Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  It wasn’t what he’d had in mind—taking Eck, Maybelle, and their three daughters out for a meal—but the excursion helped cement a friendship. Hank became one of the first Opry stars to refer to Maybelle as “Mama,” and before long, just about everyone was doing it. Some called her that because she was mama to the three girls, but Williams did so because she became a surrogate mother to him. He was a frequent visitor to Eck and Maybelle’s house in suburban Nashville, where he’d load up on Maybelle’s corn bread crumbled into a glass of cold milk, or biscuits and gravy. While he ate, he’d complain about Audrey—some of the time they were separated, some of the time together—or he’d sit and ogle Anita.

  For the insecure, hard-lovin’ Hank Williams, there was sustenance in Maybelle’s kitchen that went beyond the food. Williams wasn’t the first wounded soul who found himself drawn to Maybelle Carter, and he wouldn’t be the last. The reason, according to Anita, was that she “never judged anyone.” No matter how badly people acted, Maybelle simply wasn’t scandalized. She would not be offended personally; she just helped as best she could. She rarely offered advice, but Maybelle had a genius for giving people a space where self-destruction and meanness didn’t seem inevitable. She wasn’t blind to Williams’s desire for Anita, but she had faith that it would amount to nothing—and faith that her very presence was a hedge against lurid behavior. “Maybelle was the greatest woman, morally, I’ve ever known,” Atkins explained. “People just never thought of doing or saying anything off-color when she was around.” Men who were chastened by her always remembered how she did it, without ever uttering a word. She’d just fix those pale blue eyes on them. As the not-altogether-harmless Hank Snow once said, “Mama just whips us to death with those eyes.”

  When Williams complained about how Audrey cheated on him and treated herself to a new car every time the ashtrays filled up in the old one, Maybelle would gently urge him to try to think of a way to solve the problem, instead of working himself into another hopeless froth of rage. If he was overly harsh in his description of his wife, or if he gave vent to some violent fantasy about what he “oughtta do,” she had only to give him the look, and he’d lower his head like a guilty dog.

  The family’s association with Williams was a mixed blessing for Anita. She didn’t know what to make of his longing looks or the preposterously expensive gifts he offered her: a horse, a car, jewelry. She refused his gifts, but on at least one occasion she accepted his help. In April of 1952, the Carters were among the Opry stars invited to New York to appear on NBC’s prime-time show The Kate Smith Evening Hour, and a segment was set aside for Anita. She was thrilled. Roy Acuff was not. Acuff had been an Opry star for nearly fifteen years, and he held sway as a sort of unofficial presiding officer of the Nashville boys’ club. So when Roy wanted the slot for a protégé of his own, he had Anita bumped. Williams, however, came to her rescue, offering to let her sing with him. Their performance of “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You” was a stunning rebuke to any city slicker who regarded country music as dull and unsophisticated. Anita’s perfect soprano took the biting edge off Williams’s nasal delivery and turned the country lament into a complicated and powerful duet. The longing in Hank’s eyes and Anita’s bashful flirtation were surprisingly convincing, for reasons most viewers never could have imagined.

  But there was always a price to pay for Hank’s help, and Anita paid it. She had just celebrated her nineteenth birthday, and on the trip to New York, Williams presented her with a beautiful ring and an offer to take her anywhere her heart desired. She told him she wanted to see Peggy Lee at the Copacabana, and he arranged it. The Copa seemed to Anita a million miles from Nashville, to say nothing of Poor Valley, and she was enjoying herself immensely when, to her surprise, Lee launched into one of Williams’s songs. Hank was so delighted, he invited Anita for a spin on the dance floor. Apparently, Williams had little experience in the kind of dancing that was appropriate in a New York nightclub. “I was embarrassed to death,” Anita recalled. “His knees were coming up even with his ears. He was dancing like a Texas oilman. People just stopped and stared, until Peggy Lee announced who he was.”

