Chapter 12
The more you earn, the less you learn To relax-ez vous
Dean Martin, “Relaxez Vous”
HANK had been surrounded all his professional life by snake-oil salesmen who used more or less unregulated airtime to sell everything from absolution to job lots of live chicks shipped by mail. He acquired a little arsenal of come-ons and self-deprecating jokes that he would trot out when he was in the business of selling something. “Friends,” he would often say, concluding his pitch, “I don’t need the money, but the folks I owe it to need it awful bad.”
Good as Hank was, Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc could make him and most other salesmen look like rank amateurs. Dudley Joseph LeBlanc was born in Youngsville, Louisiana, on August 16, 1894, and claimed to trace his ancestry back to René LeBlanc in Longfellow’s Evangeline. He grew up speaking nothing but French, and never lost his Cajun accent. LeBlanc was fiercely proud of his heritage and eventually published a book on Acadian culture. After graduating from Southwestern Louisiana Institute, he became a salesman for a shoe company, working the same patch in north Louisiana as Huey P. Long. LeBlanc and Long were both formidable salesmen, and came to mistrust, then detest each other as only rival salesmen can.
After World War I, LeBlanc got his introduction to selling patent medicines when he represented Wine of Cardui, fetchingly called a “woman’s tonic.” His first brush with politics came in 1924 when he stood as a candidate for the state legislature in Vermilion Parish, and won. This was at a time when the hot issues of the day included care of Confederate veterans. In 1932, he stood for governor, but lost. LeBlanc then concentrated on his own patent medicines, starting with Happy Day Headache Powder, a concoction that, in common with most of his remedies, contained a stiff dose of laxative.
In 1942, after another unsuccessful stab at the governorship and the Public Service Commission, LeBlanc fell ill with beriberi, and was cured with vitamin B1 compounds. With the unquenchable enthusiasm of the autodidact, he set out to learn everything he could about vitamins, and then began distilling his own compound in the family barn. It was a mixture of vitamins, minerals, honey and — not least — 12 percent alcohol. It was dubbed HADACOL, a rough acronym from HAppy DAy CO., topped off with an L for LeBlanc. Its alcohol content was roughly the same as wine, but at $3.50 it was four times as expensive and immeasurably more foul-tasting so that people would believe it was doing them some good. With many dry counties still in the South, Hadacol was the closest to a nip that many folk out on the rural routes could get — from a bottle with a label on it, at least.
Hadacol went on the market in 1945 after LeBlanc had tested it on his cattle, himself, and his neighbors. Sales were static for a while as he rekindled his political ambitions, becoming a state senator in 1948. During this second stint in politics, he was instrumental in helping to pass the Old Age Pension bill, then used his newfound credibility among older citizens to sell them Hadacol. LeBlanc more or less introduced saturation advertising to the South. His newspaper ads were rife with testimonials. “I have been suffering from nervousness, weak spells, lack of energy, and never felt like working,” wrote Mrs. L. E. Mitchell from Wadsworth, Texas, in March 1949. “After taking Hadacol, I am doing my work better than I have in years. I don’t have weak spells; I eat well; and I sleep like a log. My little girl didn’t eat very much. After taking Hadacol, she eats two helpings every meal. We just can’t praise it enough. I just wish more people knew how wonderful Hadacol is.” Others claimed to be cured of cancer, epilepsy, heart trouble, strokes, and tuberculosis, and LeBlanc published their claims until the Federal Trade Commission stepped in. The advertisements concluded that the good senator “has served his people in public life faithfully and well. In private life, he brings you a service which is appreciated by suffering humanity — HADACOL.” At first, the advertising was designed to devour pretax profits, but it quickly began to assume a life of its own.
Early in 1949, LeBlanc hooked up with Murray Nash, then head of Mercury Records’ southern division. “I asked LeBlanc what was in Hadacol,” said Nash, “and he told me there was enough alcohol to make people feel good and enough laxative for a good movement.” Nash’s commercial antennae began twitching, and he cut two Hadacol paeans — one for the country market, Bill Nettles’ “Hadacol Boogie,” which charted in June 1949, and another for the rhythm and blues market, Professor Longhair’s “Hadacol Bounce.” The publicity generated by “Hadacol Boogie” convinced LeBlanc that country music was an effective medium for promoting his product, so he was primed when Mack Hedrick of WSM approached him with the idea of sponsoring Hank Williams’ Health and Happiness shows in October 1949. Even then, Hank was just a bit player on LeBlanc’s stage. In 1950, LeBlanc spent more than one million dollars a month on advertising, making him the nation’s second-largest advertiser after Coca-Cola. His enterprise grew to the point that Hadacol was shipped by a wholly owned fleet of trucks from the plants in Lafayette, where the employees were now dressed in white starched uniforms to simulate a lab environment (a far cry from the barn in which Hadacol had been concocted). Sales were astronomical at the peak of the operation in 1950 and 1951.
