prison and a brother who died, leaving their parents to pour all their love and hope for a better life into the living son. Elvis’s parents had bought him his first instrument, and he learned to make music by watching people around him, studying, absorbing everything he could from the black people in the fields and the white people in church, and on weekends he gathered with his people around the radio to hear the Opry and Hayride, and snuck off to hear hillbilly blues on WELO in Tupelo, hosted by a singer named Mississippi Slim. They were brothers, the blond boy and the dark boy, separated only by three hundred miles of cotton fields. They had both taken the music of their South, black and white, hillbilly and blues, and made it shake. They were alike, those boys, but not the same.

A few months before, as if in some crazy moment of déjà vu, Jerry Lee was lounging around Sun when he saw Sam come walking toward him through the usual crowd of hopefuls and hangers-on.

“Are you gonna be here a while?” Sam asked.

“Sure,” said Jerry Lee. “Why?”

“Elvis called, and said he wants to see you.”

It was like someone had just rewound time to the day he first met Elvis, not much more than a year before. The difference was in Sam himself. He was a smiling man by nature, a hand-gripper and an arm-squeezer. You made contacts, smiling like that, made money. But he was not smiling now.


Elvis, Jerry Lee believes, wore a mask in the winter of 1958, in those last months before he left. He made himself appear stoic, brave, patriotic, the face Colonel Tom Parker decided he would show reporters and weeping fans as his induction neared. Elvis talked of doing his duty. He would not ask for special treatment, would not become a singing serviceman but would wait to be selected, go where the army’s bureaucracy decided he would go, and live off his seventy-eight dollars a month instead of whatever unearthly amount he was making back home. If the army decided he should peel potatoes and tote a rifle in the Cold War he would do it, because the Colonel had decided that was the best of all outcomes to this train wreck of dreams. But that was not the face that looked back at him in the mirror in his mansion on the hill, or the face he pressed to the telephone when he sobbed to his mama, telling her he would just disappear into those two long years; the world would move on to other talented boys.

That face, the haunted one, was the one Jerry Lee saw staring into his through the glass at Sun Records, as Elvis opened the door and walked up to him. They shook hands, but Elvis just stood there, as if he was a little lost.

“You got it. Take it,” he said to Jerry Lee. “Take the whole damn thing.”

Then, Jerry Lee recalls, Elvis started to cry.

“It happened. It did,” Jerry Lee says. He just stood there, awkward, frozen. Grown men only cried when their mamas died, or maybe their children, and when they were in the grip of the Holy Ghost. They did not cry before other men, in a lobby crowded with people in the middle of the afternoon. He remembers how the room went quiet. “They didn’t say a word, them people. They didn’t even move.” He remembers trying not to look at Elvis, trying to look at anything else, at the drab green walls covered in that ugly surplus paint. He remembers the dust on the tiles, and secretary Sally Wilbourn looking up from the desk, her face bleak. He remembers Sam coming up from the back to handle things, how he came to stand at Elvis’s side, nodding his head, gently, talking softly, saying it’s all right, son, it’s gonna be all right. Finally, there was nowhere else to look, and Jerry Lee will never forget the tears running down Elvis’s cheeks.

“You can have it,” Elvis told him.

“I didn’t know,” Jerry Lee told him, “it meant that much to you.”

What he meant by that, he says now, was that he knew Elvis had already moved on to Hollywood, that he was inching away from the music that had made him. He seemed headed for a life of soft ballads and pop music, says Jerry Lee, because what Elvis really wanted to be, and what he told people he wanted to be, was “a good actor,” and, failing that, he might have to settle for just being a movie star. But in ’58 he was still the king, and with the induction just days away and the blond-haired boy rising, rising, he believed his time was over.

“That ain’t nothing to cry about,” he said, like they were little boys on a playground.

Elvis broke down, sobbing.

“I just wondered . . .” he said, but could not finish.

“What?” said Jerry Lee.