When Hank had conquered the Grand Ole Opry, his future in Nashville seemed assured. This was something he must have believed when he opened an envelope from Rose early in 1950 and saw a check for over $10,000, just one installment of a yearly total of over $15,000 from MGM and $8,000 from Acuff-Rose, and that might have been severely clipped from what he actually had earned—which, Variety noted, was something around $65,000.If so, both Walker and Rose had found all sorts of ways to stiff him on “expenses” and deductions for studio time and records that were returned by store owners. Even though Hank would clear almost $20,000 more in royalties in 1950, he likely never made nearly what he was owed.
Beyond simple exploitation of artists, a related matter was that MGM had taken a loss on its pressing plant in New Jersey after it began cutting the smaller 7-inch, vinyl 45 RPM records, following the trend set by RCA of releasing lightweight disks that would take the place of seven or eight bulky 78s.1 MGM hastened to release Hank product for the first time on 45, and as the record houses scrambled to make the transition with all their artists, jukeboxes would switch over to the 45 format in ’50. Once the transition was under way, it was far more expensive to operate this new equipment. MGM needed to massage the bottom line any way it could.
Meanwhile, early in the year, Hank had sold the Shreveport house at a profit, putting another ten grand in his pocket, and the Opry assigned him a business manager, Sam Hunt, an executive with Nashville’s Third Avenue Bank. Hank, though, would not agree to have any of his stash tied up and out of immediate reach. He toted sacks of bills to the bank for deposit himself. He would pile them up at the window. The teller would ask how much it was. “How the hell do I know?” he’d say. “My job is to make it. Your job is to count it.”2
Lycrecia Williams recalled one breakfast when Hank and Audrey began talking about cars. Audrey had gotten in her head that she wanted a gold convertible.
“You don’t need a convertible,” Hank said. “You’re a married woman and don’t have any business with a convertible.”
“I don’t care,” she told him. “I want a convertible and that’s what I’m going to get.”3
Not only did Audrey get what she wanted—a canary yellow Cadillac drop-top—he came home with one of those for himself, in emerald green.
He was apt to leave ten-, twenty-, even fifty-dollar tips on meals that cost a fraction of that. Or drop a C-note into a hotel clerk or bellhop’s hand. They would usually begin to make change for him, but he stopped them. “You need it more than I do,” he’d say.
• • •
“Why Don’t You Love Me” promptly became Hank’s third No. 1 in the early summer of 1950. By then, his whirlwind tours had touched down all over the map, logging thousands of miles with the Drifting Cowboys, lurching from Kansas City to a Southern tour with stops in Jackson, Mississippi, where he did a brief turn on a radio show on WSLI, Mobile, and Pensacola, then back out to Springfield, Missouri, and into Chicago to sing at the important Jukebox Operators Convention.
At the latter, he was photographed for the cover of the March 25, 1950, Billboard grinning in the middle of a group of faceless industry suits suddenly eager to “glad-hand” him, as the caption read. In the group were six regional MGM “reps,” the association’s lawyer, and, hardly by coincidence, Fred Rose (“ ‘pubber’ of Williams’ songs”) and Oscar Davis. Hank then doubled back to Florence, Alabama, and then made for Nashville, for a job only a performer as elevated as he was could have made a reality—a session not for him but for Audrey.
This had been one of her long-held goals, and Hank, who placated her at almost every turn for the sake of holding the fragile marriage together, had Rose work on it. Frank Walker was out, having made it emphatically clear he wanted no part of Audrey on his label beyond the few duets with Hank, and shooting down her contention that Hank had implicitly signed with MGM as a team. And so Fred, as he had done with Hank in the beginning, called around. Paul Cohen, the A&R boss at Decca, who had passed on Hank, but now, like many of his peers, fancied a scenario that would one day bring him to his label. If the price for that was giving Audrey a one-off deal, with perhaps some spillover of the Williams brand leading to some sales, he could live with that.
