Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(91)

Oscar Davis, perhaps believing that the press might be distracted by some sleight of hand, went to the American embassy to ask if Jerry Lee and Myra could be married there—on American soil, so to speak—but the officials at the embassy said that was impossible. So he promised the press that Jerry Lee and Myra would be married again, legally, as soon as the couple got back to Memphis, but nothing would placate the papers; the stories grew more and more strident, and calls for Jerry Lee’s ouster, even arrest, grew louder. Four days into the tour, theater owners bowed to the pressure from the newspapers and the growing hostility in the government itself and canceled all his remaining engagements because of “unfavorable audience reaction and for other reasons.”

Jerry Lee and the others packed their bags for home. Oscar Davis stayed behind to try to collect some of the money they were owed. “I will stay behind until this arrangement has been made,” he told reporters. “I think I shall keep Jerry back home in the States for some time.”

Jerry Lee remembers looking out the window of the hotel and seeing throngs of people but not an angry mob. He does not remember any signs with ugliness scrawled on them or any catcalls or anything like that, only a crowd of people gathered as other crowds had gathered, to cheer or to get a look at the man the magazines had called the future king of rock and roll. As he and Myra and the others departed through a side door into a waiting limo, people flung themselves on the car, not cursing, not trying to hurt them, only behaving as other half-crazy fans had done. He will never understand how what he saw and what the newspapers insisted were such different things.

“I’ll be back,” he told them, through the glass.


It would have been better to just fly off immediately. But instead he and the others were trapped at the airport for eight long hours, as reporters, inexhaustible, tried to pick at his fears, tried to get him to admit that the events of the past four days were just the beginning of a kind of awful landslide for his career. Jerry Lee, also inexhaustible, just kept talking about the good life that awaited them, once he got home to where people appreciated and understood folks such as him. “Look, I make money, not lose it, see,” he told reporters. “There’s plenty of work back home. I’m well breeched, you know, and I don’t have to worry about money. . . . I shall be glad to get home. I just bought a six-hundred-dollar lawn mower that I want to ride around.”

The reporters watched with great regret as he checked his tickets and prepared to leave their island. As Jerry Lee and Myra looked through a newspaper, Myra exclaimed, as if with disappointment, that there were no pictures of them on the front page. One of the last pictures had been a mug shot of Jerry Lee with the caption “Lewis: Bigamist.”

“Who is this De Gaulle fella, anyway?” Jerry Lee joked, looking at the newspaper. “He seems to have gone over bigger than us.”

Now and then, a teenager would come up and ask for his autograph.

“I’ve lost nothing,” he told the reporters who hung on to the end.

He boarded the plane with Myra clinging to him, with the British government believing it had chased away an undesirable and a threat to the very fabric of England itself. “The thoroughly unpleasant case,” the minister of labor reassured Sir Medlicott, “was ended by the cancellation of the contract and the disappearance of the man.”


He would not concede, ever, that he was wounded by it, not as he waited to board the plane, not as he touched down in New York, and not now. It would have an undeniable effect on his life and career, but a man is wounded, Jerry Lee says, only when he lies down, “and I don’t.”

In New York, with Myra by his side, he confronted the phalanx of waiting television cameras not as prying eyes, but as a welcoming party. “I stepped off the plane in New York and some news reporter said I had a bigger crowd than Clark Gable,” he says.

Asked, leeringly, about London, he seemed completely unfazed. “We had a very nice time,” he replied. “People treated us real nice.”

“Why did you leave?” the reporter asked.

“Well . . . I don’t answer those questions, sir,” he said, then joked: “My manager might knock my head off or something.”

“When were you married?” the reporter pressed.

“Pardon?”

“When were you married?”

He wrapped his arm around Myra’s shoulder protectively and smiled again. “Why don’t we leave our personal questions out of this, sir?”


“When we got to Memphis, I went to see my lawyer, and he told me if I wanted to get married, I could,” says Jerry Lee. So he took Myra home to Ferriday, and with his people looking on, he married her again, with a legal license procured from the Concordia Parish Courthouse. But the ugliness followed them across the ocean even before they could say their vows in his parents’ house, as newspapers and magazines here retraced the agony of his London ordeal. It was not as intense here, but it rolled on, and before long some radio stations bowed to pressure from sponsors not to play his music. Other threats would surface, from people who had hated his music all along and from inside his circle of friends and business associates. Dick Clark had already written him off. And it was only beginning.

Sam and Jud Phillips seemed unsure how to respond, at least publicly, to the attacks on their marquee star. They knew the threat was serious, potentially career-ending, but they seemed unsure whether to try to laugh it off or treat it as a serious matter requiring stern action. Oscar Davis was no longer in the equation—or in the country, for that matter. Having remained behind, ostensibly to collect money owed to Jerry Lee, he was last heard from somewhere in France or Italy or some damn place, and he watched the saga of Jerry Lee Lewis play itself out from across the waters. Conspiracy theorists would say it was all a plot, that Oscar was in league with his old friend Colonel Tom Parker to torpedo Jerry Lee’s career, but Sam Phillips would later say the man had merely been given an impossible job. “Jerry Lee can’t be managed.”