Jerry Lee Lewis’ former teen bride reflects on the star’s death, their shocking marriage: ‘I was the adult’

Myra Lewis Williams, the former teenage bride of Jerry Lee Lewis, is mourning the loss of the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer.

The last survivor of a generation that included fellow performers Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, died Friday morning at age 87. The rebellious Louisiana-born piano player known as “The Killer” made his mark with hits such as “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”

“It’s a sad time for the music business and the world,” the 78-year-old told Fox News Digital. “They’ve lost a great entertainer, a very talented man.”

Lewis and Williams, his second cousin, married in 1957 when he was 22, and she was 13. Their story was previously chronicled in the 1989 film “Great Balls of Fire” starring Dennis Quaid as the performer and Winona Ryder as the former Myra Gale Brown. Williams has also written two books about her life, including 2016’s “The Sparked That Survived.”

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“He had gone to Louisiana and came back,” she recalled. “He called me out to his car and showed me something. It was a marriage license. He had taken a friend of his to the courthouse. She posed as me and signed the marriage license application. And he brought his marriage license home to me for us to get married. I looked at him and I said, ‘Jerry, are you crazy? My daddy will kill you.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, he won’t. Your daddy likes me and your mama likes me.’ I just kept telling him, ‘They will kill you.'”

“The next day, he said, ‘You wanna go to a movie or something?'” Williams shared. “I said, ‘OK, sure.’ So we got in the car and he drove straight to the preacher that married us. I guess he had it all set up. I was like a deer caught in headlights. You just stare and wonder, ‘Oh my God, where am I? What’s going on? How is this happening?'”

“And that’s how we got married,” she chuckled.

However, as Williams predicted, her parents were not thrilled by the union. She described how Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records, urged Lewis to “get out of town” quickly.

“He told him my parents found [his] marriage license,” she said. “And that daddy was looking for him with his trusty little pistol. Sam got Jerry to the airport and put him on a plane. I’m not sure Jerry even remembered where he went, but he was just put on the first plane leaving because daddy was furious. I mean, he was ready to kill. I don’t think he would’ve done it by any means, but he was really angry.”

Williams said her father marched down to Sun Records ready to confront Lewis. However, Phillips managed to calm the furious patriarch down.

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“He said, ‘Now look, we can’t see the future,'” she said. “‘We don’t know, maybe this couple loves each other. They’ll be happy and things will be fine. But it’s done and we might as well just live with it.’ Daddy backed down and said, ‘Well, let’s see what happens then.’ He couldn’t change it. There was no getting around it. There was never a big argument about it… it was just a resolve. That’s the way it was. And nothing was going to change it.”

Lewis was poised to replace Presley as rock’s prime hit-maker after the “Jailhouse Rock” singer was drafted into the Army. However, while Lewis toured in England, the press not only learned of the controversial marriage to Williams, but that the star was still married to his previous wife.

“We got married in December and we went to England in May,” said Williams. “… The tour in London was booked. We were going to visit a bunch of places in Europe. They told Jerry not to take me… Had I known, I could have pretended to be sick, do anything except go. When we arrived, the reporters were there as everyone got off the plane. Jerry and everybody else was being interviewed and I just stood in the lobby where they were going to play. A reporter came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me miss, didn’t I see you get off that plane? Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m not anybody.’ But he insisted. ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m Jerry’s wife.’ I may as well drop the bomb in the middle of London Town.”

The backlash was swift. Lewis’ tour was canceled. He was blacklisted from the radio. His earnings dropped overnight to virtually nothing.

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“I let the cat out of the bag,” said Williams. “But I didn’t know. I had no instructions… I tried to ignore the reporter, but he kept insisting. He knew I was with them. And when I said what I said, it was like his hair caught on fire. He just took off. He got the scoop and I let the cat out of the bag. That’s how the career took a gigantic nose dive when we arrived in London. I dropped the bomb. They took it and ran.”

Williams said it was “ridiculous” to be referred to as a “child bride” because she “did not feel like one.”

“I was the adult in the room and Jerry was the silly child,” she said. “I was more of the adult than Jerry was. He was still playing with squirt bottles with his friends. I dealt with [the controversy] a lot better than anybody else did… I had not thought like a child in a long time. I was happy to think I would have a home and a husband and children. That’s what I yearned for more than anything else. I went out and found us a house. I took the money to the bank after he came home from his shows.”

The couple welcomed two children, a son named Steve Allen Lewis in 1959 and a daughter named Phoebe Lewis in 1963. The marriage eventually came to an end in 1970, when Williams divorced Lewis. She filed on the grounds of adultery and abuse. The exes remained cordial over the years because of the bond they shared with their daughter. Their son passed away in 1962 at age 3 from drowning in a swimming pool.

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Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer. He convinced disc jockeys to give him a second chance, and the music industry eventually forgave him. He won three Grammys and recorded with some of the industry’s greatest stars.

In his lifetime, Lewis married seven times. Williams briefly remarried to Pete Malito from 1970 to 1972. She said “I do” once more to Richard Williams in 1984, and they have been together ever since. The couple owns a real estate company in Atlanta.

“I’ve had a different life here,” she said. “And most of the time, people have no idea who I was!”

There were plenty of ups and downs in her marriage to Lewis. However, Williams said she wants to look back at the happier times they had.

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“We were driving from Memphis to Louisiana and Phoebe was about three or four years old,” she remembered. “I was reading this book about this baby duck who got lost from its mother. And he was going everywhere going, ‘Are you my mother?’ This poor little duck was just desperate. I stopped in the middle of my reading to sip my Coca-Cola because I was so thirsty. All you could hear was Jerry going, ‘Well?! What happened to the duck?’ He was driving and listening to the story too. That memory will never not be funny to me.”

Would Williams do it all over again if she could? She said it is complicated.

“That’s the toughest question to answer because it would change everybody’s life – mine, his, our children,” she said. “It’s the path not taken…. I don’t know. I guess if I had to do it all over again, I’d have to do some things differently. I just don’t know which ones they’d be.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.