Although the California tour was a loud warning signal, Jim Denny went ahead with ambitious plans, with Hank in the middle of them. He booked Opry tours in late April through early May 1952 with a troupe that included Ernie Tubb, the Carter Family, Carl Smith, and Danny Dill. They wound through Texas and veered all the way to Toronto before heading back home for the Opry broadcast. Hank posed no major trouble and in fact seemed to have lightened up after his dark revelations to Minnie Pearl in San Diego, and his protestations of deep regret following the frightful incidents with Audrey and June. He brought Lillie up from Montgomery on Mother’s Day, and a remarkably forgiving Audrey allowed Randall and Lycrecia to spend the day with him. Denny then put together another tour that would alight in perhaps the worst possible venue, given Hank’s parlous mental and physical condition—Las Vegas.
A two-week engagement was booked to begin on May 16, Hank being the only Opry biggie on the bill, no other big star wanting to make the long trip. By the early ’50s, the city of lost wages had grown from an isolated desert oasis for gamblers into a tight coterie of hotels, some rumored to be bankrolled by mobsters, with a steady schedule of performers to entertain the gamblers and tourists between trips to the slot machines and craps tables. The Opry pooh-bahs naturally saw this spigot of excess money and greed as a good bet to extend their own avarice. And though the slogan that best explained the city’s appeal was still decades off, it might well have occurred to Denny and his minions that if they were going to send Hank here, it would be helpful indeed if what happened in Vegas would stay in Vegas.
The show would be in the Last Frontier, built in 1942 around an existing hotel called the Club Pair-O-Dice. The second casino on the Strip, it was popular as a one-stop locale where you could either marry or get a quickie divorce and then gamble. The troupe would play in a lounge called the Ramona Room, as part of a monthlong country gala billed as “Helldorado,” apropos as it turned out. Hank was supposed to fly to Vegas but, coming off a bender, missed the flight. Jerry Rivers and Don Helms, who would be driving out there, were called by a frantic Denny at the last minute and told to pick up Hank and take him with them—and to take every step they could to keep Hank from booze.
As Rivers would recall, Hank “looked like any old derelict you’d see on skid row. He would’ve drunk anything. In fact, Don thinks he tried to drink some anti-freeze on that trip. . . . We’d avoid stopping at filling stations that had beer signs out front. One time we caught him trying to bribe the colored boy who was wiping off our windshield. He had some money out, and he was asking the boy, ‘You got anything to drink here?’” Rivers said Hank arrived in Vegas “mean as a snake but stone sober.”1 Denny had ordered them to pay two burly hotel dicks extra, with Opry money, to keep Hank off the sauce, working in twelve-hour shifts. One of them shook hands with Hank and told him, “We’re gonna be the best of buddies. But if I see you take a drink of anything, I’m gonna knock you flat on the ground.”
There were few high rollers around, mainly transients, and only familiar names would bring them into the lounges. When Hank took the stage for his first performance, the patrons could barely fill a barn, which is where they belonged. “The crowds were mostly farmers, cowhands, and hotel employees,” said Rivers. “They’d buy one ninety-cent Coke, watch the show, and leave,” not stopping at the slot machines or tables. The hotel promoters could only take so much. The irony was that Hank had stayed dry—but so had the audiences; if booze did not flow, the hotel made no money. Taking the gig seriously, Hank had gone to the extraordinary length of renting some jukeboxes from a Vegas vendor to set up in the lounges and stocking them with his records, but they were barely played. After one week, the engagement was canceled and slapstick vaudeville comedian Ed Wynn brought in to replace the hillbillies. Hank didn’t mind at all. “I could see a sigh of relief come over him,” Helms recalled.
