Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  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.

  Chapter 16

  My dear old mammy’s waiting With arms outretched so wide Before the sun goes down again I’ll be right by her side I can wait no longer for the sun to shine ’Til I get back to my mammy And that Alabama home of mine

  “That Alabama Home of Mine” (unknown)

  MIDNIGHT

  HANK Williams was back in his old room, the front downstairs bedroom of Lilly’s boardinghouse. His life had come full circle. He’d started in Montgomery, left for Shreveport with his heart full of hope, gone on to Nashville in triumph, then returned in disgrace to Shreveport, and finally come back to his mother’s boardinghouse in Montgomery.

  Hank was sick. He told friends who came to call that he had the “Asiatic” flu, but he’d had it for several weeks, and couldn’t seem to shake it. Toby Marshall had prescribed antibiotics but they hadn’t worked, and now Hank’s back hurt terribly from the long haul through eastern Texas and back to Alabama. On December 21, Lilly phoned Marshall, who wired a prescription for twenty-four capsules of chloral hydrate the following day. Billie Jean had it delivered by Walgreens, and the prescription was refilled again within the week.

  Clyde Perdue was let go as Hank’s two-car convoy swept through Greenville. “I told Hank all the time,” said Billie, “’You don’t need him. He don’t book you. The agents are calling you. If you decide to play, you can call the agents and they’ll book you.’” So now Hank was without a manager or a band, and with just one firm commitment for the new year, other than the two dates for A. V. Bamford on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. When Brack Schuffert came to visit, Hank told him that he was booked solid until May, but Hank was spinning tales wherever he went, always trying to maintain the impression that everything was rosy. Braxton was still working at Hormel Meats, and Freddy Beach’s wife, Irella, worked there too in the baking room. They invited Hank to the Christmas party, but he was too sick. “I went up to get him,” said Braxton. “He was lying in bed with his clothes on. He was sick in bed and Doctor Stokes had come out. He had a fever. Doctor Stokes tried to get him in the hospital, but he wouldn’t go.”

  Bobbie Jett was somewhere in town, just days away from giving birth. Her daughter, Jo, was with her. It’s possible that Bobbie was in Lilly’s other boardinghouse, next door to the main house, but Marie Glenn’s son, Butch, insists that she was elsewhere. Lilly later told Audrey that Hank was walking around singing the current Jo Stafford hit “Keep It a Secret,” and it’s clear why he was drawn to the song. If Bobbie was next door, Billie Jean probably didn’t know it, but just being confined with Lilly and Marie Glenn was enough like purgatory. Billie Jean and Lilly had been on bad terms since Billie had vetoed Lilly’s demand for enough money to purchase yet another boardinghouse. Marie was spookily silent.

  Then, as Christmas neared, Hank’s thoughts kept drifting back to Nashville and his young son, now three and a half years old. In all likelihood, Hank hadn’t seen Hank Jr. since the session in September or the deejays convention in November. Perhaps it had been longer than that. He and Billie had a fight after he bought Hank Jr. a toy and sent it to him. Back in the room he thought he’d left forever four and a half years earlier, he must have wondered if his life could have been more of a mess.

  By Christmas Eve, Hank had rallied a little and went to southern Alabama to show off Billie Jean to his kin. Taft and Erleen Skipper lived in a tiny settlement called Advance, and Hank sat outside with Taft in the wan December sunlight. Billie Jean made a deep impression on the Skippers; she was not only strikingly beautiful, but also willing to pitch in and help with the cooking and the washing-up. The Skippers held this up in stark contrast with Audrey, who wouldn’t get out of the car unless it was to sit on the porch.

  Hank and Taft walked to the pond and down to Ernest Manning’s store. “We were going back to the house,” he said, “and he got short-winded and he says, ‘Taft, I believe I picked up asthma somewhere,’ and he kinda felt toward his heart. We got up to the store and sat down and he said, ‘That kinda makes me short-winded. I gotta get out and get a little more exercise.’” Hank showed Taft the Acuff-Rose check for four thousand dollars, and told him it was all the money he had in the world.

