Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(88)
After the parade, after the home folks had trickled back to their homes, he would go to the new house he had bought for his mama and daddy here in Ferriday, the one with the driveway lined with gleaming Detroit steel, and he would eat his mama’s fine cooking prepared on her brand-new stove, then drive back to the high school and play a dance in the gymnasium out of the goodness of his heart. Then he would rush back to Memphis to fly away, first to the bright lights and unchecked room service of New York, then to the British Isles for a five-week tour that would make him an international star. And if he happened to see his cousin Jimmy while he was home, he’d tell him he’d decided to buy him a new car, too, a brand-new ’58 Oldsmobile for him to drive on the revival circuit even as he preached against rock and roll, so that he could better do God’s work. But for now, for just a few blocks more, he rode in that new leather, face to the sun, his future limitless, his conscience clear.
Jud met Jerry Lee in New York to try once more to talk him into keeping Myra a secret at least until the tour was over, to just not mention the marriage if he was unwilling to leave her behind altogether. Somehow Jerry Lee and Myra had remained mostly undiscovered outside Dianne Lane, but Jerry Lee had his back up about the England trip and said they would not sneak around in England. “She’s my wife,” said Jerry Lee. He would not hide her by leaving her behind. “That wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all,” he says now. “I was glad it was gonna be out in the open. I wasn’t hidin’ nothin’,” he says, something he has stressed again and again. “I was out in the open with everything.”
“If you do this,” Jud told him, “you’re gonna flush the greatest talent that this country’s ever seen right down the commode.”
He could not imagine going to Myra at the last minute and telling her that, out of fear over what might happen, he, Jerry Lee Lewis, was going to slink off to England alone. Myra and Frankie Jean were looking forward to a great vacation of shopping and sightseeing while he played his shows. To leave Myra behind, he says now, would have been to admit he was ashamed of her and what he had done by marrying her, but he was not, and in that conviction he was trapped. They all were. Jud went back to Memphis to closet himself with Sam and worry, and—it would come out later—to start planning for the fallout they knew was coming. They could feel it, the way you can feel lightning pull at the hairs of your arms before it strikes.
A harbinger of things to come waited for them in New York. Dick Clark, whose career had been greatly served by the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose Saturday evening show had been pulled from the fire by the Beech-Nut–“Breathless” collaboration, had scheduled Jerry Lee for the Saturday before he left for England. But then suddenly, after a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night warning that Jerry Lee was about to be wrapped in scandal, Clark canceled him. “After we took him nationwide,” says Jerry Lee.
To him, it was hysteria over nothing.
“Stupid,” he says.
It began on May 21, 1958. Jerry Lee, Myra, Jerry Lee’s sister Frankie Jean, the drummer Russ Smith, J. W., Lois, and the little boy Rusty arrived in New York, to be joined there by old Oscar Davis, the man who had managed Hank Williams. Jud was there, to wish them bon voyage. Jerry Lee wanted his mama and daddy to go, but they had never been on a plane before. Elmo and Mamie had traveled before to see their son, and they loved the fancy hotels—Elmo thought room service meant he had his own butler—but the New York to London flight, ten hours in all, was over water all the way, and Mamie didn’t think her nerves could take it.
They almost didn’t make it to England at all. The number two engine on the plane carrying the entourage burst into flames, raining small pieces of itself down over the Atlantic, and the pilot made an emergency landing in Ireland. The group boarded another plane and finally landed at Heathrow on the evening of the twenty-second. There an immigration official looked at Myra, at her passport, at her boarding card, and back at her face. “It was noted that the date of birth shown on her passport was 11 July, 1944,” wrote A. R. Thomas in his report on the arrival of Mrs. Lewis. “This seemed to be an unusually young age for a married woman, but since both parties come from the Southeastern part of the United States, where the legal age for marriage is lower than is usual in other parts of the world, no action on my part seemed to be called for. Mrs. Lewis’ appearance was fairly well in keeping with her age, although she might have passed for a couple of years older. She was as tall as an average fully-grown woman. . . .”
There was some hope that Myra might pass unnoticed through the airport and into the semiprivacy of a hotel with the rest of the entourage, some hope that Jerry Lee, with the power of his music, could somehow preempt any coming disaster or at least get through his shows and return safely to America, where the story might be, if not contained, at least spread out a little more, in the way a firecracker does less damage on a driveway than it does under a tin can. There was no hope that the British would understand, or accept. The British were not built that way, and their own rock-and-roll revolution was at the time merely in the grumbling stage. Though the young people of the British Isles hungered and clamored for American rock and roll, the politicians and ruling class were highly suspicious at best of the wild boy from the American South and were already harrumphing mightily.
England took itself quite seriously in 1958, and with every right. It seemed like just yesterday that a German madman had sent bombers across the Channel to flatten whole blocks of London. V-1 and V-2 rockets had rained upon them from space itself, and they had buried their dead and soldiered on, as if the whole ordeal had merely chipped some old crockery and run them late for tea.