Chapter 15
It’s a great separation my friends have caused me By bearing the spite my favor has won,
It’s a great separation, likewise a vexation And they shall be sorry for what they have done.
“Adieu to Bon County” (unknown)
“Boy, thank you, Horace, thank you a lot. Boy, sure feels good to be home, y’know.”
“Been ‘bout two years since you’ve been home, boy.”
WITH that exchange, Hank Williams was back on the Louisiana Hayride. It had been a shade over three years since he had left with his heart full of hope. He was brought back on September 13 for a teaser, and after Horace Logan’s introduction, he sang “Jambalaya,” “Lovesick Blues,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” and the as-yet-unrecorded “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.” The crowd clapped and stomped, and wouldn’t let him off the stage for twenty minutes. He promised to be back to play and sing every week.
Just before Hank left for Shreveport, he called Billie Jean. “Baby,” he said, “this is ol’ Hank.” Billie Jean was taken off guard. “I do believe we’ve got a date October nineteenth,” he said. It was the date they had planned to marry, after her divorce from Harrison Eshliman had become final. “Well,” she said, “we had a date.”
“Listen,” he said, “in a coupla days, ol’ Hank’s gonna be down. I’m movin’ to Shreveport. I want you to find me a place.” And a few days later, as Billie Jean recalled it, Hank drove in. Marie Glenn, though, said that he flew while she and Clyde Perdue drove his cars. Perdue had staged the Greenville Homecoming and was now Hank’s personal manager. Born in April 1914 in Farmersville, Alabama, some twenty-five miles outside Greenville, Perdue was an Air Corps veteran who had returned to Greenville after the Second World War, first as an express clerk and then as a theater manager. Neither occupation had groomed him to be Hank Williams’ manager.
Everything Hank owned from his three and a half years at the top of his profession was in those two vehicles. Billie’s brother, Sonny Jones, found him a room in an apartment hotel, and, as Hank drove around the streets he knew so well, greeting a few old cronies from the first go-round, no one came away with the impression that he thought he’d been demoted. He was upbeat, or, as he would say, spry, still insisting that he had quit the Opry.
“He called me from an Italian restaurant downtown, Tony Sansone’s on Spring Street,” said Horace Logan. “He said, ‘Come on down, I want you to meet my French girl.’ I went down, walked in, and there was Billie Jean. I said, ‘Billie Jean, where in hell have you been?’ Hank said, ‘You know my French girl?’ I said, ‘She’s not French — she’s Irish as can be.’”
Settled back in Shreveport, Hank tried to reassemble his old band. He called Felton Pruett, his steel guitar player from the first time around, but Pruett had had enough Hank Williams for one lifetime. “He got real perturbed at me for not going back with him,” said Pruett. “He was pretty strong with me. He had Billie Jean with him and he was treating her bad, cussin’ at her, and I thought, ‘Hell, I don’t need none of this.’” Although he tried, Hank never succeeded in putting a band together. When he toured, he sometimes used Red Sovine’s band, which included pianist Floyd Cramer, steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and guitarist Tommy Bishop; sometimes he used the house band at the clubs. Like Chuck Berry, Hank figured that everyone knew his songs, so he wouldn’t even bother to rehearse his pick-up bands. At show time, he would kick off every song with a chord. “Gear of C, boys,” he’d say. He’d telegraph the last verse by lifting his foot.
Hank managed to get Oscar Davis to rejoin him for a while. Perhaps with Oscar, he thought, it would be just like 1949 all over again. Hank found him in Vancouver, Canada, and persuaded him to come down to Shreveport. “He was living in a horrible, horrible motel,” said Oscar. “Sparsely furnished. An old kitchen table and junk all around. He wanted me to meet Billie, so every night we had to go out and sit and drink.” It’s possible that Oscar arrived from Canada with an Australian singer he was managing, Tex Morton. When Morton signed with Columbia Records in 1952, Davis was listed on the contract as his manager, and they’d reportedly worked together in Canada. Morton later told friends in Australia that Davis asked him to hypnotize Hank into giving up alcohol.
Commercially, this would be life lived at a lower level than Hank had known it for several years. Oscar Davis notified Billboard that he expected Hank to tour every second week and spend the other week songwriting. It was a gauge of Hank’s unreliability that his record of “Jambalaya” was atop the country charts and Jo Stafford’s pop cover version was in the top ten, yet he and the song everyone wanted to hear were confined to smaller halls and beer joints around Shreveport. The emphasis on songwriting might have represented much more than an attempt to slow down, though. In terms of record sales, Hank was already a falling star. “Jambalaya” was number one, but his income from record sales had slipped from $22,574 in 1950, to $20,224 in 1951, down to $13,869 in 1952. Meanwhile, his Acuff-Rose income had risen from $18,040 in 1950, to $32,632 in 1951, and jumped to $55,044 in 1952 as the revenue from the pop cover versions kicked in.
Immediately after arriving back in Shreveport, Hank went out on a short tour, accompanied by Billie Jean and Clyde Perdue. On September 17, they went to San Antonio, where they visited the Alamo. That night, Hank played Charlie Walker’s club, the Barn. Walker later scored several big hits, chiefly “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down.” Doug Sahm, then eleven years old, was in the audience. Already something of a child prodigy, he was brought up onstage to sit on Hank’s lap and play “Steel Guitar Rag.” “His breath stank of whiskey,” said Doug, “and there wasn’t nothin’ left to him. His knees were sharp. Poked right into me.” Hank was in a good mood that night, though. He was celebrating his twenty-ninth birthday, and Charlie Walker had arranged a private party after the show. Walker ordered a cake with the musical notes of “Jambalaya” around the circumference, and “Happy Birthday Hank from All Your Friends” in the center. The cake was hidden behind the piano, then brought out at the end of the set. Hank was so moved that tears streamed down his face.
Hank and Billie Jean went to change after the show while Walker stood guard over the door. Suddenly, a three-hundred-pound oil field worker appeared and demanded to see Hank. He pushed Walker aside and burst into the room. Walker called his bouncers, but the intruder broke free and sent the cake flying to the floor. Billie Jean’s brothers were with Hank. One of them, Sonny, had frizzy hair, and Hank called him “Niggerhead.” “Git him, Niggerhead,” said Hank, and Sonny flew across the table and floored the guy. As he went down, Hank kicked him several times with his pointy-toed boots, and left. It was a bizarre coda to what would be his last birthday.