  Hank and Billie Jean joined the Skippers that evening at the East Chapman Baptist Church. Some in the congregation asked Hank to sing, but he thought his songs were inappropriate and refused. Later, though, he played the Skippers the acetate of a song he said he’d just written called “The Log Train.” Set in Chapman, it was in traditional ballad form, starting with “If you will listen, a song I will sing…” It was a predictably skimpy account of Lon’s days as an engineer, but Hank had recorded it at the KWKH studio on December 3 and probably thought that the folks back home would like it.

  Hank and Billie Jean stayed overnight with the Skippers, and then, on Christmas morning, drove to McWilliams to see Lon, Ola, and Leila. The only phone in McWilliams was at the railroad depot, so Hank couldn’t call ahead, and when he got there he found that Lon and his family had gone to Selma for Christmas. Hank scratched out a note on a plain piece of paper and left a cigarette lighter for Lon and a gift-wrapped five-pound box of candy for Leila and Ola. The missed visit deeply affected Lon. He hung on to the wrapping paper for years, and refused to leave the house in case someone was coming to see him whom he would never see again.

  Hank went to see nearly everyone he knew in that part of Alabama, including the proprietor of the Journey’s End Inn, where he’d played early in his career. He sang “The Log Train” for several of them, then drove on to see Lon’s sister, his aunt Bertha, in Pine Apple and had Christmas supper with her and her family before driving back to Montgomery. On December 27, Hank and Billie Jean went to see the Blue and Gray football game at Crempton Bowl, but their seats were high in the stands and caught the wind; Hank felt chilled. Taft Skipper and his niece Mary were there too; they offered Hank their seats lower down out of the wind, but Hank refused, and he and Billie left before the end of the first half and went back to Lilly’s.

  The last two full days in Montgomery, December 28 and 29, were not good. Billie Jean faced unrelenting hostility from Lilly and Marie Glenn. The idea of a protracted stay in Montgomery with those two was more than she could bear. Marie saw a lot, and said a little. In 1946, she’d divorced Conrad Fitzgerald, the ostensible father of her son, born three years earlier. The following year, she reportedly married one of Lilly’s boarders, Norris Glenn. But later that year, Glenn deserted from the army, deserted Marie, and disappeared to South America. Marie gave that story in court testimony, although her son, Butch, states that Marie did not in fact marry Norris Glenn, despite taking his name.

  Marie was listening when Billie Jean’s father phoned to say that he’d received word that Hank and Billie were not legally married. Several heated arguments followed, and Lilly and Marie overheard Hank yelling at Billie Jean. Perhaps Billie threatened to leave, because Marie remembered Hank saying that it didn’t matter what she did because they weren’t legally married anyway. Lilly squirreled away that piece of information; it would prove to be very useful in the days and weeks ahead.

  On Sunday, December 28, Hank gave a performance for 130 members and guests of American Federation of M
usicians’ local 479 in Montgomery at their eighth annual party. It was held that year at the Elite Café to benefit a member who had been stricken with polio. Hank and Billie Jean tucked into their steaks. Two days later, the Alabama Journal reported, “Another star of the show the musicians put on for themselves was a thin, tired-looking ex–country boy with a guitar. He got up and sang (or howled) a number of his tunes that started out to be hillbilly and ended up as pop numbers, played and sung by every band in the land. The boy who once worked here for eleven dollars a week in the Depression sung ‘Jumbalaya,’ [sic] ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’ ‘You Win Again,’ and ‘Lovesick Blues.’ There was thunderous applause as he went back to his steak. He was, of course, Hank Williams.”

  Several days later, the president of the Montgomery local of the AFM, Tom Hewlett, elaborated on what would be Hank Williams’ last show:

  To the average modern musician, frequently called “jazzmen,” and also the serious musician, often called “squares” or “longhair,” folk music or hillbilly music is not to their taste. When Hank Williams played and sang to us at the Musicians Party, December 28, all of us, including the above two groups, were there. We listened attentively as if attending a concert by Benny Goodman or hearing the cultivated voice of some operatic star. We forgot our talent, our technical skill, and musical training and truly enjoyed every note.