LeBlanc always said that the 4 S’s of salesmanship were Saturation, Sincerity, Simplicity, and Showmanship, and with the last in mind, he staged the Hadacol Caravan. Murray Nash said that he gave LeBlanc the idea based upon a hillbilly jamboree he had organized in Tampa; LeBlanc insisted that the idea came to him at 4:30 one morning in Abbeville, Louisiana. The first Hadacol Caravan ran in August 1950. Hank Williams wasn’t aboard; the headliners were Roy Acuff, Connie Boswell, Burns and Allen, Chico Marx, and Mickey Rooney. Researcher Floyd Martin Clay described how LeBlanc skillfully used the Caravan to promote Hadacol in areas where he hadn’t secured distribution. He bought heavy advertising on radio in the form of a contest: a well-known song was played and the audience was invited to send in a card with the title. If they were correct, they got a voucher for a free bottle of Hadacol. Of course, Hadacol was nowhere to be found, but druggists were now getting a steady stream of requests for it and pestering the jobbers to carry it. Then the advertising for the Caravan kicked in, with admission restricted to those carrying Hadacol box tops. By this point, the Hadacol trucks were waiting outside the city limits, and the jobbers were begging for the product.
The 1951 Caravan was the largest show of its kind ever staged. The mainstay of the bill was to be Hank Williams, backed by Minnie Pearl, comedian Candy Candido, emcee Emil Perra, juggler Lee Marks, a house band led by Tony Martin, a troupe of dancers, and twelve clowns. Other star attractions were to be added at various points along the route. Cesar Romero was on the first seven dates. Jack Benny and Rochester, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Rudy Vallee, Carmen Miranda, Dick Haymes, and Jack Dempsey were all conscripted for one or two dates. Admission was one Hadacol box top for children, two for adults. There were prizes for the kids and “reserved seating for coloreds.” Most shows were preceded by a parade.
By this point, LeBlanc had a hidden agenda: he wanted to sell Hadacol, and he wanted to use the publicity generated by the Caravan as a base to launch another stab at the Louisiana governorship. His photo loomed larger than any other in his advertisements, and he made an appearance on every show. He knew that demand had peaked, and he knew that the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and the Liquor Control Board were sniffing around. More than that, LeBlanc’s ruinous advertising budget meant that the corporation lost two million dollars during the second quarter of 1951 alone. With low cunning, he used the second Caravan as a smokescreen to disguise the true financial picture and snare potential buyers.
Inevitably, the Caravan began in Lafayette. Hank and Bill Lister went into the senator’s office before the tour started. They noted the shelf full of Old Forester whiskey with a subscript on the label that read, “Bottled Especially for Sen. Dudley J. LeBlanc, Lafayette, Louisiana.” Hank and Bill Lister were impressed. A shelf full of premium whiskey with “Bottled Especially for Hank Williams” on the label was alternately Hank’s darkest nightmare and his fondest dream.
The Caravan was scheduled to run from August 14 to October 2, although it had been agreed that Hank and Minnie Pearl would miss the Saturday night shows so that they could fly back to Nashville to meet their Opry commitments. LeBlanc had spared no expense in mounting the shows. He budgeted $500,000 for talent and another $750,000 for promotion. A fleet of fifteen Pullman cars was leased, and arrangements were made to transfer the fleet from one railroad company’s engines to another as the show made its way across eighteen states. Fine food was laid on for the performers, laundry facilities had been prearranged, and the logistics of setting up and tearing down had been rehearsed with military precision.
For most of the performers, this was their first contact with Hank Williams and his audience. The dancers had been recruited from an agency in Los Angeles; they’d never heard of Hank, but by the end they were standing in the wings every night as he performed. The reception even surprised Hank. He knew he was the king of the honky-tonks, but now he had stadium crowds eating out of his hand, and legit entertainers working as his supporting acts. Even the Drifting Cowboys were surprised. They had always thought of themselves as working a lowly rung of the entertainment ladder; now they recognized the magnitude of Hank’s stardom. The chorus girls, used to most stars’ frosty hauteur, were also surprised at Hank’s willingness to do the shake ’n’ howdy. He would sign autographs for hours. No one was turned away.
