Honky Tonk Angel (10 page)

Fay and Harry Crutchley, Elias Blanchfield, and his fiancée Frances Null, Fay’s sister, joined “the Peers” on July 1 at the Drake Hotel Courts on Murfreesboro Road. After supper, they went to the Ryman Auditorium, where Patsy joined up with her discoverer and mentor Wally Fowler. She was a guest on his All-Night Gospel Sing broadcast from the hall, singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

“It was quite a thrill,” Fay remembered. “Bill drove us by Bradley’s studio, took us sightseeing, and then, like bigshots, we just pulled up to the backstage entrance and were waved right on in by the security guard. If that wasn’t enough, we were back the next night for the Opry and Pat’s first time singing on it. It seemed almost everyone knew Bill. He said he was Pat’s manager and he introduced her to nearly everybody. We mingled with the stars and took loads of pictures.”

Ernest Tubb hosted the Ralston-Purina portion of the Opry. He brought Patsy on with a flourish: “Here’s a little lady with a powerful voice. I’ve been predicting big things for her. Make welcome Coral Records‘
³
newest star, singing her debut recording, ‘A Church, a Courtroom and Then Goodbye.’”

When he commented he’d never seen Patsy nervous, she told Tubb about her Opry audition when she was sixteen and how she was snubbed. This would be her revenge. Alas, there wasn’t much response even when Tubb rushed onstage to pump the audience for more applause. He put his arm around her, leaned into the microphone and declared loudly: “Folks, Miss Patsy Cline. Isn’t she terrific!” As she went to walk off, he called her back. “Patsy, honey, take another bow.”

Crying, Patsy ran off into Bill’s arms. “Oh, Bill, how can I thank you? I don’t care what they think. Appearing on the Opry’s my biggest dream come true! You made me the happiest woman in the world.”

“You were in fine voice,” Tubb assured her. “It was that damn song. It would bring a pall over an Irish wake.” And this was the very tune he had recommended.

Tubb’s manager, Gabe Tucker, told him, “E. T., we’ve found us a female Red Foley. She sounds like nobody’ll believe. Everybody’s talking about her voice.” Tucker cornered the Opry general manager and told him how impressed he was. Denny, perhaps not remembering how he had once snubbed Patsy and her mother, replied, “Then maybe you ought to sign her.”

After a stop at Tootsie’s to see and be seen, Patsy and Bill went to Tubb’s music store to do the “Mid-Nite Jamboree,” where Tucker spoke at length about her career. He arranged for her to sing with Tubb the next day, and after the broadcast had Patsy go in an audition booth and record several acetates singing a cappella.

He played the acetates for Tubb. “Good God, Gabe, you’re right. That gal can reach out and get it This stuffs better than what she’s recorded.”

“E. T., I’d love to manage Patsy, but I can’t talk to her without that guy butting in.”

“That guy is already her manager and a lot more. Leave it alone for now.”

“She’s saying how low on money they are.”

“Can you do anything?”

“She’s going to sing with us tomorrow and I’ll see if I can get her on at the cave in the afternoon. Told her it would only be fifty dollars, but they were agreeable.”

“When you ain’t got it, fifty’s agreeable.”

Tucker called Claude “Spot” Acuff, who ran his brother Roy Acuff’s Dunbar Cave Resort near Clarksville, at the Tennessee-Kentucky border, which was once a Big Band mecca for the GIs at Fort Campbell, and said, “There’s a girl here—”

“You don’t say. Is she pretty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is she good?”

“Goddamn right, she’s good! And she needs money.”

“If she’s good ‘n’ pretty ‘n’ needs money, I’ll put her on the afternoon show. Will that do?”

“It’s all taken care of.”

“Then why the hell did you call?”

On Sunday, Patsy and Bill drove forty-two miles northwest to Dunbar Cave, where Patsy did a whole set.

Tubb explained, “It was near impossible not to adore Patsy—or resist her charms. That gal was dedicated. She had a good voice and was trying so hard to
make it. She knew exactly how to get to me! Years before, Patsy had started coming around to where I was playing and flattering one of my musicians till they introduced her to me. Then she’d ask me to let her sing a song.”

On Monday, the Fourth, after their friends left Nashville for home, Bill and Patsy happened to be passing through Memphis. She “dropped in” on Tubb and Faron Young at the ballpark, where the temperature was over a hundred degrees.

