Honky Tonk Angel (49 page)

An investigation lends credence to the fact that the Hollingsworths, Bradfords, and Miller and his friend, because of the fall of the rugged terrain, possibly passed within feet of each other at the same time and didn’t know it. The site was eerily quiet. The elder Hollingsworth was walking south along a ridge to the upper end of an area called Fatty Bottom—a succession of woods, hills, hollows, and swamp.

He got to the site at 6:00 A.M. “I almost had a nervous breakdown when I saw the bodies,” Hollingsworth told the
Tennessean.
“I had to sit down and then walk out to the road till help came.” Jeners Hollingsworth got word to the search party.

State Trooper Troy Odle, who was up all night helping to organize the ground crew, was the first official at the scene. He shook his head. “I’ve never seen a wreck as bad.” Odle found the tail and radioed the identification number N7000P to confirm ownership by Hughes. Civil Defense official Dean Brewer, asked whether
all four bodies had been located, replied, “There’s not enough to count ... They’re all in small pieces.”

Because of the delay in getting the search party started, due to the weather, terrain, and darkness, the final verdict was slow in coming.

“Everybody was calling to express their concern about Patsy,” Mrs. Hensley said. “They kept telling me not to give up hope. ‘There’s still hope,’ they’d say. But nothing helped. The waiting was unmerciful.”

Then the Hensleys’ and Dicks’ phones rang again. It was the news no one wanted to hear.

The wire services ran the story, and stations everywhere interrupted programming to report the tragedy. It was a black day in Nashville history, losing three beloved record stars and prominent members of the Opry. Grant Turner went on WSM and, with his voice breaking, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. The plane bearing Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Cowboy Copas has crashed, and all of the above have perished. Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Cowboy Copas are dead.”

The Butlers continued on down the highway after speaking to Grant Turner. When he came on and made the official announcement, Carl turned off the highway onto a gravel and dirt road.

“It twisted and turned every which way,” Pearl remembered. “I finally said, ‘Hon, where are you going?’ and he stopped and we tried to pull ourselves together. All I could think of were Patsy’s costumes in the trailer. And something Patsy had told us one night when we all were driving back from a date. She’d been in Winchester visiting her mother and said, ‘Everyone wants me to sing for nothing. That’s especially true back home. They think they own me. I want you both to remember this, because one day you’ll be able to tell it. The next time I go to Winchester, everyone in that town’ll know that Patsy Cline has been there!’

“When I recall that and the last time I saw Patsy, it makes chills run all over me. When they took her back there for her burial, I said to myself and in tribute to her, ‘Well, girl, everybody sure did know it!’

“Anyway, when Carl started up the car, we were lost. He turned around and headed back till we hit the highway. I’ve tried and tried to find that road and, to this day, I’ve never been able to. I used to think, ‘My goodness, did we go on a road that didn’t exist?’”

The Butlers had turned onto Mule Barn Road. Had they proceeded another mile, they would have encountered the hundred cars from the search party waiting to go into the area.

Loretta Lynn tells her reaction to Patsy’s death. “I had gone to bed early Tuesday night instead of listening to the radio as I usually did. I got up real early Wednesday to clean my house so I’d have plenty of time to get ready and be able to go shopping with Patsy. We had a date for Tuesday, but I heard they would be late coming back. I wanted to be ready for her now.

“I thought, ‘I’ll call that lazy thing and get her out of bed.’ Just as I lay my hand on the phone, it rang. I said to myself, ‘I wonder who the heck this is? It’s Patsy. She must have come in last night.’ But it wasn’t Patsy. It was [agent] Bob
Neal’s wife calling to tell me the bad news. I froze. I said, ‘What? What are you saying?’

“I’ll tell you how I felt when I lost her. I felt that probably I wouldn’t make it ‘cause she was my buddy. I went to her for advice and she’d give it. When she was killed, the thought ran through my mind, ‘What am I gonna do now?’ When Patsy died, I lost the most wonderful friend I’ll ever have.”