One week into the tour, the show touched down in Montgomery. Braxton Schuffert remembers getting a call from Hank’s mother asking him to meet Hank on the Hadacol train, which was parked down at the railroad yard:
He was sittin’ there, and he had the seat in front of him pushed forward and he was sitting with his boots up on the other seat. I set down beside him. I said, “Hank, how you doin’ boy?” He said, “I’m doing no good at all.” I said, “What’s the matter?” I seen them movie stars walking by outside the window. “All them pretty movie stars on this train, Hank.” He said, “I don’t have nothin’ to do with them. They think they’re better than I am.”
Then Hank got to what was probably the true cause of his foul mood. “He pulled out a pink check about six inches long and three inches high,” said Braxton. “It was for something like seventy-five hundred dollars. He said, ‘Ever’body on this train has got one of these.’” The paychecks had bounced.
Hank and Minnie Pearl eventually forced the issue of payment by threatening not to return from Nashville unless they were paid, and for a few weeks LeBlanc managed to juggle enough funds into the payroll account to keep everyone happy. From Montgomery, the show moved into Georgia. Walter McNeil drove Lilly to the show in Columbus so that she could savor Hank’s triumph once more. Then the Caravan swung up through the Carolinas and into Virginia. After the show in Roanoke on Friday, August 31, Hank flew back to Nashville for the Opry and to sign the papers for his spread in Williamson County. The new toy did little to mollify Audrey, who had spent her life trying to get off the farm.
Band members recall that Hank often came back from his weekend furloughs distraught and angry, hinting broadly that all was not well on Franklin Road. There were rumors that Audrey was keeping company with other men, and those rumors gnawed at Hank, despite the fact that he was trying hard to start an affair with one of the dancing girls. He used his failing marriage as an excuse for coming on to her, giving the impression that he wanted to get involved. He took her shopping, bought her some cowboy boots, and squired her to clubs, but she wouldn’t succumb.
“When we got to Louisville, Kentucky,” said Big Bill Lister, “Dick Haymes said to his wife, ‘Well, we’re finally getting out of the sticks — the hillbillies won’t be tearing them up now.’ What he didn’t know was that Louisville was a second home to a lot of Opry acts; somebody played there every Sunday afternoon on the way to somewhere.” Bob Hope joined the show for two appearances in Louisville and Cincinnati. Hank had been closing the show up to that point, but LeBlanc asked him to take second billing and Hank agreed. To make things as difficult as possible for Hope, Hank reached back for something extra and took encore after encore. “That crowd wasn’t gonna turn him loose,” says Lister, “and LeBlanc was trying to introduce Bob Hope over all this hollerin’ and clappin’. They got the crowd quieted down, and somewhere in his wardrobe Bob Hope had this old hat that he’d used in Paleface, and he wore that and just stood there, and when the place quieted down he said, ‘Just call me Hank Hope.’” When he came off, Hope found LeBlanc and told him that he wouldn’t follow Hank Williams again. Hank could afford to smile inwardly, but — being Hank — he probably smiled outwardly as well because a triumph was for nothing if not to be savored. When LeBlanc told him he was topping the bill, Hank said, “That’s fine. Just pay me what you’re paying Hope.”
Lister and everyone else in Hank’s entourage had less charitable memories of Milton Berle, who appeared on the show in St. Louis. Uncle Miltie, Lister recalls, had offered to emcee the entire show in addition to performing his usual schtick:
He had an ego big as all outdoors, and when Dick Haymes was doing “Old Man River,” Milton Berle had a red bandanna around his head and stood out behind Dick Haymes and just ruined the man’s act. Nobody deserves that. Uncle Miltie had already been out and done his thing and now he was ruining everybody else’s act. I told Hank, “If that joker comes out doing that when we’re out there, he’s really gonna mess things up. If he wants a good laugh, I’m gonna get this ol’ guitar and crown him with it.” Hank said, “If you do, I’ll buy you any guitar you want,” but the word circulated around and Milton’s manager got him plumb offstage somewhere.
On Friday, September 14, the movable feast touched down in Wichita, Kansas, for a show designed to coincide with the Frontier Days Rodeo festival. A second show was laid on in the early hours to accommodate those who had just gotten off work at the aircraft plant. Hank and Minnie Pearl flew back to Nashville later that night and rejoined the troupe in Oklahoma City on Sunday. Flying back to Oklahoma City with Minnie and her husband, Henry Cannon, Hank asked Henry to pull his guitar out of the baggage when they stopped to refuel, then wrote a song called “Heart of a Devil, Face of a Saint.” Clearly, not a happy weekend.
Over that same weekend, Dudley LeBlanc had sold Hadacol to the Tobey Maltz Company in New York. He announced the sale in Dallas on Monday, September 17, just before the show scheduled for the Cotton Bowl. “The next morning we were having breakfast,” remembered Bill Lister, “and Hank asked the senator, ‘What did you sell Hadacol for?’ He meant, ‘Why did you sell it?’ but the senator leaned across the table and said, ‘Eight and a half million dollars,’ and our jaws just dropped to the floor.” Jaws dropped again when the performers were handed their final paychecks and tried to cash them. Once again, LeBlanc hadn’t juggled enough money into his account to cover payroll.
