Lovesick Blues Page 14
He learned early on just how big a star he had become. Most of the other performers had barely heard of Hank Williams, but soon they and even the California-based dancers were crowding the stages to follow his performances. The Caravan was working in Hank’s backyard, from Cajun country to the border states like Kentucky and Missouri, and he was met with tumultuous welcomes at every stop. The truly big names like Hope and Berle had signed on for occasional appearances, and both of those ran afoul of Hank’s drawing power. Berle, for example, had tactlessly whipped out a bandanna and begun faking a crying jag for all to see while Haymes sang “Old Man River”; the crowd loved it, but not one of the Cowboys did—they confronted Berle and threatened to break a guitar over his head if he did that when Hank was singing one of his sad songs of unrequited love. What happened to Hope when he was scheduled to follow Hank in Louisville soon topped the list of Hank Stories. Hank had reluctantly agreed to allow Hope top billing that night—after all, this was Bob Hope—but he was going to make him pay. He performed the whole package, from “Lovesick” to “Cold, Cold Heart,” and he took so many encores that LeBlanc, serving as master of ceremonies, couldn’t introduce Hope over the roar of the crowd. When it finally subsided, Hope shuffled onto the stage, wearing the oversized cowboy hat he had worn in his recent movie Paleface, and said, “Just call me Hank Hope.” When he finished his monologue he buttonholed LeBlanc and got a promise that he would never have to follow this Hank Williams again.
It was fun while it lasted. They were in Dallas, with a couple of weeks to go, when LeBlanc abruptly announced the Caravan was over. His checks had begun to bounce—Hank’s last one was for $7,500—and he had managed to sell the Hadacol franchise for eight-and-a-half million dollars. As it turned out, it was only paper money. Drowning in a sea of lawsuits and government threats, LeBlanc saw profits of only $250,000 from the sale and Hadacol was officially declared bankrupt a year later, ending one of the most bizarre stories of hucksterism in American history. Meanwhile, when the Caravan ended that day in Texas, Hank and Minnie Pearl flew back home to Nashville while a couple of the Drifting Cowboys were dispatched to Lafayette to fetch the Cadillac. They were among the lucky ones; some of the California showgirls, virtually penniless after having regularly mailed their worthless paychecks home, had to ride the rails to the end of the line in Juarez, Mexico, where they then hitched a ride on a cattle car from El Paso to get home to Los Angeles.
Both Gene Autry and Tex Ritter had become wealthy as cowboy movie stars, transcending their status as country singers, and it seemed only a matter of time before Hollywood would go after the hottest property in Nashville. They knew the audiences overlapped—country music fans loved cowboy movies as well—and MGM Pictures, stablemate of MGM Records, had certainly noted that Hank’s easygoing manner onstage was a major part of his appeal. Billboard and the Nashville newspapers had picked up on the rumors that a deal was in the offing, and Hank seemed to enjoy the possibility of such a move much more than the actual fact, coyly talking about the hours he had spent as a child watching the movies in south Alabama. Those who knew him, though, could only shake their heads when conjuring a vision of Hiram Williams sitting down to “take a meeting” with some tanned movie producer in the distant make-believe kingdom of Hollywood, California. Those old feelings of insecurity were certain to come back again. Autry and Ritter were different animals—Ritter, although raised in east Texas, had earned a business degree in college and had married a movie actress—but Hank was most at home singing in a roadhouse. He understood that; Hollywood, much to its chagrin, did not.
Thus it was that a deal was announced, backstage at the Ryman Auditorium, on the night of Hank’s return to the Opry following the collapse of the Hadacol Caravan. He wouldn’t be making horse operas (“oaters” in Variety and Billboard vernacular) but costarring in real movies with the likes of the luscious swimming star Esther Williams. The contract he signed with MGM Pictures called for four years, paying him about $4,000 dollars a week while on the job, no picture to take more than four weeks of his time, and a guarantee that he would make at least $10,000 per movie. That sounded like good money, but Hank had done the math. He was getting top dollar for working big concerts, and could easily make more money than Hollywood was offering each week by staying on the road, which accounted for the photos taken backstage at the Opry that night to mark the occasion: Wesley Rose and MGM’s Frank Walker with cigars, the Drifting Cowboys in their stage costumes, and Hank with a pen in his hand and a cowboy hat on his head and something less than a smile on his face.
