Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(92)

In the end, Jud and Sam decided to treat the scandal as both threat and farce. First, Jerry Lee signed his name to a long letter that seemed intended to be contrite, but was in its final draft neither apology nor explanation nor defiance, but a rambling and confusing mixture of all three. Published as a full-page ad in Billboard, it merely rehashed parts of the scandal for American audiences, while leaving Jerry Lee sounding like anyone but Jerry Lee.


Dear Friends:


I have in recent weeks been the apparent center of a fantastic amount of publicity and of which none has been good.

But there must be a little good even in the worst people, and according to the press releases originating in London, I am the worst and not even deserving of one decent press release.

Now this whole thing started because I tried and did tell the truth. I told the story of my past life, as I thought it had been straightened out and that I would not hurt anybody in being man enough to tell the truth.

I confess that my life has been stormy. I confess further that since I have become a public figure I sincerely wanted to be worthy of the decent admiration of all the people, young and old, that admired or liked what talent (if any) I have. That is, after all, all that I have in a professional way to offer.

If you don’t believe that the accuracy of things can get mixed up when you are in the public’s eye, then I hope you never have to travel this road I’m on.

There were some legal misunderstandings in this matter that inadvertently made me look as though I invented the word indecency. I feel I, if nothing else, should be given credit for the fact I have at least a little common sense and that if I had not thought the legal aspects of this matter were not completely straight, I certainly would not have made a move until they were.

I did not want to hurt Jane Mitcham, nor do I want to hurt my family and children. I went to court and I did not contest Jane’s divorce actions, and she was awarded $750.00 a month for child support and alimony. Jane and I parted from the courtroom as friends and as a matter of fact, chatted before, during, and after the trial with no animosity whatsoever.

In the belief that for once my life was straightened out, I invited my mother and daddy and little sister to make the trip to England. Unfortunately, mother and daddy felt that the trip would be too long and hard for them and didn’t go, but sister did go along with Myra’s little brother and mother.

I hope that if I am washed up as an entertainer it won’t be because of this bad publicity, because I can cry and wish all I want to, but I can’t control the press or the sensationalism that these people will go to to get a scandal started to sell papers. If you don’t believe me, please ask any of the other people that have been victims of the same.


Sincerely,


Jerry Lee Lewis




Then, as if replacing the mask of tragedy with that of comedy, Sam had Jack Clement and Memphis radio personality George Klein piece together a novelty record that used snatches from Jerry Lee’s records to make fun of the whole thing:

KLEIN: “How does it feel to be home?”



Oooohhh, it feels good!




It was called “The Return of Jerry Lee,” and it didn’t work either.

Jerry Lee himself had always put his faith in the music, but the tide was still washing out, and even great performances couldn’t pull it back in. Charlie Rich, a new Sun artist, gave Jerry Lee a rueful raver called “Break Up”; it shot to number 50 on the Hot 100 but then slid quickly down. Its flip side, a mournful ballad called “I’ll Make It All Up to You,” hit the country charts for a blink in time. Then he reached back to Moon Mullican and covered “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone”—by now every song title seemed a self-portrait—but it went nowhere.

To Jerry Lee, it seemed like Sam Phillips had lost confidence in him almost overnight. He had been the artist on whom Sam’s hopes were pinned, he had played and sung his heart out, and for a time he’d been rewarded with Sun’s almost exclusive promotional attention while other artists smoldered. Now, only five hundred days since his first big hit, he was falling fast. Sam was a millionaire by this point, or close to it, and he was taking the money he’d made from Sun and his song publishing business and investing it elsewhere, in radio stations and zinc mines and other ventures. Jerry Lee kept recording singles, and Sun kept pressing them, but precious few radio stations would play them; he wondered whether Sam even sent them out to disc jockeys anymore. Sam would never again risk significant money on his prodigal son.

“People ask me what effect England had on me, and mostly the effect was on Sam Phillips and distribution,” Jerry Lee says now. “He just was not puttin’ my records out there.”

Sam was in a corner. In the eyes of his harshest critics, his boy had committed not one offense but two, simultaneously: bigamy and cradle robbing. Marrying a cousin was also frowned on by most in the wider world, even if it was a third cousin and even if it was culturally commonplace. Phillips could have simply fired him, of course, cut his losses, and moved on. Instead, he kept recording him. Sun had more than a hundred Jerry Lee recordings in the vaults by 1960, and in the years to come he would cut nearly a hundred more. But most of them would linger unreleased for years. Jerry Lee has long suspected there was some ulterior motive behind Sam’s fading interest, fueled perhaps by old loyalties.

“I’m not crazy by a long shot,” he says, but he wonders, sometimes, whether Sam was halfway glad his boy no longer posed a threat to Elvis’s throne. “I think that’s . . . a dead cat on the line, somewhere.”