by Bryan Mealer
Back in the early fifties, they’d caused a huge scandal at the Big Spring Country Club, where they were members. Leaving one night, the two of them stumbled out to their car, which the valet had pulled to the front door. But before Iris could get in, Raymond threw her against the hood and hiked up her dress. As people filed out to leave, they encountered quite a scene. The club’s directors were mortified, going so far as to hold a hearing and revoke the Tolletts’ membership. Raymond was furious.
“Have it your way,” he told them. “I’ll build my own place.” And that was how the Cosden Country Club came to be. The year it opened, it was so popular that it nearly sank the Big Spring club.
But like slow poison, the drinking crippled their marriage. Raymond was always gone. He wore no wedding band, and there were rumors of women on the road. Iris, alone most of the day and hounded by suspicions, drank to calm her nerves. In the fall of 1957, she was driving the kids home from the club when a patrolman saw her swerving and pulled her over. While Iris went downtown, charged with a DWI, the children cut through a pasture and found their way home.
Her case went to trial. On the stand, her doctor testified that he prescribed sedatives for her nerves. And on that particular day, she was distraught after her husband’s plane briefly disappeared from radar during a trip out west, which explained her erratic behavior. It was a false alarm, of course, but all the same, it took the jury less than twenty minutes to acquit.
But the drinking continued. Iris said that she felt inadequate around Raymond, that her husband didn’t see her as an intellectual equal. Iris could also be a flirt, especially after she had a few rounds and was feeling vindictive. Tensions came to a peak in the summer of 1958, when Raymond filed for divorce. The announcement appeared in the public-notice section of the Herald—just one line and nothing more. But for whatever reason, the couple remained married.
That fall, Tollett carried Cosden Petroleum into the Fortune 500. But earlier that year, he marked another personal milestone when the family moved into the dream house that he’d painstakingly designed, located just down the block on Hillside Drive.
He’d chosen the site for its eastern views, where he could step out at night and see the refinery—the “Jewel of the West,” he called it—sparkle under the stars. The Herald published a big spread about the home. Photos showed Ray Jr. posing with his model airplanes, Jason Blake demonstrating his puppetry in the birch-paneled den, and little Ann dressed in bobby socks at the breakfast bar, along with their housekeeper, Annie Mae Huey.
In the pictures, Iris strained to smile. She hated the house, found it cold and fussy, but played along with the pageantry. “The new R. L. Tollett home was designed with the family in mind,” the reporter concluded, making only vague reference to the separate master bedrooms.
6
Frances rides with the Texas Playboys, weathers a broken heart … home beckons … Tommy enters with his steel guitar …
For Frances, who came to California in search of her mother Bertha and had already married and divorced, the fifties began with a desire to return home. The wide-open skies of West Texas beckoned her, as full of sand and familiar misery as they were. Most likely it was a broken heart that pushed her toward familiar ground. For that’s what she was—heartbroken. When the love had gone away, the old roots had found purchase again and were trying to fill the empty space. But if she went back to Texas, where would she go? What would she do? What was even left for her now in Big Spring?
So much had happened in California. She’d come west like everyone else, looking for adventure and a new beginning—and look where she landed. Sometimes she couldn’t believe it herself.
She’d fallen deeply in love with the guitarist Les Anderson after that night at the Oakland Auditorium, and a dizzying romance ensued. By then, in the mid-1940s, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys were one of the biggest acts in the country, especially along the West Coast, where they outdrew Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Harry James, and all of the big bands combined. With the war still on, people had money to spend. Soldiers coming home were seeking diversion in girls, cold beer, and dancing, and Wills’s western swing carried a reckless energy they craved. The crowds were growing so big that auditoriums turned people away, even on Monday and Tuesday nights. It was in this whirlwind that Frances found herself wide-eyed and in love.
She practically lived with the band, riding up and down the coast on their bus, the Playboy Limited. During the week she danced till two, then rode all night back to San Francisco to get to the Biscuit Company by nine, often without any sleep.
