Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches

Author:Nick Tosches
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780802135667
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1982-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

Three

His marriage to Jane was irreparable. Execration and fury, which had held them together like love, were now spent. Nothing remained, and they shared their little red house like narrow rays of cold winter light, intersecting occasionally, briefly, in harshness.

At the end of August, a secret informer told Jerry Lee that earlier in the summer, on July 17, while Jerry Lee had been playing in Youngstown, Ohio, Jane had lain beneath another man. Jerry Lee confronted Jane with this information. She took their child and left town, went to her older sister in Natchez.

On September 4 Jerry Lee filed a divorce petition in Circuit Court. The petition accused Jane of adultery, of frequenting bars, of cursing in public, and of using their home as a rendezvous for acts of immorality and wild drunken parties.

Jane returned to Memphis with two Natchez attorneys, Carl Chadwick and William Riley. Retaining a third lawyer, Caruthers Ewing of Memphis, Jane filed in Circuit Court on September 20 an answer and cross-bill to Jerry Lee's petition for divorce. She denied that she had committed adultery and claimed to have spent the night in question at home with her child, her thirteen-year-old sister, who was married but separated from her husband, and her fifteen-year-old girl cousin. She also denied that she drank excessively or cursed in public. Asking that she be granted a divorce on grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment, abandonment, and nonsupport, her cross bill accused Jerry Lee of deserting her twice, leaving her on one occasion with nothing but "eighty-two cents and six cans of milk to take care of self and child." The bill further claimed that Jerry Lee had a friend "who will go on the witness stand and testify that he is the father of the child (Ronnie Guy)," and that this was a part of Jerry Lee's "nefarious and illegal scheme to vilify this defendant and get out of his legal and moral obligation to support her and his children."

On the weekend after Jane filed her cross-bill, Jerry Lee appeared at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem for a brief set consisting of "Crazy Arms," "Mean Woman Blues," "Great Balls of Fire," and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." This was the first time that he played for a predominantly black audience, and he was pleased, in an odd sort of way, to find that colored girls screamed for him almost as much as the white girls he had encountered in recent months. "There's a lot of animal vigor in the Jerry Lee Lewis Trio, an ofay rock 'n' roll team featuring the piano mining and piping of Lewis," wrote a Variety reviewer who was at the Apollo that night. The reviewer went on to praise Jerry Lee's musical talent, but said that, "He would be wise to cut out some of his antics, for example, that of combing his hair after a frenetic number, and blowing his comb free in the direction of the audience. He could be the hillbilly he boasts that he is with good manners, too.

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