Honky Tonk Angel (39 page)

Was Patsy faithful to Charlie? Was he faithful to her? There is an array of spins on those questions.

Patsy and Porter Wagoner worked several package shows together. “I can truthfully say Patsy was a beautiful, great woman. She lived and breathed her music. As an artist, she was dedicated to the business. Patsy and I had a lot of common ground. I did everything the best I could, and so did she. We were never satisfied with second best. Neither of us could live knowing we didn’t give something the very best we had.

“Patsy enjoyed having a good time and so did I. I have wonderful memories of Patsy when we worked the road. One of the funniest things involved Patsy, Lew Childre
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and me. We were in the West Virginia hill country and, in those days, people you met would invite you fishing or to dinner. I took Patsy and Lew along to one of these families. By the time we got to their place way back in the woods, it was dark.

“We drove up and walked into the yard. Patsy bumped into something and jumped like crazy. There was this boy hunkered down relieving himself and just a-going to town doing his thing. He shot straight up, grabbed his overalls, and pulled them up as best he could. He gave us this wild look and blurted, ‘My brother Wiley’s inside. He’s got a gitar. He plays the hell out of it!’ Then he ran inside.

“Lew and I nearly fell out. Patsy broke up screaming. ‘I don’t know who that was, but he’s got something, too, and he plays the hell out of it!’ All through dinner that poor boy tried to avoid looking at Patsy, ’cause whenever he did she’d give him this sly smile and wink.

“Traveling in the car caravan with someone you liked to be around didn’t often happen. I looked forward to being with Patsy, who you could depend upon for entertainment. Nobody was a stranger around her. I’d known Patsy a long time and was quite attracted to her. There was an affinity between her and me. We enjoyed each other’s company and, after a while, one thing led to another. It was beautiful and special.

“But I wouldn’t say we were in love or that we had any torrid romance.
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We were sharing what we felt at the moment, two people alone who’d grown fond of each other. It was a communion of two spirits who found they had more in common than friendship. In each other’s arms, it made a few lonely nights on the dismal road more bearable.”

Were there also lonely nights on the road with Faron Young? “Hot damn!” proclaimed Young as he gave a unique overview of Patsy and Charlie’s relationship.

“When Patsy was out working with me,” Young stated, “Charlie’d get drunk and call to accuse her of things. And he’d be home doing just what he was accusing Patsy of.”

One of these occasions was a series of dates that landed Patsy and Young in
Wyoming. She came to his hotel room, where he was in bed watching TV. “Patsy was about half snookered from the pint of whiskey she kept in her bag. She told me she’d been on the phone with Charlie and he was berating her again.”

Patsy sat on the edge of the bed and they talked and watched TV together. Suddenly, Patsy got really heated about what Charlie was accusing her of. She started taking her clothes off.

“What are you doing?” asked the stunned Young.

“All right, little Sheriff, you always wanted to make out with me! Well, tonight you’re gonna get some!”

“Honey, are you nuts? Get your ass outa my room!”

“Naw! Tonight’s your night!”

She proceeded to get in bed with Young.

“Hey, what you doing?”

“Hoss, let’s make all of Charlie’s wildest dreams come true!”

Of that incident, Young simply stated, “What the hell you gonna do? We laughed about it the next day.”

Patsy and Randy. It kept coming up. Some said “definitely,” others “never in a million years.”

Kathy Hughes said her marriage was solid and there was no romance between her husband and Patsy. “She had a strong dependence on Randy and theirs was more than a client/manager relationship. They were best of friends. Why’s that ugly to some people? Randy was there for Patsy at all hours. Two-thirty one Sunday morning, Patsy called. She was in tears and told Randy, ‘It’s a knock-down, drag-out fight! You better get over here quick.’ And he did. Just like that, got out of bed and went.

“Patsy was always threatening to leave Charlie. But anything Patsy said about getting a divorce, she wasn’t leaving Charlie for Randy!”

Billy Walker reported, “Patsy and Charlie separated for a while, and Patsy and Randy made overtures but resolved it. Randy was my manager. I was with him a lot. If a romance was there, I didn’t know it. They had a crush but it didn’t go further. It had long waned. He knew she’d be hell to live with and he was very much in love with Kathy.
And
nothing could’ve broken she and Charlie apart.”

“To Patsy,” explained Gordon Stoker, “Randy was the greatest. He was stuck on her and she was stuck on him. I kidded him, ‘Don’t get too interested in your merchandise.’ Randy got tired of me bugging him and finally said, ‘I was told to never put your cock in the payroll.’ He made that remark firm and sincere.”

“The subject never came up between us,” noted Dottie. “They were so close, it made you wonder. Patsy loved Randy. It was love for the man who helped achieve her dream. I never saw them even embrace. Patsy was never unfaithful, but that didn’t stop Charlie from accusing. He wanted to say something to hurt. He’d yell, ‘You ought to be home with me and the kids!’ And Patsy’d yell back, ‘If I was, there wouldn’t be anything to eat. Somebody’s got to make a living!’”

Though she was to suffer the consequences, Patsy, in pursuit of money to pay bills and the realization of her dreams, didn’t allow her nervous breakdown to put a
damper on the new year. Charlie was now lending a hand on the road and with the business affairs.

On January 10, 1962, Decca released Patsy’s new single. The label’s ad in
Billboard
read: “Don’t Fall to Pieces but you’ll be Crazy about Patsy Cline’s newest two-sided smash ‘She’s Got You’ c/w ‘Strange.’”