  Anita recovered from her embarrassment, but for Hank Williams, everything grew worse. His jealous love for Audrey was driving him batty. It was bad enough when they were together; it was beyond bad when they were apart and Hank was left to wonder how she was spending her evenings. On top of that, he’d been given morphine for a back injury, and he was becoming addicted. He was also more dependent on the kind leeway shown him in the Carter household. At any time of the day or night, Anita’s telephone might ring and there would be Williams, drunk or stoned or both, trying to pronounce her name: Anita-wuh, zzHank. Before many performances, Williams would be so drunk that the Carter women had to drop whatever they were doing and try to sober him up enough to go on. Sometimes he would come to Pop and Maybelle’s for a meal and listen patiently while June encouraged him to forsake the demon alcohol. These sermons were not without effect, but that effect was short-lived. Chet Atkins recalled one of Williams’s pathetic efforts to wean himself from booze during a road trip to Kansas City with the Carters: “I’d see him down at the newsstand, buying a whole bunch of comic books: Captain Marvel, Superman, and all that stuff. That was his reading material when he was trying to go straight. But he would call his wife at two o’clock in the morning and she would be out catting around. And that drove him to drink, of course. He never stopped loving Audrey. Men tend to fall in love with women they can’t control. That’s my opinion . . . and should be yours.”

  In 1952 Hank Williams was showing up for concerts too drunk to perform, or missing them altogether. The Opry was ready to fire him, and Audrey was heading for divorce court. Williams didn’t let go easy, and his addictions fueled more jealous rages. On one occasion, as he drove to the Carters’ home, he saw someone he thought was Audrey sitting next to June in a car. Exactly what went through his mind, no one ever found out, but he actually tried to run the car off the road. Fortunately, the screams made him realize his mistake before anyone was hurt or killed. This was the only time Maybelle ever upbraided him. Her jaw set, her outstretched finger trembling, she told him if he ever hurt one of her girls, he would regret it.

  “But Mama,” Williams began, trying to explain himself. Maybelle cut him off. “Don’t you call me Mama,” she said.

  “That was the harshest thing I ever heard Mama say,” Helen recalled years later. Williams, she added, shuddered as though he had been whipped.

  Maybelle cooled toward Williams after that, but she never banned him from the house. And he turned to June for long, tearful conversations about Audrey and how miserable he was and how much he loved Anita. June listened with a mixture of sympathy and horror. The whole thing was a mess. Audrey, who was a friend of hers, “just didn’t like Hank,” and there was no question she was cheating on him.

  “This is ridiculous, Hank,” June would scold him. “This is just . . . ridiculous! And it’s wrong, morally wrong.” She would try to remind him that he was still legally married, and that married was married, and that union with Anita was forever out of the question. “I loved him for his talent and brilliance,” she said, “but I never would have loved him for a brother-in-law. He was much too messed up, and always would be.”

  A few months after the escapade in the car, Hank showed up at Pop and Maybelle’s house while Audrey was over for a visit. She saw him coming and made for the rear of the house, begging to be left undisturbed. Williams came in and had a perfunctory chat with Anita and then went to June for a private conversation. It was hard to tell exactly what mood he was in, but he said he wanted Audrey to come home for a talk. “I won’t hurt her,” he said.

  “You promise, Hank?” asked June.

  “I promise. I won’t hurt her,” he replied with a puppyish, repentant look.

  “Well, of course you won’t,” said June. She went to the back of the house and told Audrey what Hank had said.


  Audrey was wide-eyed. “Oh, no, you can’t believe him,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I’m not going home. He’ll kill me before I even get there.”

  June offered to go home with Audrey, assuring her that Hank wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. Then she sent Williams ahead, saying she and Audrey would come by soon. When the two women rolled up to the Williams house, Hank was waiting in the driveway. And he looked menacing. Audrey panicked and slid down in her seat, out of view.

  Hank approached the car, talking through his clenched jaw: “I know she’s in there. Tell ’er to get ’er ass up.”

  June didn’t seem to grasp the danger. She got Audrey out of the car and walked her straight toward the house, talking to Hank like he was just a big troublesome child. But Hank bolted for Audrey, and Audrey bolted for the door. June got between them, pushing Williams in the chest. “You can’t come in here like that.”

  “The hell I can’t,” he slurred. “It’s my house.”