The caravan, so huge and unwieldy, was torn down in the space of hours. Everyone said their hurried good-byes. Some of the chorus line, who had been living for free on the train and sending their ninety-dollar paychecks back home, ended up in Juarez and had to ride a cattle car back to Los Angeles. Hank flew back to Nashville, and flew Don Helms and Sammy Pruett to Lafayette to pick up the limos. He gave Jerry Rivers and Howard Watts train tickets back to Nashville.
In fact, LeBlanc saw no more than $250,000 for Hadacol. Payments of half a million dollars a month from future profits were called for but weren’t made because there were no future profits — only liens, overdue bills, returned shipments, and FTC and Liquor Control Board suits. LeBlanc exculpated himself neatly by saying, “If you sell a cow and the cow dies, you can’t do anything to a man for that.” He’d sidestepped some potentially damaging fallout, but was tagged as a loser and once again failed in his 1952 bid to become governor. Hadacol was officially declared bankrupt at the height of the campaign.
The tour was supposed to have ended back in Baton Rouge on October 2. Hank had also scheduled a date in Biloxi on October 3 and had committed to perform at the Mississippi-Louisiana Exposition in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the same day. No one now remembers how he filled the two vacant weeks at the end of the tour, but when he played the Opry on October 6 he told the audience that he was “entertaining at home next week for the first time in nine weeks,” suggesting that he had filled in the dates at short notice.
On the weekend after the wheels came off the Hadacol Caravan, Hank was photographed backstage at the Opry signing a motion-picture contract. His uneasy dance with the legit entertainment world that had started when Tony Bennett covered “Cold, Cold Heart” was now acquiring an unstoppable momentum. The attention left Hank profoundly uneasy. Frank Walker had come down from New York for the MGM Pictures signing. He, Wesley Rose, and Jim Denny circled predatorily around their meal ticket, cigars in hand, as Hank committed himself to a deal for what the local paper called “top quality motion pics.” Walker made a point of telling the press that this was the first time anyone had ever been signed to do motion pictures without a screen test or audition. Hank had a keener sense of his limitations than his handlers, and had never cared to capitalize on the link between MGM Records and MGM Pictures. He was happier telling people that the picture division was courting him, all the while keeping them at bay. Inevitably and inexorably, though, the pressure grew. Hank probably read in Billboard that his fellow MGM Records act, Billy Eckstine, had been signed to Skirts Away, and all of his heroes, like Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Davis, and particularly Gene Autry, had made motion pictures. Even so, Hank had reservations.
Basic economics weighed on Hank’s mind as he rebuffed MGM. He could make more money on the road than if he were tied up week after week in Hollywood. Soon after he arrived at the Opry he had put his band on salary rather than a per-gig fee, which assured him of having his pickers on call, but also meant that he was committed to paying them regardless of whether they worked. A deeper concern was Hank’s sure knowledge that he was getting out of his depth, but in holding out, he only dug a deeper hole for himself. When the offer was tabled, MGM Pictures not only offered to forego screen tests but guaranteed to place him right away in costar billing roles. Billboard reported that the movies would “not [be] in the horse opera category,” and that Joe Pasternak of MGM had already offered Hank a costarring role in an upcoming Esther Williams movie, Peg o’ My Heart. He was offered a four-year deal, and no picture was to take more than four weeks of his time. The salary guarantee was between three thousand and five thousand dollars a week, with a ten-thousand-dollar guarantee per picture. Tellingly, at the signing ceremony, Hank wasn’t smiling. He knew he didn’t belong in Peg o’ My Heart.
Hank still wasn’t smiling when he went to meet Pasternak in California. Pasternak asked him to stand up and turn around, and the hair rose on the back of his neck. “He said it was like he was for sale,” said Don Helms afterward. The motion-picture deal also meant that Hank had to wear toupees again. The remaining hair on the crown of his head was shaved off yet again, and he went for several fittings. In Pasternak’s office, Jim Denny, himself the owner of a lot of hair that nature hadn’t given him, told Hank to take his hat off. Pasternak saw the toupee and asked Hank if he had any hair. “Hell, yes,” he said, “I got a dresser drawer full of it.” Hank left with some scripts for his consideration.
