Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(90)

He could have acted contrite, could even have toned down his attire a little, to bow at least slightly to what was happening all around him in this foreign and hostile place, but to Jerry Lee that would have been more like a curtsy. He ascended the stage at the Regal Theater in perhaps the most written-about outfit in British history outside of a royal wedding: a hot-pink suit with sparkly lapels. As he swaggered across the stage, the people applauded with reserved vigor, which was less than he was used to but still far from hostile. He did a few songs, starting slow, and the crowd was blank and unresponsive. He took a break, as some idiot in the crowd sang a snatch or two from “God Save the Queen,” then came back to the stage and did it up right, gave them a good, hard jab of rock and roll, and he remembers that they cheered louder then, cheered the way people were supposed to cheer when Jerry Lee Lewis played the piano. He does not recall any ugliness, any jeers, any meanness, and when it was over, he figured everything in England was going to be fine.

But the press was only getting started, and now reporters in London and Memphis were digging into the near past. Some seemed content to flog Jerry Lee with opinion pieces and old news, but the Daily Mirror dug deeper, and in public records back in the United States discovered that Myra was not fifteen at all, but only thirteen, and that Jerry Lee was not divorced from Jane when he and Myra were wed, and that she was his cousin, and the sum total of all that was the hottest rock-and-roll star in the world was in London cohabiting with a thirteen-year-old relative who was not legally his wife.

That news made the British press nearly hysterical. Jerry Lee, having tried unsuccessfully to soften the matter by fudging Myra’s age and date of the marriage, now pretty much told it all to reporters who could barely believe their luck. He told about Dorothy and about the shotgun wedding to the pregnant Jane—all of it—believing that surely they would understand that it didn’t matter that he married Myra before he was divorced from Jane because, in a way, he was not really married to Jane, having still been married to Dorothy. He appealed to them as men, telling reporters about how Jane’s father and brothers came to him “with hide whips.”

“I was a young fool when I married at fourteen and sixteen,” he told them. “My father should have put a foot on my neck and beaten a worm out of me.”

It seemed like plain talk to him, the way men talked to men. Surely they would understand.

They did not. They went almost giddy when Jerry Lee told them that he married bigamously. The headlines grew uglier, and he became not a singer with a few secrets but an international incident. He played a second show, this time in London proper, to a four-thousand-seat theater, but it was less than half full. Outside, newsboys waved the late edition.

CLEAR OUT THIS GANG!



As Jerry Lee will tell you, the fans still lined the sidewalks of the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair, just hoping to get a look at him. He does not believe they had turned on him.

“The newspapers did all they could to destroy us,” he said. “The things they wrote . . .”

In the papers, he was presented as some kind of serious threat, an example of the unlettered Southern American at his virulent worst. Oscar Davis, apparently believing it was his reputation he was supposed to safeguard instead of his star’s, abandoned Jerry Lee completely, announcing that he was as surprised by the news of Jerry Lee’s marital tangles as everyone else and that he knew nothing of any marriages or of Myra’s age, making him perhaps the least-informed manager and acting publicist in rock-and-roll history. Even the British government took a hand in the affair, sending officers from the Home Office to inspect Jerry Lee’s and Myra’s passports and immigration status. The headlines screamed:

BABY SNATCHER!

‘GO HOME’

CROWD SHOUTS AT SINGER

‘WE HATE JERRY’

SHOUT EX-FANS



Spokesmen from the theater chain that had hired Jerry Lee said that if they had known of his past, they never would have hired him. Columnists called for his arrest and deportation and for an investigation by the child welfare office. Even Parliament weighed in. Sir Frank Medlicott, of the constituency of Norfolk Central in the House of Commons, questioned why a man of such nefariousness was granted a permit to work, prompting this exchange between the lord and the minister of labor, Iain MacLeod:

MEDLICOTT: “Is my right honorable friend aware that great offense was caused to many people by the arrival of this man, with his thirteen-year-old bride? Will he remember also that we have enough ‘rock and roll’ entertainers of our own without importing them from overseas?”



MACLEOD: “This was, of course, a thoroughly unpleasant case.”




Young women who had once professed to love him announced they were going home to smash his records. At a show in Tooting, South London, fans chanted “We Hate Jerry!” and cried “Cradle Robber!” from the audience. Offstage, Jerry Lee kept talking to reporters, and they only wound the noose tighter; by now several theaters had canceled and the tour was in jeopardy. Jerry Lee refused to quit. He was convinced that the bad press would die down and he could go back to the stage with audiences untainted. But the taint was overwhelming. Reviewers described him as a drooling bumpkin making more noise than music. Even the most highbrow critics in the States, even the ones who despised his genre, had often been forced to admit that, whatever danger to society he might pose, the music was there, the music was good. But the British appreciation for American music was not yet deeply ingrained, and such matters were easily overlooked.