Americans Abroad

From the moment he arrived in London for his six-week rock-'n'-roll tour of Britain, Tennessee's flaxen-haired Jerry Lee Lewis, 22, made himself at home in the headlines. The tiny, pony-tailed Mississippi schoolgirl he had brought with him, he proudly announced, was none other than his third wife, Myra. Her age: 15. When reporters gaped, Lewis, resplendent in blue velvet trousers, casually drawled: "I can assure you that my wife is all woman, even though she looks kinda young."

With some distaste, London journalists did their best to explain to their readers the strange marital customs of the U. S. South. But it soon turned out that Mrs. Lewis was even kinda younger than her husband saw fit to say. Memphis court records showed her age to be 13, and her quickie marriage last December took place more than five months before Jerry's divorce from wife No. 2.

Hide Whips. Jerry, now resplendent in a redlined black suit trimmed with ocelot, had an explanation for that too: "I guess you could call the mix-up a technical hitch." He was not really a bigamist, he added, because his second marriage, not his third, was illegal. It was this way: "I was 14 when I first got married. My wife was too old for me; she was 17. Then I met Jane. One day she said she was going to have my child. Her brothers were hunting me with hide whips. I was real worried. So I married her, just one week before my divorce from my first wife. It was a shotgun wedding without shotguns. I never married Jane properly, and though she divorced me, she didn't need to. She was never my wife."

The explanation seemed perfectly satisfactory to Myra. "I love married life," she said, adding that though Jerry had been too busy to buy her a wedding ring, he did get her a red Cadillac. And her father, who played bull fiddle in Jerry Lee's band, didn't seem to object either. But the London press, already fed up with the antics of Britain's own rock-'n'-roll stars, was all shook up now. The Daily Mail angrily demanded that Jerry be sent back "whence he came, somewhere in the mid-belt of America's deep delinquent South." "He could and should." stormed the Sunday People, "be arrested by the police," reminding the Home Office that cohabiting with 13-year-old girls is against British law.

Catcalls & Combs. Even rock-'n'-roll fans, whose tolerance of their idols had previously seemed inexhaustible, had had enough. At his first appearance, they booed and catcalled for 20 minutes, while Lewis nervously ran a comb through his long hair. "Go home, baby snatcher!" they screamed. "Go wheel your wife in a pram!" After one more such appearance, Jerry's managers decided to call the tour off. "I did want to stay here long enough to get a wedding ring," whimpered Myra at the airport. Fumed Jerry: "I don't feel guilty about nuttin!"

Hurriedly, the J. Arthur Rank organization booked 16-year-old Rock-'n'-Roller Terry Wayne in his place. Terry's launching slogan: "He's good! He's clean! He's wholesome!"

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