Hank Williams

by Colin Escott

  After Talmadge Smith led the congregation in prayer, Dr. Lyon introduced Red Foley, who came forward to sing “Peace in the Valley.” Foley said later that Hank had made him promise he would sing it at his funeral should he go first and Red remain. Foley’s normally rich and measured baritone was cracking by the time he finished. Then Lyon gave a final, lengthy eulogy, saying that Hank’s true eulogy was in his music. At Lilly’s request, the Statesmen Quartet sang “Precious Memories” before the final benediction. The cortege then moved slowly toward Oakwood Cemetery.

  Horace Logan had flown to Montgomery with Felton Pruett, Hayride guitarist Dobber Johnson, and a few others. “Acuff was talking about ‘Hank’s friends from the Grand Ole Opry…,’” said Logan. “Jim Denny sat in front of me. He turned around and said to me, ‘Logan, if Hank could raise up in his coffin, he’d look up toward the stage and say, “I told you dumb sons of bitches I could draw more dead than you could alive."’

  At the grave site, Lyon gave a rosebud to the survivors as they threw handfuls of earth on Hank’s coffin. Fred Rose was one of the honorary pallbearers. Talking to reporters after the funeral, he was refreshingly down to earth. “Whatever people say about Hank, he never hurt anybody but himself,” he said. “He was his own worst enemy…but one thing he had — and all his friends recognized it — was loyalty. I don’t give a hang whether he drank or not, I appreciate the fact he was loyal.…[If someone tried to bribe him away], he’d say, ‘I started with Rose and I’ll stay with Rose.’” Rose also threatened to sue anyone who duplicated recordings of the funeral. With so much litigation to follow, it was altogether fitting that the first threat of legal action was made as the earth was covering the coffin.

  Everyone then went their separate ways. Audrey, Randall Hank, and Lycrecia returned to Nashville with A. V. Bamford; Lilly went back to the boardinghouse, and Irene joined her for a few days before returning home. Toby Marshall went back to his “practice” in Oklahoma City. Billie Jean and her family caught the Greyhound back to Shreveport, although attorney Robert Stewart later remembered her coming up to him after the funeral, “telling me that if I didn’t have them seven Cadillacs ready for her to take back to Shreveport, her brothers would personally stomp my God-damn teeth down my throat.” Irene remembered the parting in slightly warmer tones. “Billie and her father came back to the house, said goodbye,” she wrote later. “I promised to send her things on to her the following week. Her father thanked me for being able to keep a fairly cool head. His words were, ‘But for you, child, there would have been a killing here.’”

  It typified the ambiguity of Hank’s life that his last journey wasn’t quite his last. On January 17, 1953, his casket was dug up and moved. The Oakwood Annex housed Free French and British airmen who had been killed during training, and their remains were now disinterred and returned to their relatives. It was a gruesome job because they hadn’t been buried in caskets, nor always in one piece. The remains of those who had no relatives were consolidated, leaving a large plot that the cemetery owner, John Hart, sold to Lilly.

  On the afternoon of January 16, 1953, Leaborne Eads and a crew dug a new grave for Hank in what would become the family plot, and then, in the middle of the night, they moved Hank to the new site. Some passersby after midnight saw the lamps flickering and the coffin being moved, and the rumor quickly started that Hank had been taken from his casket, his boots stolen, and his body pickled. Eads, though, insists that the casket wasn’t opened.

  A monument in Vermont granite now sits atop several tons of poured concrete. Beneath that impregnable tomb lies the ol’ Drifting Cowboy, almost certainly looking, according to Eads, exactly as he did on January 4, 1953, when the lid was closed on him. Perhaps the skin would have pinched a little around his nose, says Eads, adding with the undertaker’s ghoulish detachment that the eyes might have popped open as well. One or both of the black, riveting Indian eyes that burned so intensely for twenty-nine years may now stare lifelessly into eternity. For the reverse of the monument, Audrey wrote a mawkish poem that scans about as well as she sang.