On March 28, 1950, Decca reserved time for her at Castle Studios, and she recorded four sides, two written with wishful thinking by Hank—“Help Me Understand,” “How Can You Refuse Him Now”—and two by Audrey alone, the less seriously themed “Model T Love” and “Tight Wad Daddy.” On April Fool’s Day she cut three more, her cover of “Honky Tonkin’” and two others of hers, “I Like That Kind” and “Who Put the Pep in Grandma?,” the last a novelty about Hadacol, its hook a repetition of the product’s name.
MGM went out with “Help Me Understand” / “How Can You Refuse Him Now” in April billed as “Audrey Williams Singing with String Band.” Nothing much was expected of them given her strained voice that was rarely on key but she was smart, not trying to be technically sound but engaging. While Hank couldn’t sing on another label’s product, he could pitch it on the radio, guaranteeing sales, but more importantly giving Audrey a fix of solo stardom that hopefully would suffice. And Rose helpfully timed the release of two more Hank-Audrey duets, “Jesus Remembered Me” and “I Heard My Mother Praying for Me,” in the fall. Audrey must have been in hog heaven. But none of this calmed the turbulent sea of the marriage. Indeed, Audrey became more annoyed when Hank would punish or reward her based on whether things were going well or not. On her part, Hank’s drinking always set her off; she saw it more than ever in terms of wrecking not only his career but hers.
When Hank got home from a tour that same April, Audrey, having been told that he’d been drinking, locked the door to the house and wouldn’t open it for him. She told him to go to a hotel and sleep it off, and he checked into the Tulane, collapsing into bed with a lit cigarette in his hand. He blacked out, and the next thing anyone knew, the room was in flames. The fire department put out the fire and pulled him out of the room, unscathed, but cops arrested him for causing the blaze, and he spent the night drying out in a jail cell.4 Sam Hunt had to write a fat check to the Tulane to cover the damages, but Hank had cheated death, and not for the first or last time. Sprung from jail, he went right back to his out-of-control life, the details of which were kept from the public—nothing of the arrest was in the papers, and he would continue to be portrayed as a fine family man with a loving wife. Those who knew better must have laughed out loud at that. Or cried.
• • •
He was back at Castle on June 14—three days before “Why Don’t You Love Me” hit No. 1—with three of his favored sidemen, Sammy Pruett on lead guitar, Don Helms on steel guitar, and Jerry Rivers on fiddle, along with Jack Shook on rhythm guitar and Ernie Newton on bass. He cut Leon Payne’s “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” an extraordinary plaint of guilt and regret about having done his woman wrong. The song was so visceral, his voice such a throbbing wound, that Rose used it as the B-side of the next single, “Why Should We Try Anymore?,” which went out in August 1950 and topped out at No. 9 on the country chart, before the jocks turned the record over and “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me” went to No. 5.
Behind the scenes, however, there were serious rumblings at the Opry about how much more Hank they could put up with. Oscar Davis had had enough of putting out the figurative and literal fires Hank started wherever he went; the last rip was when Hank demanded a higher personal appearance fee on the Opry tours, for which he had to take much less than on his own tours. To make matters worse, he had one of those dustups on the road that the Opry always prayed wouldn’t get in the way.
It was on, of all days, July 4 when Hank and the Drifting Cowboys were the headline act at the Watermelon Festival in DeLeon, Texas, near Fort Worth. Hank was in no shape to go on. He arrived in a stretch limo, remaining in the back seat when a guy who said he was Hank’s road manager got out and informed the promoter, W. B. Nowlin, who also happened to be the mayor of the town, that Hank was too ill to perform. Nowlin, who had a full house of people sitting on the grass waiting for Hank, did not take the news well. He called in the chief of police, who proceeded to handcuff the road manager and had two cops pull Hank from the car and carry him onto the stage. As they held him upright, Nowlin told the crowd, “Hank Williams’ manager says Hank Williams is too sick to perform, but if you were standing as close to him as I am you would know what he’s sick from.”5
As he spoke, Hank sagged almost down to his knees, but if Nowlin hoped he could shame Hank into going on, he was wrong. When the cops let him go, he stumbled off the stage and back into the limo, which drove off, leaving Nowlin to refund several thousand folks, and to dun Davis for every dime of it. If this was exactly the kind of behavior that made people wary of Hank, he didn’t give a damn about his bad reputation, and never would. Hank had resolved not to sell his soul to the Opry and soon believed he might not even need that gig anymore, and that they needed him more than he did them. Moreover, Hank was too big for the Opry booking agency anyway. An item in Billboard announced that the Jolly Joyce Agency of Philadelphia had booked Hank and the Drifting Cowboys for an October 27 appearance at the Mutual Arena in Toronto.