  Hank retreated to his car, and when he started back toward the house, he was carrying a pistol.

  Now June was scared. “You cannot do this, Hank!” she yelled, and the two scuffled in the doorway. Then Williams took a step back, raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.

  The shot missed June by about six inches. The noise “rattled my head,” she remembers. “I thought I’d never hear again.” And then the absurdity of it finally occurred to her: He’s going to kill me . . . me, of all people.

  June screamed, gripped the doorway, and dropped to the ground as if she’d been shot. Hank stood frozen. “You’ve killed her!” Audrey screamed from inside the house. “You’ve killed June!”

  Did Hank Williams throw down his gun, grasp June in his arms, and cry, “What have I done?” Did he run around the front lawn begging for help or forgiveness? Did he make up with Audrey long enough to enter the house and call an ambulance? He did not. Hank Williams sprinted to his car, gunned the motor, and took off.

  “I began to look at him in another light,” June later said dryly. “When he ran away, I realized he really was crazy.”

  More than a week passed before any of the Carters saw Hank Williams again. He finally showed up at one of their radio shows and meekly approached June. “I have to talk to you,” he stammered. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . I’m desperately sorry.” The apology hardly sufficed. “But,” admits June, “I was inclined to forgive him. We knew he was going to die, and he was going to die soon.”

  In the final days of 1952, Hank Williams hired a college boy to drive him from Montgomery, Alabama, to a New Year’s Eve concert in Charleston, West Virginia, and then on to a New Year’s Day performance in Canton, Ohio. Once they got on the road, a snowstorm made it impossible to make the Charleston date, but he remained determined to make it to Canton. Williams spent much of the trip sprawled in the backseat, with chloral hydrate tablets, vodka, and whiskey for company. The booze probably didn’t mix well with the morphine shots he got in Knoxville to alleviate his excruciating back pain, and as the driver sped the car toward Ohio, Hank Williams expired in that lonely backseat. He was pronounced dead at a hospital in Oak Hill, West Virginia, at seven o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day, 1953, at the age of twenty-nine.

  * * *

  Hank’s death took a little of the strange heat off Anita, and she never seemed much interested in celebrity matches after that. “All the stars wanted to get something going with her,” recalled Chet Atkins, “but she didn’t go for stars.” She preferred the company of regular guys, such as the brilliant fiddler Dale Potter. She’d met Potter through family friend Don Davis. Potter was handsome and courtly, and he could play any kind of music on the fiddle. It was like having three or four fiddlers playing at once, Chet Atkins used to say. Potter’s musical talents entranced Anita, and she quickly developed a crush, which, in her inexperience, she mistook for love. She was also oblivious to a fact that would have made her shy from the relationship: Potter was a drinker. Unlike Hank Williams, he was fairly good at keeping his tendencies hidden. But he wasn’t perfect. Maybelle once made the mistake of picking up his Coke and taking a sip. “Lord, Dale!” she sputtered. “What have you got in there?”

  Anita was just nineteen when she decided to marry Potter, and she resolved to act before anybody could talk her out of it. “Mother Maybelle and Pop are up in the country, not home,” says a friend of the Carters. “June was there, and Anita waltzed in and says, ‘I’m gonna get married.’ And June said, ‘Mommy and Daddy are not here; wait until they’re here.’ And Anita said, ‘No, I’m not gonna [wait].’ I think they went to Franklin [Kentucky] that day and did it.”

  Before a week was out, Anita realized she’d made a terrible mistake. The marriage ended quickly, but in 1953 she married again—again hastily. This time to Don Davis.

  June, meanwhile, had become one of the most popular stars in Nashville and had a long line of suitors. By the end of 1951, she had winnowed the list to three. One was a guy from the Valley, whom she would soon dump when he tried to become too intimate. Another was Carl Smith, a new arrival at the Opry who had recently released a smash hit, “Let Old Mother Nature Have Her Way.” (The song became a favorite of Eck’s, who liked to sing, “Let old Mother Maybelle have her way.”) The third was steel-guitar whiz Frankie Kay, “the best-lookin’ of ’em all,” says June. Kay was anxious to please, and when he heard that the Carters were looking for someone to fill in for Helen, he suggested Becky Bowman.