Hank Cochran was driving back into Nashville late Tuesday when he heard the news report. “I was pretty shook and had to pull over. I really loved that gal. I was supposed to be on that plane with them. Patsy had asked me if I wanted to go and I said yes, but at the last minute a meeting came up with Timi Yuro, who was in town looking for material. So I stayed home and wrote all weekend.”

Cochran followed the WSM broadcasts into early Wednesday. When he heard that it all was true, he ran outside and went berserk, screaming through the trees, “It’s not true. It’s not true! Please God, don’t let it be true!”

Around the crash site, a multicolored jigsaw puzzle littered the landscape. There were scattered pieces of instruments, guitar strings, sheet music, Patsy’s cosmetics, wigs, and clothing. A soft slipper, gold and muddy, from the pair Patsy was reported wearing in Dyersburg, pointed to the impact spot. On a piece of notepaper in red ink was written “Boo Boo Hoo Hoo.” Someone picked up Patsy’s beloved “Dixie” cigarette lighter. A black sock and western shirt fluttered in tree branches.

Among the broken bodies was Hawkins’ cowhide belt, with his name tooled across the back, his famed hawk jacket, his Stetson, and one of a pair of his boots. A few feet away lay the broken black-and-silver neck of his Gibson guitar. Underneath the torn guitar strings, in pearl inlay, were letters spelling “Hawkshaw.” Nearby was Patsy’s fringed cowgirl jacket and western hat and, several yards away, her white belt, inscribed with the black-tooled lettering “Patsy Cline.”

The beautiful white dress with the rhinestone accent she wore at the last show in Kansas City was never found, nor were the matching shoes. Randy’s money bag was never found. Reportedly it was picked up by a local woman, who came to the scene with her baby in her arms.

Randy was thirty-five; Cowboy, forty-nine; Hawkshaw, forty-one; and Patsy, thirty.

She had lived to see her thirtieth birthday after all.

F
rom the Paul Harvey News broadcast on March 6, 1963:

Brenda Lee was in Germany and heard an Armed Forces Network broadcast. “It stunned and hurt me. Patsy was gone just like that. It seemed so unfair after all she’d gone through. I called Owen and asked what I should do. He told me even if I could cancel my dates, I’d miss the funeral. He said, ‘Hon, Patsy, would understand.’ The thing I kept saying to myself was, ‘She hadn’t even seen her peak.’ Probably, had she lived, Patsy’d be bigger than even she ever dreamed!”

Donn Hecht and his wife were driving from Los Angeles International Airport, where he’d just purchased his ticket for the trip to Nashville. “I was tuned to a country station absorbing all I could. Suddenly, they interrupted with the news. I was too overcome to drive. I pulled onto the shoulder of the freeway. My wife was trying to comfort me. I recall looking up through my tears and seeing the cars whoosh by and thinking, ‘How can they go along as though nothing has happened when part of my world has ended?’

“Then the deejay inappropriately put on ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ and I was rendered completely incapable of operating the car. My wife drove us home where I consumed a third of a bottle of cognac. She said, ‘It’s none of my business since it was before you knew me, but I’d like to know. Was there anything between you and Patsy?’ I said, ‘Why do you ask?’ She replied, ‘I’ve never seen you like this. You’re about ready for the hospital.’ My answer was a truthful one, ‘Honey, there was
everything
between me and Patsy!’”

In Frederick, Maryland, Fay Crutchley called bandleader Bill Peer. “My God, Fay,” Bill exclaimed, “I can’t believe this. I had no way of knowing. I was only kidding Saturday night. I didn’t mean anything.”

“I had forgotten all about what he was talking about,” said Fay, “then I remembered when I asked him if he’d heard from Patsy, he said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, Patsy can just fall to pieces!’”