A few weeks later, the legit entertainment world beckoned again. CBS-TV offered a spot on The Perry Como Show for Wednesday, November 14. He would have to stay a week in New York for rehearsals. Bill Lister, who rode up with Hank, said:
Perry Como was just like he was on television. Relaxed, a real likable guy. We spent most of our time shooting pool. They had one scene where they had a pool table. While the McGuire Sisters and everybody else on the show was getting all their timing down to just a gnat’s hair, Perry Como, Hank, Sammy Pruett, and myself would all shoot pool. That show was sponsored by Chesterfield, and it had a little jingle that Perry Como sang, and he wanted Hank to join him and do it with him, but Hank couldn’t get it. Finally, Hank said, “Well, we’ll just have to give up on that.” And when we got out of New York City a ways, driving along, Hank kind of chuckled to himself, and he said, “I didn’t come all the way from south Alabama to sing a commercial.”
On the following week’s show, Como donned a cowboy hat, sang “Hey, Good Lookin’,” then apologized to Hank.
Hank felt as out of place in New York as he had in Hollywood. He was always the first to feel condescension and reacted to it with a mixture of truculence and boorishness. “If you don’t like folk music,” he once told an interviewer, “stay away from my shows. I can’t stand classical music, but I don’t tell the world about it.”
During rehearsals for the Como show, Hank took time out to do an interview at Billboard in which he explained how careful he was to space his releases properly, and follow what he called a “jump tune” with a blues or ballad. The piece also mentioned that Hank was scheduled to do a spot on Ed Sullivan’s Talk of the Town, although, as far as we know, he never appeared. His rancor toward Milton Berle was still bubbling near the surface, though. He told the Billboard columnist that he had been offered a spot on Berle’s television show but had turned it down. “The last time I worked with him, there like to have been a killing,” he said with a frankness that must have surprised the columnist.
On November 9, possibly anticipating a flood of orders from Como viewers, MGM issued Hank’s first album, Hank Williams Sings. It was released in three formats: ten-inch LP; four 78s packaged in an album; or four 45s in an album. It was axiomatic that country LPs didn’t sell, and the notion of the single as a trailer for the hugely more profitable album was still more than ten years away. Rose used Hank’s first album as a dump site for oddball tracks that hadn’t sold elsewhere. With the exception of “Wedding Bells,” the tracks were the dogs of Hank’s catalog, like “I’ve Just Told Mama Goodbye,” “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” and “Six More Miles.” Rose’s thinking in recycling these oldies but not-so-goodies was paraphrased by Billboard: “The release of an album [of eight new sides], they feel, would spread jockey and juke plays too thinly instead of getting the concentrated push on the single record.”
For Hank, the contrast between the tawdry glamor of network television out of New York and the mundane grind of personal appearances in the South was made all the more apparent by the fact that a week before the Como show he was appearing at the Wagon Wheel Club between Opelika and Auburn, Alabama. Hank almost certainly felt more at home at the Wagon Wheel than in New York or Hollywood, but if he found any incongruity playing the Wagon Wheel one week and Como’s show the next, he didn’t talk about it. But Hank didn’t talk about anything substantive very much, anyway.
One month after the Como show, and just a few days before a scheduled operation on his back, Hank returned to the Castle studio to cut the last of the five hugely prolific recording sessions he’d done in 1951. It would also be the last session to feature all of the Drifting Cowboys. Nothing new was on the menu. The oldest song was “Let’s Turn Back the Years,” a plea for reconciliation that had first appeared in one of Hank’s WSFA songbooks in 1946. Its words now rang truer than ever. Several verses had been omitted from the 1946 draft, including one that Hank couldn’t quite bring himself to sing:
You have been so faithful, darling
Waiting for me all these years,
And if you’ll forget the vows I’ve broken,
I’ll try to pay you for all your tears.
Finally, Hank got a releasable cut of “Honky Tonk Blues,” a song that dated back almost as far as “Let’s Turn Back the Years.” He had first tried it at the August 1947 session that had yielded “Fly Trouble.” He’d taken another stab at it in March 1949, and yet another in June 1950. Rose might have held it back because the title was easily confused with “Honky Tonkin’,” but the flurry of activity around “Honky Tonkin’” in 1948 and again in 1950 had died away, and Rose now felt confident scheduling “Honky Tonk Blues” as Hank’s first release for 1952. The version that hit the streets didn’t contain all the lyrics on his original demo; the next-to-last verse in which Maw and Paw are “really gonna lay down the law” was missing, emphasizing in a way that Hank himself never made it back from the honky-tonks to pappy’s farm. On release in February 1952, “Honky Tonk Blues” was coupled with “I’m Sorry for You, My Friend,” the song Lefty Frizzell said Hank had written for him.
