Willie

by Willie Nelson

  I mean by 1975 when my Red Headed Stranger album came out there were people showing up at the ranch who thought I could lay hands on them and heal their crippled limbs.

  We built a six-foot-high wall with stones three feet thick around the ranch house property. We strung electrified wire along the top of the wall and stuck up signs that said NO TRESSPASSING, NO ADMITTANCE, NO HUNTING, NO KIDDING. Out at the main gate about a half mile from the house we put a closed-circuit television system and a call button with instructions that said, “Press the button but please do not hold the button down.”

  Me and Connie got to wondering if we were building ourselves a jail to live in.

  She led the move to Colorado. Connie bought a three-story Swiss chalet on sixty acres in Morrison in the Denver area and said she already knew too many people and didn’t want to meet anyone else. Connie would never really mean something like that, of course. In Colorado she found a new group of friends who were not bowled over by the fact that she was married to me. She fell in love with snow skiing. Then she found us an even more remote place near Evergreen, close to where we had visited my nephew Freddy a few times. Paula and Amy both started to school in Colorado.

  The deal was supposed to be that I would live 50–50 between Texas and Colorado when I was not on the road. When I really wanted to get away, truly needed privacy, Colorado was certainly the place to go. I could step outside the door in Colorado and I was in the forest with the mountains all around and the flowers growing and no sound but maybe the wind in the pine trees. I enjoy that and I need it occasionally. It was sanctuary. There were practically zero visitors in Colorado.

  We had the Pedernales Country Club twenty-six miles outside of Austin, and one of the houses we owned there was kept as a home for me and Connie and the girls when we came in from Colorado. But the country club was a hot spot, as far as constant people.

  In Colorado I talked on the phone a lot, but that was about it for doing business. My business was in Austin. Out at the country club, I had a first-class recording studio and was set up with an office eventually where I could sit at my desk and look through a big plate-glass window at the hills and at Lake Travis.

  And I must admit, my office was a wedge shot from the first tee.

  So, one midnight in the Christmas season of 1977 I was sitting at the Backstage Bar across the street from the Austin Opera House, swapping bullshit with my old friend Bud Shrake while we passed a bottle of tequila back and forth.

  Bud had just quit a great job at Sports Illustrated magazine, where he worked for fourteen years after leaving the newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas. Bud had written half a dozen novels by then and two or three movies, including Kid Blue, starring our amigo Dennis Hopper.

  We talked and drank far into the night and came up with an idea for a movie. He would write the script and I would star in it. We would be 50–50 partners. The story involved a country songwriter getting fucked by Nashville who moves home to Texas and figures out how to fuck Nashville back and come out on top. The movie was going to be about greed and power and loyalty and love. A musical.

  We dreamed up our star cast: Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Dennis Hopper, and me. By the time we came up with a title—Songwriter—it must have been about daylight, and me and Bud hugged each other and bragged about how smart we were. This movie was going to be the simplest thing in the world to put together. Everyone would love it.

  I phoned Waylon in Nashville who jumped in as an equal partner. He met us at the suite I used to keep as a hideout in the old Gondolier Hotel on the shore of the river downtown.

  The suite had a balcony that looked down on the boats at a dock and across the river to a green slope and then the office buildings of Austin. It was a nifty hotel, not expensive but convenient and with that nice view. Waylon kept getting up and going to the bathroom while we were talking. Once he went into the closet and shut the door. When he came out of the closet he said, “I’ll tell you one damn thing. If the law ever puts either of you on the stand and asks if you saw Waylon Jennings do drugs on whatever day this is, you sure as shit don’t have to perjure yourself on my behalf.”

  Dolly and Emmylou liked our idea. We couldn’t find Dennis.

  That afternoon I played Waylon and Bud a tape of the new album I was going to send CBS. It was Stardust. I glanced at them while we listened to the tape. Bud started crying during “September Song.” Waylon already had tears streaming down his cheeks.

  When the tape ended, Waylon said, “God damn, Willie, I’ve heard them songs all my life but I never realized they were so beautiful. Where did you find all them songs?”