Now, with the gig done, Rivers and Helms took the leash off. As they were leaving Las Vegas, the three of them stopped to catch Rex Allen, the movies’ “Arizona Cowboy,” perform at the Thunderbird Hotel, and Hank got stinking drunk. Neither did Helms and Rivers keep him from boozing all the way back to Nashville. But at least Denny couldn’t blame Hank for the debacle; that was on him, for misreading Vegas and overestimating the reach of the Opry. The only positive was that he may have thought he had finally gotten a handle on his problem child. As Roger Williams put it in his seminal Hank biography, when it came to keeping Hank clean, “Jim Denny had at least one notable success, in Las Vegas.”2
But was it? Lycrecia Williams by contrast recalled this trip as anything but a success. Denny, she said, had sent “an ex-policeman named Charlie Sanders to keep tabs on Daddy,” but he still “arrived drunk,” and “as things got worse, the club management decided to cancel the contract after only five days.”3 While in Vegas, she related, he was “locked in his room, but he tied his boots to a bedsheet and lowered them. A bellboy filled them with bottles of liquor, which Daddy then reeled back up.” She quoted Danny Dill saying that Hank, similar to the Hollywood deal, “blew it deliberately. . . . He was one of the first hillbilly singers to go to Las Vegas [but] I think the man was scared.” She also quoted Denny’s wife, Dolly, as calling the trip “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” convincing Jim that he could no longer put up with Hank. As it turned out, it wasn’t the last straw, not yet. Still, however Denny regarded Hank’s conduct on the trip, there was now little margin of error left for the top country star in Nashville.
• • •
In late May 1952, even after the awful meeting with Dore Schary, MGM Pictures sent Hank a contract meant to officially sign him for Small Town Girl. “You are to report to us at our studios in Culver City, California, on or before” June 16, it read, signed by the Loew’s vice president.4 But the space under Hank’s name would remain blank, the contract unreturned. When the movie began in mid-June, it still was. Without telling anyone, Hank had changed his mind. Not having memorized a single line of the script, he treated the project like it didn’t exist. Without a personal manager as a conduit, and Fred Rose and Frank Walker never able to lean on him, the studio couldn’t wait. Nor did they want him anymore. Another letter was sent, dated June 17. It read:
Dear Mr. Williams:
Referring to that certain contract between you and us dated September 22, 1951, covering your employment by us as an actor in such roles and in such photoplays and/or other productions as we may designate, this is to notify you that, for good and sufficient cause, your employment under said contract is hereby terminated.5
Hank had already moved on by then, in effect terminating them. He left so much ill will that Schary, for one, would insist later that there had never been a signed contract between Hank and the studio at all, no matter that the termination letter referred to that very contract. There would never be a Hank Williams movie, a real pity for future generations who could only appreciate his talent on grainy home movies and TV kinescopes. Tex Williams, on his part, believed Hank “could’ve done better than Bob Wills, who wanted to be a movie star more than anything. [But] Hank never said a thing about movies, because he didn’t care about ’em.”6 It was a pity for Rose and Walker, too, all that negotiation for naught, and greater profits for Hank’s songs perhaps now just a sidebar.
Maybe Walker did foresee this at the signing, his grim look indicative that if Hank did mess it all up, there would be nothing he could do about it. Which is exactly what happened.
• • •
On May 28, the final divorce papers came to Audrey’s and Hank’s lawyers, needing only the signatures. They both went in and signed, a note of finality that Hank accepted begrudgingly, though not necessarily permanently. For him, nothing lasted forever, not a marriage, not a divorce, not life. Only love and death were permanent. He was clearly not over Audrey, and may indeed have believed he would not survive much longer without her if she didn’t come back, a fairy tale he refused to dismiss. When his lawyer told him he still didn’t need to sign away half of his future royalties, Hank said, “I want to.” Ray Price, who was with him, interpreted that as Hank wanting to “show her he loved her and wanted her to come back.”7
Still, his lovesick blues did not stop him from moving on to his next victim—er, partner. His happy roving cowboy eye was not near dead. Needing a warm set of curves to keep from fixating endlessly on Audrey, with Bobbie Jett now existing solely as the incubator of his next child, and with Anita Carter over, he soon began circling like a vulture around someone as young and pert as Anita but with a ton more baggage. This was Billie Jean Jones Eshliman, who in August would turn nineteen. Hank had actually spent his Shreveport days just yards from her on Modica Street. Her father was a Bossier City cop, and the family lived a few houses away from Hank and Audrey, though they had never met. When she was sixteen, she met a corporal in the air force stationed in Shreveport named Harrison Eshliman. She dropped out of school, and they married in June 1949. A year later, he transferred to Lubbock, and they had a daughter, Jerry Lynn Eshliman. As the marriage fell apart, Billie Jean moved back home and began working as a carhop and an operator for the phone company.
