by Colin Escott
LeBlanc always said that the 4 S’s of salesmanship were Saturation, Sincerity, Simplicity, and Showmanship, and with the last in mind, he staged the Hadacol Caravan. Murray Nash said that he gave LeBlanc the idea based upon a hillbilly jamboree he had organized in Tampa; LeBlanc insisted that the idea came to him at 4:30 one morning in Abbeville, Louisiana. The first Hadacol Caravan ran in August 1950. Hank Williams wasn’t aboard; the headliners were Roy Acuff, Connie Boswell, Burns and Allen, Chico Marx, and Mickey Rooney. Researcher Floyd Martin Clay described how LeBlanc skillfully used the Caravan to promote Hadacol in areas where he hadn’t secured distribution. He bought heavy advertising on radio in the form of a contest: a well-known song was played and the audience was invited to send in a card with the title. If they were correct, they got a voucher for a free bottle of Hadacol. Of course, Hadacol was nowhere to be found, but druggists were now getting a steady stream of requests for it and pestering the jobbers to carry it. Then the advertising for the Caravan kicked in, with admission restricted to those carrying Hadacol box tops. By this point, the Hadacol trucks were waiting outside the city limits, and the jobbers were begging for the product.
The 1951 Caravan was the largest show of its kind ever staged. The mainstay of the bill was to be Hank Williams, backed by Minnie Pearl, comedian Candy Candido, emcee Emil Perra, juggler Lee Marks, a house band led by Tony Martin, a troupe of dancers, and twelve clowns. Other star attractions were to be added at various points along the route. Cesar Romero was on the first seven dates. Jack Benny and Rochester, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Rudy Vallee, Carmen Miranda, Dick Haymes, and Jack Dempsey were all conscripted for one or two dates. Admission was one Hadacol box top for children, two for adults. There were prizes for the kids and “reserved seating for coloreds.” Most shows were preceded by a parade.
By this point, LeBlanc had a hidden agenda: he wanted to sell Hadacol, and he wanted to use the publicity generated by the Caravan as a base to launch another stab at the Louisiana governorship. His photo loomed larger than any other in his advertisements, and he made an appearance on every show. He knew that demand had peaked, and he knew that the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and the Liquor Control Board were sniffing around. More than that, LeBlanc’s ruinous advertising budget meant that the corporation lost two million dollars during the second quarter of 1951 alone. With low cunning, he used the second Caravan as a smokescreen to disguise the true financial picture and snare potential buyers.
Inevitably, the Caravan began in Lafayette. Hank and Bill Lister went into the senator’s office before the tour started. They noted the shelf full of Old Forester whiskey with a subscript on the label that read, “Bottled Especially for Sen. Dudley J. LeBlanc, Lafayette, Louisiana.” Hank and Bill Lister were impressed. A shelf full of premium whiskey with “Bottled Especially for Hank Williams” on the label was alternately Hank’s darkest nightmare and his fondest dream.
The Caravan was scheduled to run from August 14 to October 2, although it had been agreed that Hank and Minnie Pearl would miss the Saturday night shows so that they could fly back to Nashville to meet their Opry commitments. LeBlanc had spared no expense in mounting the shows. He budgeted $500,000 for talent and another $750,000 for promotion. A fleet of fifteen Pullman cars was leased, and arrangements were made to transfer the fleet from one railroad company’s engines to another as the show made its way across eighteen states. Fine food was laid on for the performers, laundry facilities had been prearranged, and the logistics of setting up and tearing down had been rehearsed with military precision.
For most of the performers, this was their first contact with Hank Williams and his audience. The dancers had been recruited from an agency in Los Angeles; they’d never heard of Hank, but by the end they were standing in the wings every night as he performed. The reception even surprised Hank. He knew he was the king of the honky-tonks, but now he had stadium crowds eating out of his hand, and legit entertainers working as his supporting acts. Even the Drifting Cowboys were surprised. They had always thought of themselves as working a lowly rung of the entertainment ladder; now they recognized the magnitude of Hank’s stardom. The chorus girls, used to most stars’ frosty hauteur, were also surprised at Hank’s willingness to do the shake ’n’ howdy. He would sign autographs for hours. No one was turned away.