  “There’s a big book full of them,” I said. “If this album is a success, I can make a living in cocktail lounges the rest of my life.”

  Bud got a call from Marvin Schwartz, who was now a Buddhist monk and was just stopping through Austin on his way back from India. Marvin Schwartz sort of empitomized the 1970s. His story is like A Star Is Born crossed with The Razor’s Edge. Marvin produced movies starring John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper and Rock Hudson. Marvin was literally chased out of Hollywood by the studio and his ex-wives’ lawyers. He walked across Africa. He arrived in Nepal and became a Buddhist monk—Brother Johnathan. Brother Johnathan, who was now destined to produce Songwriter, we thought.

  I leaped in and made my movie debut with the part of Robert Redford’s manager in Electric Horseman. I just called Sydney Pollack on the phone and asked to be in the movie.

  I had started appearing on national magazine covers and I picked up a good movie reputation on Electric Horseman, but our Songwriter still wasn’t happening. I couldn’t find out why. Marvin gave up as producer and went back to India. He said Hollywood was wrecking his tranquillity.

  Then one night after a concert I did in Reno, a chunky guy named Mark Rosenberg walked in. He said he was head of production at Warner Brothers. He wanted me to star in a script they had. It was called Honeysuckle Rose. The story was about a country musician who is on the road a lot and falls in love with a young girl and nearly loses his marriage.

  Mark Rosenberg took a check out of his pocket and gave it to me in Reno. I signed up to do Honeysuckle Rose instead of Songwriter.

  When Bud heard I had signed for Honeysuckle Rose on the day still another of our Songwriter deals was supposed to come through, he drove out to see me at the ranch on Fitzhugh Road in Dripping Springs. He was hung over and upset, but after I told him they put the money in my hand, he said he didn’t blame me for taking it. He said, “We believe in Karma, don’t we?” I said, “I don’t know if I done right or I done wrong with this, but we will someday find out.”

  So I made the leap from guitar picker to movie star.

  When I was a kid going to the movies, I used to like Roy Rogers’ clothes the best but I preferred Gene Autry’s horse.

  The movie that was closest to my heart all along was Red Headed Stranger. I talked to Shrake about writing a script in 1976, but he said he didn’t know how to write a story where the hero shoots a woman to death for stealing his horse. An old hang-around buddy tried writing a script, but it didn’t feel right. I knew this was going to be a movie, but I didn’t know how to make it happen.

  One day in 1977 Bud introduced me and Connie to his old friend Bill Wittliff and Bill’s wife, Sally. I liked Bill and Sally right off. I had seen a TV movie Bill wrote with Johnny Cash in it, and I knew he and Sally owned and operated Encino Press, a very high-class regional book publishing house, which impressed me.

  Bill and I went for a long drive in his pickup truck and played the Red Headed Stranger on his tape machine. Bill said he would write the script. We got a development deal with Universal and they gave me a suite of offices in Burbank. Bill turned in his first draft of the script, which followed the story line of the album pretty close. The story is about sin and redemption, set in the West in the 1870s. An idealistic preacher falls all the way to the bottom because he can’t control h
is animal nature, but he finds the power of love draws people around him to perform a heroic act and save themselves from tyranny.

  Universal put the pencil to it and came up with a budget of 14 million.

  Then they sent the script to Robert Redford to play the Red Headed Stranger.

  What was going on here, I found out, was Universal wanted me to sign with MCA Records, so in 1978 they set up Willie Nelson Productions on the Universal lot for me to develop the movie Red Headed Stranger—but not necessarily for me to star in. Basically, I think, they wanted my music contract a lot more than my classic profile on the screen.

  Giving the script to Redford froze the project at Universal. The moguls said our movie would only be made if Redford would do it. Bob and I had become acquainted up in Utah, where I had bought a ranch not far from Redford’s place. Bob sent word to me that he liked the script and was thinking it over. He thought it over for the next two years. He wouldn’t say yes and go ahead and do the movie, but he wouldn’t say no and release us to try it somewhere else.