Her girlfriends Mary, Dorothy, and Tiny also dated guys in the band, and the four of them were inseparable. They kept each other company on the road and during the long days in the studio. In spring 1946, the girls were in the basement of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco when the band started recording their most famous sessions, known as the Tiffany Transcriptions, using a stripped-down lineup and a single microphone. Frances had no idea she was witnessing country music history. All she remembered was that Noel Boggs, one of the steel players, pranced around with castanets under his shirt trying to make her laugh, and the prank upset Wills—who insisted on total silence in the studio.
When the band embarked on national tours, which carried them away for weeks at a time, the girls endured the lonely nights by cooking for one another. On Christmas Eve the previous year, they’d came up with the idea of serving dinner to the entire orchestra in Frances’s tiny apartment on Pine Street. She probably had three chairs in the whole place, but nonetheless, there stood the greatest western swing band to ever take the stage, eating glazed ham and listening to her Jimmie Rodgers records.
Les had worn a wedding ring on his finger the night they met, but told Frances it belonged to his mother. She’d believed him, but a month later, one of her girlfriends said he had a wife and kid out in Fresno. Frances told Les she never wanted to see him again, but something always drew her back. She’d be sitting in her little apartment feeling lonesome when he’d call wanting to come over. She’d let him in, even though she knew it was wrong, even as she thought, There are names for women like me.
She supported Les when he quit the Texas Playboys in 1946 and started his own band. The Melody Wranglers appeared regularly on radio shows like Spade Cooley Time in Los Angeles. Frances traveled beside him, rode for hours on buses to meet him, even started the Les Anderson Fan Club because he asked her to. His nickname for her was Poncho, and whenever he called her that and looked down with those big blue eyes—well, who could blame her?
But by 1949, it was clear that Les wasn’t going to leave his family, not that Frances would ask him to anyway. And when he did go back to his wife, she didn’t protest. Heartbroken, she moved to Richmond to live with her friend Dorothy so she wouldn’t be alone, then fell deeper into the music, which was the only thing that felt good.
Back then, the country and western circuit was small and informal, and through Bob Wills, Frances knew just about everyone who toured California. She knew many of the Grand Ole Opry stars, such as Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Roy Acuff. For a while she hung out with Hank Garland, who must have been eighteen or nineteen but could play the guitar better than anyone she’d ever heard. It was around the time he released “Sugarfoot Rag,” which sold over a million records. In the summer of 1950, she saw him play an Opry package show in San Jose with Tubb, Minnie Pearl, and others. Afterward, Billy Byrd, Tubb’s guitar player, passed along a note from another Hank who’d played that night—Hank Williams, who’d seen Frances backstage and wanted her in his room. They all shared a laugh over that, but what Frances didn’t say was that her heart still longed for Les.
By then, the old gang had broken up and scattered. Bob Wills was no longer the juggernaut he’d once been during the war. By the late forties, his drinking had spiraled out of control and practically wrecked his band. In September 1948, he committed sabotage when he fired his lead singer, Tommy Duncan, aft
er overhearing him complain about Wills’s drinking. Many of the core band members also left, forcing Wills to get along with a smaller outfit that struggled to find the old chemistry. In the summer of 1949, worn down from touring and no longer earning the same money, Wills moved the band and his family to Oklahoma and eventually back to Texas, seeking a sense of home he’d never be able to find.
Meanwhile, Tommy Duncan started his own band, the Western All Stars, that featured Millard Kelso, Joe Holley, and Ocie Stockard from the old Playboys lineup. And for a while it featured Ernie Ball on steel guitar, the same Ernie Ball who’d later make a fortune selling his own brand of guitar strings called “Slinkys.” Frances became good friends with Ernie and his wife, Gail, and the three of them stayed close even after Ernie was drafted for Korea and shipped to Arizona.
By 1950, Frances had been in California for nearly ten years. During that time her mother, Bertha, had married a man named Tex, who was a former boxer and merchant marine. Tex had also served in World War II and suffered an accident that paralyzed half his face, though Frances never asked for the details. But she knew that drinking turned him violent, and more than once he’d wheeled around from a barstool and challenged three men to a brawl, licking every one. When nobody was around for Tex to fight, he beat up on Bertha. During one of these episodes he punched out her front teeth.
