In a crowded basement meeting room at the posh Omni-Memphis Hotel, 20-some journalists are attempting, with difficulty, to grill the subject of the forthcoming film ”Great Balls Of Fire.”
The discussion, which never quite seems to interconnect, has degenerated to a foreign-sounding reporter`s question about whether the film`s subject, Jerry Lee Lewis-rock music`s archetypal bad boy-ever motorbiked naked with Elvis Presley, his fellow Memphian and ultra-rival.
”Motorbikes?” Lewis says archly, dismissively. ”Nekkid? Me and Elvis Presley?” His eyes suddenly narrow. ”How`d you know that?”
”It`s in Joe Smith`s book,” says a reporter.
”You can`t believe nothin` . . .,” Lewis mutters, his voice trailing off. ”Well, that was at 3 o`clock in the morning,” he suddenly adds, prompting explosive laughter from the journalists.
”It really was,” he goes on with a grin. ”There was nobody out then-except this one policeman on a horse, and he was doing his dead-level best to catch us. Now, that was a sight. If anybody woulda saw that, we never woulda sold no more records. That woulda been the end of that.” Pause, his eyes narrowing again. ”How`d you know that?”
”It`s in Joe Smith`s book,” the reporter repeats.
”Who`s Joe Smith?”
”The head of Capitol Records. Used to be head of Elektra Records.”
”Well, that`s ridiculous. That`s not right. Do you believe that?”
”You just told us it happened at 3 o`clock in the morning,” the reporter notes.
”I can`t believe people will believe anything you say.”
”Well, is it true?” another reporter asks.
”Yes. It`s true.”
Welcome, folks, to talking with The Killer, a 54-year-old rock king dethroned before his time-in fact, before his prime-by the 1958 disclosure of a mad marriage to his 13-year-old second cousin.
The scandal caused Lewis, a Bible-college dropout, to fall from rock `n`
roll grace into comparative oblivion-made all the more bruising by the fact that he was arguably the most intense performer, and most brilliant self-taught pianist, to ever rattle music stages around the world.
Today, he`s-sort of-helping hype a big-bucks Dennis Quaid production purporting to portray his 1956-58 rise and fall, based on a book written by the aforementioned cousin and, now, ex-wife (one of several). Truth, as a Nashville performer once put it long ago, can be stranger than publicity.
This is, after all, the supreme egotist, who set a piano afire onstage to upstage a show-closing rival (one of the reasons he earned his nickname). This is the tough guy who routinely threatens people`s lives, is rumored to have shot a band member-and whose role in the death of one of his young wives has been publicly questioned.
The tragic father who has suffered the death of two of his children; the legendary abuser of alcohol and drugs whose health nowadays always seems to be precarious, and the fundamentalist sinner whose lifelong resistance to The Way preached by his double-first-cousin, the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, has seemed to haunt his mind.
And this man is standing for morning-long, round-robin press conferences, shooed by Orion Pictures publicists from meeting room to meeting room to face five different packs of reporters, roughly 20 per, to ballyhoo the movie.
Most of the press at the sessions-more than 100 print representatives brought to the Omni not only from the four corners of America but also from as far away as the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand-seem not to realize that this is a man who rarely grants interviews, and that when he does, he is almost always menacing; even at his friendliest, his incessant substitution of outrageous quips for serious introspection makes truth a constant casualty.
Clutching an incongruously contemplative-looking pipe, he throws out dozens of quips this morning. A sample:
– ”I was a virgin the first time I got married. So was my wife. But it`s kinda been downhill ever since.”
– ”I like Al Jolson, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Jerry Lee Lewis. The rest of `em are imitators.”
– ”I miss Elvis. I don`t think he had as much talent as I did, but he may have been better-looking.”
– ”I ain`t gonna marry any more cousins.”
The evening before, at a Memphis theater next door to the hotel, the journalists were treated to a sneak preview of the film, scheduled to open in Chicago Friday. When the showing concluded, there was a marked lack of applause.
Oh, the thing is entertaining enough, at least the first half or two-thirds. Dennis Quaid plays-or maybe over-plays-this man who left rock history the classics ”Whole Lotta Shakin”` and ”Great Balls Of Fire”; 17- year-old Winona Ryder is ingenuously powerful as his 13-year-old cousin-wife, Myra Brown; John Doe of the Los Angeles rock band X is competent as Myra`s father, J.W. Brown; Alec Baldwin is bland as the recently notorious Swaggart; and the late Trey Wilson is pretty awful as Memphis music mogul Sam Phillips.
But the central problem is that the first two-thirds or so is comedy.
(The Killer`s life a comedy?) Then-after Lewis flees London, where the British press front-paged the essential details of his marriage to his cousin for the first time-it suddenly turns dark and serious, with Quaid swaggering out of a Swaggart sermon proclaiming that if he is going to Hell (as the movie Swaggart predicts), he`s going playing the piano.
It`s as if Jim McBride, director of ”The Big Easy” among other films, couldn`t decide what sort of movie to make. As he, Quaid and other principals one by one make the same meeting room-to-meeting room round-robin, McBride says as much himself.
”I don`t think I knew what we were doing,” he disarmingly tells one group of reporters, adding his aim was to get the spirit of the truth rather than the truth itself.
”With Dennis (Quaid, who also starred in `The Big Easy`), he and I talk before the movie starts, and there`s a lot of changing and adjusting. We don`t like to rehearse, but there`s a gestational period. Then he really comes up with the stuff, and I react to it.”