One week into the tour, the show touched down in Montgomery. Braxton Schuffert remembers getting a call from Hank’s mother asking him to meet Hank on the Hadacol train, which was parked down at the railroad yard:
He was sittin’ there, and he had the seat in front of him pushed forward and he was sitting with his boots up on the other seat. I set down beside him. I said, “Hank, how you doin’ boy?” He said, “I’m doing no good at all.” I said, “What’s the matter?” I seen them movie stars walking by outside the window. “All them pretty movie stars on this train, Hank.” He said, “I don’t have nothin’ to do with them. They think they’re better than I am.”
Then Hank got to what was probably the true cause of his foul mood. “He pulled out a pink check about six inches long and three inches high,” said Braxton. “It was for something like seventy-five hundred dollars. He said, ‘Ever’body on this train has got one of these.’” The paychecks had bounced.
Hank and Minnie Pearl eventually forced the issue of payment by threatening not to return from Nashville unless they were paid, and for a few weeks LeBlanc managed to juggle enough funds into the payroll account to keep everyone happy. From Montgomery, the show moved into Georgia. Walter McNeil drove Lilly to the show in Columbus so that she could savor Hank’s triumph once more. Then the Caravan swung up through the Carolinas and into Virginia. After the show in Roanoke on Friday, August 31, Hank flew back to Nashville for the Opry and to sign the papers for his spread in Williamson County. The new toy did little to mollify Audrey, who had spent her life trying to get off the farm.
Band members recall that Hank often came back from his weekend furloughs distraught and angry, hinting broadly that all was not well on Franklin Road. There were rumors that Audrey was keeping company with other men, and those rumors gnawed at Hank, despite the fact that he was trying hard to start an affair with one of the dancing girls. He used his failing marriage as an excuse for coming on to her, giving the impression that he wanted to get involved. He took her shopping, bought her some cowboy boots, and squired her to clubs, but she wouldn’t succumb.
“When we got to Louisville, Kentucky,” said Big Bill Lister, “Dick Haymes said to his wife, ‘Well, we’re finally getting out of the sticks — the hillbillies won’t be tearing them up now.’ What he didn’t know was that Louisville was a second home to a lot of Opry acts; somebody played there every Sunday afternoon on the way to somewhere.” Bob Hope joined the show for two appearances in Louisville and Cincinnati. Hank had been closing the show up to that point, but LeBlanc asked him to take second billing and Hank agreed. To make things as difficult as possible for Hope, Hank reached back for something extra and took encore after encore. “That crowd wasn’t gonna turn him loose,” says Lister, “and LeBlanc was trying to introduce Bob Hope over all this hollerin’ and clappin’. They got the crowd quieted down, and somewhere in his wardrobe Bob Hope had this old hat that he’d used in Paleface, and he wore that and just stood there, and when the place quieted down he said, ‘Just call me Hank Hope.’” When he came off, Hope found LeBlanc and told him that he wouldn’t follow Hank Williams again. Hank could afford to smile inwardly, but — being Hank — he probably smiled outwardly as well because a triumph was for nothing if not to be savored. When LeBlanc told him he was topping the bill, Hank said, “That’s fine. Just pay me what you’re paying Hope.”
Lister and everyone else in Hank’s entourage had less charitable memories of Milton Berle, who appeared on the show in St. Louis. Uncle Miltie, Lister recalls, had offered to emcee the entire show in addition to performing his usual schtick:
He had an ego big as all
outdoors, and when Dick Haymes was doing “Old Man River,” Milton Berle had a red bandanna around his head and stood out behind Dick Haymes and just ruined the man’s act. Nobody deserves that. Uncle Miltie had already been out and done his thing and now he was ruining everybody else’s act. I told Hank, “If that joker comes out doing that when we’re out there, he’s really gonna mess things up. If he wants a good laugh, I’m gonna get this ol’ guitar and crown him with it.” Hank said, “If you do, I’ll buy you any guitar you want,” but the word circulated around and Milton’s manager got him plumb offstage somewhere.
On Friday, September 14, the movable feast touched down in Wichita, Kansas, for a show designed to coincide with the Frontier Days Rodeo festival. A second show was laid on in the early hours to accommodate those who had just gotten off work at the aircraft plant. Hank and Minnie Pearl flew back to Nashville later that night and rejoined the troupe in Oklahoma City on Sunday. Flying back to Oklahoma City with Minnie and her husband, Henry Cannon, Hank asked Henry to pull his guitar out of the baggage when they stopped to refuel, then wrote a song called “Heart of a Devil, Face of a Saint.” Clearly, not a happy weekend.