She was a knockout, with long legs, a classically beautiful face, full pouty lips, and a flowing mane of auburn hair. As Webb Pierce once said, “She was so beautiful cars would wreck when she walked by.”8 He was far from the only member of the Louisiana Hayride to notice. Billie Jean, who liked to frequent the Hayride, was a catch, and the first to grab her was Faron Young, who was discovered by Webb the year before. The short, darkly handsome singer revered Hank, having started out as a pop singer until he heard Hank one night on the Hayride. Young joined Pierce’s band and won a contract from Capitol Records before moving to Nashville, where he earned a spot on the Grand Ole Opry, Hank helping him along by giving him a song to record called “Goin’ Steady.” Young became an item with Billie Jean and brought her to Nashville the night he made his Opry debut on June 14, 1952, which would be an auspicious night for Hank for several reasons.
Headlining the show as usual, after being introduced by Red Foley, he told Red, “I got a brand-new song that ain’t never been aired.”
“Ain’t never been aired”? Red said, following the script.
“No, and it might need airin’.” Hank winked. “It’s ‘Jam-bal-eye-oh on the Beye-oh.’”
With that, he broke into “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” helping send it through the country music roof. And then, backstage, he first caught sight of Ms. Eshliman. Faron Young had seated her in a glass booth with other relatives of the performers, and when Hank came in to say hello to them, he was hit by a thunderbolt. Seeing her in a tight, off-the-shoulder dress with a plunging neckline revealing all he needed to know, he ambled over to her and with no subtlety asked if she was married.
“Well, who you with?”
When she told him, he sent a staffer to fetch Young. When he came in, Hank asked him, “Boy, you gonna marry this girl?”
“No sir, I don’t think so,” Young replied. “She’s got too many boyfriends for me.”
Young was kidding, but Hank leaped into the breach.
“Well, boy, if you don’t, I am,” he said.
That became the theme of the night for Hank, not to steal Billie Jean from Faron Young but to take her off his hands. Big-heartedly, he said he’d fix Faron up with the woman he himself had brought to the show, whom he described as “that ol’ black-haired gal in the front row with the red dress on.”9 The four of them went to a club called the Nocturne, but Billie Jean begged off going inside. She had never been to a nightclub before or taken a drink of alcohol. That was an opening for Hank. “Well, I’ll just sit out in the car with you,” he said, “and Faron and my girl can go in and dance.”
He then made small talk that turned heavier. He was amazed that she lived so close to him in Shreveport. He listened to her go over her marriage and being a mother—again, making him very interested. She told him she had made plans with Young to marry but that “I couldn’t get along with Faron. No one can.” She giggled and told him that when she was a younger teenager, she had told her mother she would marry Hank Williams. That’s when he made a vow. As Billie Jean would recall decades later, the conversation went like this:
“You know, ol’ Hank’s gonna marry you.”
“No you ain’t. I’m not getting married. I’m ain’t ready to get married. . . . You don’t even know me, and I don’t know you.”
“That’s awright, I’m gonna marry you.”10
She didn’t know if he was serious. She did know she wasn’t ready to marry and that these randy country singers were bad news. However, like Audrey, like Anita Carter, like almost all women, she gave in to his little grin and big swagger. They went into the club and sat together, on condition that he drink only coffee. Don Helms, who was also at the Nocturne, said later that “Hank left with Billie.”11 Faron Young’s version of what happened next was that
we went out to Hank’s house, and Hank got a big suitcase and opened it, and it was full of guns. I’ve never seen so many pistols. And Billie was sitting there. [She said] “Oh, Hank, what is this?”
“That’s a .38.”
“And what’s this?”
“That’s a .45”
And so I wasn’t paying no attention. I was sitting around and having a beer or two. I got to thinking, watching the way he kept watching her, cuz she was a beautiful, beautiful girl, Billie Jean was.
I went in the back [of the house] and here come Hank, and there was a pistol pointed right at me. . . . He said, “Well, boy, I don’t want no hard feelings but I think I’m in love with that girl.”
I said, “. . . you can have that girl. You can put that gun back in your pocket, cuz I ain’t gonna die for her.”12
However, in other recitations, Young spoke of the “switch” being made more casually, with no gun pulled or required. Billie Jean really left him, he said, because Hank simply had more money. Others made the case that Faron revered Hank so much he stood aside out of deference. In any case, he soon moved on, entering the army for his hitch later that fall. In boot camp he met his staff sergeant’s daughter, Hilda Macon, who happened to be Uncle Dave Macon’s great-granddaughter, and they married before the end of the year, when “Goin’ Steady” became Young’s first big hit—and not a bad souvenir for having had a brief encounter with Hank Williams.