As 1951 was drawing to a close, Hank Williams needed repair. Two and a half years of almost constant travel, sleep deprivation, and unrelenting pressure had taken their toll on his body and mind. The drinking bouts were becoming increasingly frequent. The lower five vertebrae of his back ached constantly. The brace wasn’t working. And now Hank’s career seemed to be controlling him rather than vice versa. If he felt guilty about his binges, as he almost certainly did, he covered it up by refusing to acknowledge that there was a problem. When he was drunk or in the process of getting drunk, he was in no condition to discuss his alcoholism, and when he was sober he pulled rank on his band and cut short any discussion. “I’d say to him, ‘That’s when you really showed your butt,’” said Don Helms, “and he’d say, ‘I don’t wanna talk ‘bout it.’”
At some point in 1951 Hank was sent, or committed himself, to a sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, which was supposed to specialize in treatment of alcoholics. There, he was told essentially what he wanted to hear: he wasn’t an alcoholic because he went days, weeks, sometimes months without drinking. An alcoholic couldn’t do that. Therefore, Hank was a spree drinker. Hank almost certainly knew in his heart that he wasn’t a spree drinker, and knew how much strength it took on a daily basis to wrestle down his craving for alcohol. “He got so bitter about alcohol,” said Ernest Tubb, one of the few Hank opened up to about his problem because it was one that Tubb shared:
He hated drinking, and he wanted to take this cure. You’d take this medicine, and you had to carry a letter in your pocket. If you’re taking this medicine [and] you take a drink, if you don’t get to a hospital quick enough it’ll kill you. He asked me if he should do it, take this cure. I told him, “This you have to decide, ’cause if I advise you to do it and you get off some place late at night and you fall off the wagon, and start drinking you could wind up dead and I’d feel responsible.” He knew he was an alcoholic. Then it dawned on him.
Unlike Lefty Frizzell, characterized by his drinking buddies as a happy drunk, Hank was a miserable drunk. He became surly and contrary. “He was a pain, a real pain,” said Don Helms. “If you wanted to leave, he wanted to wait; if you wanted to wait, he wanted to leave.” Hank’s problem was aggravated by a low tolerance for alcohol. Helms and Rivers agree that Hank probably drank less than just about anyone else on the Opry, but he drank in binges and his low tolerance quickly put him out of commission. A few drinks and he was a foaming-at-the-mouth, under-the-table drunk. When he was drunk, his natural bluntness turned into boorishness. His band members knew all the little telltale signs, like the strange wave from the wings when they were warming up the crowd. Said Jerry Rivers,
We’d all just wilt ’cause we knew then he was drinking. One time in St. Joseph, Missouri, we were onstage picking and he came to the wings and we knew right away he was drinking. He came on, swung into “Move It on Over,” did the verse with “Remember pup before you whine,” and then Don did a solo, then he sung the same verse and Jerry took a solo. Then he did “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” which is basically the same tune, and he came out of the break singing “Remember pup before you whine.” We’d rather he didn’t show. It was just such a letdown to us.
Most of those who knew Hank have a pet theory about his drinking. He drank because of back pain, because of Audrey, because of career pressures, to gain attention — the list was long. Wesley Rose had a complex theory that centered around blood sugar levels, which was probably state-of-the-art thinking about alcoholism that month. Hank drank. It was a behavior he had acquired in his youth — before Audrey, before his back gave him much trouble, before his career took him over. It was a behavior to which he turned at moments both predictable and unpredictable. It was a behavior that took him over and acquired its own momentum as his personal and professional problems mounted. More than anything else, it was a release from whatever ailed him at the time. “I’m gonna keep drinkin’ ’til I can’t even think,” he’d written in “Tear in My Beer,” and he was true to every word.
Hank and Fred Rose had discussed Hank’s problem many times. Rose approached it from the standpoint of a recovered alcoholic, but was unsuccessful in persuading Hank to tackle his alcoholism with a renewed spiritual awakening. Joining an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous was also out of the question for Hank, partly because of his intensely private nature, but mostly because it would have been an acknowlegment that he had a problem. This left palliative professional help when he was on a binge, which was essentially limited to deprivation, a good meal when he stood a chance of keeping it down, a few vitamins, and a big bill.
With most tours lasting just a few days between Opry commitments, Hank was usually brought home if he was drinking, and Audrey would, with good reason, refuse to let him in the house. Jim Denny would ask the band to take him to a sanatorium attached to the hospital in Madison, just north of Nashville. The sanatorium had some outbuildings with bars on the windows that it used for drying out alcoholics. The band would pull up in front of the sanatorium and Hank wouldn’t have a clear idea of where he was. Someone would say, “Come on, Hank, let’s get out,” and he would see where they were and say, “Oh no, oh no, I ain’t goin’ in there. It’s that damn hut.” The attendants would have to come and get him, and he would stare daggers at the band as if he had been betrayed. “Seems to me,” said Helms, “that everyone would disappear round about that time,” but Helms lived close by and had known Hank the longest, so he would come to visit after a couple of days, and he’d bring candy bars and books. Usually, by the third day Hank would say, “Reckon they’re gonna let us outta here?” Helms would think to himself, “Hoss, we ain’t in here.”