Three days later, Hank made his official return to the Louisiana Hayride. He had hassled with KWKH general manager Henry Clay, insisting that he wasn’t going to work for scale, and Clay had agreed to pay him around two hundred dollars a show instead of the usual eighteen. Horace Logan insists that Hank was tied to the show with a one-year contract on which the Hayride could exercise two additional one-year options.
On Tuesday, September 23, Hank flew back to Nashville for a recording session. The two songs he had finished in Montgomery with Fred Rose, “Kaw-Liga” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” were on the slate together with the song he’d written for Billie Jean, “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.” To round out the session, Fred Rose contributed perhaps the best song he ever presented to Hank, “Take These Chains from My Heart.” It was one of the very few Fred Rose songs that sounded somewhat similar to a Hank Williams song.
If Hank was in terminal decline, it wasn’t obvious from this session. Most of those present remember him in better shape than the last couple of times he had recorded. The problems, such as they were, stemmed from the fact that Bobbie Jett had got wind of the fact that Hank was recording and appeared at the studio. Billie Jean was there as well as Paul Cohen, who had been one of Bobbie Jett’s suitors. Hank was denying everything to Billie Jean. After the session, Hank and Billie went for dinner with Wesley and Fred Rose at Bozeman’s Restaurant on Murfreesboro Road.
Under the circumstances, it’s surprising that anything was cut, and even more surprising that the session was, in many ways, one of Hank’s best and most productive. It was also his last. Most singers hope to hang their careers on one or two classics; Hank cut four classics between 1:30 and 3:40 on the afternoon of September 23, 1952, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the song that would become as much his anthem in death as “Lovesick Blues” had been in life. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” is the song that — for all intents and purposes — defines country music. Hank’s performance of the song underscores its scalding bitterness. Billie Jean says that Hank wrote the song on their drive to Louisiana in August, and insists that it was aimed at Miss Audrey. If so, Hank might have appreciated the irony that Audrey collected copiously off a song that was, in virtually every respect, a character assassination of her. “You’ll toss around and call my name…. You’ll walk the floor the way I do” were prophecies truer than Hank could ever have hoped or imagined. Perhaps unable to come to terms with the implications of the song, Audrey eventually tried to believe that Hank had written it about himself. “You or no one else would ever believe this,” she said late in life, setting up her listeners for the required leap of faith. “Hank wrote [’Your Cheatin’ Heart’] immediately after he and I had just separated, and he wrote [the] song about himself, hoping that I would think that he thought I might have been cheating.”
“Kaw-Liga” needed a drummer, so Fred Rose brought in a big band musician, Farris Coursey, who’d played brushes on “Moanin’ the Blues.” Drummers were still prohibited on the Opry stage, but Coursey was the drummer in WSM’s dance band, and provided the Indian war-dance rhythm that Rose wanted. At the close, “Kaw-Liga” was faded — the first and only Hank Williams recording to end in a fade, now the industry norm. The lesson of “Jambalaya” had been that a novelty song with a faintly ethnic twist was a hot prospect, and that’s what Hank and Fred Rose had crafted on “Kaw-Liga.” Hank left the session with an acetate of the song, and when he played it for people he told them that it would be his biggest record yet. No one doubted him.
The first song from the September 23 session to hit the stores was “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.” Rose slotted it onto the flip side of “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” for November 21 release. After Frank Walker got the session tapes, he distributed the songs among his pop acts. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” went to Joni James, “Kaw-Liga” to Bill Farrell, and “Take These Chains from My Heart” to Tommy Edwards. After Mitch Miller got advance acetates from Fred Rose, he gave “Your Cheatin’ Heart” to Frankie Laine. Both Laine’s and Joni James’ version cracked the pop top ten in 1953. Dolores Gray’s Decca recording of “Kaw-Liga” got up to number twenty-three on the pop charts in May 1953.
Two days after the session, Billie Jean finally filed for divorce from Harrison Eshliman, then accompanied Hank on a tour of Georgia and South Carolina with her old flame, Faron Young, on the bill. Generally, though, Oscar Davis booked short tours with Hayride acts. The Hayride still didn’t have anything comparable to the Opry ‘s Artist Service Bureau, but that was just as well because the Hayride would have done what the Opry had done: flung Hank from coast to coast, using him as a standard bearer for the show. Fred Rose was clearly hoping that the shock of being exiled from Nashville together with the less demanding schedule would be sufficient to make Hank shape up. The thought also probably occured to him that if Hank screwed up, it would be in front of only a few hundred people somewhere in eastern Texas.
As it was, the biggest show that Hank played after he returned to the Hayride was his own wedding. Oscar Davis came up with the notion of a public pay-per-view marriage in New Orleans on Sunday, October 19. “We had most of our meetings at a saloon in Bossier City,” Davis recalled during 1975 trial testimony. “No one had any money, and they were worried about what they would do for money. I suggested a public wedding onstage in New Orleans, and I made arrangements with Ed Pender-grass at WBOK.” Davis presold tickets at prices ranging from $1.00 to $2.80. Around fourteen thousand people would see Hank married at the Municipal Auditorium at a three o’clock “rehearsal” and again at seven. It appears as though no one from Nashville was invited, except Audrey. If Lilly was invited, she didn’t attend.
The last unresolved item of business from Nashville was an exgirlfriend now six months pregnant. During the week before the wedding, Billie Jean went to New Orleans to do advance publicity for the wedding. Hank worked show dates in and around Oklahoma City on October 13 and 14, and then, on October 15, flew back to Montgomery to sign a document that provided for Bobbie Jett and her child. In the first sentence of the agreement, it was stated that “Hank Williams may be the father of said child,” and the document went on to note that Hank would provide for Bobbie Jett’s room and board in Montgomery, that he would pay all doctor bills and hospital bills, and that, thirty days after the birth of the child, he would provide a one-way plane ticket from Montgomery to anywhere in California that Bobbie designated.