  I had mixed emotions about this. Though I very much wanted the movie Red Headed Stranger to be made, deep down I didn’t want Redford to do it. This was a movie I felt I was meant to star in.

  By the time we finally shot Red Headed Stranger in 1986, nearly eight years after Universal first gave the script to Redford, I had already starred in Honeysuckle Rose for Warner Brothers, Barbarosa (written by Bill Wittliff and co-produced with me and Gary Busey) for Marble Arch, and Songwriter (which finally got filmed in 1984, only six years later than the six months we had figured on at our Gondolier meetings) for Tri-Star, and had played smaller roles in Thief with Jimmy Caan and in Electric Horseman. That’s on the big screen. I had co-starred with John Savage in a TV movie, Coming Out of the Ice, and had been executive producer and co-star (with Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings as my main pals) in a TV remake of Stagecoach that amazed the industry by knocking out its competition and becoming the highest-rated TV movie of the year.

  To get Red Headed Stranger done independently, we had to pay back Universal the money they had advanced me and the money they’d paid Bill to write the script.

  I built an 1870s Western town on the hills across the road from my golf course. It cost about $800,000. We did a new budget and cut Universal’s $14 million, which by then, eight years later, would have been up to $25 million, down to $1.8 million.

  Then with the help of God and friends and good luck and very hard work, we all pitched in to shoot Red Headed Stranger and brought it in on time and under budget. I’m proud of that movie. I think all our years of frustration and all our struggles resulted in making it leaner and stronger. You certainly can’t tell when you see it—the beauty of Neil Roach’s photography and the authentic costumes and all—that we could have made fifteen movies like Red Headed Stranger if we’d had the budget some studio spent on making another so-called Western, Silverado, that same year.

  The movie business and the music business have interchangeable parts. It’s kind of like the phone company and the IRS. I think they all work for each other. They all seem to use the same lawyers. There’s good people and bad people in both businesses, and sometimes it takes quite a while to tell them apart.

  I think they hired me as executive producer on Stagecoach because they thought I could keep Kris in line. But they were wrong. I didn’t even try. Kris didn’t like the director, he didn’t like the script. He didn’t like anything about the project except that me and Waylon and Johnny were in it with him. I would send reporters to interview Kris and he would tell them, “Man, what a piece of shit this is. I wouldn’t watch this fucking movie if they strapped me in front of a TV set and sewed my eyelids open.”

  It was not a happy location. I was called upon twice to make decisions as executive producer. Once was when someone brought it to Johnny Cash’s attention that the Indians hired for the picture were being treated shabbily. The first group of Indians hired didn’t look like warriors. They were too fat. They couldn’t ride bareback and shoot at the same time. So the company hired some fine Indian cowboys off the Apache reservation. But when the Apaches arrived at our location around Tucson, the company wouldn’t pay them enough to live on. Some had brought their horses and trailers down at their own expense. They were sleeping on blankets in the brush. I was appointed by Johnny Cash to protest to the company, and the treatment of the Indians improved.

  But the movie company was still fucked up. They kept bringing us out for shots and changing the scenes. We’d rehearse all night for a big scene, and the next morning we would get to the set and they had changed their minds. I was accustomed to all the sitting around and waiting that goes with acting in a movie, and I knew how things could change unexpectedly, but this was ridiculous. It happened every day, over and over.

  I got mad and said, “I’ll be back at the motel when you need me.” Gator drove me away in my Honeysuckle Rose bus. A couple of other buses pulled away behind us; the makeup and wardrobe and production people were breaking for lunch. The director, however, thought everybody was walking off the movie. This kind of shook him up and maybe it helped pull the picture together.

  There are a lot of things I’m involved with one way or another, a lot of decisions I have to make—so many that there’s no need to start worrying about just one. The more things I get into, the less I worry. There’s safety in numbers. Things have a way of working themselves out.

