The Price of ‘The Killer’: Myra Lewis Reveals the Emotional Scars of Marrying Jerry Lee Lewis at 13

For decades, the name Jerry Lee Lewis was synonymous with untamed rock and roll rebellion. He was ‘The Killer,’ a man who hammered the piano keys into submission and whose swagger defined an era. Yet, intertwined with his explosive fame is one of the most shocking and career-defining scandals in music history: his 1957 marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gale Brown.

Now, stepping out of the shadow of the legend and the sensational headlines, Myra Lewis shares her personal, in-depth account of the marriage that began in a dizzying whirlwind of idolization and manipulation, descended into public outrage and private abuse, and ultimately forged a woman defined not by her past, but by her resilience. Her story is a raw, emotional counterpoint to the triumphant narrative of a rock-and-roll immortal, laying bare the profound personal cost of marrying the one and only ‘Killer.’

The Idol and the Child

The setting for this unlikely union was Memphis, Tennessee, in the late 1940s and 1950s—the vibrant crucible where white country, rockabilly, and Black gospel, and R&B music violently fused to create rock and roll. Myra had been uprooted from rural Louisiana at age five, moving to the city that would soon become the epicenter of this musical revolution.

It was into this electrifying environment that her cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, arrived. Though only 21, he had already been married twice, a common occurrence in the South where people married and started families young. Myra’s father, realizing his cousin’s raw talent, brought him to Memphis with the hope of forming a band. The world was about to hear Jerry Lee Lewis, but Myra was about to see him up close.

In 1957, as Myra turned 13, Jerry Lee Lewis’s career launched into the stratosphere. His debut performance on The Steve Allen Show, an electrifying display of piano mastery and wild, unrestrained showmanship, instantly elevated him to a national sensation. “I guess seeing him on Steve Allen Show,” Myra recalls, “he rose in my mind, you know, to a higher level.”

For a young girl, her older cousin transformed overnight into a glamorous, unreachable star. And then, the attention began. Jerry would track when school let out, asking if she wanted to go for ice cream or catch a movie after dinner. Myra, in her own words, was completely oblivious to his true intentions. She was simply “idolizing Jerry and looking up to him and thinking he’s this great big star.” She thought he was just “being nice to a kid,” like a patronizing pat on the head. She couldn’t fathom the reality: “What I didn’t know was that he was falling in love with me.”

The Scandalous License and the Gun

The transition from idolization to marriage was not a traditional courtship, but a calculated act of control and manipulation. Jerry Lee Lewis never actually asked Myra to marry him. Instead, he took an older friend to the courthouse, and had the woman illegally sign Myra’s name to the marriage license.

He brought the document home and dramatically pulled it out for her. When a bewildered Myra asked, “You mean we’re married?” Jerry quickly corrected her, promising, “No, no, no, no, no, we’re not married. We’re going to get married.” Then, cornering her, he declared, “Myra, I love you, and I want to marry you.” In that moment of overwhelming emotional pressure from her superstar cousin, the 13-year-old girl simply “melted.” She reciprocated his words of love, sealing a fate that would rock the music world.

The next morning, the secret was violently exposed. Myra, in a moment of childish pride or carelessness, left the marriage license lying on the nightstand. It was found by her mother’s maid, who handed it to her father. The fury that erupted was immediate and terrifying.

“My daddy… got his gun and he said I’m going to go kill that son of a bitch,” Myra recounts. Jerry Lee Lewis was at Sun Records when his life was saved by the quick thinking of his manager, Sam Phillips. Phillips received a frantic call from Myra’s mother and warned Jerry, urging him to flee Memphis immediately. When Myra’s father arrived, gun in hand, Phillips—the man who had staked his career on ‘The Killer’—managed to calm him down. Phillips convinced the enraged father that charging Jerry would accomplish nothing but a long prison sentence, and since the marriage was already “done,” they had no choice but to “hope for the best and learn to live with it.” The father reluctantly backed down, but the fragile peace would not last.

The International Bombshell

The true disaster unfolded on the international stage. In May 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis, riding the peak of his fame, arrived in London for a highly anticipated tour, bringing his new wife, Myra (now 15, but having been married at 13), her brother, and her mother.