Louise Seger had left Houston and was living temporarily in Manaus, Brazil. “When I heard the news of Patsy’s death, it was something I wouldn’t let myself believe. There were a lot of people around the hotel from Oklahoma who worked the oil rigs and they liked country music. We’d get a few under our belts and we’d start singing. I’d always do Patsy’s songs. A man from New York came in from the airport and we got real friendly. I sang ‘I Fall to Pieces.’”

“Louise,” he asked, “who’d you say sang that song?”

“Patsy Cline.”

“My God, that’s the girl that was killed in a plane crash, isn’t it?”

Louise went absolutely cold. “No, you must be talking about somebody else. It couldn’t have been Patsy.”

“I’m almost sure it is.”

“I said it couldn’t have been. No, you must mean somebody else. You don’t mean Patsy Cline.”

“I’d almost swear to it. I was reading about it in
Life
on the plane coming down.”

“I don’t care what you were reading, you’ve got to be mistaken.”

“The magazine’s in my room. Here’s the key. If you don’t believe me, go see for yourself. Honey, I’m not lying to you.”

Louise went to the room, found the magazine, and started turning the pages until there it was. He hadn’t lied. Patsy Cline had been killed. Louise broke down.

Granville “Shorty” Graves, fondly known around the Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home in Madison, Tennessee, as “the last man to let you down” because of his job as an assistant funeral director, went to Stockdale-Milan Funeral Home in Camden Wednesday morning to bring the bodies to Nashville.

“I paid four hundred dollars in charges for the work they did, swapped bags, and headed back with a Tennessee Highway Patrol escort. Each time I’d cross a county line—from Dickson, to Cheatham, to Williamson and so on into Davidson County—there’d be another car waiting to take me on.”

Hubert Long helped the families with final arrangements. Friends from inside and outside the music community gathered at the homes of the deceased bearing cakes, pies, fried chicken, baked hams, potato salad, stuffed eggs, biscuits, soft drinks, and bottles of beer and liquor.

As Patsy wanted, Charlie brought Patsy home for one more night to the house she loved so much. “Since she’d gotten to spend so little time in it, I wanted her to enjoy it for as long as she could.” He had her gold-finished casket placed in front of the now-draped picture window in the living room. He put a photograph of Patsy on top. WSM and the Grand Ole Opry sent a huge casket spray.

“At first,” said Ann Tant, “I thought it a bit morbid having the casket at the house with the kids and all, but Patsy did love that house, and everything was handled in the very best of taste.”

Alexander Groves, the young sailor who dated Patsy during the summer of 1953, was living in Massachusetts. “Country music wasn’t very popular in New England,” he explained, “and I was unaware of the incredible career Patsy had carved for herself. When I picked up the newspaper and read about the accident that took her life, I read the article and reread it. I said, ‘This is Pat Cline, the girl that I dated!’ But no one would believe it.”

Five years later, when he was married and had started to follow country, his wife came home one day with an album she bought him. It was
Patsy
Cline’s
Greatest
Hits
.

Dottie West was in bad shape. She even found herself angry at Patsy. “I was at the kitchen table crying and staring into nowhere. My face was a mess, but I didn’t know, didn’t care. I was sipping black coffee and saying, ‘Damn it, Patsy, why didn’t you come with us? You always had to be so hardheaded. Had to do everything the way you wanted it!’”

Bill West tried to get Dottie out of her stupor. “Dottie, you’ve got to pull yourself together and get dressed. We’ve got to go to Kathy, Lucille, and Jeanie. Then we’ve got to go to Charlie. He needs us. We have to help him. There are people who need us. We’re their friends. We need to be with them. Think about what they’re going through.”

“Charlie. Oh, my God, Charlie!” Dottie snapped back to life. She got up. “Bill,
here I am feeling sorry for myself, and I’d forgotten what Charlie and those poor children must be going through.”

When they pulled up and Dottie saw the house, she couldn’t get out of the car. Her husband opened the door and waited.

“Honey?”

“Bill, I can’t.”