  Born and raised in Kansas City, Bowman had grown up with Carter Family music. Not only had her parents spun the old records, but during the war she’d performed on the same bill with the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle at Kansas City’s Play-Mor Arena. She’d had an enjoyable round of girl talk with Helen and felt like she’d made a new friend “at a church picnic or something like that.” By the time June contacted Becky in February of 1952, she had a steady gig playing bass with a western swing trio on radio station KRES, St. Joseph, Missouri. June asked if Becky would be interested in sitting in for Helen on the accordion, and Bowman agreed without hesitation. There was only one problem: Becky Bowman had never played the accordion in her life. So before packing herself, her sister Emily, and mother, Claudine “Mommy” Bowman, in an old green Kaiser automobile and heading out for Nashville, she stopped by Al Crocker’s music store in Kansas City to buy one: “I felt that if I could just get an accordion I could fake it well enough and the other instruments I played—guitar, bass, and clarinet—would carry me.”

  The Bowmans drove through a snowstorm to get to Nashville, and June recalled Becky chugging up to Maybelle’s house behind the wheel of the Kaiser, a long-billed cap on her head and a pipe in her mouth. Bowman says this is an exaggeration, that she didn’t start the pipe until after she’d been in Nashville awhile (Opry sponsor Prince Albert tobacco used to give them out), and the cap she wore only on hot trips, with a damp washcloth underneath. But the two women agree that one of the first things she ever said to June was “I don’t have enough hair to wad a shotgun.”

  “If you were to drive up to the Carters’ house, the first thing Pop would say is ‘Come on in. Have somethin’ to eat. Stay all night,’ ” says Becky. “That’s the way they were raised. They never treated anyone like a stranger. My dad used to love corn bread and milk, and that was the first real meal that we all sat down to eat in the Carters’ home. Helen talked all the time—she was like a magpie—and she was telling some big story and she reached over and she gets this big glass of cold milk and this big hunk of corn bread, and I thought, ‘Lord, I’m home.’ ” Becky was an immediate hit, personally and professionally, and she lived and traveled with the Carters most of the next four years.

  “It was like one great big vacation,” she says. “My first plane ride was in 1952 when the army flew a bunch of us from the Opry to Texas to play some of their bases. They put us on a C-119—Ernest Tubb, Lou Childre, a whole slug. They put parachutes on us, and Hank Williams looked like a big H with his
legs hangin’ down as thin as pool cues. That night, Ernest Tubb took us out for Mexican food.”

  For June Carter, especially, the Nashville ride continued to be bracing . . . and perilous. Carl Smith had established himself as one of the hottest stars of the moment and told June he wished to marry no one but her. Pop and Maybelle seemed to approve of him, but June was less sure. “He was a country boy from just about a hundred miles down the mountain from Poor Valley,” says June. “He treated me with a lot of respect.” Still, June had eyes. And she could see that women were drawn to Smith like bees to honey. “No way around am I gonna be marryin’ you,” June would tell him. Poor Carl swore it wasn’t his fault. What could he do? Women just would not leave him in peace. For God’s sake, even Minnie Pearl had propositioned him. It took some doing, but Smith finally convinced June that she was the one and only for him. They were married in July of 1952.

  Professionally speaking, the partnership was a hit. They sang mush-song duets like “Love, Old Crazy Love,” and June would parody Smith’s hits. He’d sing “Wait ’Til I Get You Alone,” and she would follow with “You Flopped When You Got Me Alone.” They were the Opry’s glamour couple, a feature in country-star magazines and tame gossip columns. “Their on-stage clowning doesn’t hide the fact that they’re just terribly in love,” gushed Hoedown magazine. “Folks get a kick out of the way they flirt and carry on during the Opry performance.” They were also raking in money. One night at the Opry, June asked Becky and her mother to hold her billfold while she was onstage. “Mama just put it in her purse and never thought anything about it,” says Becky. “A few days later, I wrote Mama a letter and said, ‘Have you any idea how much money was in that billfold?’ June had thirty-seven thousand dollars, and Mama was holding it for her!”