Off the Charts: Jerry Lee Lewis

The sinner and the preacher

By Newt Briggs

It might have been hard to see the resemblance back in the day, but looking through the telephoto zoom of history, it's easy to see how disgraced singer Jerry Lee Lewis and disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart could be cousins. Besides sharing the middle name Lee--a family name inherited from their uncle, Lee Calhoun--they were born in the same year, grew up on the same Louisiana dirt and developed the same righteous fear of Gawd and his great balls of hellfire. Each also had his career derailed by a sex scandal--Lewis with his 13-year-old cousin, Swaggart with a slew of backwater hookers.

But while Swaggart choked out hallelujahs and cried rivers of baptismal tears to atone for his indiscretions, Lewis was unrepentant. Abandoned by friends and called "baby snatcher" in the international press, he stood up for what he figured was a perfectly normal union between a grown man and his cousin/child bride. Not that Lewis was any kind of hero or anything; he was, as rock historian Greil Marcus has observed, symbolic of "much of the best and much of the worst in American life." Sure, he had his problems--pills, guns, taxes and little girls to name a few--but like the stubborn hero in a Faulkner novel, he refused to kowtow to the expectations of a society that was, at least to his mind, as backward as a treed possum. It was one of many things that would distinguish him from his more accommodating cousin.

HOLY ROLLER: The split between Lewis and Swaggart happened early--right about the time the latter discovered the pie-on-the-windowsill goodness of the Holy Ghost. According to Nick Tosches' seminal Lewis biography, Hellfire, Swaggart built "a log altar in the midst of a clump of trees, and every day he knelt there and prayed for many hours." Swaggart also took to speaking in tongues--a practice he abandoned in 1972 when he decided it would be too bizarre for a mass TV audience. Lewis, on the other hand, never spoke in tongues. He scatted on "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee"; he boogie-woogied on "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"; but he never spoke in tongues.

FALL FROM GRACELAND: Swaggart made a good living for himself, thumping the good book on the revival circuit and liberating the ignorant from their monetary burdens. Lewis, too, dipped his hand into America's collective pocketbook--making, by some accounts, up to $10,000 a night. This all stopped, though, when Lewis revealed his new bride to the British press. He returned to the U.S. in disgrace, and not long after, he was lucky to find a roadside saloon that would pay him $250 to plunk the keys for a night. His slide into infamy hit rock bottom when he was arrested at 3 a.m. outside the gates of Graceland with a .38-caliber pistol. At the time, Elvis was contentedly wrapped in stoned slumber inside the house.

THE PASSION OF THE PREACHER: Swaggart's reckoning would come more than a decade later. At what many considered the peak of his spiritual prowess, he was photographed with a prostitute outside a seedy Louisiana motel. Despite his previous insistence that it was wrong for a woman to wear shorts or engage in oral sex, he had paid the woman to simulate sexual acts in front of him. After being outted, Swaggart blubbered and moaned in front of an international TV audience, but his career quickly fell into decline.

BONNY LEE'S BIBLE: But no one knew how far Swaggart had fallen until Robert Blake's 44-year-old wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, was "mysteriously" murdered outside Vitello's Italian Restaurant in Los Angeles. While investigating Bakley's death, police discovered her address book, which contained listings for Gary Busey, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Larry Flynt and Swaggart. The book did not include the contact information for Lewis, who continues to tour with his fifth wife, Kerrie McCarver.