  Hank had planned to fly to Charleston, then probably ride on to Canton with Bamford or one of the other performers, but the weather reports from up north were bad. “That was the hardest I ever saw him fight to get to a gig,” said Billie Jean, “’cause it was usually no problem for him to say, ‘Ol’ Hank just don’t want to go. I’ll catch you later.’” Billie Jean says that she’d planned to ride with him, but now that he was forced to drive she decided to go back to Shreveport for New Year’s and meet Hank in Nashville on January 3. He’d said, “Hey, baby, let’s us move to Nashville and buy one of them big houses.” He told her that he had a piece of land picked out near Carl Smith’s ranch in Williamson County, but it was probably another pipe dream. He’d just sold his place in Williamson County a couple of months earlier.

  Hank told Marie Glenn that he’d be back in Montgomery in four days, and he told Lilly the same thing. He’d also signed the agreement to adopt Bobbie Jett’s child, so he probably wanted to be there for the birth, or at least see the child. In a letter that Hank’s sister, Irene, wrote to her attorney some fifteen years later, she recalled some of what Lilly and Marie had told her of those last days in Montgomery. Irene and Lilly always insisted that Billie left before Hank, although Billie is equally insistent that she saw him off. Irene wrote:

  Billie left Hank in Montgomery on December the twenty-ninth or thirtieth. They had a real loud argument the night before in which she told him that she had found out that they were not legally married and she was going back to Shreveport…. The next morning she packed her trunk and addressed the mailing stickers to herself in Shreveport and asked that Railway Express be called and have them ship the trunk on to her. Lawrence Peirce [photographer Laurens Pierce] photographed the trunk and the labels after the funeral and we shipped the trunk on to her.

  There’s no doubt that Hank and Billie fought in Montgomery; they fought everywhere, just as Hank and Audrey had done. The tension went from simmer to boil several times as Hank continued his pattern of messing up whenever he had a chance. Irella Beach recalled seeing Hank and Billie at a bar. “Hank was up on the counter dancin’ or something,” she says, “and he hit Billie Jean in the face ’cause she was trying to get him to quit [it]. He was sloppy drunk, and she took off home. She said, ‘Ain’t no man gonna beat on me,’ and she left.”

  Like almost everything to do with Hank Williams, his relationship with Billie Jean has been seen through the wrong end of the telescope. Hindsight tells us that Hank was country music’s greatest star, and thus a prize for any woman, but things must have looked very different to Billie Jean in December 1952. Hank looked like a falling star hanging on by a thread. Even if he kept his hit streak intact, he had a very uncertain future as a performing artist. It’s hard to know if Billie Jean reached the end of her tether during the ten days in Montgomery, or whether she intended to rejoin Hank after the New Year’s dates. “We wondered how Billie Jean could put up with him at all,” said Horace Logan. “Falling down drunk, throwing up drunk, throwing up on himself.” Billie had more reason to walk out on Hank than he had reason to put her on a plane back home. She was just nineteen years old; Hank was only twenty-nine but had the physical attributes of a man more than twice that age. Was this what Billie Jean wanted from life? In later interviews, she insisted that it was, but disillusion was probably setting in.

  Billie Jean and Audrey would soon stake out their official positions. Billie’s position was that she would meet Hank in Nashville on January 3. Audrey insisted that Hank called over Christmas and asked if he could come back, and she said he could. Had she forgotten everything that she had spelled out in such petulant detail in her divorce petition just months earlier? Did Hank call after an argument with Billie Jean? Did he even call at all?

  At some point on December 28, Lilly wired Toby Marshall, telling him that Hank was capable of making the trip by himself. Sitting in a drugstore in Oklahoma City, waiting for prescriptions that he shouldn’t have written to be filled, Marshall scratched out a two-page letter to Hank. His concern for Hank’s well-being seemed unaffected, explaining why Hank and Lilly put such trust in him. “There is only thing I ask, Hank,” Marshall wrote, “and this you morally owe to yourself, me, and your public. If [triple-underlined] you run into trouble, call me. Don’t for Heaven’s sake let the pattern run too long or get too deep before you holler. And there is nothing wrong with an old boy asking for help when he is sick. And no matter where you are or what the circumstances may be, I’ll manage to get there. And you know I can help you.”