Indeed, the Opry had to accept that Hank replaced Davis with any number of “road managers” he’d find in local bars. For a time he made Jerry Rivers his “general manager,” and for other bookings hired A. V. “Bam” Bamford, a Cuban businessman who in the 1930s sank his money into several Southern radio stations, helping to establish country on the airwaves. Bamford was also a tireless promoter of himself and country artists who performed on his stations and at state fair concerts he booked, such as Hank in the Shreveport days. In fact, Bamford was yet another who would claim it was he who convinced the Grand Ole Opry barons to sign Hank. Bamford, too, migrated to Nashville in the late ’40s; he was not affiliated with the Opry, yet was given the authority to book Hank on tours with Opry stars, doing so immediately by grouping Hank with Minnie Pearl and Ernest Tubb on another swing through Texas and the Deep South.
Neither did Bamford shy away from demanding a higher percentage for Hank, whose power surely did seem to transcend that of the Opry. The old vows to keep dry were almost laughable, with the Opry impotent to do a thing about it. No one had ever made those arrogant Nashville cutthroats crawl like Hank, and they would make sure no one ever would again. As he continued gaining elevation, characters shady and otherwise filtered through his life. One of the more intriguing was an erstwhile ex-Chicagoan, Jack Rubenstein—who went by the name Jack Ruby. He managed a Dallas nightclub called the Silver Spur and had reputed mob ties, but Hank had become tight with him and committed to playing a gig at the Silver Spur.
Hank flew to Dallas in Henry Cannon’s plane, but as the gig neared, he was either too sloshed to go on or perhaps just wanted to stay incognito, the better to keep the gig from the boys in Nashville. Jerry Rivers would later tell of seeing Hank getting into the elevator at the Hotel Adolphus, where he was not registered, wearing a white cowboy hat and dark glasses wrapped around his face, obviously trying to keep from being recognized.
“Hey, isn’t that Hank Williams?” Rivers asked a bellhop.
“Oh, no, sir,” he was told. “That’s Mr. Herman P. Willis, in room 504.”6
Rivers laughed to himself, that being the pseudonym Hank used jokingly, often calling someone by that name to rag on him. Rivers made his way up to the room and found him nearly out cold and not eager to make the gig. But he made it anyway, a wise move indeed, keeping Jack Ruby happy. Hank, of course, would not live to see Ruby leap out of the shadows one November day in 1963 to gun down the alleged killer of a president. All he knew, said Jerry Rivers, was that “Ruby was a good old boy. He was a good man to work for.”7
Rivers also related that at the next stop, in the old stomping grounds of Greenville, Hank was so drunk that frantic calls were made to get Hank Snow to come down from Nashville and sing with the Cowboys, there and also in Little Rock. As his band backed another star, “Herman P. Willis” went back on Henry Cannon’s plane and flew home to Nashville, caring not a whit that he was really starting to push boundaries that could only push back.
In November, meanwhile, Irving Mills’s lawsuit over the writing credit on “Lovesick Blues” had gone to, amazingly enough, Frank Walker for arbitration, Walker’s stolid reputation being such that it overrode any appearance of favoritism to one of his artists. Indeed, Walker played it straight and narrow, ruling that Mills’s name was to be printed on all succeeding copies of the record, and that he would collect every cent of the writing royalties for them. Mills would also split all future publishing royalties with Acuff-Rose. And they were lucrative. By year’s end, Billboard made “Lovesick Blues” the top country and western hit, and “Wedding Bells” was fifth, “Mind Your Own Business” twenty-fourth. It also named Hank the No. 2 Top-Selling Folk (Country and Western) Artist behind Eddy Arnold. The other trade paper, Cash Box, still a bit behind the country curve, named “Lovesick Blues” the Best Hillbilly Song of the Year in a poll of jukebox vendors. In the year-end roundup in Billboard, Hank came in third among the hillbilly singers, behind Arnold and Red Foley, and ahead of Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.
