Goodness gracious! Seven marriages, six kids, and an extremely creepy relationship with his
teenage cousin mark Jerry Lee Lewis' extremely complicated family history.
"The ladies I went with, and I knew great, great ladies, I mean beautiful ladies,
at least I did marry mine."
According to Nick Tosches' Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, Lewis and the woman who would become
his first wife met in the summer of 1951, in his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana. Dorothy Barton
was the daughter of a local Pentecostal minister, Reverend Jewell E. Barton. In February 1952,
after Lewis reportedly turned 16 and Barton was 17, they went to get a marriage license
at the Concordia Parish Courthouse. Lewis lied on the application, claiming to be 21, and
Barton listed her correct age, although he later claimed that he was even younger, telling People,
"I was 14 when I first got married. My wife was too old for me."
To support her, Lewis agreed to follow in the footsteps of her father and become a
preacher. But he never got around to it, preferring instead to play music in bars.
By mid-1953, Barton had left Lewis and filed for divorce. According to Newsweek,
that split hadn't been legally finalized when Lewis remarried later that year. Technically,
the union lasted just 20 months.
Before the end of 1953, Jerry Lee Lewis was ready to get hitched again — or maybe not, because he
claims that he was forced to marry Jane Mitcham by his second wife's family. He told People,
"One day she told me she was going to have my child. [...] Her brothers were hunting
me with whips. I was real worried, so I married her, but never properly."
The early days of the relationship led to Lewis' first child, a boy they named Jerry Lee Lewis Jr.,
and their second child, Ronnie, was born two years later. This marriage would be over in 1957,
but not before forming a short-lived legacy. The younger Lewis took after his father musically,
and while just a teenager he joined his father's band as a drummer.
In November 1973, just days after performing with his father on the live-music TV series Midnight
Special, and less than two weeks after his 19th birthday, Lewis Jr. died in a car accident near
Hernando, Mississippi. He was driving alone in a Jeep near his father's farm on a rural route
when it flipped over, killing him instantly. The death of Junior, closely following the death of
his beloved mother, pushed the elder Lewis into deeper substance abuse. He told People,
"I was drinking heavy. I needed a fifth of tequila just to sober up. It wasn't
the marriages that brought me down. It was just the passing of the caskets."
There remains some mystery as to how and why Lewis' second marriage ended. Lewis claims
the wedding was never legally valid, rendering Mitcham's filing for divorce unnecessary. Still,
what was left of the marriage, legally speaking,
hadn't been completely dissolved by the time Lewis had moved on to wife number three.
Jerry Lee Lewis got married for a third time at age 22,
but when the specifics of that relationship became known to the public, the backlash was
so severe that Lewis' tremendous early career momentum was halted. Lewis exchanged vows in
December 1957 with Myra Gale Brown, daughter of his supporting bassist,
J.W. Brown. She was also Lewis' cousin, and she was 13 years old when they walked down the aisle.
In May 1958, Lewis headed to England for a tour that should have expanded his fame. He brought
his wife of five months with him, and when he landed in London, reporters wanted to talk
about nothing but his bride. He introduced her as his wife, but he unsuccessfully tried to downplay
the scandal by telling the press that Brown was 15, not 13. No longer welcome in England,
Lewis returned home, where the news about his teenage bride had already damaged his celebrity.
"Married my cousin, I was wrong. Blew my career down the drain. Like a billion dollars."
The marriage lasted 13 years and produced two children, Phoebe and Steve. Tragically,
Steve Allen Lewis drowned in the family pool at the age of three. The death was
the first of several that would send Lewis into a self-destructive spiral
in which he self-medicated with alcohol and narcotics.
Myra Gale Brown later alleged that Lewis abused her physically and mentally. In her court filings,
she alleged that her estranged husband had threatened to hire operatives to throw
her into a river and to attack her with acid, according to the Village Voice. Lewis admitted,
"It was all my fault — she caught me cheating."
After that divorce was finalized in 1970, the 36-year-old Lewis got hitched again
the same year, marrying a 28-year-old Memphis woman named Jaren Gunn Pate.
By the time they wed, Pate was already pregnant with Lewis' child. Over the course of the '70s,
Lewis and Pate separated, then got back together, sued each other for divorce, patched things up,
separated once more, and tried for divorce once more. Through all that, according to Vulture,
the pair lived together during their first month of their marriage and never again.