Maybe he never really took it seriously. Certainly the old cautions about a poor southern boy’s “risin’ above your raisin’ ” were at play, for twice in the coming months Hank managed to sabotage Hollywood’s plans to make him a movie star. (Years later, Buck Owens recorded a song called “Act Naturally” that might just as well have been about Hank’s brush with Hollywood: “They’re gonna put me in the movies . . . and all I gotta do is act naturally.”) He went to Los Angeles that fall for a meeting with MGM producer Joe Pasternak, who ordered that he be fitted for a toupee, causing Hank to grumble that it had made him feel like a heifer being prepared for auction. The following spring, back in California again to seal the deal with MGM, he blew it off once and for all; liquored up, resenting what he perceived as a condescending attitude from one of the company’s biggest mucketymucks, Dore Schary, he sauntered into the office, threw his boots on Schary’s desk, tipped his hat over his eyes, and proceeded to mumble yeps and nopes throughout the “interview.” He had shown them what they could do with their palm trees. MGM, in turn, showed Hank what he could do with his impertinence: there was a curt letter awaiting him when he got back to Nashville, dated the very day after his visit with Schary, “to notify you that, for good and sufficient cause, your employment under said contract is hereby terminated.”
It had been a bad idea, anyway, and Hank knew it. He was born to write songs and perform them for live audiences, not to prance about a movie set, reciting lines written by someone else. Had he lived long enough to witness the coming of Elvis Presley, he likely would have delighted in watching Elvis make an ass of himself in a series of awful low-budget movies—the singing Elvis as a circus roustabout, as a prisoner, as a boxer and a pilot and a race-car driver, ad nauseam—while he, the humble poet of the common man, stayed true to his roots. Even though television was a fairly new medium, one requiring a certain screen presence, Hank had little difficulty adapting to it in the fall of ’51, when he made his first national TV appearances, because all he had to do was, well, act naturally. As a guest on both The Kate Smith Evening Hour and The Perry Como Show he was introduced, bantered briefly with the host, and then sang: the same routine he followed every Saturday night on Prince Albert’s portion at the Opry. Only the presence of television cameras made it any different from playing just another one-nighter. Indeed, the week before he was to do the Como show in New York, he was working the Wagon Wheel Club on the Auburn-Opelika Highway in east Alabama.
As he neared the end of his most successful year, Hank resembled a leaky old boat in need of repairs. He had turned twenty-eight in September, but the drinking sprees were coming more often, bringing with them bouts of depression and black nights full of self-doubts and open warfare with Audrey. He was being pulled off the road for more incarcerations in sanitariums, in Shreveport and Montgomery and Nashville and Louisville (where he was deemed not an alcoholic, just another binge drinker, exactly what he wanted to hear), and there were times when it seemed he had lost the will to carry on. “I wish I was back at WSFA making twelve dollars a week,” he told his uncle Walter McNeil from a hospital bed in Montgomery, surly and paranoid, living unhappily with his success. He spent some time confiding with Ernest Tubb, a recovering alcoholic, who told him of one solution—there was a capsule he could take every morning, Antabuse, but if he took a single sip of whiskey he would either die from the reaction or wish he had—and that was the end of that. Everyb
ody else seemed to be able to blow off steam with a healthy toot—it was a hard-drinking crowd, the Opry bunch, floating in a sea of whiskey from one roadhouse to another—so why couldn’t he? One drink would lead to another binge, to drying out in the medieval huts behind the Madison hospital, and the cycle would continue upon his release. Not eating, or at best eating poorly, had turned him into a 130-pound scarecrow with a twenty-eight-inch waist.