Bertha didn’t believe in divorce, and despite her children’s pleas she stayed with Tex and endured his abuse. Together they lived in a crummy residence hotel on Sixth Street near the Tenderloin, where each Christmas Bertha cooked plates of food for the lonely drunks and old people living in the building. Once, after getting some insurance money, she shocked Frances by giving most of it to a soup kitchen.
Bertha could be so generous, yet she remained this enigma to her children. Never once had she discussed those years in Big Spring after Bud’s death, her relationships with Virgil and Red, or the trauma she caused them all. Decades would pass before she offered up an apology, but in the meantime, the love that Frances had for her mother was left to drift in a gulf between them. That love had initially brought her to California, but it could no longer hold her there.
Frances was closer to her siblings. Leamon and Flossie had eventually moved to the Bay Area after leaving their foster home in Texas, and John soon followed. For ten years, the four of them were hardly out of step. She and John attended dances together—Bob Wills and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, among others. John had even married one of her girlfriends, Geneva.
But still there was no word of Jimmie, and there never would be. Bertha never mentioned the boy, as if he’d never been born, but for the rest of Frances’s life she’d look for him. At any moment she expected him to run up and grab hold of her dress, just like he did in those years when all they had were each other. Jimmie would be going on twelve now. Her heart ached to think of him alone and missing them, wondering why his family had chosen to leave him behind.
Not long before, Frances had met the singer Hank Thompson and become friends with his wife, Dorothy. The couple were based out of Dallas, where Thompson and his Brazos Valley Boys played dance halls when they weren’t touring the southwestern circuit. In 1950, Wills had also moved the Texas Playboys to Dallas, where he opened a giant club called Bob Wills’s Ranch House. If Dallas was good enough for Hank Thompson and Bob Wills, then it was good enough for Frances. Texas was calling her home. So, without a job or place to stay, she packed her things in a box and boarded a Greyhound bus before she could change her mind.
Along the way, she stopped in Phoenix to visit Ernie and Gail Ball. Ernie was stationed at Williams AFB, where he played in the air force band. That night, as the three of them sat around reminiscing, Frances suddenly began to second-guess herself. Was she crazy for leaving California? Did her friends think as much?
At some point, Ernie mentioned Bob Wills’s brother, Billy Jack, and what a killer band he had out in Sacramento. Frances said that she’d dated Billy Jack’s steel player, Tommy Varner, after meeting him at one of their shows. They’d gone out a few times and she really liked him. He was shy and a bit austere, a real musician’s musician. But for some reason she’d never called him back. By that time she’d made up her mind to move to Texas, and after that, Texas was all she saw.
She hadn’t thought about Tommy in weeks, but suddenly, the three of them were talking about him like he was someone important. Then Frances said, without even thinking, “That’s the kind of man I’d marry, even if he wasn’t a musician.”
“Then get on the phone and call Tommy!” Ernie shouted, triumphant.
“Oh,” gushed Gail, “you must!”
“Go back to Tommy!”
The next afternoon, the box of Frances’s clothes arrived at the bus station in Dallas, but Frances was not there to claim it. She had boarded a bus in the opposite direction. She was going to find Tommy.
* * *
Out in Sacramento, she found him in a smoky ballroom behind a pedal steel guitar, creating the music that offered the only real sense of home. Everything familiar lay tied up in that lonesome sound, and right away, she began falling deeper in love with the man who could roll it off his fingers.
It was a different scene now, with different players. Bob Wills had taken his Texas Playboys to Oklahoma and Texas and left Billy Jack, his youngest brother, to keep the sound alive on the West Coast. Billy Jack Wills and His Western Swing Band took residence in the Wills Point Ballroom on the outskirts of Sacramento, which Bob had opened back in 1947. It featured a large dance hall with a beer garden and restaurant, while outside was an Olympic-sized swimming pool, burger stand, and picnic grounds. There were also six apartments where members of the band and their families lived.
