Willie

by Willie Nelson

  When I was in college at USC, I had long hair and wore beads and they called me Indian Jim.

  But now I was a guy in a three-piece suit on his way to meet Willie Nelson, and I had no idea what to expect. I was nervous.

  Jan and Gary opened the door and ushered me inside the condo. The place was a cloud of smoke. I saw Willie sitting in a chair at the dining table near the windows with a view of the ocean. He was looking me over.

  “Hello, Willie, I’m the man from Prudential,” I said. “How are you fixed for life insurance?”

  Willie laughed. He said, “I hear you want to talk to me about Red Headed Stranger.”

  “Yeah, I love it. I think I can put it together as a movie,” I said.

  He said, “Fine. Consider yourself my agent.”

  We shook hands. I had my first major client.

  This was at a time when Willie’s career was starting to explode. A lot of people in Hollywood didn’t know who he was yet, but they were just about to find out. From a professional standpoint, for Willie to let me represent him was monumental to me. It certainly got me instant attention. Very soon people were saying, “Who is this guy Wiatt to be able to represent this Willie Nelson who is turning up on all the magazine covers?” So for me from our first handshake—an agreement that still holds good ten years later—Willie has been a pillar of strength and a friend.

  Willie hired me during a transition period. He was breaking up with his manager, Neil Reshen. I became a focal point for his activities for a few months while he was without a manager. My own boundaries with Willie were never formally set. We never sat down and had a business conversation where he said, “Okay, Jim, this is what I want you to do.” I just felt my way along.

  I was certainly walking on eggshells in my early dealings with Willie’s band. Most of them looked at me like, “Who is this guy?” I remember setting up a deal for Willie to play for a private party given by HBO. They were paying him $70,000 for one night, just to play a party for like 800 people.

  I certainly did not yet have a relationship with Paul English. In fact I actually stayed away from him, because Paul is a very scary guy if you aren’t his friend, and I hadn’t reached that place with Paul. But the HBO party concert was about to start, and Willie hadn’t showed up. I was waiting around, not knowing what to do. The HBO people were getting very anxious and kept asking me where is Willie, and I was looking for answers but I wouldn’t ask Paul.

  Finally Willie arrived. The anxious HBO people said, “Great. You go on in fifteen minutes.”

  Paul stepped out and said, “No, we ain’t playing. We don’t play until we get paid.”

  I said, “Paul, they’ve got a check right here.”

  I tried to hand Paul the check.

  “We don’t take checks,” Paul said.

  “Paul! This is HBO! Time-Life! A billion dollar company. And it’s eight o’clock at night in Anaheim!”

  “I don’t give a shit. We don’t play unless we are paid cash up front.”

  Willie and Paul were used to the old days, when they couldn’t take anybody’s word or their checks.

  The HBO guys ran out and scrambled around and somehow came up with a bag filled with $70,000 cash. The show went on.

  The same thing happened later when Willie did a Showtime special up in Tahoe. The band was about to go on, the cameras were ready to roll—and suddenly Paul and Willie insisted they have the money in cash. But by that time they trusted me to tell them the check was good.

  Another night in Tahoe, I gave Willie a check for $50,000. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and he kind of rolled up the check and put it in his pocket. Years later Price Waterhouse—his accountants at the time—called me and said there was $50,000 unaccounted for. Obviously, Willie put his jeans in the laundry, or even washed them himself, with the check still in the pocket. We never found the check. That’s pure Willie.

  We made a deal at Universal for Red Headed Stranger. Willie was given a suite of offices as co-producer. I don’t know if Willie ever even visited his offices. He put a Hell’s Angel biker friend, Peter Sheridan, into Universal as his representative. We called him King Peter—big, powerful guy with a deep voice and overwhelming, intimidating vibes but really down deep a sweet person who wanted to write songs. Most people never thought of “sweet” when they encountered Peter. They were terrified of him at Universal. When Peter came to see me at ICM, he rode his Harley up the curb on Wilshire Boulevard and then up the ramp and right on through the double glass doors into the lobby of the ICM building. He had long hair, a scarf around his neck, his gloves on. He put down his kick stand and told the receptionist, “Say, bitch, take good care of this Harley. I’m going up to see my man.”