Once, these kind of designations had meant little. Now, country music, thanks in large part to him, had detonated, lending its stars godlike dimensions.
• • •
An odd, brittle sort of god. Hank’s mischievous grin and dimples were trademarks of his youth, but a closer inspection would reveal a man in deterioration. He always looked malnourished, his 150 pounds stretched across his six-foot frame, the booze and all his platters full of ketchup never putting an ounce on it. His skin was sallow, ashen at times, especially when he wore big white cowboy hats that matched his complexion. He would refuse to take off the hat, knowing that his hair was thinning rapidly, a bald spot on the crown of his head widening by the day. His cheeks were hollow, and his lower teeth serrated from yanking too many caps off beer bottles. More ominously, his back now was almost always making him wince, and he would need to sit for long stretches; coming offstage, he sometimes needed to be helped to a dressing room or his car by members of the band. And, to his great dismay, he couldn’t ride Hi Life, the pain of being on horseback intolerable. Lycrecia would take the nag out on a run, to give it some exercise. He was, for all intents and purposes, an old man, in deep pain. And booze and regular pain pills and powders were not going to be enough to take it away.
Little Jimmy Dickens, who with Minnie Pearl was constantly on the road with him, became something like a stand-in Audrey trying to get a helpless Hank into performance condition. Dickens, a shaver of a man who stood barely five feet and was nicknamed “Tater” by Hank, after Dickens’s song “Take an Old Cold Tater,” once recalled that
Mr. Nudie made his clothes, but Hank could wear the most expensive suit and it’d still look like a sack because of the way he put it on. He’d wear a dress tie with a Western suit, which didn’t work, and he’d tie those real old-fashioned long knots. The tie would be off to the side and I’d straighten it up for him because he went out on the stage, but he’d pull it right back over there and say, “You’re too particular.” He figured those old country boys that came to see him would like him the way he was.8
For Hank, the endless rinse and repeat of performing and pocketing big bills was a salve, if even just in his head. But he had other elixirs that rinsed away the boredom and despondency of being out on the long road. Women, of course, were on top of the that menu, and Hank’s way of courting friendships with the police in whatever town he was in had the dividend of being allowed not only to skate on a bar brawl or two or speed through the no speeding signs but also, in effect, to use them as pimps. Early Hank biographer Roger Williams wrote that Hank was so fixated on finding loose women that “he relied on the local cops [working in the arena] for accurate information on [women]. He’d cozy up to an officer, ask him a few questions about his pistol, and then say casually, ‘Know any goin’ women around here?’ More often than not the cop did know some, right on the premises, and Hank would be fixed up for an after-the-show engagement.”9
Williams quoted Nashville songwriter Jimmy Rule saying that among the bulging bags of fan mail that would come into the Opry office was one from a California woman that read: “Please come live with me, I can love you twenty-four hours a day and stand up to it.”10 Still, as sophisticated as the system of solicitation furthered by the men in blue was—and as portentous as it would be for future generations of rock and roll stars who took to similarly “scouting” the house picking out women to invite to postconcert activities—an even less savory dimension of it was that often his taste was for not-yet women, commensurate with Hank’s creed about sex apparently being “old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.”
Not that there weren’t complications. During one swing through California, Hank was said to have fled his motel room in a panic after a fling with a waitress. An unnamed friend of Hank recalled:
All of a sudden, the door flies open and Hank comes out, hoppin’ along with one leg in his trousers, He jumps in the car all excited and says, “Come on, come on, let’s get outta here!” The guy driving figured it was somethin’ good, so he dawdled with the keys. Hank gets even more agitated and shouts, “Hurry up, durn it!”