Billie Jean never admitted she dumped Young for a man with more money. But neither did she ever speak of a gun threat being involved. After Young had receded, she and Hank became closer. She moved into a ten-dollar-a-week room in a boardinghouse on Shelby Street, and Hank proudly took to calling Billie Jean “my French girl,” something this full-blooded Irish lass was definitely not, except in his imagination.
• • •
By early summer 1952, the Opry brass was still cutting Hank slack. With their blessing he was given a new radio gig at WSM on Sunday evenings for more money. The brass also kept overlooking his missed gigs on the road, which Hank usually, and smartly, kept limited to his own bookings, not those of the Opry, the overlords being far more zealously proprietary of their own brand than of Hank’s. As drunks will do, he also became wily about making excuses for himself, not that he needed to exaggerate how painful his back was. Don Helms, who still was playing some dates for Hank in and out of the studio, his steel guitar so elemental in striking those weepy or kicky chords, recalled driving to one gig when Hank moaned in the back seat, “Ohh, my back.” As much as he knew Hank was hurting, he could tell he was milking it to get him to stop and buy him booze somewhere, so he kept driving.
“Ohh, my back,” Hank repeated, a little louder.
Helms still didn’t stop, and felt a sharp boot kick from the back seat.
“Dammit!” Hank yowled, “I said, ‘Oh, my back,’ and when I say ‘Oh, my back,’ I mean ‘Oh, my back.’”13
That was code for get me some booze or you’ll lose these high-paying gigs. Still, Helms and Jerry Rivers would soon split from him completely rather than put up with the bullshit and madness anymore.
The irony was that on a broad level, Hank seemed pristine. Once he had broken through the crossover wall, selling over a million records in 1950, the consumer print media “discovered” his idiom, only about two decades late, and Hank, of course, was a major point of reference for the Northern-based literati, who still used broad strokes addressing country with ingrained condescension. While the New York Times stayed away completely, never covering the idiom, Collier’s July 28, 1951, issue brought a story titled THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLBILLY TUNES. The Wall Street Journal, always up for a good capitalist success story, patted country on the head with the title HILLBILLY TIMES BOOM. Billboard, arguably the most respectful and helpful of the major press sheets when it came to country, nonetheless used the same template even as its reporting was a marker of where the idiom now stood. Page 1 of the August 19, 1950, issue featured a four-column story headlined THERE’S GOLD IN OPERA ROW just above a two-column-wide story by Jerry Wexler headlined B’WAY PUB TURN SONG REVENOORS BUT HILLBILLIES GOT ALL THE GOLD. Wexler wrote that pop publishers were streaming to Nashville to get a foothold only to find the country songs already owned by Nashville interests. “The reason is simple,” he wrote. “The top hillbilly performers write almost all the country hits.”
The stories on Hank were fluff, and sometimes fluffed Audrey, too—“Yes, girls, Hank is married to lovely and listenable Miss Audrey, featured on his program,” read a note in December 1951, the month when the marriage blew apart. Yet if one could read between the lines, some hints about his mood might have surfaced in a cover story on him in a June 1952 interview when he said his favorite song was “Death Is Only a Dream,” a very bleak work by the bluegrass Stanley Brothers, written after one brother nearly died in an automobile accident.
No one can know if Hank on some level wished for that dream to come true, if he was just plain tired of living and being exploited, at least as he saw it. “They’re slicing me up and selling me like baloney,” he would tell people, this from one of the greatest baloney salesmen there ever was.14
If so, that was the price for hauling country onto the top shelf of American music, which with great irony happened as the South was devolving. Superhighways began replacing the old Southern plantation fields, oil rigs dotted what was left of open land, and factory smokestacks belched into skies that once were so blue. The rock-and-roll-loving teenagers adopted the “mobile culture” spawned by these infrastructural changes, turning hot rods and motorcycles into sacred instruments—something Hank had portended in “Hey, Good Lookin’” with its images and patois of “hot rod Fords,” “goin’ steady,” and “cookin’” in the back seat. Not for nothing did future generations look back at Hank as “the most important person in the history of country music.”15 MGM Records may have even owed its very existence to him, Hank’s chain of hits having pushed them into “the big six” with Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol, and Mercury. He was the hub of a wheel with many spokes. But he himself was spinning out of control.