  Willie is incredibly easy to work with, except that he has the propensity to say yes to everybody that walks through the door with something. Then when the calls come to me, I have to investigate, finding out what it’s about, asking questions like, “Where is the money in escrow?” Or Willie will just tell me to get him out of something that he has second thoughts about, and it’s up to me to do the dirty work. Willie has a very difficult time saying no to anybody. A big part of my job is cleaning up these situations. Sometimes I hang up the phone after an unpleasant discussion with Willie—about stuff that is negative or isn’t going the way Willie thinks it should go—and am literally sick at my stomach because I am trying so hard to please him but also to protect him.

  Willie has been on top for a long time now. He’s got a very large core group—unlike the rock and roll business, which is very fickle, based on young kids screaming and yelling and all of a sudden they grow up. Willie’s audience grows up but still goes to see him. Although he is considered country and southern, it’s interesting that he has a huge market in Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles. Big urban cities full of working men, the real blue-collar guys. Willie’s got a great voice for the working man. His songs are stories that never go out of date.

  Willie doesn’t have any fear. He says he was happy riding around Nashville in the back of Roger Miller’s station wagon without a nickel in his pocket. He loves the life-style of having toys like his bus and his Learjet and his golf course, but I have the feeling that if everything was lost tomorrow and Willie was left with his guitar and a pickup truck, he’d be fine. Not that he’s about to lose anything. Even though he protests about getting tired and being on the road too long, if he sits still for more than three or four days, he wants to be out on the road again. As long as he can play his guitar and sing his songs, he’s basically a happy guy.

  MARK ROTHBAUM

  I had been a student at the University of Cincinnati and worked in nightclubs four or five years, helping musicians and club managers. When I went back to New York after college, I sought out a job on a little record label. I started in the mailroom.

  My job was menial, but soon I was working in management. They had hired a guy who was supposed to be this super addition to the firm. My desk was next to his. This guy would roll into the office about eleven in the morning, looking sleepy-eyed, he hadn’t shaved or showered, his hair was mussed, he was slow on the phone. Watching him, I just snapped to the notion that anything this guy could do, I could do better.

  It was like a sudden awakening for me at the age of twenty-three. The business started making sense to me—touring, records, television, everything. I figured out the role of a manager: to coordinate all aspects of an artist’s career in addition to the artist’s personal life. A manager has to be part of the ongoing enterprise and interpret for the artist what is happening in the clearinghouse, if you know what I mean. I became determined to become a force to be reckoned with.

  I started working on tours. In September of 1978—God, that’s ten years ago, an eternity in this business—Willie asked if I would start handling his bookings. I opened a little shop. Responsibility started falling on my shoulders. Gradually I became his manager.

  I have many functions,
but one of them is to field the information and suggestions and advice that come from Willie’s accountants and lawyers and agents. Because of his itinerant life, it’s very hard to reach Willie. But he will call me three or four times a day and I can put him in touch with all the things that are happening in his business and personal life.

  People ask me if Willie is difficult to work with. And I have to say, “Compared to what?” I haven’t worked with that many other clients. Willie, Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and Emmylou Harris are my main list. Willie may get hot at me but he compensates with a whole lot of love at other times.

  Love, in fact, is really the key to Willie and his whole way of doing things. Take Paul English, for example. Paul is a very moral guy. He’s honest. He’ll tell you where it’s at, and he tells the truth. Paul is really the band’s leader. He gets the show from place to place, keeps the band happy, is everyone’s sounding board. Paul shares responsibility for money on the road and accounts to Willie’s business manager for it. Paul does the payroll taxes on the road. He is Willie’s closest friend. Personally, I would rather die than hurt Paul. He deserves nothing but good things. Paul has done so much good in his life, never asked for a lot of money. He’s with Willie because they love each other. As I said, love is the key.