In a 1979 filing, Pate alleged that Lewis had victimized her with adultery,
prolific alcohol and drug use, and cruelty. With the divorce settlement almost legally complete
in the early 1980s, ending a stormy decade of marriage, Pate told a Mississippi court
that when she'd called her soon-to-be-former husband to discuss the financial terms of the
arrangement, he told her it wouldn't be an issue, reportedly telling her,
"You are not going to be around very long anyway."
Pate petitioned the court to force Lewis to pay spousal and child support,
as she was raising their 10-year-old daughter Lori alone, and had to resort to food stamps
to help offset costs. For much of Lori's life, Lewis denied that he was her father.
In June 1982, Pate's body was discovered in the swimming pool at the home of a friend
in Collierville, Tennessee. She was declared dead at 38 years old. According to the UPI,
authorities later ruled that the drowning was accidental.
In 2011, Lewis' daughter Lori Lancaster made headlines for her own reasons. Police
in Germantown, Tennessee, arrested Lancaster on a charge of criminally
negligent homicide following the death of her infant son. According to police,
Lancaster ingested muscle relaxants and accidentally smothered her five-month-old
son in her sleep. Lancaster was released after posting bond.
A year after the death of his fourth wife, Lewis married Shawn Stephens,
whom he had met in 1981 while touring in Dearborn, Michigan.
Stephens married Lewis, moved in, and the relationship took several downward turns.
Reports from people close to the couple recalled incidents of domestic violence
and Lewis growing obsessed with setting up a sexual encounter between him, his wife, and his
wife's sister. Just 78 days after the wedding, Shawn was dead, according to the Village Voice.
When she didn't wake up on the morning of August 24th, 1983, Lewis' household staff investigated
and found her with heavy bruises on her arms and hip, blood in her hair and on her hands,
and all over the room and her clothing. A first responder noted that there were fingernail-type
marks on her husband's hand, which he claimed was from punching a door. An autopsy was conducted,
and her death was attributed to an overdose of methadone. The fifth Mrs. Lewis was 25
years old. According to the Evening Times, she was believed to be pregnant at the time of her death.
"And I think that on Judgment Day it'll all come out, and we'll see what happens.
And we'll find out that Jerry Lee Lewis is not a killer."
In April 1984, Jerry Lee Lewis, then 48 years old, married 21-year-old Kerrie
McCarver. McCarver was a musician too, part of the McCarver Sisters vocal trio with her
siblings Sherrie and Dee-Dee, popular around Memphis at the time. J.D. Davis' biography
Unconquered noted that the wedding came just 10 months after the death of Lewis' fifth wife.
Lewis and McCarver had a son named Jerry Lee Lewis III, and in 2005, not long after his
18th birthday, the couple filed for divorce. A judge approved a financial settlement in
June 2005 in lieu of courtroom proceedings. Outside the courthouse, Lewis told reporters,
"It's been a long day and it's been an expensive day."
While the terms of the divorce were not disclosed, he got to keep his 40-acre
ranch in northern Mississippi, but he had to hit the road on a tour to make good on the
financial obligations resulting from the settlement. Lewis was unattached for the
next seven years, by far the longest bachelor period of his adult life.
At age 76, Jerry Lee Lewis married for the seventh, and final, time. According to WTHR,
Lewis met 62-year-old Judith Brown Coghlan when her ex-husband got her a job as the rock 'n'
roll star's in-home caretaker. Coincidentally, Judith Brown was once married to Rusty Brown,
Lewis' cousin, and the brother of his former teenage bride, Myra Gale Brown.
Lewis and Judith married in a small wedding in Natchez, Mississippi, in March 2012, attended
only by Brown's sister and her husband, and Lewis' sister and her spouse. He told Newsweek,
"To the people that think there's never going to be someone out there for them to love,
just wait until they're in their 60s and 70s. It's better than ever."
Free of much of the public scandal and tension of so many of Lewis' previous marriages,
the couple lasted 10 years, until his death.
But Jerry Lee Lewis' final marriage wasn't completely quiet. According to RadarOnline,
the couple filed a lawsuit against his daughter Phoebe and her husband, Ezekiel Loftin, for libel,
intentional infliction of emotional distress, and other claims after Loftin authored some
Facebook posts about Lewis. In the filings, Lewis and other family members accused
the Loftins of unnecessarily sedating the musician, committing elder abuse,
and stealing millions of dollars from his fortune. Phoebe had managed her father's personal and
professional life from 2000 to 2012, and according to Lewis, she took advantage of the arrangement.
In March 2017, a Tennessee judge dismissed the case, finding that Lewis and Brown
hadn't properly proved that the matter came under the legal jurisdiction of Tennessee,
where they had filed. At the time, Loftin resided in Virginia, Lewis and Brown in Mississippi.