“What’sa matter, Harm?” we asked him. Well, he wouldn’t say at first. But it turns out that after he’d gotten his, he dozed off, and when he woke up her pussy was right in his face, like she was expectin’ somethin’. That was too much for an old country boy like Hank. He got the hell out of there.11
Still, if Hank didn’t do everything in bed, he did more than a country or city boy could have been called on to do in a lifetime. Which may be why it wasn’t enough to keep him from becoming bored with that, too. Out there on the road, he would go looking not for women or girls but for trinkets of some kind. Often, it would be a gun, or multiples of guns. Jerry Rivers remembered when Hank obsessed on a trip in California on a pair of Colt .45s he’d gotten a tip about. He spent a couple of days locating them and reaching a purchase price. He loved the Colts so much that even when he found out he’d been ripped off—one was a .45 and one a .44—he held on to them, sometimes carrying both of them in his waistband, loaded, making people extremely nervous, especially when he would get loaded himself. It was miraculous that he never fired off any of his guns, nor wound up shooting himself, given how out of control he could get and how obsessed he was with guns, or practically anything with a gun as a motif. He even bought twelve pairs of cufflinks that were mini scale models of a Colt .45.
Nothing, however, could take the place of a good, stiff belt. Although Jimmy Dickens, a major elbow-bender himself, insisted he never saw Hank drunk, “he was very moody [and] his moods were probably related to alcohol. . . . I know what he went through to be an alcoholic, and it’s very, very difficult when you drink as much as I did or he did, not to take that first drink before you go on stage. It becomes a part of what you do.”12 Indeed, it was that first drink that was the problem, the one everybody feared. Because while Hank could go days, even weeks, sober and clear-headed, all it would take was one shot and he was gone. And the problem was that not even Ike Eisenhower’s army could have prevented him from getting to that one shot.
• • •
To Audrey, he was nothing like his confident stage persona. She described him as “extremely nervous before each performance, and each time he went on the stage, it’d take him about three minutes to really relax.” In essence, she said, he was “a loner. Well, it was really shyness and loneliness together.” She would often see him in arenas or clubs sitting off by himself, like a little boy lost.13
That he was still able to crank out songs of great personal meaning and intensity, as well as commercial viability, was downright amazing. He went back in the studio on August 31, 1950, with the same musicians as the last time, but with a notable addition—a drummer, for the first time, Farris Coursey, who not only drummed in Owen Bradley’s band but was Bradley’s business manager. Coursey would soon be the drummer in the Nashville scene, one of a coterie of sidemen known as the “Nashville A Team.” Still, the Opry’s resistance to drumming, and his own methods of having his backup musicians keep a steady beat, made drumming a novelty for Hank. Then, too, as open as he was to trying something new, his mien was basic, unvarnished country blues. Once during a session, when a musician asked Fred Rose if he had played “too country,” Rose, reflecting Hank’s rock-ribbed tastes, said, “It’s never too country.”14
The session at Castle produced another four songs, three written by Hank, “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me,” “Moanin’ the Blues,” and “Help Me Understand.” There was one by Rose—the Cold War curio “No, No, Joe,” the patriotic diss of Joe Stalin that Hank for some reason thought complementary with his Luke the Drifter talking blues litany. “Help Me Understand,” an allegory of a broken family “I once knew” and their daughter “Sue,” left adrift after “one word led to another and the last word led to a divorce,” was the best. But it wasn’t what Rose thought was A material, so the play went to “Moanin’ the Blues,” a literal moan, and a hell of a catchy one. Hank had written it with Jimmy Dickens as a preemptive plea should Audrey up and leave, training his yodel and vocal bathos on his latest tale of woe about “lovin’ that gal for so doggone long, I can’t afford to lose her now.” Rose consciously kept Hank’s colloquial canter by titling the song with the dropped g, stoking the down-home authenticity of the blues feel.
MGM pressed “Moanin’” for an October release, though Hank wasn’t sold on the drum, believing it might be too sharp a sound for his tastes, and would keep the drum off his sessions, save for one of the last songs he recorded, “Kaw-Liga.” Still, on December 2, it was at No. 5, and at the end of 1950, “Moanin’” leapfrogged Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” to put Hank back atop the heap.
• • •
Still, if ever moanin’ the blues seemed the framework of his life, it was now. With spectacular timing, a month before the song came out, in September 1950, Audrey learned she was pregnant. It was an accident, for sure, as close as it was to Randall’s birth and as torn as she was about the marriage; her defenses would always be weakened when he began cooing in her ear, even if all the booze and drugs left him often unable to finish the job. Thus, Hank was overjoyed he had sired another child. Audrey was not nearly as happy about the news.