  Within a week of Hank’s burial, Audrey began rewriting history. That task, together with her adventures in the music business, would consume the remainder of her days. “I knew he would never hurt me or anyone else,” she said, all evidence, especially her own, to the contrary. “The dream was good, it was true…. The heights of joy could not be told or even imagined of the happiness I [knew] as his wife…. Everything I ever wanted or could desire I found in Hank Williams.” Hank might have wished for those flowers while he was living, but he might have stomped on them too. Audrey was the first of many who found Hank more lovable dead. In a letter to Irene dated February 24, 1953, she sounded a slightly more realistic note. “I believe Hank’s love for me is what destroyed him,” she said, “and there wasn’t too much I could do about it. That’s what makes it so bad. I was helpless. If I was weak like he was, the same thing would happen to me.”

  In Nashville, Hank Williams was welcomed back in death to preside beatifically over country music. The Opry was as anxious to reclaim him in death as it had been to cast him out in life, but as Jerry Byrd, who had played steel guitar on “Lovesick Blues,” remembers, his canonization didn’t go unchallenged in private:

  There was a bunch of us in the hallway at WSM on January 1. George Morgan, Ken Marvin, Jim Denny, and me. Jim Denny said, “We’ll never see his like again.” I said, “I hope not.” Everybody looked at me like I’d blasphemed, and I said, “You’re trying to put a halo on him that won’t fit.” He had a great chance and he blew it. He did as much to hurt country music as he did to help it — doing shows drunk as hell and insulting the audience. Everyone forgets that. They have short memories.

  George Morgan, who had been the butt of some of Hank’s arrogance, broke the awkward silence. “I’m with Byrd,” he said.

  Out on Long Island, Frank Walker composed a letter to Hank addressed “c/o Songwriter’s Paradise.” Walker started by saying that he always enjoyed writing to Hank on New Year’s Day, although the only letter anyone ever found was a curt reply to Audrey, who had called inquiring where the year-end royalty statements were. “An hour or so ago,” Walker wrote, “I received a phone call from Nashville. It was a rather sad call too for it told me that you had died early this morning…. I think HE wanted to have you just a bit closer to HIM. Nashville’s pretty far away, so HE just sent word this morning, Hank, that HE wanted you with HIM…. You’ll be writing for the greatest singers too, the Angels, they’re so wonderful — I know they’ll want you to join them.”

  Then a voice borne on a sepulchral breeze spoke to Walker: “When the plant reopens tomorrow,” it said, “take records by all other artists off the presses, lay on an extra shift, and press only Hank Williams records; this is the opportunity of your lifetime.” Walker didn’t go to Nashville; instead, he heeded the voice and reaped the rewards. “Honestly,” he’d said in his letter, “I’m not too unhappy for I must rejoice with you at the tremendous opportunity you will have to do good for others.” How true those words would become. Walker’s folly was that to the end of his stewardship at MGM in 1958, he would sign average, occasionally above-average, country singers, believing them to be the next Hank Williams.

  Two months after Toby Marshall arrived back in Oklahoma City, he was unmasked. His wife, Fay, died in mysterious circumstances on March 4, 1953, and Hank Williams’ name was found among a list of “patients.” An investigation was launched, and lots of damaging innuendo was heard, but in the end Marshall could be indicted for nothing more serious than parole violation. Before he was arrested, he contacted Billie Jean once again for payment, intimating that he knew things that could prove very valuable to her in the legal battles ahead. Then, while serving out his time, he wrote a 222-page book detailing much that Hank Williams told him during their sessions. Marshall’s manuscript surfaced recently but has never been released. Its thesis is that Hank Williams committed suicide. “It occurs to me,
” Marshall said during testimony in March 1953,

  that perhaps Hank got to mulling things over in his mind, and having a very persuasive personality he might have just talked the doctor in Knoxville out of enough stuff [barbiturates] to kick himself off…. He had been on a rapid decline. Most of his bookings were of the honky-tonk beer-joint variety which he simply hated. If he came to this conclusion [suicide], he still had enough prestige as a star to make a first-class production out of it. Six months from now, he might have been playing for nickels and dimes on skid row.