Quaid, who says this role paid him $2 million, makes a seemingly valid point about the funny, blithe-spirited and utterly unsubtle Lewis he plays:
that the 1957-58 Lewis was, after all, a 20- and 21-year-old.
”We covered this 18-month period that was, from his own explanation and those of the people who were around him then, the happiest time of his life,” the 35-year-old actor says. ”He was a kid from Louisiana getting to do what he loved to do best and getting paid really well for it.
”It wasn`t `til his career went like that (pointing down), when they found out about the marriage, that he really started sinking into alcohol and drugs and things like that. Before that, he was kind of a milk-drinking, teetotaling kid, his religious background being like it was.”
The present-day, recently bankrupt Lewis-whose only part in the production is a sometimes-awesome re-recording of his hits-often seems to be damning the movie with faint praise, as well as sometimes calling into question his own motives for participating in its publicity.
”I`m living, I`m breathing, they`re doing a movie on my life here, and I think it`s a great honor,” he says at one point. ”Whether it`s been done right or wrong is debatable-I don`t know . . . but I think they`ve given it a good shot . . . I just hope they pay me.”
He goes on to add such things as ”I`m pretty well pleased” but ”I would have liked for it to have been exactly like my life was.” Quaid, he tells the press people, ”done a good job of the acting,” but ”that Winona did a fantastic job-I think Myra must`ve coached her.” He repeatedly denies ever saying that if he was going to Hell, he`d go playing the piano.
But, although as ambivalent as ever in his talk, he seems comparatively subdued, almost (dare we hope?) mellowed. His young sixth wife, Kerrie , holding their 2 1/2-year-old son, Lee, graces the hall outside the meeting rooms, and their presence seems to pacify the old man.
An Orion publicist barks ”Drop that line of questioning!” when one journalist asks Lewis, ”Jerry, are you broke?,” but Lewis amiably replies,
”Yeah, I am broke”-and then makes one of his inscrutable additions: ”At least, I hope I am.”
As usual, he continues to sometimes interject the fundamentalist religious beliefs that rarely seem far below the surface of his consciousness. ”But we all got to stand before God someday,” he says at one point;
”that`s all I`m worried about.” He describes himself as ”Christian-minded” but not yet ”Christian,” although ”I`m working on it.”
The colorful arrogance remains. When someone asks who will close the show when he does a scheduled tour with fellow rock pioneer Chuck Berry later this year, he shakes his head in disgust. ”I think anybody on a show is foolish if they don`t let Jerry Lee Lewis close it,” he replies.
Later in the afternoon, in a suite 27 floors above the meeting rooms, Lewis one-on-one is even more surprisingly friendly and cooperative than he has been downstairs. He seems relieved to have just one interrogator at a time.
Drinking a cup of coffee laced with four sugar cubes, he begins talking about how he came to participate in this cinematic biography based on an ex-wife`s book, which he persistently describes as ”bull—-.”
”They`ve been messing around with this thing for 15 years, and it`s never come about,” he says. ”We never could get together on the script-mostly, on who was going to act the part out. We went with so many
different actors, from Richard Gere to this one to that one and finally got Dennis Quaid.
I wanted to see it done before I died or everybody else died, so I went along with their situation. I finally just got to a point where I said, `Fine, do it.`
”I`d like to have done it years ago, and I`d like to have done it the way I`d like to have done it. But I don`t guess we get what we want, do we?” Had he gotten to do it the way he wanted, how would it have differed?
”I probably would`ve messed it up big-time,” he says, with a laugh. Then he sobers. ”But I would like to have done it about, like, my mother, my father, my son who got killed when he was 19 years old, certain people they didn`t even mention in the movie.
”But it`s probably for the best. I think they`re very smart people and know what they`re doing.”
One of the things repeatedly referred to in the sessions downstairs was that, when he was given the movie`s script, he sent it back with ”lies, lies, lies” written on virtually every page. Just as down there, he again and again disputes the movie`s facts.
Asked if he holds it against Myra, now a remarried Atlanta real-estate executive, that she blurted out their marital status to a British reporter on arrival in the London airport in 1958 (as the movie portrays it), he claims that Myra ”didn`t do that.”
He goes on to indicate he himself ”made that statement” out of a desire to make headlines.
”It was MY deal,” he says. ”I looked FORWARD to that. I knew what was gonna happen when I made that announcement. I said, `This is gonna be a real trip,` and it was exactly like I called it. I swear to God this is the truth: I knew EXACTLY . . . . Ask Sam Phillips. They BEGGED me not to do that. I said, `Oh, man, I gotta do THIS. This has got to be GREAT.`
”I was married to Myra for a year or so before I ever went to England. Here in the States, nobody ever wrote a word about it, and she traveled with me to all my shows everywhere. The reporters just backed off and looked-and they KNEW it.
”But Sam Phillips and Jud Phillips (Sam`s brother) said, `Don`t take her to England, `cause THEY won`t accept it.` I said, `Well, I think I should.` ” He suddenly laughs, obviously proud to have been the agent of his own destruction. Nobody, he seems to say, could have killed The Killer but The Killer.
”But NOW,” he adds, still laughing as if at the world`s funniest joke,
”I think I know what they were talking about. I think I underestimated just a little. THEY (the English) really come unglued.”