“You’ve got to.” He took her arm and helped her out. She slipped. He thought she was fainting, but Dottie suddenly stood erect. She looked at the house and Patsy’s words about bringing her back to her castle when she died came to mind. Dottie put her arms around Bill.

When they entered, Dottie and Charlie embraced, shaking. She turned and saw the casket.

“Oh, Charlie, I know she’d be happy.”

And they both fell apart.

If things hadn’t been traumatic enough for Charlie, they quickly became worse. He was so distraught, there was fear among close friends that he might kill himself. “Let there be no mistake about the fact that Charlie loved Patsy,” Del Wood said. “I only wish all those doubting Thomases had been there to see how broken he was and the exemplary way in which he conducted himself. My heart went out to him. He looked drained, pale. Like a lost soul.”

Explaining Patsy’s death to the children was an ordeal. “Randy had only just turned two that January,” he said, “but telling Julie, who was four and a half, oh, God, that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. Our friends were terrific with the kids, trying to keep their minds occupied, but they knew something was not right. Especially Julie.

“She didn’t quite understand what had happened, but she knew it wasn’t the normal, everyday thing. She’d ask me, ‘Daddy, is my mama ever coming home again?’” Randy was still sick. “There was no way I could make him understand. He kept running through the house crying for his mother. That made it doubly bad.”

On Wednesday evening, Mrs. Hensley arrived with three carloads of family and friends, including Charlie’s mother, Mary, who’d grown devoted to Patsy. Mrs. Hensley said she’d tried to accept her daughter’s death. When she got to the house and stood before the closed casket, the full impact hit her and daughter Sylvia Mae.

It was a horrifying experience as one would pass out, then come to, only to have the other pass out.

“People told me they were talking to me and I seemed to be in space,” recalled Dottie. “I was. I was a zombie. I couldn’t bring myself to believe Patsy was gone. Bill didn’t know what he was going to do. He was afraid he’d have to call my doctor and put me to bed. Patsy was my friend. Heck, she was more than that! It wasn’t easy accepting her death, nor would it be easy to go on without her. But I had to.

“Charlie was getting upset with me. He and Bill forced me to get away from the casket. I was on Patsy’s gorgeous white satin couch. I rubbed my hand across the fabric and said, ‘Charlie, this is the sofa Patsy just had made.’ He answered, ‘Yeah, Dottie.’ I said, ‘She was so proud of it.’ Charlie said, laughing, ‘She shoulda been ’cause she drove ‘em crazy till they got it the way she wanted it!’

“Next to me was Loretta. Oh, she was upset and shaking. I looked on the wall
and saw the portraits of Julie and Randy that Patsy had done the week before. I started to cry about those kids not having their mother, and so did Loretta.”

At the various homes, friends gathered en masse—from the stars of the Opry, industry executives, and neighbors to devoted fans and, in Charlie’s case, his buddies and poker mates from the printing plant.

On Nella Drive, everyone took on chores. Minnie Pearl and Pearl Butler stood watch at the door. Anita Carter and Jan Howard went into Madison and bought a Barbie doll for Julie and toys for Randy. Dottie and Loretta carved ham while Skeeter Davis served potato salad. Del Wood and Mooney Lynn scrambled eggs and bacon. Hank and Shirley Cochran kept the trays full of sandwiches, ham, and chicken. Roger Miller and Ann Tant kept hot biscuits coming. Teddy Wilburn and Wilma Burgess made iced tea. Billy Walker and Owen Bradley filled glasses with ice. Faron Young spiked drinks when asked.

Dottie and Loretta thought playing with the children would help not only them but the kids. “But it didn’t,” said Dottie. “Julie and Randy kept running to Charlie, hugging his leg and asking, ‘Daddy, where’s Mommy? Isn’t she coming home tonight?’ Every time they’d start to cry, Loretta, Hilda, and me would would go to pieces. And Hank was taking it real bad.”