The child was to be placed in the care of Lilly and Bill Stone for two years, and during that time Hank was to pay for a nurse. The agreement then stated that “both the father [and here Hank was referred to as the father, not the possible father], Hank Williams, and Bobbie Jett shall have the right to visit said child.” Then, beginning on the child’s third birthday, Hank was to assume custody of the child until his or her fifth birthday. At that point, custody was to be shared; Hank would have custody during school months, and Bobbie Jett would have custody during the summer. On two other instances in the agreement, Hank was referred to as the father, although, contradictorily, the agreement concluded with the notation that the “paternity of said child is in doubt” and emphasized that paternity was not to be construed as admitted by the fact that Hank had entered into the agreement. It strains credibility though, to believe that Hank would have entered into such complex custody arrangements for a child he did not truly believe to be his own.
For her part, Billie Jean contends that Hank signed the agreement partly at the urging of his mother and partly to get Bobbie Jett off their backs. “Every gig he played, she’d pop up,” she said. “Here she is fixing to drop somebody’s kid.” Billie also contends that Hank was incapable of siring a child in March or April when Bobbie Jett’s child was conceived, because when she met him in July he was still incapable of having sex as a result of his operation. “It was on his mind,” she says, “but, as my momma always said, ‘If it can’t get up, it can’t get out.’” But if, as Billie Jean says, Hank was impotent when she met him in July or August, it was probably because of the alcohol and pills he had been taking rather than the operation.
On the trip back to Montgomery, Hank ran into his old bass player, Lum York. Lum was working with Lefty Frizzell and was resting up in town for a few days. Lilly tracked him down at the radio station and tried to get him to change Hank’s mind about marrying Billie Jean. Lum told her he was having no part of it, but she said that as Hank was just around the corner in the barber shop, Lum should go look him up anyway. Lum recalled their conversation:
He was in the chair when I got there, so I went into the little coffee shop near the barber, and he come in and said, “Do you wanna go work for me?” I said, “Hank, how much you gonna pay me?” He said, “I’ll pay you seventy-five a week.” I said, “Hank, I’m making more than that.” He said, “Aw, that’s the way it is with Frizzell and them guys, they want to pay you all they make.” I said, “Well, I’m satisfied where I’m working.” He said, “How ‘bout catchin’ a plane with me and goin’ to Shreveport?” I said, “Naw, I’m staying around here a coupla days.” I never did talk to him ‘bout marryin’ Billie Jean. I figured he was a grown man.
On October 17, two days after signing the agreement with Bobbie Jett, Hank was back in Shreveport. Billie Jean was back from New Orleans and went to court that day with her father. Judge Louis Lyons of Bossier City represented her. Billie was told that her decree would be granted on October 28, some ten days after she planned to marry. Either she didn’t understand the implication of what she was told, or she decided to ignore it. Hank wasn’t with her, and it’s unclear what, if anything, she told him. When the court reconvened on the twenty-eighth, the news of Hank and Billie’s marriage was public, and Judge Bolin asked her attorney, Louis Lyons, if he’d seen the newspaper reports. Lyons said that he hadn’t, and Bolin said that he would grant the decree on the understanding that Lyons would contact Billie Jean, to inform her that she should marry again, as the public marriage was invalid. Lyons said he would probably perform the ceremony himself and collect another fee.
It’s hard to know exactly what Hank was doing on October 17. Billie Jean says that Audrey flew to Shreveport, trying to convince him to return to her by threatening that he would never see their son again. They met in a hotel room, and Hank emerged with a welt on his forehead, the result, says Billie Jean, of Audrey hitting him. A welt is clearly visible in the wedding photos, although its provenance has never been established. In a 1975 trial over copyright renewals, one of Hank’s Hayride costars, Paul Howard, remembered seeing Hank on October 18 and remarking on his scratched-up appearance.
“What tiger bit you?” Howard asked.
“Audrey and my mother has been down here,” Hank replied. “I don’t know what they’re going to do in New Orleans.”
The hours before the ceremony were very tense. Billie Jean had been told that she wasn’t divorced, and now Audrey had thrown an unexpected curve into the plans, telling Hank that she would disrupt the ceremony. Part of the reason Hank had agreed to a public ceremony was to spite her, and that now looked likely to backfire. Hank asked Paul Howard if he knew of a justice of the peace who could marry them before they left for New Orleans. Howard said he could probably arrange it. After the Hayride finished on Saturday, October 18, Hank and Billie drove out to Minden, Louisiana, with Paul and Marie Howard. They arrived around 1:00 a.m. Howard knew a local justice of the peace, P. E. Burton, who was willing to marry them that late and that quickly. Then if Audrey tried to disrupt the ceremony, Hank and Billie could wave a marriage certificate proving that they were already married.
Both Hank and Billie Jean seemed to believe that Audrey was still in town, and took measures to avoid her following them. Billie Jean later testified:
We borrowed my brother’s car, because we were afraid to take Hank’s car because she could have been hanging around outside. My brother’s car was a 1950 Ford, [and he] never put more than a dollar’s worth of gas in it ever, and on the way back we ran out of gas. So Hank got out and started flagging a ride. So here are the witnesses, Mr. and Mrs. Howard, and Hank and myself. He had on a white cowboy uniform made by Nudie in Hollywood. I’d spilled my purse and makeup out on the car seat. My rouge was spilled and Hank sat down in it, and his whole rear end was red. Here he is out hitchhiking late at night. This fellow stopped and we piled in the car. He took us all the way home. Hank asked the fellow to spend the night with us. I said, “You don’t want to do that. Not on our wedding night.” We were already stuck with [Clyde Perdue in a] two-bedroom apartment. The fellow driving the car realized it wasn’t the thing to do.
Oscar Davis had chartered a plane from Shreveport to New Orleans that was due to leave at 7:00 a.m., but it was nearly eight o’clock before it took off. Hank and Billie Jean flew down with one of the Hayride’s upcoming stars, Billy Walker. In testimony twenty years later, Walker remembered that Billie Jean was very agitated on the flight down. He remembered her saying, “What are we going to do if he [the first husband] shows up?” Hank then said, “We’re going to do it until it takes.” Walker might have been confusing two issues under discussion that day. The first was that Billie Jean might have been informed that she could not marry until October 28, leading Hank to say “We’re going to do it until it takes.” And, in all likelihood, it wasn’t the possibility of Billie’s first husband turning up that perturbed Hank and Billie so much as the possibility that Hank’s first wife might show up.
