“Phoebe worked for him and when I visited her I would still see him, too. “Because we have a daughter, Jerry and I remained in contact for many years,” she wrote. In a separate Instagram post from 2015, Williams elaborated on her later relationship with the rocker, sharing a photo of them with their daughter, Phoebe. Movies A Knock on Rock Movies : How ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ the latest failed rock bio, reduces Jerry Lee Lewis to Roger RabbitĪfter 30 years of rock ‘n’ roll movies, is it too much to ask Hollywood to make a biography that reaches for insight rather than nostalgia a film with enough imagination and heart to add to a performer’s artistic legacy rather than belittle it? She described the memoir as her story “of how to overcome life’s worst tragedies and your own dumbass decisions.” Williams again addressed their scandalous relationship in her 2016 memoir, “The Spark That Survived.” While promoting the book, she took to Instagram to air some of the sordid details. “Jerry Lee Lewis may be a lot of things, but he’s not a simple cartoon.” “‘Great Balls of Fire’ is the toon of rock movies, with Jerry Lee Lewis reduced on screen to Roger Rabbit,” Times music critic Robert Hilburn wrote at the time. Instead director Jim McBride, who co-wrote the script with Jack Baran, “ends up simply satirizing the argyle innocence and daffy exuberance of the ’50s,” according to The Times’ review. But it didn’t delve deep enough into exploring Lewis’ indomitable character. The 1989 biopic “Great Balls of Fire,” which starred Dennis Quaid as Lewis and a 17-year-old Winona Ryder as Myra, was based on Williams’ first book of the same name. Lewis upended pop music with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ but his personal life was a chronicle of scandal and controversy. Music Jerry Lee Lewis, original wild man of rock ’n’ roll, dies at 87 (Couples married young in his Louisiana hometown of Ferriday, and he wed for the first time when he was 16 and had seven wives over the course of his life.) The revelation resulted in the abrupt cancellation of Lewis’ tour he was blacklisted by radio and his earnings dropped overnight.

Lewis was 22 and Williams was 13, and the press came down hard on him when it was revealed that she was also his second cousin and that Lewis was still married to his second wife, Jane Mitchum, when they wed. The “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire” hitmaker had eloped with Myra Gale Brown in December 1957, the result of a romance that developed when he moved into the Memphis home of Myra’s father, JW Brown, who was Lewis’ cousin and bass player, according to Lewis’ obituary in The Times.

Today, Myra Williams, 78, reflects on the scandal and her late ex-husband. Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to his 13-year-old cousin in 1957 nearly ended his career. Music Jerry Lee Lewis’ teenage bride speaks out: ‘I was the adult and Jerry was the child’

Lew later age