• • •
As the summer fell in Nashville, Hank Williams had a child on the way and a nubile young lover, yet he was already pining for the woman he had lost, and damn near killed a few times. Audrey Mae Sheppard, who still identified herself as “Mrs. Hank Williams” and would go on doing so, seemed indeed to be permanently wedded to him on levels deeper than statutory law and terms of divorce. June Carter recalled that when she, her husband, Carl Smith, and Hank went to see a baseball game that summer, Hank became more and more fixated on a woman in the stands, who he thought from a distance was Audrey. Said June: “He could always see her somewhere,” even if only in his mind.16 When Hank spoke of marrying Billie Jean, wrote Lycrecia Williams, “he would say, “I wish it was Audrey.” He seemed to be living out the song he had written foreseeing their split, “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You.” And while Audrey was cooler about it, her daughter believed that “neither would ever be free of their love for each other.”
Audrey indeed seemed to have moments of ongoing feelings for him. While he was staying at the Andrew Jackson, she was at the movies with a friend one day when, seeming distracted, she checked her watch. “Hank will be at the hotel for about an hour and a half. I’m going to call him,” she said, and rushed to the lobby phone booth. The Williams’s housekeeper, Audrey Ragland, would say of her that “deep down in her heart she was hurting [but] she didn’t want people to know her real feelings.” Hank, by contrast, didn’t try to hide his hurt. Ray Price could hear it his voice, see it in his eyes, smell it on his breath. For all the goofballs and losers who came through the house, Price said that Hank was “a lonely person,” and when he wanted to talk,
he’d call all over the country trying to find me. I think he drank because he wanted people to pay attention to him. He wanted people to show him they loved him, and this was his way of testing them. He was doing real fine when he thought she wasn’t actually going to divorce him. . . . But when the divorce came it got real bad. He went off the deep end. Don Helms and I wound up taking him to a sanitarium up in Madison. Then . . . he started raising cane again.17
It was possible to see the drinking in a broader light now; as a way for Hank to keep people pitying him, enough for him to be able to measure their loyalty. But now fewer of them were even around, making him turn to booze even more as a salve. Sometimes, it was all he seemed to care about. It frightened Ray to see Hank wasting away as a result. “He had no interest in food. If he ate and the food came flying back up, he’d take another drink right away. Naw, he wasn’t a public drunk. He’d do all his drinking right in a room. The problem was to get him out once he got started.” Helms would say that Hank was “ashamed at his own behavior,” but when Audrey was gone there was no chance he was ever going to stop it. When a reporter from the Nashville Tennessean, H. B. Teeter, came to WSM to begin a series of interviews with him that summer, Hank’s remarks bordered on morbid.
“I’ll never live long enough for you to write about me,” he said at one point, adding, “God comin’ down the road after me.”18
With no fresh Hank product, all Fred Rose could do was release another album, giving it more thought than he had the first. He picked from among Hank’s bluesier songs and alloyed eight of them, this time including three No. 1 hits (“Lovesick Blues,” “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” “Honky Tonk Blues”) and two more Top 10 hits (“Moanin’ the Blues,” “I’m a Long Gone Daddy”) in a kind of seminal “best of” compilation, and as such a collector’s-item-to-be.
When Rose finally got Hank back in the studio on June 13, 1952, it had been six months since he’d last laid down a note. Writing had been the last thing on his mind, and the best Rose could do was cobble up four songs, none of them written solely by Hank, the only session he ever did without at least one of those. One was co-written with Rose, the terribly prophetic “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” which Hank had made a fixture in his act. Another was a joint effort with Hank’s pudgy, piano-playing buddy Moon Mullican—“Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”—during a ride on Minnie Pearl’s husband’s plane, the song he had already performed at the Opry. It was an homage to Hank’s ancestral roots—and it too was prophetic, since the hook “Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun on the bayou” would shortly be his hope of salvation.