Oscar Davis had arranged for a limousine to meet Hank in New Orleans and for a police escort to take them to the auditorium. Local merchants had donated Billie Jean’s trousseau, as well as furniture and appliances for the new apartment. Hank started drinking as soon as he got to the auditorium. The Minden marriage created a problem when the minister found out about it, and naturally refused to marry a couple who were already married. Oscar Davis scouted around and found the Reverend L. R. Shelton of the First Baptist Church of Algiers to perform the ceremony.
Meanwhile, a convoy of Hayride cast members arrived in New Orleans to perform at the prewedding shows. They had driven down overnight. Hank wasn’t scheduled to sing, but there was a concert featuring Tommy and Goldie Hill, Billy Walker, and some local acts. Just as Walker started to sing his hit of the day, “Anything Your Heart Desires,” Hank came onstage, pulling Billie Jean. Walker stopped cold and looked at him in disbelief. Hank took the microphone and said, “When ol’ Hank comes to git married, he wants to git married.”
There was a white carpet down the aisle, and Billie Jean had arranged for her sisters-in-law to act as bridesmaids. The daughter of a local radio station owner was the flower girl, and the mayor of New Orleans was among the invited guests. It was a three-ring circus — a fitting end to Hank’s association with the old vaudevillian, Oscar Davis. Billie insists that Davis took the lion’s share of the proceeds, although his accounts were later subpoenaed, proving that Hank and Billie Jean shared the proceeds with him.
In an oral history deposition given to the Country Music Foundation, Davis insisted that even on the morning of the ceremony Hank was hoping that Audrey would come and stop it, but the photos tell a different story. They capture a few moments of undeniable tenderness between Hank and his new bride. The marriage was more than an impetuous act to spite Audrey. Billie had the glow of health and beauty that attracted Hank; she also had the fieistiness that simultaneously attracted and repelled him. For his part, Hank had a stray-cat quality that made women want to take him in and nourish him with food and affection, but like most alcoholics, he would soon abuse that love, frustrate it, and ultimately alienate it. Billie Jean looked radiant that day, and Hank indeed looked younger than he had in years, despite his thin- ning hair. He hadn’t left his old problems behind, though. His back hurt terribly, and he self-medicated himself from the crates of champagne that Davis had arranged for the guests backstage. After the wedding, Hank and Billie were supposed to fly to Cuba for their honeymoon, but the backache blues and the champagne got to him and he passed out in his room at the Jung Hotel after his third “I do” in two days.
Hank had put on thirty pounds, something that has usually been ascribed to the edema common in heart disease or drug abuse. Billie Jean, though, is adamant that Hank’s weight gain was due to the fact that he was eating decently for the first time in years. They’d go on squirrel hunts, she says, then skin and eat the squirrels, and Billie’s mother would feed him syrup and biscuits. One of Hank’s Hayride costars, Claude King, remembers Billie Jean trying to take care of Hank. “She’d order for him [in restaurants] and got him to eat more,” he said. “She just looked after him.” Shortly after he arrived in Shreveport, it’s likely that Hank did indeed gain some weight, but in several photos from the last months of his life, he seems unnaturally bloated, and his fellow performers say that some weeks he would be gaunt and other weeks puffy. The systems were starting to break down.
Hank and Billie lived with Billie’s parents for a few days, then moved into a new development at 1346 Shamrock in Bossier City that Sonny Jones was managing for his father-in-law. It was sparsely furnished by the standards of Franklin Road. No carpet, no Oriental furniture, no grotesque paintings, no chandeliers. Hank didn’t appear to mind, and Billie Jean didn’t miss what she’d never had. She made a concerted effort to give Hank much of the affection she felt he’d lacked. She and her brothers also tried to help Hank manage his alcoholism. Quickly and inevitably, disillusion set in, but Hank and Billie Jean had their honeymoon. “He had never been held,” she says. “I knew this. I was wise for my years. I knew I had to be a lover and a mother to him. We wrestled, had picnics. I gave him a childhood. I wouldn’t wear shoes in a hotel lobby. He loved my simplicity. We held hands, and I’d sit on his lap. I wore short-shorts and T-shirts tied up in the front. I was a virgin in a lot of ways.” When Hank saw Paul Howard a few weeks after the wedding, he told him, “Billie is the best thing that ever happened to me. I was way down and she brought me up out of the ditch.” It wasn’t long, though, before Billie Jean began to realize that Hank’s street called straight never ran for more than a few blocks, and that his problems couldn’t be licked.
Sometimes Billie Jean accompanied Hank on the road; sometimes not. Her enthusiasm for the task she had undertaken almost certainly waned as she came to appreciate the nature of Hank’s addictions and the extent of his physical problems. The back pain was always there, robbing him of sleep and peace of mind. Sometimes his legs would buckle underneath him. People thought he was drunk, but his legs would simply give way. It’s hard to know how much Hank understood of what was happening to him. If the doctors at Vanderbilt had given him a bleak prognosis, he wasn’t admitting it to his young wife. Whenever Billie Jean asked him about his back pain he would just say, “Damned ol’ horse threw me, babe,” and dismiss the issue.
It wasn’t until Hank arrived in Shreveport that he began to exhibit the first signs of heart disease. Red Sovine was one to whom Hank complained of chest pains. Just as he was leaving the Hayride in 1949, Hank had installed Sovine as a replacement Syrup Sopper on KWKH, and Sovine was still there when Hank returned. Shortly before the marriage, Hank told him that the chest pains were so bad he sometimes couldn’t sleep and couldn’t get his breath at night. “We were going off to Oklahoma,” says Sovine, “and he put both hands on his chest and he says, ‘It feels like it’s gonna bust, like it’s gonna tear open. I couldn’t hardly breathe last night.’” When Billie and her brothers took Hank to dry out at the North Louisiana Sanatorium on October 31, he complained of chest pains that worsened when he breathed deeply.
