by Colin Escott
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 pas
sing 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.