He figured at least he could do something about the back problems that had worsened through the years of riding in cramped cars from date to date. In the spring, while drying out at a hospital in Shreveport, he had been outfitted with a chrome-and-leather back brace, which only led to more discomfort. The last straw came in the fall when he took a catastrophic spill in a ditch while hunting with Jerry Rivers, putting him in excruciating pain, so in late December he checked himself in to the Vanderbilt Medical College in Nashville. “Cure me or kill me,” he told the surgeons there. “I can’t go on like this.” They did the best they could and reluctantly allowed him to go home so he could recover from the surgery during the Christmas holidays on Franklin Road, where all hell promptly broke loose. By now the marriage seemed irretrievably ruptured. Audrey wasn’t there much—she was gone most nights, and one day came back empty-handed when she was supposed to have been shopping for Christmas gifts for the kids—and when he arose from his sickbed long enough to throw a chair at her, straining his back, he was sent back to the hospital for more repairs.
Before the surgery, Hank had been booked for some New Year’s Eve shows in the Washington-Baltimore area. That was impossible now. Jimmie Davis would take his place, and Audrey, “Mrs. Hank Williams,” would go along as well, to sing with the Drifting Cowboys and to play a recorded message from Hank himself. WSM’s Jim Denny had insisted that Hank literally go on record with an apology to allay any suspicions that he was simply drunk again. In it, Hank went into painful detail about his back problems: “. . . I had two ruptured discs in my back. The first and second vertebra was no good . . . deformed when I was a child, or wore out or something. [I wanted to] take an airplane with a stretcher in it [but they said] it’d be impossible for me to be out of here before the first of February. . . .”
For Audrey, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was like living in a cage with a wounded animal. Hank practically had to crawl between the bedroom and the bathroom. They snarled and threw things at each other, and on the last Saturday of the year she moved herself and the kids to the home of neighbors. On the next morning, New Year’s Eve, she sneaked into the house, accompanied by three lady friends (as witnesses, more than anything), to fetch the clothes she would need for the trip to Washington. “We were just easin’ around,” she would later write, “and I knew he was there and very edgy, and as we were leaving the gun shot four times. I could hardly walk. I was scared to death.”
She flew to D.C. and did her duty, singing and playing the tape of Hank’s “apology.” And then, getting toward midnight on that New Year’s Eve, the ringing of the phone echoed through the hollow rooms at 4916 Franklin Road. It was Audrey. “Hank,” she said, “I’ll never live with you another day.”
The Crash
This time, Audrey meant it. Among the songs Hank was piddling with but never finished was one entitled “I’m Gonna Hire a Lawyer,” and that refrain was ringing in his head as he got into his car and scuttled home to Montgomery—back to his mother’s boardinghouse, always a refuge whenever he couldn’t think of anyplace else to go and hide—to curl up in his old bedroom with booze and painkillers for comfort in the cold. By now, having learned how easy it was to stockpile pills from physicians eager to help out “ol’ Hank,” prescription drugs were as much a part of his baggage as his guitar and boots. Beset by Lillie’s clucking and raising hell, he asked his father to come over from McWilliams and rescue him, but Lon got there just in time to see his son being carried out on a stretcher to an ambulance bound for a hospital. Lillie swore that he had swallowed no more than two aspirin tablets and a couple of beers that day, but the doctors told Lon that they couldn’t release Hank until they had flushed “the dope” from his frail body. It was some homecoming this time around.
Within a week, Hank was back in Nashville, renting a two-story stone cottage near the Vanderbilt medical center and sharing accommodations with a young Texas singer named Ray Price, and that’s when the impending divorce took on a life of its own. Messy marriage, messy divorce. It resembled a soap opera or something from one of Hank’s romance magazines. Lawyers were hired, depositions taken, bills of complaint and countercomplaints filed and, as the bile flew, fans and people in the business found themselves choosing sides. It was sordid stuff, the basis for many of Hank’s songs about love gone wrong, but there was no occasion for background music this time. First to fire a salvo was Audrey, who listed every “misconduct” she could come up with from their seven-year marriage: the drinking, the cursing, the physical abuse, ending with the holiday shootings that had made cohabitation “unsafe and improper.” She sent MGM and Acuff-Rose scurrying to produce Hank’s financial records so she could get her share. Hank’s cross-complaint, a blend of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and legalese, was even more damning in its specificity. Audrey spent money like crazy, he said, called him a “son of a bitch” and worse, refused her “obligations of married life,” was a rotten mother often carousing at night (Hank, Jr., even called his nurse “Mama”), persistently drove a wedge between him and his own mother, insisted on singing when she had “neither voice nor musical ability”; and then, finally, he brought up the abortion and claimed to have evidence that she had carried on affairs with a highway patrolman and a car salesman, to name a couple of them, while he was on the road.