The incontinence associated with spina bifida also began to manifest itself. Almost every night Hank would urinate on himself regardless of whether he had been drinking, and even when he was awake he had only marginal control of his bladder. “When he told you he had to go, if you were driving, you had better stop the car,” says Billie Jean. “He’d say, ‘Stop this thing or I’ll flood the sucker.’” He would occasionally defecate on himself, too. At the same time, the combination of pills, alcohol, and general dissipation had rendered him almost impotent. “He was doin’ good if he could get it up,” Billie said.
Nothing in Billie Jean’s life had prepared her for this. Her brothers tried to act as minders, and sometimes worked as Hank’s opening act as well, but as Hank had proved throughout his life, he could outsmart anyone when he really needed a drink. He reacquired a taste for beer, perhaps because it enabled him to take in some alcohol without falling over drunk. Billie tried to keep him from drinking before a show, but on one occasion she remembered coming back to their hotel room after she’d been out shopping, and finding Hank on his hands and knees, digging under a chair. “He jumped up like I was an army sergeant and saluted. He said, ‘Hot damn, baby, I was just lookin’ for my shoes.’ Sonny’s eyes was this big, and I said, ‘You’ve got your damn shoes on, Hank.’ I looked under there, and there was two cases of beer. I took that beer and one by one I opened them and washed ’em down the drain. He said, ‘Baby, just leave ol’ Hank a couple. Just a couple.’”
Billie Jean and her brothers were out of their depth. They didn’t understand the nature and complexity of Hank’s physical disorders, and although they had been around spree drinkers all their lives, they had never been around a serious alcoholic like Hank. Billie tried to bring compassion to the problem, but inevitably it defeated her. “Nobody ever trusted him and left him alone,” she says. “That takes your manhood away. Sometimes you just had to let him do what he wanted to do. [Then] he’d say, ‘Ol’ Hank ain’t never gonna drink no more, baby,’” It was the same promise he had made repeatedly to Audrey, but he was less capable of keeping it now than he ever had been.
Billie knew that Hank was going to drink, and tried to at least keep him sober until show time. “Before a performance, I said, ‘You go out there and put on a good show. You can’t have no beer before the show, but I’ll have two of the coldest ones you ever had waiting on the side of the stage.’ He’d say, ‘Hot damn, boys, let’s pick.’ That sucker, man, he’d put on a good show.” Like every alcoholic, Hank would keep to his deals for a little while, holding out a glimmer of hope to those around him, then he’d dash it. It was a pattern that had frustrated Audrey to the point where she had given up, it had frustrated Lilly for fifteen years, and it quickly frustrated Billie Jean.
Still, there were moments when everything was good. Everywhere they went together, Hank would introduce Billie from the stage. Billie was winsomely shy, but the tenderness and affection apparent in the wedding photos was still there. They went on picnics and drove down to Lafayette to visit Dudley J. LeBlanc. Hank reckoned that LeBlanc still owed him the best part of ten thousand dollars from the Hadacol debacle, so, when he and the senator were out drinking on the lake, Hank stripped LeBlanc’s boat of everything he could take home with him.
Hank’s problems in Shreveport were exacerbated by the one man he saw as his savior. When Hank had gone to Oklahoma City in mid- October, shortly before flying to Montgomery to sign the agreement with Bobbie Jett, he’d worked a show at the Trianon Ballroom with the Hayride cast. That day, he told Red Sovine about his chest pains, then started drinking. The booker called someone who was supposed to be a doctor who specialized in treating alcoholics. His name was Horace Raphol “Toby” Marshall. According to Billie Jean, Hank went to Oklahoma City with three thousand dollars and returned with three hundred. He told her he had spent the rest of the money for “treatment.” He thought he had finally found a medical person who had walked a mile in his shoes.
The treatment that Hank had received from Marshall in Oklahoma City was chloral hydrate, a new drug in Hank’s pharmacopoeia, even though it had been introduced in 1860. It was a powerful sedative (classed at the time as a “hypnotic sedative") and antianxiety drug that had briefly become notorious in Oklahoma City three years earlier when it had been used to sedate a leopard that had gotten loose from the Oklahoma City zoo. Leapy the Leopard had been sighted around town, and some meat laced with chloral hydrate was left for him. Leapy ate it and died soon afterward from a collapsed lung, unable to shake off the effects of the drug. Further evidence of the drug’s potency came from Billie Jean, who later testified that she had taken Hank’s usual dosage, four tablets, one night. “They made me groggy and crazy as a bat,” she said in testimony in 1953. “I vomited for two hours and after that felt as if I was in a drunken stupor.”
Chloral hydrate was a harmful, potentially lethal, drug when combined with any central nervous system depressant, such as alcohol. It was, in fact, the drug customarily used for making Mickey Finns. The combination of chloral hydrate and alcohol had been the means by which British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti had offed himself in 1882. Chloral hydrate was not to be prescribed for anyone with heart disease, which Hank now had, and it was strictly advised not to exceed the stated dose, which Hank always did. Various manufacturers produced the drug under different names and specified that a warning be placed on the bottle saying “Overdosage May Be Fatal.” If the drug didn’t produce a calming or sedative effect, patients were specifically warned not to take more. If Hank was searching for something that would numb every part of his body — perhaps for good — chloral hydrate was it.
Toby Marshall remains a shadowy figure despite the recent discovery of correspondence and an unpublished manuscript. “I think you better list me for the record as a pathological, constitutional liar,” he said at one of his trials. Even his date of birth has never been established. The date he gave to the prison system, March 20, 1910, has been questioned. Marshall’s first taste of life behind bars came in 1938, when he spent one year in San Quentin for armed robbery. After release, he became by his own admission an alcoholic. He had drinks stashed in all corners of his house and would drink on the way home from work, he said. In what he called an act of desperation, he offered himself up as a guinea pig to a Yale University study of alcoholism, and claimed to be on his way there when he got into a card game in Miami, Oklahoma, lost all his money, and was arrested for passing a forged check for five hundred dollars. He entered McAlester Penitentiary in what he called “an alcoholic-barbiturate-Seconal-bromide haze interposed with flashes of hallucinations,” a self-diagnosis that Hank could relate to even if he didn’t understand it.