For six years, Billy Jack had paid his dues as his brother’s bassist and drummer. He even penned the lyrics to one of Bob Wills’s most enduring hits, “Faded Love.” But Billy Jack was twenty years younger than Bob and favored more modern rhythm and blues. His band covered the black musicians whose songs were laying the foundation for rock and roll, artists such as Ruth Brown, Wynonie Harris, and Larry Darnell. And the swing numbers Billy Jack composed jumped harder and faster and were fused with elements of R&B, bebop, and early rockabilly. This sound was drawing a new generation of fans the way the Texas Playboys had done before the war.
Frances took an apartment in downtown Sacramento and found a job at the American News Company sorting magazines. She spent Saturday nights at Wills Point watching the band, and the rest of her nights with Tommy. Although Tommy was only twenty-three—three years younger than Frances—he’d been married twice already and had two daughters from another past relationship. The girls lived with their mother in Bakersfield. And from one of her girlfriends, Frances heard that Tommy had been involved with yet another woman before her—the sister of Dean and Evelyn McKinney, who’d sung backup with the Texas Playboys.
Wanting no more surprises, Frances asked Tommy about the woman and was told she had moved back to Alabama.
“You don’t see a ring on her finger, do you?” he said, to which Frances replied, “Well, I don’t see a ring on my finger, either.” The next day, June 12, Tommy showed up at her work and drove her to the courthouse. She became pregnant almost immediately.
She was seven months into her pregnancy, big as a house, when the U.S. Army sent Tommy a draft notice for the war in Korea. He reported for basic training, but while home on leave before shipping out, Tommy went AWOL.
Being on the lam meant he had to quit Billy Jack’s band and lie low. In the meantime, Billy Jack brought in Vance Terry as a replacement while Tommy took gigs down in Vallejo and wherever else he could find. He was still AWOL in February when Frances went into labor. Their daughter, Mary Ellen, was born at the military hospital but Tommy stayed at home, afraid of being caught. When the baby was four months old, Tommy went on tour with Duncan’s band, the Western All Stars, only to find the military police waiting when he returned. Within a matter of days, the army had ship
ped him to Korea, where he worked on the front lines filing paperwork. Meanwhile, Frances’s brother Leamon was fighting with the Third Infantry. In the summer of 1953 he participated in the war’s most famous battle, the taking of Pork Chop Hill.
The Red Cross helped Frances find a babysitter so she could keep her job. She dropped the baby off each morning and picked her up in the evening, walking everywhere because she didn’t own a car. This period lasted a year, and despite the tired feet and sleepless nights, it was a time that Frances would always cherish, for she’d never experienced a stronger feeling of love than she did for Mary Ellen. At night, the two of them cuddled together in bed and Frances told her everything she knew.
Despite his having gone AWOL, the military released Tommy with an honorable discharge in early 1954. He slotted right back in with Billy Jack, this time playing bass fiddle, since Vance Terry still had his old job on steel guitar. By then the band had gained momentum, thanks to appearances on KFBK in Sacramento, which beamed all the way up the Pacific coast. In rural Washington and Oregon, where television had yet to penetrate, people came by the hundreds to see them play.
Frances and Tommy soon moved into Wills Point, taking a cramped one-bedroom apartment just below the dance floor. It was then that Tommy’s old girlfriend, a woman named Frida, started driving up from Bakersfield to drop off his daughters, who were ten and eight. Frida was unstable and prone to hysterics, and her very presence put Frances on edge. At the same time, Frances’s sister Flossie also appeared from Texas, pregnant, and announced she was staying. With no room to fit everyone, Frances and Tommy rented a motel room across the road just so everyone had a place to sleep.
Their arrival at Wills Point also coincided with Bob Wills’s return to California. Back in Texas, he’d started worrying that the club was losing money and prestige under his baby brother’s marquee. So in spring 1954, Wills resumed control of Wills Point and eventually took over as bandleader. In early 1955, he put Tommy back on steel guitar, since Terry had left to attend college, and scheduled a major tour. Before Frances knew it, her husband was a Texas Playboy and constantly on the road.