Myra Lewis Williams was 13 when she married her 22-year-old cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, but she said there was no question which one of them was the grown-up.
“I was the adult in the room. Always,” said Williams, 78, sitting at a picnic table outside her Gwinnett County real estate office. “He didn’t take advantage of me. He surprised me. But I was the more mature person. Jerry was having fun and being a kid and throwing bubble gum around.”
For Williams, the last few weeks have been a tumultuous time. Her father, J.W. Brown, who played a part in Lewis’ rise to fame, died Oct. 10. Then Lewis died Oct. 28.
Journalists from around the world have been calling. And nearly every obituary of the wild man of rock ‘n’ roll mentions the career-crippling scandal of his marriage to the teenage Myra Brown.
Lewis, 87, was eulogized Nov. 5 in his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, at funeral services conducted by his cousin, televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Myra Williams did not attend the funeral. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she spoke to Lewis. Part of her reluctance to maintain contact stemmed from his seventh and last marriage to her older brother’s ex-wife, Judith Brown.
“I just don’t want to be around her,” said Williams.
Myra Brown was Jerry Lee’s third wife. He was still married to wife number two, Sally Jane Mitcham, when he and Myra tied the knot.
Jerry Lee was living at Myra’s house at the time.
This is how it happened. “My daddy was a lineman with Memphis Light, Gas and Water,” she recounted. “He was on a 90-foot pole when a wire broke and hit him; it set his shirt on fire, the electricity knocked him out and set the grass on fire.”
After a year of rehab, the power company offered him his old job back climbing poles, and he turned that offer down. “He said ‘I think I’ll go to Louisiana and try to find my cousin Jerry.’ He said he hadn’t seen Jerry Lee since he was snotty-nosed and had on a diaper.”
Lewis had developed a following playing music in Ferriday, and was playing at the Blue Cat Club in the Under-the-Hill section of Natchez, just across the river, when Myra’s dad tracked him down. J.W., a musician himself, wanted to recruit Jerry Lee for a trip to Sun Studios in Memphis.
But Lewis was reluctant. “Nah, I’ve been there, that ain’t going to work,” he said, according to Williams. The next day Lewis reconsidered, she said, and followed J.W. to Memphis.
According to Williams, Sam Phillips, the noted Sun Records producer, told her father that he couldn’t risk cash on “drifters” who came by to audition and then disappeared.
“Dad said ‘he’s staying at my house, I’m driving the car. I assure you he’s going to be here when I say he’s going to be here.’”
Lewis impressed Phillips, and played session piano for a variety of Sun artists, including Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. He then achieved enormous success with his own Sun recordings, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire.” Lewis’ talent was unmistakable, but, said Williams, “If it were not for my daddy, you wouldn’t have a clue who Jerry Lee Lewis was.”
Williams said her first impressions of Lewis weren’t that favorable. “Well, he was wearing a red plaid shirt, he had a real bad haircut and his ears stuck out. It wasn’t like wow, look at this good-looking guy. He grew into looking good.”
While he was living in her house, he was polite and cordial, but that’s all, said Williams. “Jerry treated me like a little friendly teenager that he was being nice to. ‘Hey, you want to go to Dairy Queen and get a root beer float?’ It didn’t look like there was any designs on me from Jerry.”
Then one day he invited her out to the car, opened the glove compartment and showed her a marriage license with her name on it, alongside his. (He had used a stand-in to draft the license.) “I was bumfuzzled by it,” Williams says now. “I was 13 years old and he was a man. I was a teenager. I liked attention.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
In the next day or so, he said he was taking her to see a movie, but drove to Mississippi instead, telling her they were getting married. “Oh my God! I was one of the few people, maybe the only person in the world, that had a surprise wedding.”
Lewis avoided a pistol-packing J.W. Brown, who swore he would kill the piano player, until Sam Phillips talked J.W. down.
Then came Lewis’ ill-fated tour of England. Nobody told Williams not to reveal to the British press that she was married to Jerry Lee Lewis, so she did. “Nobody talked to me and told me how explosive this thing could be.”
Lewis’ rock ‘n’ roll career tumbled, but he came back later with hit country records, and continued to perform in the U.S. and abroad. In 1986 he was in the first class of inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
They had two children. Their son, Steve Allen Lewis, drowned in a swimming pool accident when he was three; their daughter, Phoebe, lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Myra Williams divorced Lewis after 13 years of marriage, claiming physical and emotional abuse. She has said that his drug use led to many of their problems.
But up until that time he was simply immature. “When we got married, Jerry was on tour and I bought our house. When he wanted a new car I bought the car, a red Cadillac convertible. When it was time to take the money to the bank, I’d bring in a big satchel with $100,000 in it.”
Asked how a girl who doesn’t have a driver’s license can buy a car, she said “If you pay for it in cash you can, easy.”
The biopic “Great Balls of Fire!” starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder was released in 1989, based on a book co-written by Williams. She hated it. “Hollywood gets everything wrong,” she said.
By then she had moved to Atlanta, become a real estate agent and married real estate broker Richard Williams. “I was captivated by her beauty,” said the basketball-playing Williams, strolling out to the picnic table behind their offices.
The two make an unusual couple: Richard, 84, is silver-haired and 6 feet tall; Myra, is a petite 5 feet tall (“5-foot and a half-inch” she insists). She applied for work at his real estate firm in the 1980s, and they have been married 39 years.
Now retired, they live in Duluth and “putter around” the office every now and then.
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