  One story I have to tell is when Willie and I were at a hotel in Baton Rouge on the evening of a concert. We were on the twenty-third floor, and we could see the coliseum in a straight line from our windows. Looked like it was just right over there. So we decided we would run to the concert.

  Willie and I took off running through Baton Rouge after dark. We ran and kept on running through the neighborhoods, and we still weren’t arriving at the concert. After we had run ten miles, we decided we were totally lost. The gig was starting, and we had no idea where we were.

  Willie said, “I’ll just go up to that house and knock on the door and ask for help.”

  I said, “You can’t knock on some stranger’s door.”

  He said, “I ain’t a stranger, I’m Willie Nelson.”

  A mother and her teenage kids invited us in, gave us a beer, and drove us to the concert. They came on in with us to see the show. Usually when Willie brings in guests, he says, “They’re with me.” This time he said, “I’m with them.”

  I can remember the first time I met Willie and Connie. I was absolutely taken aback by these people. To be honest, I really didn’t know much about Willie before then. I was given a copy of the Willie Nelson and Family album. It just floored me. So much love surrounding these people, a genuine feeling of family with Paul English and Willie and Bobbie and of course all the wives and husbands and children and everything. I was very impressed. I knew I wanted to have an ongoing relationship with them. I loved them and their music, and I just wanted to be around. And I still feel the same way, happy to be around.

  JOEL KATZ

  I have in ten years only seen Willie get mad at me one time. Real mad. I went to see him and brought an estate plan to show him how he could earn and keep more money for himself and for his family. Willie erupted. “Why are you doing this and it was really none of your business and I didn’t really ask you to do this!” He got really very angry and then just stomped out of the room. I was dumbfounded. How did this happen? What did I do wrong? Oh, my God, I’m about to be fired from my biggest client and my whole career has just evaporated.

  Willie came back after fifteen minutes. He was quite different. He was very calm. He put his arm around me and looked at me and said, “I know you’re really trying to help, so I apologize. I did not mean to be so cross with you because your motives are certainly good. You were trying to do what you thought was right for me. But you’ve got to understand my philosophy of life, Joel. I want the people around me to be happy, but I look at life as a roller coaster. When I’m up, I’m up, and when I’m down, I’m down, and I hope when it’s all over, the money runs out just about the same time that I’m through with my life.”

  I looked at Willie and I said, “Well, we can plan so that it happens just that way.” He laughed and said, “No, let’s not plan. It’s a lot more fun if we don’t.” I said, “Well, I’ll never mention this to you again, sir.” And he said that’s fine, and he gave me a little wink, that little Willie wink, and that was the end of the conversation.

  SYDNEY POLLACK

  I had never listened to country music. My idea of country music was the hillbilly music that I heard in the army, and I remember I used to throw ration cans at the guys who played the stuff.

  In 1979 an agent asked if I would do him a favor and meet a guy named Waylon Jennings that he thought would be terrific as an actor. I didn’t have any particular part for him, but I said sure. Waylon came to my office in Burbank. I was fascinated by him. What an interesting-looking guy. We talked for about an hour, a real good meeting, and Waylon left me a stack of records.

  I started playing the records and I thought, gee, this stuff is pretty good. I heard this one voice that really touched me somehow, and I kept looking to see who it was. On the album I saw this picture of Willie in bib overalls with no shirt. God, this guy was good. I went out and bought a couple more Willie albums. I was learning how musical country music can be.

  I was with Redford in Nashville, scouting locations for a film. Waylon was at the RCA studios cutting some tracks and asked if we wanted to come watch. Bob and I went, and there was this guy Willie, crazy looking with long hair. I mean, he was really something. I loved Waylon, but I became just totally fascinated with Willie. They had the instrumental tracks laid down and were laying the vocals in, and Willie had this sort of relaxed manner and this terrific voice that got to me in some way that’s hard to explain.