  Marshall is the only person to have raised the specter of suicide, but his opinion cannot be discounted because he was as close to Hank as anyone during those last weeks, perhaps even closer than Billie Jean. Many around Hank would have ruled out the notion of suicide, insisting that he had everything to live for — which, in a sense, he did. Even so, the world must have looked very different to Hank Williams when he was coming off a drunk, reeling from ceaseless back pain, soaked in his own urine, the taste of vomit still in his mouth, facing the prospect of a three-hundred-mile haul to the next beer joint, always knowing that midnight was approaching.

  “He wanted to destroy the Hank Williams that was making the money that fair-weather friends and relatives were getting,” said Marshall. “Although he had a multiplicity of personal problems, basically he was a very lonely person, and couldn’t stand being alone…. He had a host of fair-weather friends, most of whom were parasites, who fawned on him, played up to him, and kept him supplied with liquor.” Several of those who worked with Hank during his last year lend credence to Marshall’s theory. Don Helms says that he sometimes dreaded coming into Hank’s hotel room for fear that the window would be open and Hank would be gone. Whether he jumped on that final trip will forever be conjecture, though. Setting out, he seemed determined to show his Nashville costars that he could arrive on time and put on a hell of a show, but we’ll never know the thoughts that beset him on that long, final ride.

  Hank had lost the focus that had driven him in 1949. One moment he felt suicidal; the next he wanted to reclaim his position at the top in Nashville. One moment he wanted to jettison Billie Jean and return to Audrey; the next he wanted to stay with Billie. He left so many contradictory messages behind him. He had lost the centeredness that had helped him achieve his success, and this too is hard to believe, because so few years separated the intently focused Hank Williams of late 1949 from the bruised, buffeted, and directionless Hank Williams of late 1952. There are enough questions around that last journey and the events that followed to suggest that a secret was buried with him, but the problem with conspiracy theories is that Hank Williams would almost certainly have been dead within weeks or months anyway. He was in such poor shape.

  Bobbie Jett was a name on nobody’s lips during the lying-in-state, the funeral, or its immediate aftermath. Two days after Hank was buried, she gave birth to a daughter named Antha (Bobbie’s mother’s name) Belle (her grandmother’s name) Jett. A lonely confinement was followed by a lonely delivery. She was the only mother giving birth that day in St. Margaret’s Hospital. Under the influence of painkillers, she began singing Hank’s songs. A week or so later, she checked herself out, picked up Jo, and left Antha Belle with Lilly and Marie Glenn.

  On January 28, Lilly attended a hearing at the Montgomery County Department of Public Welfare. She stated that the child had been left at her house when she had gone back to Butler County, and she told the public welfare officers that the child was Hank’s and she would be willing to adopt her because “this was what her son would want her to do, and he once commented that he did feel that Miss Jett was not a suitable person to take care of the child.” According to the report, Lilly seemed quite devoted to the baby, and wanted to keep her because she would help her feel closer to Hank. Lilly, though, had been diagnosed with heart disease, and her fitness to adopt was questioned. Meanwhile, Bobbie Jett was back in Nashville, caring for her grandmother, and cooking and cleaning for several other family members. At no time did she consider taking Antha Belle.

  Three days later, Irene wrote to Robert Stewart, “Please talk my mother into never bringing Bobbie into this mess no matter what. Yea Gods, if all of the scandall [sic] that could be dug up ever was, I would feel like changing my name.” Robert Stewart was equally opposed to Lilly’s adopting the child. “I am making as few suggestions as possible,” he wrote to Irene on March 16, 1953, “other than to say that I feel it [the child] should be turned over to the Welfare Department or to the Sisters in the event that Bobbie will not take care of it.” Four days later, Irene replied to Stewart, mentioning that she’d had a letter from Bobbie Jett that morning in which Bobbie told her that she was going to Montgomery the following week to sign the papers allowing Lilly to adopt the child.

  All the while, Irene was making it clear that she would never assume responsibility for the baby (referred to by both Irene and Robert Stewart as “it"), despite the fact that she’d told social workers that she would. In another letter to Robert Stewart dated April 6, 1953, she made her position clear: “Tee [Irene’s husband, John T. Smith] says that if she [Lilly] adopts it and then can’t take care of it, he is not going to let me take it. Keep this under your hat, mabey [sic] it will never be necessary for me to have the child at all. I feel that the poor child would have a better chance in life if it were adopted by someone that would never know its origin at all.”