“Faron asked, ‘You know who’s here?’ and I turned and there she was,” Tubb said. “I told her, ‘Patsy, honey, I didn’t know you was coming.’ She said she wanted to go on the road with me. I replied we didn’t have room in the cars. She started bawling so bad none of us knew what to do. ‘It’s just I been having a real hard time, but it don’t matter, Mr. Tubb. Only if I could just sing one song. I’ll even do it free, for the exposure.’ Finally, I said okay. Patsy wiped her eyes and waited on pins and needles to go out on that stage. I gave her a big introduction. There must have been fourteen thousand people, and they loved her. Afterwards, she hugged and thanked me and they were on their way.”

A day after their return, Gerald was at work and Bill and Patsy spent a lazy afternoon together. Bill didn’t park on Patrick Avenue but in the lot of a five-and-dime store temporarily located down the street at the fairgrounds. He’d stand on the corner to await Patsy’s signal that the coast was clear, then hurry across to the apartment. He and Patsy were in the throes of passion when she heard a car door slam.

“Holy shit!” she screamed. “It’s Gerald! Quick, hide.”

“What? He couldn’t have seen my car.”

As Gerald began his ascent up the shaky flight of stairs, Bill ran into a closet. Patsy thought better and hid him under the bed.

“As soon as he comes in,” she whispered, “he’ll head to the refrigerator for a beer. Then you get the hell outa here!”

“Surprise!” Gerald proclaimed. “Hi, honey! I’m home.”

“Hi,” replied Patsy, unnerved.

Gerald looked around.

“What you looking for, Gerald?”

“Nothing.” Under the bed he saw movement and went to sit on it.

“There’s cold beer in the fridge.”

“Thanks. Want to get me one?”

“Why don’t you get it yourself?”

“Naw. I’ll just sit till I cool off.” He flopped down on the bed. “Oh, by the way, driving around town last night, guess who I spotted in Bill’s car?”

“I give up.”

“You—”

“You must be seeing things. I was at Fay’s.”

“You really must think I’m an idiot! Up to your old tricks, huh?”

“Talk’s cheap!”

“You think about that while I rest awhile.”

As Patsy watched nervously, Bill sweated. Gerald lay back and finally dozed off. Patsy signaled Bill frantically, who crawled out from under the bed slowly and tiptoed to the door. “I ran down the stairs like a bat out of hell!” he told one of his Melody Boys. His movement on the creaky stairs woke Gerald.

“What was that?” But he drifted back to sleep.

The next weekend at the Lodge, Bill and Patsy performed. However, something was different They weren’t smiling and stayed apart. Two days earlier, Bill’s wife Jenny sprung quite a welcome-home surprise. He’d made her the laughingstock of the area for the last time. She filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery.

“A Church, a Courtroom and Then Goodbye” received little public response, even from the Brunswick Moose regulars, but on that point no explanation is necessary.

S
ome people might get the idea our tri-state area is a Peyton Place within a Peyton Place,” Fay Crutchley said, laughing. “And they’d be about right.”

“You could say we were a friendly area,” Lois Troxell commented. “If you made the circuit of Moose Lodge dances, you’d see couples from throughout the area, happily dancing and enjoying themselves. You’d think they had ideal marriages. Before you knew it, they’d be divorced and remarried to each other or friends’ spouses. Sometimes, it was astonishing to me what went on when good friends got together. First, it was a few drinks, then dancing and one thing led to another.”

Because of some of her escapades, Fay explained, “Pat had a reputation for being a bit loose, but what she was doing was going on all over the place. To my knowledge, the Moose wives didn’t consider Pat a threat and weren’t hostile to her.”

Mrs. Peer filed her action July 11, 1955, in Jefferson County Chancellory Court, Charles Town, West Virginia. A date of September 22 was set to hear
Virginia M. Peer v. William Peer.
Divorces and spouse swapping was so commonplace, Jenny’s action hardly caused a stir except to those intimately affected.

“It wasn’t all Patsy’s fault,” Jenny observed. “Bill was older; she was only
twenty-two. He was persistent and insistent. I blame him as much as her. I knew what was going on but didn’t have solid evidence. They never told the truth. I didn’t even know about them going to Nashville alone. I was terribly hurt by it all. From the way they carried on, I felt sure Bill would marry Patsy as soon as the decree was final.”