A third cut, “Window Shopping,” covered a 1914 early country song by Marcel Joseph fleshed out with cute metaphors of a straying woman—a natural theme for Hank. Rose collaborated on the last cut, “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” with Tin Pan Alley songwriter Ed G. Nelson. Hank brought in Jerry Rivers and Don Helms to team with Chet Atkins and old friend Charles “Indian” Wright of the Willis Brothers on bass, a reunion of his first Sterling recording session. The arrangements for the four songs cut that day had the sharp, chiming electric guitar riffs that had crept from the background of earlier rhythm-and-blues country rags like “Move It On Over” to stamp nascent rockabilly.
Arguably, the most optimistic and pessimistic of Hank’s recordings came out of this session—“Jambalaya” and “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” though the latter, a sad blues rag, wasn’t nearly as depressing as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” or as dour as “Ramblin’ Man.” The steel guitars and fiddle rang out in the style of a New Orleans funeral as Hank, returning to yodeling accentuation, made fatalism almost trippy, not in frustration but in resigned amusement that “I’ve had a lot of luck but it’s all been bad,” crowing that he would live high “until that fatal day,” because “no matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get out of this world alive.”
“Jambalaya” must have been exactly what Hank’s fans were waiting for, another merry tune like “Hey, Good Lookin’.” Its cyclical melody was borrowed from an old Cajun rag by Chuck Guillory, “Grand Texas,” but the lyrics were a follow-up to Hank’s previous dip in the Pontchartrain, “Bayou Pon-Pon,” a Delta blues stomp written with Jimmie Davis. “Jambalaya” was like a pontoon tour of Cajun country, its native dialects, its flat-bottom boats and epicurean delights, and the Delta women Dickey Betts would later swear thought the world of him.
Alas, Hank couldn’t really manage the French Cajun tongue, which was more pidgin Alabama backwoods, but he sure sounded comfy with lines like “Thibodaux Fontaineaux the place is buzzin’ / Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozen,” and colloquialisms like “Goodbye Joe, me gotta go” and “me oh my-oh” as rhyming mechanisms with “on the bayou” were dead-on perfect. Rose deserved a lot of credit for recognizing its appeal beyond country, producing the song in a folk style, with a very tight meter, technically perfect and highly danceable, with Hank in a yodel-less, pop prism. Rose was aiming at that market, as he also would with “Woods,” and “Jambalaya” came rolling out as hip-hopping, twangy country pop, Atkins’s bass-deep guitar chords the very essence of rockabilly.
It had been a trying session. Hank was burnt-out and capable of only maybe one good take. Atkins recalled that “after each take, he’d sit down in a chair. I remember thinking, ‘Hoss, you’re just not jivin’,’ because he was so weak that all he could do was just sing a few lines and then just fall in the chair.”19 Under these circumstances, it’s nothing short of amazing how vibrant these records sound. Rose knew “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” would be the first one released, and it went out on July 18—with only Hank listed as the writer, Moon Mullican being given surreptitious royalties because Fred Rose was loath to leave Mullican at the mercy of his label. The ditty only whetted the public’s appetite for Hank songs, sung by whomever. Mitch Miller had Jo Stafford cover “Jambalaya” as frothy pop. Bandleader Art Mooney covered “Window Shopping.” MGM had Fran Warren cover “Settin’ the Woods on Fire.” And with his desire to record having been awakened, Hank was back at Castle on July 11 to record a quartet of songs. This time they weren’t sweet and light, but more than ever mirrors into his empty soul, emptier now with the divorce having become final one day before. The first, the bitter “You Win Again,” had him seething that “trustin’ you was my great sin.”
The next, “I Won’t Be Home No More,” was another, now moot, empty threat about leaving her. The last two were tear-jerking Luke the Drifter semi-raps. “Be Careful of the Stones That You Throw” was written by Bonnie Dodd, an Acuff-Rose client who had penned hits for Tex Ritter and Little Jimmie Dickens. The final number, “Why Don’t You Make Up Your Mind,” was a not-so-coy suggestion to Audrey of the pain she created for him, moaning that “there just ain’t nobody knows what I go through.” Yet this was actually one of the most amusing numbers he’d ever written, with sly references to her having “a big policeman carry me back home.” His impish tone gave it the feel of satire, but the last line came down hard. Pausing for effect, drawing up all his frustrations, he intoned laconically, the music going silent behind him:
What in the confounded cat hair you want me to do?
