Honky Tonk Angel (54 page)

March 1963 proved to be one of the grimmest months in country history. Besides the deaths of Patsy, Cowboy, Hawk, and Randy, and the loss of Jack Anglin, Texas Ruby, one of Patsy’s early influences, passed. President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated that November.

One of the most poignant tributes to Patsy was Jimmy Buffet’s in his song “I Miss You So Badly”:

For Joltin’ Jim McCoy’s annual March 5 Patsy Cline memorial broadcast, he received the following poem, “Leaning on Heaven’s Gate,” from Mrs. Hensley:

This classified ad appeared in the October 15, 1980, edition of the
Winchester Star:

A phone number was given. Within days, the lots were sold.

Patsy Cline’s grave is marked with a simple bronze plaque that reads:
Death cannot kill what never dies.

She was a star when she left us, and a star she remains.

S
ince this book’s initial publication twenty-seven years ago and then after the 1993 edition, a number of fascinating details about Pasty Cline’s life have surfaced.

The saga of Patsy and Charlie and the spectrum of their marriage—from unbridled passion and wedded bliss to their struggles to make it as a family and eventually bouts of great turmoil—could fill volumes.

Rose Marie (“Ree”) Flynt became one of the shoulders Patsy could cry on. “We met on music gigs back when they were living in Fayetteville [North Carolina] and struggling,” she observed. “I assisted Patsy with driving, wardrobe, hair, selling records and photos, and making sure her pay was accurate. Traveling so many roads, so many hours—cracking up laughing or singing our hearts out—we bonded. She helped me with my phrasing and taught me how to breathe from my diaphragm. She
also taught me about showmanship, saying the ‘trick’ to grabbing an audience was a song that socks it to them and leaves them wanting more.”

According to Flynt, problems flared early in the couple’s marriage. She recounted the time she returned Patsy home after some club dates to find a strange car parked out front. “Patsy caught Charlie red-handed [with a woman]. There was hell to pay!”

Another time, “after shopping for groceries and liquor, we got to the house and there was Charlie’s car. Patsy became livid. ‘That bastard should be at work!’ He was asleep. She woke him up and they got into it pretty bad. I was in the kitchen putting things away. Patsy ran in with Charlie yelling, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll slap the hell out of you!’ He saw I had a whiskey bottle in my hand. I told him, ‘If you don’t want me to splatter your brains with this bottle, you better not put your hands on her.’”

Juggling career and marriage was difficult, but Patsy made great attempts to be the ideal wife. Yet the reputation of the “old” Patsy—especially in the “Brunswick Triangle”—was hard to shake.

Flynt told of Baltimore disc jockey Ray Davis, who bragged that he’d taken Patsy home after a gig and slept with her. “I dressed him down, saying, ‘You didn’t sleep with Patsy—I did.’ Then it dawned on me what he might think, and I explained. We were just girls in our twenties and didn’t think anything of it—especially if we could save money on hotel rooms.”

When Ree’s husband, Pat Flynt, a Private First Class at Fort Hood, Texas, caught scuttlebutt of Davis’s boast, he called his wife and told her he didn’t want her hanging around “that woman.”

“What do you mean?” his wife demanded. “Ray’s full of crap. He didn’t sleep with her that night, I did!” Pat wanted an explanation. When Ree gave it, they laughed.

Flynt described carefree times when she and Patsy would enjoy “downing a few,” with Patsy’s choice being bourbon and Coca-Cola—a few times sans Coke, “just picking up the bottle and drinking.”

With Godfrey and “Walkin’ After Midnight,” Patsy was hot. Flynt drove her to so many dates, often they didn’t know where they were. “En route to Berryville, Virginia, for a show at Watermelon Park, I got lost,” she recollected. “By the time I found it, Patsy missed two shows. The head honcho got mad and I took the blame. He said he’d have to dock her fee. She told him how badly she needed the money and promised an extra-long show.

“In the dressing room, I laid out her gold lamé pants suit. Patsy was exhausted, but she got dressed. It was so tight, she couldn’t sit. I looked around and there she was leaning against the wall taking forty winks.”

When they went to collect, “the bum not only shorted her fifty dollars but demanded 25 percent from the sale of records and photos. Patsy was steaming mad, but had another date the next day and didn’t want to argue. ‘Do it,’ she said. I threw him a few bills and change.”

In the car, Flynt told Patsy to look in the glove compartment. She pulled out an envelope and, waving a handful of dollar bills, screamed, “Ree, you didn’t!”

“Yes, I did,” replied Flynt. “That bastard wasn’t going to screw you twice in one night.”

In 1962 Patsy’s biggest road “haul” was twelve hundred dollars for an Alabama show featuring rock ‘n’ roll stars. The fee would have been much less, but Randy asked the promoter, if the rock artists got paid more, why shouldn’t Patsy?

Patsy and Ree Flynt began a correspondence—an archive of over twenty letters—in October 1959 that spanned four years, to February 5, 1963, a month before Patsy’s death. (The excerpts from Patsy’s letters to Rose Marie Flint appear here as Patsy wrote them, uncorrected.)

In her handwritten (except for one typed) letters, Patsy’s voice jumps off the page as she discusses her marriage, love for the children, career, songs, and the grueling travel as she began another hit streak. In letter after letter, she went on about either how much she loved Charlie and hated being away from him, or how she couldn’t get out the door fast enough.