Over that same weekend, Dudley LeBlanc had sold Hadacol to the Tobey Maltz Company in New York. He announced the sale in Dallas on Monday, September 17, just before the show scheduled for the Cotton Bowl. “The next morning we were having breakfast,” remembered Bill Lister, “and Hank asked the senator, ‘What did you sell Hadacol for?’ He meant, ‘Why did you sell it?’ but the senator leaned across the table and said, ‘Eight and a half million dollars,’ and our jaws just dropped to the floor.” Jaws dropped again when the performers were handed their final paychecks and tried to cash them. Once again, LeBlanc hadn’t juggled enough money into his account to cover payroll.
The caravan, so huge and unwieldy, was torn down in the space of hours. Everyone said their hurried good-byes. Some of the chorus line, who had been living for free on the train and sending their ninety-dollar paychecks back home, ended up in Juarez and had to ride a cattle car back to Los Angeles. Hank flew back to Nashville, and flew Don Helms and Sammy Pruett to Lafayette to pick up the limos. He gave Jerry Rivers and Howard Watts train tickets back to Nashville.
In fact, LeBlanc saw no more than $250,000 for Hadacol. Payments of half a million dollars a month from future profits were called for but weren’t made because there were no future profits — only liens, overdue bills, returned shipments, and FTC and Liquor Control Board suits. LeBlanc exculpated himself neatly by saying, “If you sell a cow and the cow dies, you can’t do anything to a man for that.” He’d sidestepped some potentially damaging fallout, but was tagged as a loser and once again failed in his 1952 bid to become governor. Hadacol was officially declared bankrupt at the height of the campaign.
The tour was supposed to have ended back in Baton Rouge on October 2. Hank had also scheduled a date in Biloxi on October 3 and had committed to perform at the Mississippi-Louisiana Exposition in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the same day. No one now remembers how he filled the two vacant weeks at the end of the tour, but when he played the Opry on October 6 he told the audience that he was “entertaining at home next week for the first time in nine weeks,” suggesting that he had filled in the dates at short notice.
On the weekend after the wheels came off the Hadacol Caravan, Hank was photographed backstage at the Opry signing a motion-picture contract. His uneasy dance with the legit entertainment world that had started when Tony Bennett covered “Cold, Cold Heart” was now acquiring an unstoppable momentum. The attention left Hank profoundly uneasy. Frank Walker had come down from New York for the MGM Pictures signing. He, Wesley Rose, and Jim Denny circled predatorily around their meal ticket, cigars in hand, as Hank committed himself to a deal for what the local paper called “top quality motion pics.” Walker made a point of telling the press that this was the first time anyone had ever been signed to do motion pictures without a screen test or audition. Hank had a keener sense of his limitations than his handlers, and had never cared to capitalize on the link between MGM Records and MGM Pictures. He was happier telling people that the picture division was courting him, all the while keeping them at bay. Inevitably and inexorably, though, the pressure grew. Hank probably read in Billboard that his fellow MGM Records act, Billy Eckstine, had been signed to Skirts Away, and all of his heroes, like Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Davis, and particularly Gene Autry, had made motion pictures. Even so, Hank had reservations.
Basic economics weighed on Hank’s mind as he rebuffed MGM. He could make more money on the road than if he were tied up week after week in Hollywood. Soon after he arrived at the Opry he had put his band on salary rather than a per-gig fee, which assured him of having his pickers on call, but also meant that he was committed to paying them regardless of whether they worked. A deeper concern was Hank’s sure knowledge that he was getting out of his depth, but in holding out, he only dug a deeper hole for himself. When the offer was tabled, MGM Pictures not only offered to forego screen tests but guaranteed to place him right away in costar billing roles. Billboard reported that the movies would “not [be] in the horse opera category,” and that Joe Pasternak of MGM had already offered Hank a costarring role in an upcoming Esther Williams movie, Peg o’ My Heart. He was offered a four-year deal, and no picture was to take more than four weeks of his time. The salary guarantee was between three thousand and five thousand dollars a week, with a ten-thousand-dollar guarantee per picture. Tellingly, at the signing ceremony, Hank wasn’t smiling. He knew he didn’t belong in Peg o’ My Heart.
