Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(87)

“I just wondered,” Elvis said, “why you didn’t have to go. Why do I have to go and do eighteen months and you don’t have to?”

“ ’Cause I ain’t that crazy,” he said.

After he threw that first notice into the Black River, no one had ever pursued it. Besides, he says, he had already been rejected years before. “I tried to enlist, then, with Arnell Tipton, to go fight in Korea. ‘You’re 4F,’ they told me. Said there was something medically wrong. I really don’t know what they thought. I wanted to go. They said, ‘We’ll take Arnell.’ And as soon he got over there, a sniper killed him.”

Elvis had seemed angry when he came in—Jerry Lee knew how to handle anger, knew how to rise to another man’s anger the way a game rooster knows—but now he just seemed like his heart was broken. “He was not just crying, he was sobbing. . . . I didn’t know how to handle it.”

He felt Sam’s hand on his arm, tugging.

“He’ll be all right,” Sam said, softly. “Elvis is emotional. He’ll be all right, just ignore him. Pay no attention to him. He’ll quit here in a minute.”

So Jerry Lee stepped away.

This was not how he had imagined it, not how he wanted it.

“I wasn’t likin’ this,” he says, thinking back.

He wanted to be thought of as the best rock and roller there was, but he wanted to take it one hit record at a time.

Finally, Elvis dried his eyes and just walked out the door.

“Sally Wilbourn and the rest of them people hung their heads. They wouldn’t even look at me.”


“It was . . . a sad thing, a sad scene. Not something I would ever care to go through again.” Both young men were embarking on great and uncertain journeys, Elvis to Germany, and Jerry Lee on a trip to England that would change his life. It was devised by his manager, Oscar Davis, and the William Morris Agency, designed to expand his overseas fan base through some thirty-six theater shows over six weeks. It would put some serious cash in his pocket—he was said to be pulling fees upwards of $30,000 a show—and Sam and Jud were hoping the tour would make him a true star overseas, just as Sun released his first long-playing album at home. “Whole Lotta Shakin’” and “Great Balls of Fire” had already been hits in England, “Breathless” was moving strong into the top ten there, and “High School Confidential” had just landed. The timing, it seemed, was perfect.

The only foreseeable complication was Jerry Lee’s new bride, Myra—whether the British would take to her. Sam and Jud urged him not to bring her along on the trip, to keep her a secret at least a little longer. But he said no, he would not do that; Myra deserved the trip, and he had nothing to be ashamed of and neither had she. Besides, his fame was growing so swiftly and surely that he ought to be able to absorb a little bad publicity if it came. He really believed there were things in his life that were the world’s business and things that were his business, like the things that happened between a man and his wife. He believed it.

After all, he was the king of rock and roll. Elvis had said so. And one thing was for sure: he would never give it up, never just hand it off in tears. They would have to take it from him.





8


ENGLAND




London

1958

It was quite a sendoff, that May. They followed him cheering through the streets of his hometown, hundreds of them, which was a lot in a place the size of Ferriday. It had been decreed by an act of the city council to be Jerry Lee Lewis Day, May 17, 1958, and instead of the quiet ceremony and polite applause that usually followed such things, there was a great upheaval in the low, flat land. They came walking in their overalls and oil-stained khakis and faded flower-print dresses to take a small part in celebration of the fearless boy who dangled from the high iron, who took the music from their dirt and made it something the rich folks and even the Yankees paid money to hear, and if that was not by God a trick, they didn’t know what was. They left their little wood-frame houses and hurried across the crawfish dirt that had soaked up a thousand years of floods, queuing up for a city block. Then the drum major struck up the band and they marched, through the good smells of Brocato’s Restaurant, by the little church where he forgot which song he was to play, and along streets where he walked coming home from the late-night show, watching for werewolves. They marched past the cotton buyers in their bow ties and the boys dumping ice on the catfish, buffalo, and gar at the fish stand, marched behind the black and gold of the Ferriday High School Marching Trojans, which blared out “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And at the head of it all, reclining in his chariot, was the shining man, golden hair tousled and gleaming. He rode in a new 1959 Cadillac convertible, fins so sharp you could hurt yourself. “The last really pretty car,” he says. “Hasn’t been a really pretty car, since the fifties.”

Just a few days before, on the thirteenth, Jane Mitcham Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis had been officially and finally divorced. Immediately afterward, Jane stood on the steps of the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis and told a reporter with the Press-Scimitar not only that she was still in love with Jerry Lee but that she planned to do everything she could to reconcile and rekindle their romance. It was not an unusual thing, such a declaration; there is just something about a divorce that gets people to thinking of romance. Jerry Lee just knew he was down to one wife again, at least, and did not think on it anymore. He couldn’t see how it had much bearing on this day or any of the perfect days to come.