Of the letters, Lisa Flood, creator of
www.patsified.com
, stated, “At a time when Patsy was meeting the goals she’d dreamed of, she was falling apart. She couldn’t find peace in her life. The letters make it plain that Patsy despised Charlie much more than she loved him. She writes that he beats her and leaves her lying in the hospital to go drinking.”

A friend of Mrs. Hensley’s who read letter excerpts found that “Patsy never refers to Charlie by name, but uses ‘he’ and ‘him.’ I’m stunned he didn’t buy the letters and burn them. Patsy makes her case against him in her own handwriting. They should convince the doubters who believe all his tiptoeing that he only hit Patsy once; and that [when they fought] Patsy gave as good as she got.”

An August 1960 letter is particularly poignant. Patsy, on tour and fearful of losing her second child (Randy), wrote of being in a Los Angeles hospital. Two days later, however, she was heading to Oregon, planning to return to California for a TV segment, and to do shows in Illinois—all the time concerned that “I’m gonna lose this young’un yet. But guess I’ll leave it to the Man upstairs.”

After her near fatal 1961 accident and breakdown, Patsy was often hyper and, as one letter put it, “wound tight.” Anxious about paying over one thousand dollars for her thirty-three-day hospitalization, doctors, and planned plastic surgery, she went back on tour too soon. Patsy wrote of being “sick in health, happiness & my mind & nerves are shot,” to the point that you might think the person who was so laid-back, carefree, and a bit of a hell-raiser in earlier times was now a barely contained explosion waiting to happen.

Patsy’s determination to be front and center was such that on Saturday, July 29, five weeks after her surgeries, she returned to the stage in Tulsa at Leon McAuliff’s huge Cimarron Ballroom, with Charlie to help. McAuliff, a Western swing bandleader with hits of his own, and his Cimarron Boys accompanied.

The ornate showroom, built in the 1920s by the Tulsa Shriners, had a capacity of two thousand and a studio for KVOO Radio.

Patsy’s timing was perfect. “I Fall to Pieces” was at the top of the trade charts and getting crossover play. There was one show—tickets priced at $1.50—and it was sold out.

Some of those who saw Patsy up close, such as club secretary Romana Ellison, were shocked at the extent of the scars. She told the Country Music Foundation’s
Paul Kingsbury, “Patsy was pretty sore, but it didn’t affect her singing.” Since she was on crutches, the stage manager accommodated with a stool.

Patsy’s ad-libs provided juxtaposition between the poignancy of her vocalizing and, as evidenced in her letters, her lack of education. Referencing her accident, Patsy kidded that she looked “beat up” because of “what women drivers does for you.” After a beat she added, “Not all!” complimenting the local gals. It was also interesting that in her banter she showed she kept up with current events when she got political and threw some brickbats at then—Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

There were several ovations and, quite moved, Patsy sobbed, “Bless your heart! ... When ‘I Fall to Pieces’ became #1, it took six nurses to tie me to that bed!” Weeks of dates were canceled, but, she said she told Randy, “Don’t cancel Tulsa! I’m gonna be there if I gotta crawl. And I made it.” The audience went wild.

On August 21, still badly bruised, Patsy recorded “Crazy.” “It was one of the few songs Patsy didn’t get on the first take,” Willie Nelson said. “I realized she was attempting to sing it the way I had recorded the demo. I told her, ‘Make it your own.’ Back at the microphone, Patsy sang the lyrics instead of speaking them and got it.”

In two letters that month, one sent the day after a recording session, Patsy and Bradley were already planning a second album, but she wasn’t happy about the direction of her career. “I could spit dust I’m so mad.... He wants to put violins (you heard me) on my new session. [He’s] still trying to get me in the pop.” She complained not of pain or depression but of having to do so many ballads. “I’ll die & walk out,” she wrote, “before I’ll go all the way pop.” She argued that the sessions proved she could sing pop music, which she already knew.

Patsy made no mention of “Crazy,” which she still evidently disliked. She seemed to come to like “I Fall to Pieces,” bragging it was climbing the country and pop charts and concluding “Now don’t that blow your hat in the creek?”

On September 8, 1961, Patsy turned twenty-nine. Hobbling on crutches, she was back on the road. In a letter dated two days earlier, she was at wit’s end, complaining Charlie was causing havoc, forcing her to think more seriously about divorce: “It’s the same ole thing . . . he proceeded to get drunk every dam night ... I get so dam fed up I could scream. I’m at that point again where it don’t matter where he is to me anymore.”

She was frustrated over Charlie “not being man enough to take it”—accepting her as his wife and “having me where I am now,” a reference to her stardom. She said she was putting away as much money as she could “& then when I get sick enough of it I’ll be able to live with out my dam man.”

In an October letter, Patsy is ecstatic not only over having two hits but also over her black and white “all power” Cadillac. Working New York, Michigan, and Florida and planning a stop in Nashville, she says she found two weeks to relax with Julie and her mother at the Washington apartment she rented. But by page five, trouble rears its head. Patsy writes that on a tour Charlie “got loaded & cussed & knocked me around in front of people.” She described his leaving her at the hospital to go drinking, stating “Ree, my life is the most up set. I’m fed up [and] don’t care if I ever see this man again. [I’m] unhappy, tired of trying, sick, and tired of being hurt & used.” She revealed she was seeing a divorce lawyer and that, “for the first time,” Charlie believed her. “He’s begging me to stay with him, but I’m finished with trying, crying, begging and there’s nothing left to be hurt any more.... I’ve had it!
I’m almost out of my mind worrying what to do. Leave or stay here.... The children are the only reason I’m here.”