Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(89)

But the reporters here were of a different stripe from those Jerry Lee had encountered in the radio stations and on the music beats back in the States, where a manager or studio executive might still slap a young music scribe on the back and buy him a whiskey or six to keep a rumor bottled up just a little while longer. Here, reporters joked, there had not been a really good story since the surrender, and the country’s own pioneering rock and rollers were of such a milksop variety, most of them, that they were never considered much of a threat. But the papers loved a smashing scandal, and if outrage was unavailable, then feigned outrage would do just as well.

From Customs, Jerry Lee and Myra walked straight into a battery of blinding flashbulbs and shouted questions from a small mob of reporters. One reporter broke from the mob chasing Jerry Lee and asked Myra who she was, and of course she answered him. “Jerry’s wife,” she told him, and though Oscar Davis hustled her away, it was too late.

The reporters, who are paid to dig, dug at first just a little, and Jerry Lee, sensing that what Jud had warned of was coming true, told them that Myra was fifteen, but when asked if it was his first marriage, he replied that no, sir, it was his third. That alone was enough for a scandal, and the more Jerry Lee and Myra tried to answer the reporters’ questions, the more they constructed their own gallows.

When reporters asked Myra if she didn’t think she was a tad young to be married, she replied that age doesn’t matter back in Tennessee. “You can get married at ten, if you can find a husband,” she said.

When a reporter asked Jerry Lee if Myra was too young, he replied, “Look at her.”

The morning after their arrival, the newsboys waved the headlines at the passing cars.


JERRY BRINGS WIFE NO. 3, FAIR AND 15

(Like a Well-Scrubbed Fourth-Former!)


Looking at the headlines from those few days in May of ’58, you’d think Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t a rock-and-roll singer at all, but an invader come ashore uninvited in the middle of a royal wedding, tracking mud through the Church of England. He still has trouble finding the sense in it, even after all this time. He does not agree with much of the history that has been written about it all these years, does not agree that the British people—or at least the rock-and-roll fans who had clamored for his visit there—suddenly turned on him en masse, because he remembers more chants of worship than cries of derision. He does not remember it as history does, and so it is ridiculous to waste his time or his thoughts on it for very long. He is not just being belligerent. He knows it was bad for him in the end. But he still cannot see the great sin the London press used to crucify him, cannot fathom what the big deal was and what people were so upset about, as a growing frenzy of self-righteous indignation and overinflated condemnation slammed into his marriage and career one newspaper at a time.

“It wasn’t nothin’,” he says.

He shakes his head, incredulous.

“I mean, it wasn’t nothin’.”


As scandals go, it was an odd one. There was some subterfuge in it, and considerable lying on the part of his manager and even a little himself, but not very good lying. But the fundamental fact is, it all happened because Jerry Lee was not trying to hide Myra—even if he did try to fudge her age—and when the news of it swelled into scandal, the people around him acted like they’d never met the girl, or feigned outrage of their own, or ran and hid. Instead of damage control, the people who might have rallied around him instead blundered around the Westbury Hotel, while Jerry Lee himself gave interviews in which he intended to explain himself but only poured kerosene on the roaring fire.

“They come down on us hard,” he says. Neither Jerry Lee nor Myra understood that what they said to the press would be used against them in sneering contempt, and it got worse with almost every hour. The papers painted a picture of hillbilly culture gone mad, and it seemed like every move he and his entourage made only riveted the image further in the minds of readers. One reporter wrote that he interviewed Myra’s mother, Lois, in her nightgown, clutching a sheet to herself, talking about how they would all have to get to the bottom of these charges right away. Every other story seemed to mention that a member of the entourage was in some stage of undress—even elegant old Oscar Davis, who apparently came to the door in his boxer shorts. They quoted Myra as saying that Jerry Lee had given her a red Cadillac for Christmas, but that she sure wished she had a wedding ring, though. “Gee, it’s fun being married,” she said. “The girls back at the school were mighty envious when I married [Jerry Lee].” Jerry Lee himself told the reporters, “I’m real happy with my third wife.” And all this was said before the first press conference. Oscar Davis, apparently living in some alternative universe where reporters do not recognize a diamond mine when they blunder into it, had merely pulled one reporter aside and told him not to print any of it, to respect their privacy.

Jerry Lee never doubted, even as he rode to his first show in the back of his limousine, that he would blow it all away once he took the stage, that he would just send the damning stories and the accusing headlines into scrap on the London sidewalk. The reporters had taken their efforts to be polite and twisted it into something ugly, but the reporters were not the reason he was in England. “I came to play rock and roll,” he says.

The first show was at a sold-out theater in Edmonton, in northeast London. Two thousand people waited quietly and politely for a taste of real American rock and roll. Warming up for Jerry Lee were the Treniers, identical twins Claude and Cliff Trenier out of Mobile, Alabama, a dynamic twosome who had successfully made the turn from jump blues to rock and roll and were considered pioneers of the music. They had a naughty song called “Poontang,” but they elected not to play that in Edmonton, doing their more palatable songs to polite and friendly applause before leaving the stage to make room for the main event. Unlike fans in America, those waiting for Jerry Lee neither stomped nor cheered, merely waited with polite and reserved anticipation. To Jerry Lee, it was a little off-putting. He believes it would have been a different story, a different England, if only he could have played first, before the newspapers put the bootheels to him, if the music had been the story that rocketed around the country in the first few days of his tour.