  Willie, Waylon, Redford, and I went to dinner afterward. Willie told me he had sold a couple of concept albums to Universal and was real interested in trying to do a little bit of acting to get ready for some sort of movie work he thought he was going to do with Red Headed Stranger. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I did think Willie was such an intriguing person, a captivating-looking guy.

  When it came time to start Electric Horseman, I got a phone call from Willie. He said, “I’d sure like to be in that picture with Robert.” Willie sounded as if he just assumed that he would be in it. I said, “Well, Willie, it’s not quite that easy. I don’t think I have a part for you.”

  “I’ll be right over,” he said.

  He showed up at my office. I sat looking at him, this great face and demeanor, and I thought, well, there is this one small part of the manager. I thought, oh what the hell, I’ll take a chance on this. I called the wardrobe designer in and said, “This is the guy that’s playing Leroy. Suit him up and get him going.”

  I didn’t bother to read Willie for the part because he simply wasn’t practiced at that. I decided to sort of tailor the part to Willie rather than try to make Willie play the part, because there was something so right and interesting and colorful about him. I was probably way behind the times in figuring out who Willie was. He was already very popular by then. He was really crossing over and hitting mainstream America about that time. Willie came onto the Electric Horseman set and he just blew everybody away. He was relaxed, he was right on the money all the time, he knew what he had to do. I tried to help him improvise the part a little. He came up with one line in that picture that knocked me and the whole crew on our ass. I had told him, hey, Willie, you know what the attitude is, you know what the character is, just tell this actor here whatever you want. So the actor asked Willie what he was going to do and Willie said, “I’m gonna get myself a bottle of tequila and one of those waitresses who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch and just kick back.” The cameraman blew apart laughing so hard he nearly fell in the pool at Caesar’s Palace.

  Willie could do no wrong for me after that.

  We became closer friends. I listened to more and more country music and ended up producing Willie’s next picture, Honeysuckle Rose. Then I produced Songw
riter, my third movie with Willie. There’s something about Willie that makes you want to do things for him. First of all, you know he’d do them for you. He is so authentic. He just doesn’t have a false bone in his body and the camera reads that honesty. He’s incapable of telling a lie, which I think is the mark of a great actor.

  I directed Streisand early on in her career, and listening to the way she sang a song with all that juice in it you just knew she could get the juice disciplined in another art form, too. I think that is how Willie is. I can certainly see Willie becoming as big a movie actor as Barbra Streisand.

  CHERYL MCCALL

  I went to Colorado on an assignment for Life to write about Willie, Connie, and their daughters Paula Carlene and Amy in their mountain hideway. My story made the cover of Life in August 1983. You see Willie, Connie, and the girls looking beautiful and happy, like some utopian hippie clan, in the photo on the cover. He had just bought her a bright candy red Ferrari 308 GTS for Christmas. I don’t think Willie was so crazy about living in the mountains near Evergreen, but Connie loved it. She could go skiing, which she was addicted to like he is to golf. Paula and Amy were in school. Connie’s mother and father had a house close by and practically lived at Connie’s house. They would run to the store for groceries, do a lot of errands.

  Connie had friends in Colorado who knew her as Connie—not as Mrs. Willie Nelson. She had her own group, and the daughters had their own group, all quite apart from Willie. Some days Connie would take the girls to school and then ski all day until it was time to pick them up.

  They had quite a compound on the mountain. There was the big house Connie and Willie and the girls lived in. Connie and Willie slept on a king-size mattress on the floor of their upstairs bedroom with a United Airlines moving carton as the bedside table. They had a redwood private deck with a view of the pasture and mountains, a master bath with a tile Jacuzzi and earth-colored Spanish tiles on the floor.