  Lilly went ahead with the adoption, and the child became Cathy (a name Lilly picked from her favorite book, Wuthering Heights) Yvone (from “Jambalaya") Stone. Lilly was still married to Bill Stone, but would divorce him in April 1954 — one legal action of many that year. Lilly took another lover, named Slim Stern, while Stone moved in with Marie and Butch in the boardinghouse next door.

  In the absence of a will, Hank’s estate was the subject of contention. Audrey’s share was clear, but the thought that Billie Jean would share the other half with Hank Jr. prompted Audrey and Lilly to become strange bedfellows. Some might say that they had a case; they had gone up and down with Hank Williams for nine and twenty-nine years, respectively, whereas Billie Jean had been in the picture for only three months. Very quickly, Audrey and Lilly played their trump. Lilly remembered the overheard conversation in which Billie Jean had told Hank that they weren’t legally married (presumably, Audrey forgot that her 1944 marriage to Hank hadn’t been legal either, for exactly the same reason).

  “If it was left to Audrey and me, we could work this thing [the estate] out on friendly terms,” said Billie Jean, striking an unusually conciliatory note a week after Hank died. “I don’t want to fight over Hank’s estate. He wouldn’t have wanted it that way.” But big money was at stake, and very soon Hank’s presumed wishes were irrelevant.

  Lilly and Audrey developed a plan: first they would prove that Hank and Billie Jean were not legally married, then they’d try to blacken Billie’s reputation. On February 24, Audrey wrote to Irene: “I’m leaving early Thursday morning to check on this Billie.…I may also go to Ft. Jackson, S.C. to check to see Farron [sic] Young.” The following month, Lilly went to Nashville because three of Billie Jean’s former coworkers at the telephone company apparently had information that they wanted to share, but wouldn’t give to Audrey. Meanwhile, Irene, Lilly, and Audrey were still following up leads on Billie’s first husband, Harrison Eshliman. Their anger rose as Faron Young’s “Goin’ Steady” (a song that Hank almost certainly wrote) began climbing the charts. Irene wrote bitterly to Robert Stewart, “This Johnny Horton that [Billie] goes out with will probably be the next one to come out with one of Hank’s songs.” Irene clearly thought that Billie had made off with a stash of songs and was feeding them to her friends.

  “I had youth, but no knowledge,” Billie concluded. Two weeks after Hank’s death, Paul Howard had called her. Howard was the bandleader who had arranged Hank and Billie’s first marriage. “He asked me if I could sing, and I said I’d been singing all my life in churches, and at the offi
cers’ club. Paul said, ‘G-o-o-o-d, because I’m fixing to make us a lot of money.’ We rented a costume and took a picture of me with a hat on. We were making two thousand dollars or more a night not counting pictures. We could have sold as many pictures as we had. I was sending money home every day.” At the same time, Audrey put together an all-girl band, the Drifting Cowgirls, and Bamford began booking her out on show dates.

  For several months there were two “Mrs. Hank Williams” on the road, invoking Hank’s memory and singing his songs. Sometimes they played at competing parks. “One time up in Missouri,” said Billie Jean, “Audrey was playing thirteen miles down the road. I said over the loudspeaker, ‘If you guys hurry up, you go on down the road you can catch my husband’s ex-wife down there.’ I used to pull crap like that all the time.” It was a situation that couldn’t last.

  On August 19, 1953, Billie Jean signed an agreement with Audrey and the estate in which she relinquished all rights to Hank’s estate and to any future income from it, and agreed not to perform as “Mrs. Hank Williams.” She and her attorney had been persuaded that the chance of income beyond 1953 was “slight and speculative,” and that she would be better off taking a one-time settlement instead of fighting a protracted legal battle. The agreement was very specific, right down to requiring Billie Jean to divulge the location of Hank’s Tennessee walking horse, Highlight Merry Boy. She was also required to deliver the saddle along with three pieces of luggage left in Shreveport. In exchange, she received thirty thousand dollars. Her lawyers, she says, took ten thousand, and the remainder barely paid off the debt load of her next husband, Johnny Horton, whom she married one month later, on September 26, 1953. Horton made Hank look like a model of fiscal probity.