Initial receptions at the airport were ecstatic; people were hanging out of hotel windows to catch a glimpse of the celebrity entourage. But everything changed when Myra, walking through the airport, was approached by a man who asked who she was. “I said I’m Jerry’s wife,” she admitted. When he asked her age, she lied and said she was 15, a small falsehood she thought would smooth things over. Instead, the man’s “face lit up like a Christmas tree, and he took off.” Myra, clueless and still a child, had no idea she had just spoken to a reporter.

The follow-up investigation revealed the full, shocking scope of the scandal: Myra was not 15, but 13 at the time of the wedding; she was his cousin; and most explosively, Jerry Lee Lewis was not yet legally divorced from his previous wife—meaning he was a bigamist.

The headlines the next morning were brutal and unforgiving: “Jerry Lewis is here with his child bride,” “He’s a pedophile,” “He’s a bigamist,” “He’s a liar and a fraud.” Calls for a boycott of his shows rang out, and ‘The Killer’ was suddenly playing to heckling crowds and half-empty theaters. The tour was canceled almost immediately, and the family fled back to America, hoping the scandal would “blow over.” It didn’t.

The Long Shadow of Guilt and Abuse

Back in the States, the financial devastation was immediate. Jerry Lee Lewis’s earnings plummeted from thousands of dollars a night to barely a few hundred. The stress, public humiliation, and financial ruin fueled a toxic dynamic in the marriage.

Myra carried a crushing, misplaced burden of guilt. “I felt guilty because of it,” she reveals. “I didn’t make it happen, but I didn’t stop it from happening, and I could have, ‘cause I was the one that let the cat out of the bag.” This internal blame allowed Jerry’s behavior to escalate into emotional and sometimes physical abuse. She describes a constant, draining effort to please him that was always met with failure. “No matter what she did to try to please him, it was never enough. Nothing was ever good enough. It ripped my self-esteem away from me.”

She shares one chilling anecdote where, returning home unexpectedly, he demanded food. When she fixed him a tray, he took a bite of spaghetti sauce and, recognizing it wasn’t her cooking, disdainfully remarked that it “still tastes like your spaghetti.” When Myra explained a neighbor had made it, he picked up the tray and “threw it at me.” This casual, violent outburst became the norm in a marriage shattered by fame’s spectacular demise.

The Altar and the Final Betrayal

In the 1960s, Jerry Lee Lewis found a lifeline. He transitioned from disgraced rock-and-roller to a celebrated figure in the emerging “Outlaw” country music scene. His 1968 hit Another Place Another Time propelled his career back to the top. Yet, this second chance at success was not enough to save his failing marriage.

In 1970, Myra Lewis received an anonymous phone call—the final, shattering blow to her belief in the man she had married. The caller revealed that Jerry had been seeing other women for years, picking them up on the road. The worst realization: he had started cheating on her only 11 months after they first got married.

Devastated, Myra ran to her local church, kneeling at the altar in a state of inconsolable grief. She couldn’t utter a word, but in that silent, broken moment, she found the clarity she needed. “That was the moment of knowing without a doubt that this was not the man I was going to spend my life with. This was not what I bargained for.”

The final confrontation was humiliating. Returning to the house to retrieve some belongings, she found Jerry in their bedroom with another woman. Her response was one of disgusted realization: “Oh yeah, you miss me and you love me and you want me back, right? And this is what you’re doing, laying in my bed with another woman.” The marriage was over.

A Life Transformed

Jerry Lee Lewis went on to be widely celebrated, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first class. He was distinct for surviving his contemporaries and for his “bad behavior,” which became part of his legend. But Myra Lewis took a different path.

The remarkable woman behind the scandal took the emotional wreckage of her childhood marriage and, instead of being permanently scarred, turned her life into something else entirely. She chose to focus on the future, the “blessings and so many good things” that life eventually brought her. “I’m happy with myself right now, I’m happy with what I’ve got,” she concludes, reflecting on the tremendous lessons she learned.

Then, she delivers a truly shocking, profound final thought that encapsulates the complex, irreversible nature of her history with the legend. When asked if she would change anything, the woman who endured scandal, abuse, and heartbreak says, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably do it all over again.” It is a statement not of acceptance of the pain, but perhaps of the unshakeable self-knowledge and resilience she earned by surviving one of rock and roll’s darkest, most sensational chapters.