Mindful of how torturous her last pregnancy was, and seeing how Hank all but ignored the son who would soon become aware of the sins of his alcoholic father, and not wanting another bond to him, she came to the gut-wrenching decision to have an abortion. When Hank went out on the road, she found through underground sources a doctor who would agree to perform a procedure that could put him, and maybe her, in jail for many years at a time when the word “abortion,” like “pregnant,” was almost never used in public. Nothing would ever be known about the identity of the doctor, only that it happened in the Williams home and that after the fetus was aborted, Audrey came down with an infection, likely the result of the abortionist’s utensils not being fully sterilized. Bleeding and with a high fever, she was rushed to St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville.
Hank came off the road as she was recovering, and after being told Audrey was in the hospital, he apparently learned from the doctors, or Audrey herself, what had put her there. He would never really talk about it to the point of saying whether he was livid that, as a God-fearing Christian, he believed she had committed one of the ultimate sins. It’s also possible that, his faith aside, had she told him her intention he might have agreed to pay for her to travel under cover to a better doctor rather than risk her life, avoiding the possibility that whole messy event finding its way into the newspapers. Indeed, that was something they now would need to work hard to prevent; they were able to perpetuate the con in interviews that Audrey had been hospitalized for unspecified but hardly serious reasons, and it only mattered in the context of how it prompted Hank to write his next big song.
This was something Audrey posited in 1973, leaving some details rather vague, saying that she went into the hospital for “some minor little something,” and when Hank showed up at her bedside, he brought a fur coat for her, apparently as a make-good gift after an argument they’d had before he left town. Still steamed at him, she threw the coat on the floor. That night, she said, Hank went home and told Hank Jr.’s nurse, “She’s got the coldest heart I’ve ever seen.” And, proving that not even the most painful of personal matters could turn off his instinct for turning pain into commercial gain, he then went into the den and composed “Cold, Cold Heart.” For Audrey, who took it as a personal affront, it would prompt her to deny the cold heart was hers. “He got so jealous of men, God knows why. I wasn’t doing anything except staying in the background and trying to help him if I could. There were so many stories told. The bigger he got, he always had such a fear of losing me, and I don’t know why. I certainly never gave him any reason.”15
Audrey’s explanations were undeniably self-serving—given what she told Don Helms, Hank had good reason to fear losing her—and that she was well trained to hold to a party line about Hank was evident in the fact that she said this even though Hank had spilled the truth long before.
Audrey, indeed, went right back to the public charade about the marriage, even years later. Neither, too, did Lycrecia Williams mention her mother’s abortion in her memoirs. And Hank on his part preferred taking the high road, never saying a discouraging word about Audrey until he had to, soon enough, by way of self-defense when he was put under oath.
As soon as Audrey’s infection was healed, their shared silence about the abortion notwithstanding, their walk through hell continued. Not even Lillie could get him out from under Audrey’s thumb. Lillie for years had been pecking at him that he had a good-for-nothing wife, that she spent too much of his money, that she dragged him down whenever she got herself into the act, that she had to be steppin’ out on him, that she was the reason he drank. Lillie’s take on the hospitalization was that Audrey had tried to kill herself—and she was crazy enough to try it again if he went on with her, and drag him down with her. To be sure, he didn’t disagree with any of it. He’d tell people on the sly that when he’d come home with a thousand dollars in his pocket, he’d by rote give Audrey half, and then spend the rest of the night listening to her try to get the other five hundred. He also said he’d opened a few bank accounts she knew nothing of, and would run to one of them after a show to sink his cash in it.
Audrey, for her part, opened unlimited charge accounts he knew nothing about until the bills came in to his business manager of the day. She would appear backstage wearing a $1,000 dress with a big A sequined onto the front, flashing her $3,000 diamond ring. During an Opry show she attended at the Ryman, Hank told Jim Denny, “I got a reason for drinkin’ and here she comes up them steps right now.”16 Yet there they stood, still fused together, making more plans to spend, together and separately, each spending what the other didn’t. Never did they look ahead to the next day. That was always a day too far.