On another occasion in late 1951, Hank was committed to St. Margaret’s hospital in Montgomery. His cousin Walter McNeil came to see him there and found a desperately unhappy man. As was often the case when he was coming off a drunk, Hank was paranoid and surly, and, some thought, occasionally suicidal. “O’Neil,” he said ("O’Neil McNeil” was Lilly’s nickname for Walter Jr.), “I wish I was back at WSFA making twelve dollars a week. At least then if someone come to see me, I’d know they was coming to see me. Now I reckon they just want something from me.”
Wondering what Audrey was doing while he was out on the road contributed to Hank’s broodiness and general upset. He saw the band members happy to get off the road and get home to their wives and families. He would go home and perhaps not find Audrey there at all. If she was there, they’d probably have a fight. As early as 1950, coming in off the road, he had told the guys that he knew they were all looking forward to going back home. Meantime, he said, he was going to Acuff-Rose to pick up a check for two thousand dollars, go home, give Audrey half of it, then spend the rest of the night fighting with her over the other half. Now he couldn’t even joke about it. It just wasn’t funny anymore.
Still, Hank loved Audrey, and he loved Randall Hank. A WSM engineer remembered that Hank had once left Nashville in a hurry and got halfway to Jackson before realizing that he hadn’t said good-bye to Hank Jr., so he drove all the way back. Another time, Ernest Tubb remembered that he, Hank, and Minnie Pearl were playing the Tri-State Fair in Amarillo, Texas. “Hank had bought every stuffed bear, dog, and he had that Cadillac so loaded the boys said, ‘Where we gonna sit?’ I said, ‘Hank, that kid ain’t big enough to play with them,’ ’cause Hank had a stuffed dog as big as a man, but he worshipped that boy. Never knew a man worshiped a child like that. He just couldn’t buy enough things for Bocephus.” In Hank’s ideal world, little Hank was the centerpiece of the family that prayed together and stayed together. In that same dream, Audrey was baking a pie as he walked in the door.
The paradox of Hank Williams was that he was easygoing on the outside, yet tense and querulous inside. He pretended that he’d just ridden into town on a mule, yet had a lively intelligence combined with what Minnie Pearl described as a “woods-animal distrust” of anyone who appeared to have any more learning than he did. He wanted to be the drifting cowboy, herding the dark clouds out of the sky and keeping the heavens blue, yet was prone to depression. He saw his own dalliances as one of the perks of the job, yet was infuriated and aggrieved by Audrey’s infidelities, perhaps because they were often conducted in full view of his peers.
Through his music, his fans sensed the chasm between Hank’s onstage demeanor and his private disquiet, and that in turn accounted for part of his appeal. There was a huge gulf between the way he introduced the songs on radio or onstage and the song itself. The introduction was straight out of hillbilly vaudeville; the songs were from Hank Williams’ heart of darkness. When the spotlight was switched off, or the red recording light went off, and the people had gone home, Hank was left with Hiram Williams, who was wretched company for himself. “When he walked on the stage,” said Audrey later, “it was the only time Hank was ever really sure of himself. It was shyness and lonesomeness.”
Hank tried to get one aspect of his life under control when he finally surrendered up his back to a team of surgeons led by Dr. Ben Fowler and Dr. George Carpenter at the Vanderbilt Medical Center. This was a major step for Hank, who had a country person’s pathological fear of big-city doctors. As early as March 31, 1951, Billboard had reported that he had a spine disorder and was expected to take six weeks off for surgery. At the time he signed his motion picture deal, he talked about working fewer shows to concentrate on songwriting (Bing Crosby was mentioned as a possible client), but as ever the bottom line was that Hank couldn’t keep his band on salary if they didn’t work.
A hunting accident finally forced Hank into the hospital. Jerry Rivers had gone hunting with him, and Hank’s dog had treed a large groundhog in a stump. The groundhog put up a fight, and Hank and Jerry began running to save the dog. Rivers jumped a gully, carrying a heavy double-barreled shotgun, and beat off the groundhog. Then he looked around for Hank, but couldn’t see him.
Hank was on his back in the gully. His face was pale and he was wracked with pain. He had lost his balance jumping the ditch and had fallen four or five feet onto his back. His first step was to check into St. Jude’s in Montgomery, where he felt more at home, but the doctors there referred him to the Vanderbilt Medical Center. As he told the story later, Hank went to the doctors and said, “Cure me or kill me, Doc. I can’t go on like this.”