Marshall was jailed on October 15, 1950, and paroled on October 8, 1951. After his release, he told a 1953 inquiry that he devoted himself “as unselfishly as possible to helping others as I could.” Armed with a diploma from the “Chicago University of Applied Sciences and Arts,” which he had bought from a traveling salesman at a filling station for a fee variously reported at twenty-five or thirty-five dollars, Marshall set himself up as a therapist for alcoholics. At first, he prescribed drugs through a qualified physician, C. W. Lemon, and when Lemon was asked in March 1953 what had brought him to Marshall, he replied simply, “I got drunk.” Later, with a forged certificate from a board of medical examiners, Marshall had some prescription pads of his own printed up. Marshall, though, was not without insight into the needs of an alcoholic. “A drunk,” he said in jail, “as anyone knows, is most disagreeable to live with. Most wives won’t do it. I made myself available to families who needed me, and often spent twenty-four to thirty-six hours at a time giving the alcoholic the attention that his family wouldn’t. I’d sit there beside his bed, in a hotel room or at home, for hours. I’d be there when he woke, and I’d talk with him. I’d show him he was wanted.” This was the best news Hank Williams had received from the medical profession. Most of the doctors he had seen couldn’t approach his alcoholism with anything like the empathy that Marshall could. The only recovered alcoholic Hank knew well was Fred Rose, and Hank couldn’t find the strength that Rose had drawn from religion. Marshall offered sympathy, compassion, and hope of a cure. Hank engaged him as his personal physician at three hundred dollars a week, yet another expense that necessitated constant touring.
Hank might have hoped for a fresh start in Shreveport, but the old patterns soon reappeared. When he was sober, he was riveting onstage; when drunk, he was boorish and occasionally lucky not to be lynched. He even turned up drunk for some of the Hayride shows. Horace Logan would announce him, and Hank would stand in the wings shaking his head, denying that he was Hank Williams. On a bus ride to a Hayride remote show in Brownwood, Texas, he wore out his welcome. “He decided he’d sing,” said Logan. “Kitty Wells was there, my wife was there, the Rowley Trio and other women, and Hank was singing,
The dirty drawers that Maggie wore
They was torn and they was split
You could see where she had shit.
“I said, ‘Hank, shut up!’ He’d apologize later.”
In November, Hank headlined a package show composed of Claude King, Tommy Hill, Goldie Hill, and Red Sovine. Billie Jean went with them, and Hank introduced her as his new bride at every show. He had his guitar beside him in the touring sedan, and would sing for hour upon hour, then sing some more in the dressing room. “One night,” said Claude King, “we had an off night. I think it was in Beaumont. We’d stopped at some little place to get a drink and he wanted to get a beer. There was a guy in there playing a piano and singing, so we spent the whole night there. Hank singing, playing the piano, and singing with this guy. There wasn’t anybody in there when we first stopped by, but when we left it was packed. I guess word got out Hank Williams was there.” In diners along the way, he’d punch up Tommy Edwards’ record of “You Win Again” on the jukebox and play it repeatedly. When he had a little audience backstage, he’d talk about how Bob Hope couldn’t follow him on the Hadacol Caravan.
The best dates that Clyde Perdue could get were now in smaller towns like Homer, Louisiana, and Orange, Texas. “He’d start a trip,” said Claude King, “and he’d say, ‘I ain’t gonna drink a drop,’ then his back would get worse and worse and he’d get right back into the drinking. He and I were the same age exactly, yet to me he was an old man.” (When Tillman Franks managed Claude King in the 1960s, he knocked ten years off King’s age, telling fan magazines that he was born in 1933; in fact, King was seven months older than Hank.)
In Opelousas, Louisiana, everyone in the audience demanded their money back after Hank showed up drunk, and when light broke the following morning, there was a crowd around the hotel. Claude King went and brought Hank’s Cadillac round to a trade entrance, intending to make a dash for the county line. Hank needed a cigarette, though, and walked blithely out of the hotel carrying his valise. He saw the crowd and sat down on the sidewalk in his white western suit. He opened the case and dollar bills started blowing in the wind. Everybody started laughing, picking up the money, and Hank left promising to come back and do a make-good.
On another night in Lafayette, Hank weaved up to the microphone. “You all paid to see ol’ Hank, didn’t ya?” he said. The crowd started roaring. Hank set down his guitar, said, “Well, you seen him.” And he walked off. Perhaps his attitude stemmed in part from the fact that he had records in the top ten, yet he was playing the high school gym in Lafayette, the type of gig he had worked so hard to escape. The interceding four years had ruined his health and wrecked his marriage, and now he was broke and back where he’d started. Money mattered most to Hank because it betokened success, and now, when he stuffed the takings into his valise at the close of a show, he knew it contained a fraction of what it did a year earlier.
Claude King’s record “She Knows Why” had just been released by Los Angeles–based Specialty Records. Hank liked Claude and told him that he wanted to change it to “You Know Why” and record it at his next session. Specialty was an R&B label started by Art Rupe, who’d been one of the partners in Sterling Records. Hank called Rupe from somewhere on the road, offering ten thousand dollars for Claude’s contract, but Rupe told him that he was hanging on to it. “We were going to get coffee one morning,” said Claude. “There’s another guy with us, and we went over and was having a cup of coffee, and I guess Hank just felt like talking. He said he liked my singing and thought that I had a great future in the music business. This other guy said, ‘What about me, Hank?’ Hank said, ‘No, to be honest with you, you need to go back to doing whatever you was doing.’ And this guy was Tommy Hill.” Hank was dead right. Claude King was a natural singer, even though it would take another ten years before he topped the charts with “Wolverton Mountain.” Tommy Hill made several more records (a couple of them for Fred Rose’s Hickory Records) but eventually became a songwriter, producer, and record label owner.
The tour ended badly. Hank’s back hurt terribly. Claude King remembers:
I was driving, and he was down on the floorboard in the back. Billie Jean was in the backseat and he was down on the floorboard and he was crying, his back was hurting him so bad. He wanted me to drive faster, to try to hurry up and get to Shreveport. It was nighttime, and we was going along pretty fast and all of a sudden we came over this hill, and there was a whole herd of cows going across the highway. I couldn’t stop, but kind of zigzagged amongst them and didn’t hit any of them. It still didn’t faze him. He wanted to get back to the doctor ’cause his back was killing him.