  This is not the ideal psychological profile for a movie producer. A movie producer is usually a walking heart attack. The producer and the director are hit with dozens of decisions every day. Robert Mitchum said working in Hollywood was like being nibbled to death by ducks. I know what he meant: the constant changing of minds, rewriting of scripts, changing of people, dueling egos.

  I’ve learned a lot about the movie business since our first Songwriter meeting in 1977. I’ve learned you really can go make a movie with a minimum of problems if you’ve got good people around you who know their jobs, and you have the production money in the bank. I have also learned this is almost never the case.

  Having seen all sides of the movie business now, and learned what everybody is supposed to be doing, I have just about decided that I don’t have much interest in producing movies. Having gotten Red Headed Stranger off my chest, I don’t feel the need to leap out there in Hollywood and ask them to strap my ass full of problems and throw me in the pool to see if I float.

  But I do like movie acting and intend to keep doing it. I’ve learned the secret to movie acting. What is important is to learn your lines and be on time. If you do that, then nobody fucks with you much.

  I am tempted to say that in the future I will leave movie-producing problems to people who need them—but if somebody should walk up and hand me the money to make any movie I want to make, play any role I want to play, and produce the picture as well, I’ll just say, “Hello problems, welcome home.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was the sort of Hill Country afternoon that makes the boys out at the club grin and say, “Well, another shitty day in paradise.”

  We were standing on the fourth tee at the Pedernales, soaking up the sunshine, listening to the whirring of the water sprinklers, smelling the wet grass. I had my shirt off and was playing in shorts and running shoes. The fourth hole is a 520-yard par five that doglegs sharply to the right about 260 yards down the fairway. Past the bend in the fairway a dozen deer, led by an eight-point buck, were watching us from the shade of a grove of oak trees. The deer were poised to bound away in the likely event that somebody in our group would nail a drive that carried beyond the turn in the fairway and rattled the branches where the deer were not so much hiding from us as just staying discreetly out of our way.

  We love our deer at the Pedernales. A year or so ago, a golf hustler thought he’d show off with a doe that had paused in the middle of a fairway some 150 yards away. He pulled out a 3-iron and said, “Watch this.” He kept his shot low a
nd cracked a line drive that flew straight as a bullet, striking that beautiful doe in the ribs with a thump we could hear back at the tee. The doe hopped up and down, stiff-legged, looking back at us as if asking why nobody had at least yelled a warning. She ran for the trees, biting her wound. It must have hurt like a bitch. The hustler smiled proudly and asked, “What do you think of that?”

  I said, “I think your ass is barred from my golf course, starting yesterday.”

  We don’t like people hitting our deer with golf balls. We don’t like people messing with the wild ducks and geese that land on our ponds. We don’t like people chasing rabbits or throwing rocks at our turtles. We feel we are very lucky to be able to satisfy our golf habits in a game park, and that’s how we want to keep it.

  But back to the fourth tee. I said it was likely one of our group would pound his tee shot past the 260-yard dogleg, because on this particular day we were playing with old friend Lee Trevino, who has won the U.S. Open and the British Open and can carry the load in any kind of match we talk him into at the Pedernales.

  Lee drops by the Pedernales when he’s in the Austin area to play golf with us and swap needles in Spanish with his longtime pal, Larry Trader. Lee and Larry both grew up learning golf by working as caddies, and they both talk all the time while they’re playing.

  Instead of distracting them, the continual chatter helps them draw pictures for their subconscious.

  Larry will stand up to his tee ball and chuckle as if he is amused at how good he is compared to the rest of us. “I had a dream,” Larry will say. “Oh, I tell you, Will, it was so sweet. I dreamed I just drew the club back and brought it down right through this little slot here”—whack! Trader has hammered a drive over the big oak in the middle of the fairway, the ball flying toward the hill that is the right boundary and then turning a bit to the left high in the air and coming down at the spot beyond the corner of the hill where a good bounce will leave him a 2-iron second shot to the green. But Larry has never stopped talking. “Do you call that perfect, or what? Maybe a hair off line? Felt like I caught it on the toe just a touch.” When Larry says he felt like he caught his drive on the toe, you know he has really coldcocked it.