Gerald was the winner by default. Once again he was squiring Patsy around and, according to Doris Fritts, “They seemed as happy and in love as two peas in a pod. Patsy would show off the wallet-size wedding photo of them on the steps of the Frederick Reformed Church. But, since gossip spread like wildfire, everyone knew the truth.”

However, when Gerald passed the five-and-dime, Bill’s car was nowhere to be seen.

“Before the divorce,” Lois Troxell reported, “Patsy and Gerald would be separated one month and she’d be either living at her mother’s or staying with my family and me. We lived next door to Gerald’s parents on Patrick Street. She didn’t have a car, so Doris Fritts and I took turns chauffering her back and forth to work in Washington.”

“And,” Fay noted, “Pat was dating Bill—until the next month when she’d be back with Gerald. You needed a score card. One month they—Pat and Bill—were hot; a month later, they weren’t. One month they—Pat and Gerald—were on; a month later, they weren’t. When Pat told me she was going home, I never knew just where she meant. Sometimes when Pat would tell me what was going on, my head would spin. I said, ‘You’re always talking about your career but all I hear are hims, hims, hims and this ain’t church. If you want to get ahead, put men on the back burner.’”

Jenny’s words returned to haunt Bill after the divorce, when he intensified his efforts to marry Patsy. “You know I love you,” Patsy would say, “but it’ll take some time.” He kept after her to divorce Gerald, but she put him off. In spite of the precarious financial situation brought on by his divorce costs, Bill lavished Patsy with gifts.

Melody Boy John Anderson (he became vocalist and electric bass guitarist when band member Mark Johnson quit to marry Jenny Peer as soon as the decree was final) remembered that Bill “finagled a deal where he worked, Goode Motor Company in Charles Town, to get Patsy a new Buick. Band members John Neal, Gene Shiner, and me helped her break it in on a trip to Rhinehold, outside Philadelphia, where we backed Patsy in her appearance at the county fair.”

Enjoying the big-city whirl of D.C. and playing the field, Patsy, now appearing with Jimmy Dean on the local weekday “Town and Country Time,” quickly cooled on Bill.

On October 15, Patsy and the band played for the opening of a Chevrolet dealership in Martinsburg, West Virginia. On the way to the Moose Lodge, Patsy announced she was leaving the band. That night, she took close friend Roy Deyton aside and told him, “Once I helped you make up your mind about getting married. You were torn between your girlfriend and going [with brother Ray] to Nashville for a career. Remember you told me she made you happier than your music. It’s different with me. Ain’t nothing I love more than my music, so it’s time I moved on. Staying here ain’t going to help matters any or my career.”

“I didn’t like what Patsy did,” Deyton explained, “but maybe he asked for it. Poor Bill. It wasn’t the type of thing you wanted to see.”

Peer went off the deep end and came close to having a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t sing without getting upset. He’d moan and groan about how Patsy had dumped him. One night, Anderson found him on the floor crying. At a restaurant after one of the dances, he broke down.

“Where’s Patsy? She didn’t show tonight and that’s not like her.”

“Bill, Patsy’s not with the band anymore,” Deyton said.

“Why’s Patsy doing me this way?” he sobbed. “Why’s she treating me so damn mean and cold? Don’t she see I gave up my wife for her? Don’t she even care?”

Grover Shroyer exhorted, “Bill, you can’t let Patsy get to you like this. You’re going to destroy yourself. We’re going to have to take you to the hospital.”

But he just sat there with his head down, bobbing and shaking. “You’ll make yourself awfully sick, Bill,” Deyton advised. “You’ve got to stop carrying on like this.”

Bill didn’t hear a word. He had the lovesick blues.

Gerald Cline pointed out that Patsy’s popularity was a double-edged sword in their marriage. “When I could, I took Patsy to her one-nighters and stayed to bring her home. Everywhere she’d sing, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got some wife! We’ve never heard anybody like her.’ They were right. Patsy was unique. None of her records had made it, but, live and in person, no one came close to touching her.

“I had to get up early for work, so I couldn’t always go on the Jamboree one-nighters. It eventually got to the point where when she was home, I’d be working. She’d either be sleeping or rehearsing. When I was home, she’d be working the show, on the road with Jimmy or doing band dates.

“Before too long, there wasn’t much of a marriage. Patsy wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. She was all for Patsy. It was all for one and one for
one
. She couldn’t bend. She wasn’t flexible. It was her way or not at all. And that wasn’t fair to me. For a long time, I tried but I got nothing in return.”