“You Win Again,” the B-side of “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” would branch off to go Top 10 country and be covered by, among many others, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, George Jones, and Bob Dylan on his unreleased 1967 Basement Tapes, which also covered “Be Careful of the Stones You Throw.” Clearly, there was still a market for thoughts and confessions that most men would prefer to keep private, at least if they came from Hank Williams.
• • •
As the summer of ’52 was broiling Nashville, the hours in the studio and the intimate moments with Billie Jean were about his only pleasant respites. And then he managed to piss off Billie Jean.
To be sure, Hank didn’t seem to know how to have a normal relationship with a woman. The innocent coffee meetings they had early on had lapsed, and Hank was now drunk much of the time, his mood swings frightening her. He still professed his love for her, but it was a peculiar kind of love. For one thing, she would relate in future years that they shared a bed but not intercourse. Later, when such things were judged fair to say aloud in a tell-all culture, Billie Jean, by then a weathered, weary sort of belle, had no hedge in saying of Hank and sex, “It was on his mind, but, as my momma always said, ‘If it can’t get up, it can’t get out.’”20 She said this was the result of his back operation, not making it clear if she meant that he was in too much pain, or that opiates and the slew of other painkillers he used in conjunction with booze to relieve that pain had rendered him impotent.
However, if this is true, it creates at least the possibility that Bobbie Jett may have been impregnated by some other man, given that she became pregnant in March, well before Hank met Billie Jean and only two months following the operation. Among the many mysteries in this man’s life, the identity of children born in proximity to him is the most intriguing, and sordid. Witness his cousin Marie’s son “Butch” Fitzgerald, who swore until his dying day that Hank was his father. Of course, it is possible that Billie Jean assumed a bit too much about his ability to perform offstage, with other women if not her. But in the summer of ’52, whatever the nature of their relationship, the matter of procreation was just one of the plethora of complications about to further muddy up his soiled life.
• • •
It had not taken long for Hank to piss off Ray Price. He had turned the quaint Natchez Trace dwelling into a combination brothel/honky-tonk. People of all sorts constantly shuttled in and out, music blasted from the radio, and God knows what was going on in there, with alarming normalcy. As Price noted, when the pain would be unbearable Hank would simply call a doctor willing to aid him and “go get a morphine shot, just like that.” After a while, all the furniture was ruined by cigarette smoke and burns; garbage was always strewn all over, unwashed dishes in the sink, empty bottles even in the bathroom.
A physician friend of Hank’s, Dr. Crawford Adams, who scrupulously did not ply him with any drugs, would come over with his wife and leave disgusted with what they saw going on, which Adams thought was Hank’s way of dealing with losing Audrey. “He’d try everything to forget Audrey,” he said, “women, parties, everything. He’d get to thinking about Audrey and he wouldn’t give a damn. He’d just drink like it was water.”21
The “sponges,” as Adams called them, would eagerly help Hank throw his money away. This flotsam would stream through Price’s house at all hours, unnerving Ray and his girlfriend upstairs, and the noise and carousing downstairs woke them up every night. When Ray had allowed Hank to crash there, he expected it would be temporary, so he wouldn’t be alone on his farm without Audrey and Randall. But Hank seemed not to want to leave, and one day had the temerity to tell Ray to find another place to live because he wanted the house to himself. Rather than be offended, and tired of being his nurse and doormat, Price jumped at the chance. He began packing, taking no chances Hank would accuse him of taking something of his by calling Mac McGree over from the Corral to verify each item wasn’t Hank’s. Hank then came into Ray’s room and asked why he was packing up.
“I just can’t take it anymore, Hank,” he said.
“Don’t leave me,” Hank replied, a line he must have practiced a thousand times on Audrey.
“I got to,” Ray told him.
“You know I didn’t mean it, Ray,” Hank said, giving it a last try. “You don’t have to go.”22
As much as it pained him whenever Hank seemed small and needy, Ray left, and would only return to his own house when Hank was gone from it. Not just from the house but gone from Nashville. That would happen sooner than anyone thought, least of all Hank. Only something radical was going to bring his life into some semblance of order, and about the most radical thing fell on him like an anvil when, before that stifling summer was over, a decision was made that had been building for three years, one that would shake up the new realm of country music.