“I was living in Madison the first time I heard ‘She’s Got You,’” Loretta recalled, “and was on my knees waxing our hardwood floor. The radio was on. Peggy Sue, my sister, was with me, and I told her, ‘Well, this is gonna be a smash record.’ And it wasn’t long before it was.”

Patsy had been a friend of June Carter (with whom Cash was having an intense affair while still married to his wife Vivian) for nearly ten years. Patsy now became a favorite of Cash, whose star had soared since he entered the business in 1956. He selected her to appear on one of his star cavalcades.

Patsy was feeling down on January 22, while en route to Kansas City on a two-week whirlwind tour of Canada, the northern states, and Midwest, because she wasn’t home to celebrate little Randy’s first birthday. All she did was pack, travel, work, unpack, and then a few days later, repeat the process. Even now that she’d made it, there was no resting on her laurels. Was this what she’d had in mind when she yearned for stardom?

That night, she continued a letter to Louise that she had begun several days before in Nashville:

Tired of the low-key ballads Bradley had been selecting for her recordings, she was seriously looking for “some good story stuff in a good uptempo” and, backstage in Omaha on the tour, Patsy heard Carl Perkins running down a song. “I was composing it [”So Wrong,” written with Donny Dill and Mel Tillis] as I went along,” he said, “jotting the lyrics on a paper towel. Patsy hollered, ‘Perkins, whose song is that?’ I replied, ‘It’s mine, I guess. I’m writing it.’ She came to the door and looked me straight in the eye and told me, ‘Hell, no. It’s mine! I’m recording it.’”

Patsy Cline product was everywhere. She was big with everyone, die-hard country fans, pop audiences, and an ever-growing teen audience. On January 29, the label released a colorful EP package of “Crazy,” “Foolin’ ’Round,” “Who Can I Count On” and “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way).” Her back-to-back hits created great demand. Randy was asking top dollar, but his phone never stopped ringing. As in 1957, after the success of “Walkin’ After Midnight,” the better part of Patsy’s day was spent talking on the phone doing interviews and speaking to deejays. She told Dottie, “I feel like a piece of meat everybody wants a piece of.”

Toronto in early February was Minnie Pearl’s second tour date with Patsy. “We shared the same dressing room. I was impressed with the way Patsy treated her fans. She was extremely kind and patient, and that always gets to me.” On that date, Roy Drusky and a very young Bill Anderson saw how Patsy championed all the stars on the program.

“Patsy was a real spunky lady,” Anderson pointed out “Then she could be as feminine as you wanted. She was smart enough to know the difference between the two. We worked one night for this particular promoter and hadn’t been paid.”

“When no money appeared forthcoming the next day, we discussed what to do,” Drusky said. “We needed a volunteer to make the point that we wouldn’t be able to work unless we were paid. Patsy said, ‘Hell, leave it to me. I’ll take care of thins.’”

Patsy called the promoter over and told him, “No dough, no show.”

“He told Patsy he couldn’t come up with the money right away and would send it later,” Anderson said. “Patsy walked onstage to great applause. She quieted the audience and asked for the house lights to be turned up.

“She told them, ‘Folks, we’ve been working for this promoter and we’ve not been paid. Country folks have to eat, too. Since we aren’t being paid, I’m sorry to tell you, as much as we love you, we just can’t perform for you tonight. I hope you understand.’”

The audience started booing, cursing, and stamping their feet. Patsy waved and walked into the wings. Within a few minutes, the promoter came running backstage with a couple of grocery sacks filled with the artists’ money.

“That’s more like it, Hoss,” Patsy exclaimed. “Somebody count it to make sure it’s all there!”

Owen Bradley wasn’t letting Patsy burn too many bridges. He had her back in the studio on February 12,13,15, and 28 and she recorded fourteen tracks. While she was soaring, Decca wanted a third album for release before the end of the year.

The songs, evenly balanced between country and pop and simple orchestrations versus heavily stringed, show Bradley’s genius as a producer and Patsy’s versatility: “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It),” recorded by Al Jolson on Decca in 1913 and later a huge smash for Judy Garland; 1931’s “Heartaches” and “That’s My Desire”; 1920’s “Anytime,” also a 1940s hit for country’s Eddy Arnold and pop’s Eddie Fisher; and the Kay Starr hit “You Were Only Fooling (While I Was Falling in Love),” a favorite of the teenage Virginia Hensley; Hank Williams’s hits “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You)” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart”; “Half as Much” and “You Belong to Me” from 1952, co-written by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart.

The new songs were: “Lonely Street,” a Four-Star copyright “cowritten” by the infamous W. S. Stevenson and already a hit for Andy Williams, Kitty Wells, and its cowriter Carl Belew; Harlan Howard’s “When I Get Thru with You (You’ll Love Me Too)”; Justin Tubb’s “Imagine That”; and “So Wrong.” In addition, Bradley chose to completely remake “You’re Stronger Than Me” in a pop style. The arrangers were Bill McElhiney and Bill Justis.

“I visited with Patsy on as many sessions as I could,” Dottie remembered, “and afterward Owen would have us to his office for a little ritual. Sometimes Charlie’d be with us. We’d listen to the playback and drink champagne. Patsy’d make a toast and then he’d make one. To the next hit was always the first, and after that it was up for grabs.