In late November, Hank made a tour of Florida and Georgia for A. V. Bamford, then worked some dates in Georgia. Bamford assembled the supporting cast, which included Ray Edenton, later the premier rhythm guitarist in Nashville, and Radio Dot and Smokey (Swan). The trip had a rough start. Hank and Billie flew to Pensacola on a chartered airplane piloted by James Hutchins of Perry Sanders Aircraft. Hutchins later testified that Billie Jean told Hank that she was pregnant. Hank was overjoyed and vowed to remain sober. As he and Billie flew over the Gulf of Mexico, Hank took the controls for a while, but the plane began running low on fuel while they were still over water. It was touch and go whether they would make it to Pensacola, and Billie panicked. The next morning in the hotel, she awoke in a pool of blood. She had either miscarried or the shock had started her period. Hank was sent out to buy Kotex, but he stopped off in the hotel bar and it was several hours before he reappeared.
On Tuesday, November 18, Hank visited his sister Irene in Jacksonville. As he left, Irene says she was convinced that she would never see her brother again. If that was indeed her premonition, it was correct.
Hank was more or less sober for the entire trip, and talking positively, but during a 1975 trial, Hank’s cousin Marie Glenn mentioned that Hank had a heart attack in Florida. As usual, she didn’t elaborate. Bamford also remembered Hank complaining of chest pains, but was sufficiently encouraged by his performance to offer him two engagements, New Year’s Eve in Charleston, West Virginia, and New Year’s Day in Canton, Ohio. Hank accepted.
Later on that road trip, Hank took Billie Jean to see Pappy McCormick in Pensacola. They went out to the Diamond Horseshoe; Pappy Neal played steel guitar, Hank sang a few songs — and got jealous when he saw Billie Jean with another man on the dance floor. That night, Hank and Billie stayed at the San Carlos Hotel, where Hank had holed up ten years earlier when he was drinking and trying to escape from Lilly. Memories were everywhere. He asked McCormick to come to Shreveport to lead his band in January; it was an almost blanket invitation he extended to his old pals. McCormick said he would.
The Nashville deejays convention was on Friday, November 21, and Hank was scheduled to attend, but it’s unclear if he did. Two days later, he was in Montgomery with Billie Jean and Sonny Jones. It was, in all likelihood, the first time that Billie had met her new mother-in-law, and the occasion did not go well. Lilly had already bought an adjoining house and converted it into a rooming house, and was now asking Hank for money to buy yet another house. Billie Jean says that she vetoed the deal, thereby earning Lilly’s undying enmity. Wesley Rose later said that he and his father drove to Montgomery to meet Hank and prepare for another recording session. Wesley insists that Fred told Hank that he would be back on the Opry in February, but there is no corroboration of this. Back in Shreveport, Hank went on a tear, and was committed once again to the North Louisiana Sanatorium.
The early days of December 1952 remain a blank. Perhaps Hank was still in the sanatorium; perhaps he worked a short tour. On Saturday, December 6, he worked the Big D Jamboree in Dallas, then played a few dates along the Mississippi gulf. Back in Shreveport on December 10, he had a big fight with Billie Jean. She took him back to the North Louisiana Sanatorium on December 11, but he got out early in the afternoon and found his way downtown and resumed his binge. At 4:30, he was arrested after a complaint from a restaurant owner about a “drunk in front of my place.” The arresting officer said that Hank had insisted that he shouldn’t have to go to jail, but he was hauled off on charges of being drunk and disorderly. He was dressed that afternoon in a blue serge suit and a green hat with a big feather, and he was carrying a .38 revolver. Billie Jean and Sonny came to get him out of jail at 9:45 in the evening and took him back to the North Louisiana Sanatorium.
Two days later, December 13, Hank played the Louisiana Hayride. Right after the show, he and his personal retinue, together with Tommy and Goldie Hill and Billy Walker, started out for Houston to begin a one-week swing through eastern Texas. Hank had hired a cowboy singer, Al Rogers, to work the first few dates with him, and Charlie Adams, who recorded for 4-Star Records, was scheduled to work a few dates. Billie Jean had probably had enough Hank Williams for a while, and opted to stay home.
Hank was due to play Cook’s Hoedown club on Sunday night. Tommy and Goldie Hill were going on to San Antonio and arranged to drop Hank at the Rice Hotel. On the way down, they heard a strange groan from the back and they saw Hank slumped forward, his head between his legs. He had stopped breathing. “He turned black,” said Tommy. “Goldie hollered at me, ‘Hank can’t get his breath.’ He was just smothering himself. Goldie was just screaming. I stopped the car, pulled him out, and started hauling him around on my shoulders. We got to Houston about daylight Sunday. I pulled into the Rice Hotel, asked for four porters and a stretcher, and got Hank up to his room. He wouldn’t go to no doctor.” Toby Marshall wrote a letter to Lilly from the Rice Hotel detailing Hank’s condition. Lilly was sufficiently concerned to fly to Texas to meet the tour in San Antonio.
Cook’s Hoedown was sold out by Sunday night, but Hank was nowhere to be seen. Around five in the afternoon, Cook phoned the booker, Warren Stark, in Austin and told him to get his ass down to Houston and find Hank. Stark told Cook that he couldn’t get down to Houston in time to find Hank, but they should check the jail, then the hotels. They eventually found Hank at the Rice, got some of Toby Marshall’s shots in him, and hauled him onstage.
Sergeant F. D. McMurry, who had booked Hank into the police benefit show in Beaumont at the end of September, was in the audience. “They booed him off,” said McMurry. “I met him backstage. He said, ‘Man, they’re killin’ me, they killin’ me. They’re workin’ me to death.’ He was all hopped up on those durn things. I said, ‘Hank, they booed you offstage. Let’s get you straight.’ I put four cups of coffee in him, and he tried it again and they booed him off again. It just broke my heart.” According to Marshall, Hank played two of his three scheduled sets. Some distant cousins of Hank’s were there that night. He was suffering ungodly back pain, they said, and drinking heavily. They tried to get him to rest up at their house, but he insisted that he had to carry on. Hank called Billie Jean and told her that he had never been sicker. Marshall was giving him shots every hour, she said.