Patsy told Fay, “In the beginning Gerald and I had a good marriage, as marriages go. My problem was that I don’t think I knew what love was.”

The couple moved from Patrick Street into a mobile home in Dutrow’s Trailer Park on Bowers Road in Frederick. Though Gerald claims he and Patsy lived together until the end of March 1957, Patsy’s friends note he was out of the picture, except for appearances’ sake, by as early as 1956.

“Although they lived in the same house,” Lois Troxell observed, “they weren’t getting along worth a plug nickel. Gerald didn’t understand Patsy’s unrelenting drive to sing, sing, sing. Things got worse when Gerald, thinking it might bring he and Patsy closer, decided they’d live with his folks. But the two Mrs. Clines clashed. Patsy was a free spirit and only the devil could get along with Lettie.

“Patsy had her goal to go up, up, up but she felt Gerald was holding her down. She was so mixed up. Patsy wasn’t in love with Gerald and wished she wasn’t married. If love is blind, marriage is an eye-opener.”

In a matter of weeks, Patsy and Gerald separated unofficially. She was commuting between her mother’s house and the Troxell home in Brunswick. Patsy maintained a good relationship with Earl Cline but Gerald’s mother snubbed her terribly and was quite mean on several occasions.

Washington, D.C., had become as big a country music entity as Nashville, minus the recording industry, and Jimmy Dean was the big cheese. He was as popular as anyone at that time. But it was Connie B. Gay’s empire.

Town and Country Time became a lucrative service mark for Gay, “the country bumpkin from Lizard Lick,” North Carolina, who had a shrewd eye for talent and was an innovator in the use of television to sell country music. (Founding president of the Country Music Association, he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980.) In addition to the afternoon radio and TV series on D.C.’s WMAL (now WJLA) headlining Dean and army transcriptions of the radio series, Gay produced a Town and Country Barn Dance, Town and Country Time live shows, and “Town and Country Jamboree,” America’s first live, late-night television musical variety show. Sponsored by Gunther Beer, Briggs Hot Dogs and Ice Cream, L&M Cigarettes, and the Otha Williams Buick dealership, “Jamboree” was on the Town and Country Network, a lineup of capital, Virginia, and Maryland stations airing Saturdays from 10:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. With fifteen thousand music lovers at the Capitol Arena, it was the place to be for a good time. There were stars galore and lots of singles, so it was an instant hit with the masses.

Patsy was added to the television shows in October 1955, as she was distancing herself from Bill Peer. For her radio work, she received scale. “It was sixty dollars and eighteen cents a week, double for TV,” Gay explained. “Jimmy made twice as much. But I paid the regulars on both shows an average of fifty dollars a day for a six-day week.”

“Connie B. Gay, Mr. Generosity himself!” asserted Dean. “Don’t be fooled! After a USO tour and a radio show I did for Connie in Silver Spring, Maryland, I went to work for him at WARL. Sy Bloomenthal, who owned the station then, tried to put me wise to Connie. He pulled me aside and advised, ‘Jimmy, watch out for him!’ But did I listen? No! I thought of Connie as a father, but look what he did. When we did the radio transcriptions, we were led to believe nobody was making any money. It was suggested we should do the show as a public service. Connie only paid us scale. What we didn’t know was that Connie and this army major had the whole thing figured out. We did the work, they got the money.

“Connie had us working like slaves—doing this show, doing that show. Plus we were trooping everywhere on the live package shows. Before you knew it, it all started to run together in your mind. He had all these artists from the Opry stopping by to do the army transcriptions and I thought, ‘Ah, great. How patriotic.’ Then I found out what they got paid.

“Television was still a novelty. We were greenhorns. It amazed me how we came off so good ‘cause it was a gigantic mess. I’d get the gang together and we’d fill in the tunes to the allotted time. I’d ask Patsy, ‘What you gonna sing, doll?’ She’d tell me and I’d say, ‘Great. What key you gonna do it in?’ She’d reply, ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ so I’d jump in with the guys and say, ‘Okay, let’s try this one. You
know all the words? . . . Good . . . Sounds like it might be conducive to have a fiddle kick in. Hey, pardner, you wanna try that? You missed a chord. That goes
kerchunk. Kerchunk,
got it? Let’s run it down again and use a diminished chord.’ That’s the way we did it till we got it right. No choreographer. No arranger. Just the bands, and we used head arrangements.”