Hank still wasn’t smiling when he went to meet Pasternak in California. Pasternak asked him to stand up and turn around, and the hair rose on the back of his neck. “He said it was like he was for sale,” said Don Helms afterward. The motion-picture deal also meant that Hank had to wear toupees again. The remaining hair on the crown of his head was shaved off yet again, and he went for several fittings. In Pasternak’s office, Jim Denny, himself the owner of a lot of hair that nature hadn’t given him, told Hank to take his hat off. Pasternak saw the toupee and asked Hank if he had any hair. “Hell, yes,” he said, “I got a dresser drawer full of it.” Hank left with some scripts for his consideration.
A few weeks later, the legit entertainment world beckoned again. CBS-TV offered a spot on The Perry Como Show for Wednesday, November 14. He would have to stay a week in New York for rehearsals. Bill Lister, who rode up with Hank, said:
Perry Como was just like he was on television. Relaxed, a real likable guy. We spent most of our time shooting pool. They had one scene where they had a pool table. While the McGuire Sisters and everybody else on the show was getting all their timing down to just a gnat’s hair, Perry Como, Hank, Sammy Pruett, and myself would all shoot pool. That show was sponsored by Chesterfield, and it had a little jingle that Perry Como sang, and he wanted Hank to join him and do it with him, but Hank couldn’t get it. Finally, Hank said, “Well, we’ll just have to give up on that.” And when we got out of New York City a ways, driving along, Hank kind of chuckled to himself, and he said, “I didn’t come all the way from south Alabama to sing a commercial.”
On the following week’s show, Como donned a cowboy hat, sang “Hey, Good Lookin’,” then apologized to Hank.
Hank felt as out of place in New York as he had in Hollywood. He was always the first to feel condescension and reacted to it with a mixture of truculence and boorishness. “If you don’t like folk music,” he once told an interviewer, “stay away from my shows. I can’t stand classical music, but I don’t tell the world about it.”
During rehearsals for the Como show, Hank took time out to do an interview at Billboard in which he explained how careful he was to space his releases properly, and follow what he called a “jump tune” with a blues or ballad. The piece also mentioned that Hank was scheduled to do a spot on Ed Sullivan’s Talk of the Town, although, as far as we know, he never appeared. His rancor toward Milton Berle was still bubbling
near the surface, though. He told the Billboard columnist that he had been offered a spot on Berle’s television show but had turned it down. “The last time I worked with him, there like to have been a killing,” he said with a frankness that must have surprised the columnist.
On November 9, possibly anticipating a flood of orders from Como viewers, MGM issued Hank’s first album, Hank Williams Sings. It was released in three formats: ten-inch LP; four 78s packaged in an album; or four 45s in an album. It was axiomatic that country LPs didn’t sell, and the notion of the single as a trailer for the hugely more profitable album was still more than ten years away. Rose used Hank’s first album as a dump site for oddball tracks that hadn’t sold elsewhere. With the exception of “Wedding Bells,” the tracks were the dogs of Hank’s catalog, like “I’ve Just Told Mama Goodbye,” “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” and “Six More Miles.” Rose’s thinking in recycling these oldies but not-so-goodies was paraphrased by Billboard: “The release of an album [of eight new sides], they feel, would spread jockey and juke plays too thinly instead of getting the concentrated push on the single record.”
For Hank, the contrast between the tawdry glamor of network television out of New York and the mundane grind of personal appearances in the South was made all the more apparent by the fact that a week before the Como show he was appearing at the Wagon Wheel Club between Opelika and Auburn, Alabama. Hank almost certainly felt more at home at the Wagon Wheel than in New York or Hollywood, but if he found any incongruity playing the Wagon Wheel one week and Como’s show the next, he didn’t talk about it. But Hank didn’t talk about anything substantive very much, anyway.
One month after the Como show, and just a few days before a scheduled operation on his back, Hank returned to the Castle studio to cut the last of the five hugely prolific recording sessions he’d done in 1951. It would also be the last session to feature all of the Drifting Cowboys. Nothing new was on the menu. The oldest song was “Let’s Turn Back the Years,” a plea for reconciliation that had first appeared in one of Hank’s WSFA songbooks in 1946. Its words now rang truer than ever. Several verses had been omitted from the 1946 draft, including one that Hank couldn’t quite bring himself to sing: