May 22, 1958: Jerry Lee Lewis's Marriage Is Exposed

No, that guy is not a young Ted Nugent.

But the confusion is understandable.

May 22, 1958: Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the biggest stars of early rock and roll music, arrives in Great Britain for a tour. It was expected to be a big success for him. Instead, it leads to a scandal that derails his career.

Like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins, he had come out of Sun Records in Memphis. Those men played guitar. Lewis played piano as if he was trying to not just outdo Fats Domino, but be even wilder than Little Richard. He pounded the keys like a madman, his curly blond hair flapping, and would sometimes put his foot on the keys and step on them. He liked to kick the piano bench away.

It was said of Elvis that rock and roll got big when it got a singer who looked like the music sounded. With Jerry Lee, a.k.a. "The Killer," it was even more so.

In late 1957, he burst onto the scene with "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," and the song sounds like what the title suggests. It hit Number 3. In early 1958, he hit Number 2 with "Great Balls of Fire," written by Otis Blackwell, who had also written Elvis' hits "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up." As he was flying to Britain, he was again in the U.S. Top 10 with another Blackwell-penned song, "Breathless."

But his personal life had already been wilder than the music. Born in 1935, in the same week as the much more sedate singers Johnny Mathis and Julie Andrews, he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London at age 22, and already having been married and divorced twice, and with his 3rd wife, Myra Gale Lewis.

It was Paul Tanfield of the Daily Mail who unwittingly broke the scandal when he inquired as to the identity of the young woman he'd seen with Jerry Lee. She said, "I'm Myra, Jerry's wife." Tanfield followed up with a question for the Killer himself: "And how old is Myra?" The answer Jerry Lee gave was a lie, even though it would have been bad enough if it were true: "Fifteen."

Myra was actually only 13 years old, a fact that would soon come out, along with certain other details, such as the fact that she was Jerry Lee's first cousin once removed: She was the daughter of J.W. Brown, his first cousin and bass guitarist. Also soon revealed was that the pair had married 5 months before his divorce from his 2nd wife was made official.

Jerry Lee tried to set minds at ease on this last point. The 2nd marriage was null and void, he explained. But the reason did him no favors: It had taken place before his divorce from his 1st wife was official.

As the press hounded Jerry Lee and Myra over the coming week, the Killer tried to go on with business as usual. But his 1st 3 shows drew meager audiences, and those that did buy tickets showered him with boos and catcalls. When the Rank chain of theaters cancelled the rest of his dates, and his fashionable Mayfair hotel encouraged him to seek lodgings elsewhere, Jerry Lee Lewis left Britain, less than a week after his dramatic arrival. Back home, he would face a blacklisting from which his career would never fully recover.

By 1961, he was again a hitmakers on the country charts, and occasionally still had a pop hit. But he went back and forth between being a great country performer, like another of his cousins, Mickey Gilley; and a fire-and-brimstone preacher type denouncing improper behavior, including his own, like another of his cousins, the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.

Somehow, he and Myra stayed married until 1970, having 2 children together (one of whom tragically drowned at age 3), before she divorced him over his abuses of her, booze and pills. Jerry Lee married a 4th time, and a 5th. That 5th marriage, to Shawn Stephens, lasted 77 days, from June to August 1983, ending with her death from an overdose of methadone. Journalist Richard Ben Cramer alleged that Lewis abused and may have killed her, neither of which was proven. Jerry Lee was not charged, and married a 6th time, to Karrie McCarver, the longest-lasting of his marriages, from 1984 to 2006. He had 6 children.

A 7th marriage, in 2012, to Judith Brown, is ongoing. As of May 22, 2022, Jerry Lee Lewis is the last survivor of the charter inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. It doesn't seem possible, given everything he did to harm himself. (UPDATE: He died on October 28, 2022, shortly after his 87th birthday.)

Myra wrote a memoir that was adapted into the 1989 film Great Balls of Fire! She was played by Winona Ryder, then 17; and Jerry Lee by Dennis Quaid, 34, literally twice Winona's age. As crazy as Quaid maid Jerry Lee seem, it still wasn't as creepy as the real 22-year-old Jerry Lee and the 13-year-old Myra. She didn't like what was done to her story, and wrote another memoir in 2016, titled The Spark That Survived.

Now calling herself Myra Lewis Williams, the 3rd Mrs. Jerry Lee became a real estate agent, married and divorced the private detective she had hired to spy on Jerry Lee, and has been married (for the 3rd time) to Richard Williams since 1984.

Jerry Lee being a bigamist with a child bride would be parodied in the 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, except it would be reversed: First came the marriage to the 13-year-old, when Dewey was 14 (Jerry Lee was 16 when he first got married), and then came the 2nd, at-first-illegal, marriage to his duet partner.

That parodied June Carter and Johnny Cash, as seen in the 2005 film Walk the Line. Waylon Payne played Jerry Lee in that movie, and, if anything, was scarier than Quaid.

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May 22, 1958 was a Thursday. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) in Detroit. Marv Throneberry, then the Yankees' top prospect, but later to become a symbol of the ineptitude of the early New York Mets, won the game with a home run in the top of the 9th inning. Mickey Mantle went 1-for-3 with a walk. Al Kaline went 2-for-4.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-4 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Ernie Banks went 3-for-4 with a home run and 4 RBIs.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Washington Senators, 3-1 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Baltimore Orioles, 5-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-3 with a walk.

* The Milwaukee Braves beat the San Francisco Giants, 9-3 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Hank Aaron went 1-for-2 with a walk and 2 RBIs. Willie Mays went 1-for-4.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Kansas City Athletics, 8-5 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. Ted Williams went 1-for-3, his hit a grand slam.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals got rained out at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The game was made up on June 23. The Cardinals won, 7-5. Stan Musial went 2-for-5. Roberto Clemente went 2-for-4 with an RBI.

* And the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds were rained out at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader on June 24. The Dodgers swept, 13-10 and 7-2. There was a lot of Dodger history in the opener: Don Drysdale started, Sandy Koufax blew a save but ended up as the winning pitcher, and former Dodger ace Don Newcombe was the losing pitcher, allowing home runs to Gil Hodges and Joe Pignatano in the top of the 10th inning. Frank Robinson appeared as a pinch-hitter, and did not reach base.

In the nightcap, Hodges hit another homer, and so did Duke Snider. Frank Robinson went 0-for-5. Reds starter Bob Purkey pitched 10 innings, but ran out of gas in the 11th, and he and Brooks Lawrence got pounded for 5 runs. Stan Williams was the winning pitcher, and Koufax, hardly yet the pitcher he would become, got the save. Over the 2 games, Snider went 6-for-9 with 6 RBIs, and Hodges went 5-for-10 with 5 RBIs.