Tommy Hill saw the lethal combination of barbiturates and alcohol with which Hank was dosing himself. He also saw how Perdue and Marshall had worked out a procedure that would enable their meal ticket to make the show, but at a terrible cost. Hank was allowed a few beers after he woke up, then Marshall injected him with a drug that made him vomit up the beer. Then they would pour black coffee down him, hand him some Dexedrine tablets and point him toward the stage. After the show, he’d be allowed some more beers and put back to bed with some downers.
Hank was scheduled to work in Victoria on Monday, San Antonio on Tuesday, Dallas on Wednesday, Snook on Thursday, and Austin on Friday. On Monday, he overdosed or had a heart attack, and couldn’t make the show in Victoria. Marshall noted only that he was “too goofed up” to perform, so the troupe moved on to San Antonio. Hank called Big Bill Lister’s house, but Big Bill was out working a show date. He then called Ernest Tubb, although Tubb never mentioned the substance of their talk. Still in a mood to talk, he called Jimmie Rodgers’ widow, Carrie, who lived nearby, and poured his heart out to her. He said his “last marriage” (presumably to Billie Jean) hadn’t worked out, and he said, “Mrs. Rodgers, I’d like to be one of your boys.” He told her that he’d come out to see her the next day, but never called back. Writing to Ernest Tubb a few weeks later, Mrs. Rodgers said, “The circumstances were so similar to Jimmie in many ways.” Tubb had been one of her “boys,” in that she’d taken a deep, unselfish interest in his career. Perhaps Hank felt in need of that kind of mentor.
To ease the strain on his back, Hank arranged to fly into Dallas with Toby Marshall while Clyde Perdue stayed behind to pick up Lilly. Shortly before they landed, Marshall told Hank that Lilly was joining them, and said later that Hank was very unhappy about it. The Wednesday night show in Dallas was scheduled for the Sportatorium. Hank ran into Ray Price on the street outside the stadium. Price’s version of “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” was showing up in several markets, and Hank started singing it as he walked toward him. Price invited Hank to spend Christmas with himself and his mother, but Hank said he wasn’t certain what he was doing. They agreed to meet in Ohio right after their New Year’s dates. Whenever he met someone in the business, particu- larly someone from Nashville, Hank tried to be upbeat. “I’ll be back with you before you know it,” he told Price. After the show at the Sportatorium, Hank, Toby Marshall, and Warren Stark went out to see Bob Wills play. That day, Hank received an Air Express package from Acuff-Rose with a check for four thousand dollars.
Hank and Warren Stark drove from Dallas to Austin, then Stark drove Hank to his Thursday night gig at a small theater in Snook, Texas. Marshall said that Hank “did okay” in both Dallas and Snook. The last date on the tour was on Friday, December 19, at Stark’s Skyline Club in Austin. Lilly sat with Stark during the show and asked him to take over Hank’s bookings after Christmas. Stark said he would. On the drive to Snook, Stark had been griping to Hank about showing up drunk, and Hank had told him what he told everyone else. People hadn’t come to see him, he said — knowing it to be false. The crowd had just showed up for a night out, and if anyone wanted their money back they should get it back and he’d make it good to the promoter. Stark told him he couldn’t do business like that.
Hank had first appeared at the Skyline as a young Hayride hopeful. Horace Logan had called in a few favors to get him on the bill. Four years later, he was a pitiful sight. He was disheveled, his nose ran constantly from a cold or flu he couldn’t shake, and he was sweating profusely. He’d lost all pride in his appearance, and, from what was unsaid as much as what was said, he gave the impression that he simply didn’t care anymore.
His show was no sad last hurrah, though. Without much advertising, the Starks had sold out the date, then oversold it. Usually, the Skyline’s maximum capacity was around eight hundred, but people were lining the walls and the Starks were hoping that the fire marshal wasn’t one of them. Tommy Hill remembered the show vividly:
I went out and did a fiddle tune, then I brought Charlie Adams on, and Charlie did two tunes and Hank asked me to get him off. I didn’t know why. He said, “It’s time to get Goldie on.” I put Goldie on, and he just wanted Goldie to sing two songs, and then I brought Billy Walker out, and Billy did four songs, then Hank said he wanted him off. Then Hank wanted to go on. The show started at eight o’clock, so now it was about nine, and Hank would usually do thirty or forty-five minutes, but that night he was still singing at one o’clock. He did not quit. He put on one of the best shows I ever saw. He didn’t falter a bit. He done some songs over and over. Me and Goldie have talked about it since. He sung everything he knew, even a bunch of gospel songs.
Hank did two sets, backed by Tommy Hill, steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and the Skyline house band led by Leon Carter, a distant relative of the Carter Family. After the first set, Hank went back into the office to get some shots, then did another set. He was running a high temperature; sweat was running off his fingers onto the floor. Right after the show, refusing to check into a hotel, he began the long haul back to Shreveport. Paul Howard’s wife, Marie, remembered that immediately after arriving back in Shreveport Hank went to the Highland Hospital to be treated for pneumonia.
On Saturday morning, Lilly went to see Horace Logan and told him that Hank was missing the Hayride that night because he was sick and she was taking him back to Montgomery. “I never gave him a release,” insists Logan, “because he had a three-year contract, but I gave him a leave of absence on the proviso that he would only make [the] personal appearances that A. V. Bamford had booked for him. Hank also agreed to fly in for the Hayride, because I was paying him two hundred a week, and he could afford to fly in on that easy — and bring Billie Jean with him.” Later in court testimony, Logan said, “He was ill. Very obviously physically ill. I gave him indefinite leave.”
Once again, it’s hard to know if Hank saw his departure from the Hayride in exactly the same terms as Logan. As he and Billie packed their belongings, closed out their apartment, and got in the car, they left contradictory messages behind. Hank told Billy Walker that he was going to the Caribbean to take a cure, and that he was going to divorce Billie Jean, go back to Nashville and bring Billy with him. But if Hank had intended to split from Billie Jean, he had an ideal opportunity when he went to Montgomery; as it was, she went with him. On the other hand, Hank had left Austin telling Warren Stark that he would be back in Shreveport and that Stark would act as his booking agent.
In truth, Hank probably didn’t have a concerted plan of action. He was running out of goals faster than he was running out of future.