Before the surgery, Hank had agreed to work Connie B. Gay’s New Year’s Eve bash. Gay booked theaters in Washington, Baltimore, Toledo, Raleigh, Spartanburg, and Charleston, West Virginia. In conjunction with Jim Denny, he had arranged to bring in virtually every artist working on the Opry to fill those venues. Denny and Gay had worked together since 1947, and Gay held the Opry franchise for the D.C. area. This was to be their biggest joint venture. It’s likely that Denny had a personal stake in the financial outcome of the shows in addition to his professional stake. Hank was to be the headliner, and they planned to “bicycle” him (that is, have him play two locations) in Baltimore and Washington. Booking Hank was a calculated risk for Denny, who was as aware of his condition as anyone, but it was a risk that he was apparently willing to take. Hank had a history of showing up stone cold sober when he absolutely had to, and Denny might have planned to ensure his sobriety by assigning a minder.
Hank didn’t make the shows, but not because he was drinking. The operation was less than a total success, and Hank aggravated his condition by insisting upon being moved home on Christmas Eve. Audrey got upset at him for ignoring the doctors’ instructions and Hank threw a chair at her, which worsened his condition and necessitated another trip back to Vanderbilt. The house was thick with tension over Christmas, deeply at odds with the cheery family Christmas card Hank and Audrey circulated. Guns were waved and insults traded. Audrey’s sister Lynette came up from Banks to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and she later said that Hank couldn’t understand why he was in so much pain after the operation. Audrey would occasionally disappear in the evening, topping up Hank’s jealousy, but he could only rail against it because he was in such pain. It was all he could do to move from the bedroom to the bathroom.
Hank’s mood worsened when he realized that he would have to prerecord apologies to the Washington and Baltimore audiences. In effect, he was being asked to prove he wasn’t drunk. His voice was sad and muted. Here in part is what he said:
On December the thirteenth, I had to have an operation that I’d been putting off for about a year. I had to have it because it finally got to where I couldn’t even walk on one leg hardly…. But when he started the operation, when the doctor got into my back he found a lot wrong that he hadn’t anticipated before, so naturally he had to go ahead and fix it all. I had what you call a spine fusion. I had two ruptured disks in my back. The first and second vetebrae was no good, it was just deformed or broken when I was a child, or wore out or something. He said he thought I’d rode a few too many hundred thousand miles in these automobiles. So he went ahead and fixed it, so after I came to, after the anesthetic wore off he told me it’d be impossible for me to be out of here before the first of February.
So then me and Mister Denny at the station here, we tried to talk him into letting me take an airplane with a stretcher in it, and fly up to Washington and take an ambulance from there to Baltimore, but he wouldn’t go along with it, so he just finally said no.
Denny arranged for Jimmie Davis to take Hank’s place, then arranged for Audrey to sing with the Drifting Cowboys and play Hank’s message for the fans. It wasn’t an easy trip for her. On Saturday, December 29, Audrey alleged that Hank physically attacked her. She moved herself and the kids to the Garretts, a family that had sold Hank a pony for Lycrecia. Then on Sunday afternoon she came back home to pack for the shows.
There were three elderly women [that] came back home with me so I could get some clothes and fly to Washington. I just wanted to slip in and out. We were just easin’ around, 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. Thinking back, I don’t know if he was shooting at me, or wanting me to think that he was shooting at himself. Anyway, I went on to Washington, and New Year’s Eve night I called him and said, “Hank, I’ll never live with you another day.”
Johnnie and Jack and Kitty Wells were in town that Christmas. They came to see Hank to ask for his help in getting them back on the Opry, and they arrived to find the screen door riddled with bullet holes and one of Hank’s guitars smashed to pieces out on the patio. According to Johnnie Wright, Hank had just found out about Audrey’s latest affair. He told Johnnie, “That busted my heart.” The troubles, according to Wright, had started when Audrey had said she was going out to buy Hank Jr. a Christmas present and had come back with nothing. Hank suspected that she had been fooling around and exploded.
During the divorce proceedings, Audrey reiterated the story that Hank had shot at her, but Hank vigorously denied it. Wright’s confirmation notwithstanding, the shotgun blasts were in keeping with Hank’s frame of mind at the time. They were also in keeping with his wayward use of firearms when he was drunk, angry, or in acute pain. And that night he was drunk and angry and in acute pain. The year-end issue of Billboard showed that “Cold, Cold Heart” was the top country song of the year and was number thirteen in the year-end tally of the pop charts, but that was no comfort at all.