Jerry Lee Lewis lived out rock & roll’s audacity in extreme ways, making him one of the defining performers of his era. Offstage, he did terrible things, over and over. Mikal Gilmore on the legacy and the misdeeds of the Killer.
, “I had to go to a psychiatrist because I thought ‘I’ve got to have lost it. You can’t go through a life like that and come out and be OK. I must be insane.’ But none of the psychiatrists would tell me I was crazy. They would say, ‘You’re fine. You’re fine.’ But I neverfine.… You see, Myra did not survive that marriage. That little girl I used to be, she died. She just dispersed into whatever.” For years, their daughter worked for Jerry Lee.
It was an inspired call. Iago is one of most formidable and daunting characters in all theater, a mystery, and he is a void: Life has wronged him and he wants to wrong others. Lewis would voice Iago’s lines seated at the piano, he’d mix blues cadence with Shakespeare’s doleful lyricism. Lewis accepted the offer. He went to Los Angeles, where the musicalJerry Lee loved playing Iago. He respected his malice.
Along with sporadically brilliant music, death, violence, and illness — some of it directly his doing — became leitmotifs of Jerry Lee Lewis’ life. His son Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., from an earlier marriage, wanted to drum in his father’s band and to live like his father, but he didn’t have the mental constitution for the drug use. Jerry Lee would try to stop him, but they would get into fights. He died on Nov. 13, 1973.
The day before that drive down Elvis Presley Boulevard, Lewis had rolled his Rolls-Royce with his fourth wife, Jaren Pate, in the car. Neither was badly hurt in the accident, but Lewis got charged with drunk and reckless driving. The Rolls was totaled, so he went out and bought a new white Lincoln Continental.
Presley was watching it all on closed-circuit television upstairs. He told his guards to call the police. The police arrived, found the gun. By then Lewis was yelling, threatening the police. The officers asked Presley what he wanted them to do. “Lock him up,” said Elvis.When Lewis didn’t show for his hearing the next day, a Memphis judge ordered him arrested again, but changed his mind when he learned the piano player was in the hospital with a peptic ulcer.
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