That’s the way divorces work in America—you take your best hold, exaggerating if you have to, in order to get the best deal—but for a while there were some indications that maybe this would go away like it did in 1948, when they turned out to be merely separated for a few weeks before coming back together. As bad as the marriage had become, both Hank and Audrey were taking sober looks at the alternative: he would lose his son, his house, at least half of his money, and, worse, any remaining possibility of holding on to the only woman he ever loved; she would become the former Mrs. Hank Williams, just another single mother stuck with two children to raise, and would no longer have unbridled access to their sizable joint checking account. As the proceedings wound their way through the courts, the terms of the settlement taking on the hard clarity of black words on white paper, they both balked at formally agreeing to a divorce. In effect, someone, meaning the court, was going to have to make them do it.
Unable to work since the failed surgery on his back—skulking around the rented house, drinking and jumping into bed with whomever came along, worried sick about his quandary—Hank had to disband the Drifting Cowboys. He hoped the situation would be temporary, that in due time he could bring them all back together, even left one of his cars in a Nashville garage for the day when he might need them to join him, but in the meantime they had families to feed and were forced to take whatever came along: signing on with Ray Price or Carl Smith, or dropping out of music altogether. When he finally did attempt a return to the stage, on the last weekend of January in ’52, he was in no condition for it. The place was Richmond, Virginia, where he was to headline shows on successive nights, and the first thing he did upon checking into a hotel was to order up a jug of tomato juice. Closely guarded to keep him off the sauce, by now willing to settle for anything that would give him a buzz, he asked the room-service waiter to bring him some rubbing alcohol so he could “treat a bad leg.” The moment it arrived, he made himself a monster Bloody Mary and promptly began throwing up the whole mess. The one beer he was allowed to have before the show, in hopes it would settle him down enough to perform, didn’t do much good. He proceeded to make an utter fool of himself, and to make it worse there was a newspaper reporter in the crowd.
His new roommate back in Nash
ville, Ray Price, was the opening act. When he finished performing and gave Hank a grand introduction, the anxious crowd grew testy the moment they saw him struggle to the microphone, obviously too drunk to stand upright, and they were aghast when they heard Hank forget the words and even the key of the one song he tried before abruptly weaving offstage. The emcee jumped in, trying to calm the crowd, saying Hank wasn’t feeling well, that Price would sing some of his songs and anybody not satisfied could get a refund. Meanwhile, during intermission, his guard was stuffing Hank with a sandwich and coffee, forcing him to walk around in the cold night air. When Hank was brought on for the second show, neither drunk nor sober but in that in-between stage of defensiveness, he was anything but apologetic. Hank Williams was no liar, he told them, and he would be glad to show his surgery scars to anybody who doubted he was hurting, and “if you ain’t nice to me, I’ll turn around and walk right off.” Ray Price stepped in to do the best he could, begging the crowd to applaud—“We all love you, Hank, don’t we, folks?”—and Hank responded by meandering through some of his songs. The man who never met a fan he didn’t like promptly left when it was over, going straight to his Cadillac.
It was all over the Richmond Times-Dispatch the next morning, under a headline reading “Hank Williams Hillbilly Show Is Different: Star Makes Impression of Unexpected Kind.” The reporter, Edith Lindeman (an erstwhile songwriter who later would coauthor Kitty Kallen’s hit, “Little Things Mean a Lot”) didn’t leave anything out. This was in the days when the press was more benign, paying little attention to live shows, so Hank and the other members of the troupe were startled to read such detailed coverage of a performance that had gone badly wrong. That night, Hank won back the crowd—didn’t he always?—when he stepped to the microphone and said he was dedicating his first tune to “a gracious lady writer,” promptly leading his backup band into “Mind Your Own Business.” It was a lively show, and afterward he signed autographs for his forgiving fans, the ones privy to his troubles with Audrey who were inclined to say the man had every right to drink, before getting into the limo to ride to his next adventure.