  Marshall mentioned a show slated for February 22 in Oklahoma City, booked by Venita Cravens. “She is writing to you regarding 5 or 6 auditorium dates here for February,” wrote Marshall. “This is the sort of thing you need, rather than beer joints or honky tonks, to get you back on top where you belong.…If you are going back to the Opry, you need some top flight bookings to help things along.” The clear implication of Marshall’s letter is that the only promise Hank had received from the Grand Ole Opry was that they might consider taking him back if he straightened himself out. After Hank’s death, Wesley Rose and the Opry management stated that Hank was scheduled to return to the Opry on February 3, 1953, but that was clearly not the case.

  On December 29, Hank started to make arrangements for the long haul to West Virginia. First he asked Braxton Schuffert to drive him, but Brack had to be back at work at Hormel. Hank asked several other friends, but they all had commitments. Finally, he went down to the Lee Street Taxi company. The owner, Daniel Pitts Carr, had a son, Charles, who was a freshman at Auburn University and was home for the holiday. Charles was seventeen years old and had driven Hank before. Hank thought that he drove a bit recklessly, but he was starting to look like the only person who could take the time off.

  “Dad was a friend of Hank’s,” Charles Carr told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “and tried to look out after him in the tough times. He was there talking with Dad and Hank asked me if I’d be interested in making the trip.” Carr was eventually paid four hundred dollars for his work, but it’s hard to know if this was what Hank had promised, or if it represented an additional payment. It was a lot of money for four days’ work in 1952. Hank’s guarantee for the shows was probably around two thousand dollars.

  Billie Jean’s insistence that she was with Hank on his last night in Montgomery, December 29–30, is borne out by Charles Carr, who remembers that on the morning they left she wanted to go along, but Hank wouldn’t let her. “He was shadowboxing all that last night,” says Billie:

  He went down to the chapel [at St. Jude’s Hospital], and he said, “Ol’ Hank needs to str
aighten up some things with the Man.” I’d say, “Hank, what in the world is the matter with you?” He’d say, “Every time I close my eyes, I see Jesus coming down the road.” He couldn’t even sleep in bed then, the pain was so bad. When he left he was looking at me kinda funny. I said, “Hank, are you sick?” He said, “No babe, ol’ Hank just wants to look at you one more time.”

  Marie Glenn also remembered Hank visiting St. Jude’s. He wanted the sisters to pray with him, she said. Hank then came into Marie’s room and gave her forty dollars to take care of the taxi fare and other expenses connected with the birth of Bobbie Jett’s child. He was pretty certain the child would be delivered before he returned. He stood in the doorway of Marie’s room and said to her, “Ol’ Hank ain’t gonna be with you another Christmas. I’m closer to the Lord than I ever been in my life.”

  Charles Carr came to the boardinghouse around 11:30 on the morning of December 30. Hank loaded his guitars, stage outfits, songbooks, photos, and records into the trunk. This meant that he couldn’t make use of the customizing job he’d had done to the rear seat. When the trunk was empty, the seat could be folded back to make a bed. Hank was wearing his blue suede shoes, a white felt hat, a blue serge suit, and navy blue overcoat. Immediately after they left, Hank asked Carr to go back to the boarding-house so that he could change into his white cowboy boots. Then they stopped at one of the local radio stations, probably WSFA, and Hank let himself be talked into going to a highway contractors convention in the same hotel. Hank stayed awhile and almost certainly had a few drinks. The next stop was Dr. Stokes’ office. He prepaid Stokes to deliver Bobbie’s baby and asked for a shot of morphine to quiet his back on the long haul, but Stokes smelled liquor on Hank’s breath and wouldn’t give him one. Hank went down to see Dr. Black, who injected him and sent him on his way.