Honky Tonk Angel (62 page)

One taker wouldn’t forget the introduction. Patsy was getting dressed when Brannon yelled, “I got someone I want you to meet.” Recalled Bob, “She stunned everyone, coming out wearing this big grin and nothing more than a red bra and half-slip. They stood chatting for ten minutes.”

After a visit when Hilda, “looking very attractive and slender though she had curves like Patsy,” came with Patsy, Charlie, baby Julie, and Sylvia for a fried chicken dinner, Mrs. Bartles’s mother did something rare. “She had been observing Patsy and I sitting next to each other on the couch and she said, ‘I saw how much you favor each other.’”

There were arguments over the attention Chet paid Patsy. After one very heated exchange, Mrs. Bartles said her mother was very upset and scolded, “You didn’t claim Patsy when she needed you, so why are you claiming her now?”

Mrs. Bartles didn’t meet “my half sister” until 1955, when “Daddy took me to see Patsy sing at a carnival. He was very eager to hang out with her, but the feeling was mutual.”

Until he was halfway through college [1961], Bob never knew Patsy was considered his half sister. Mrs. Bartles spilled the beans, and the story started coming out in drips and drabs.

In later years, when Patsy played locally, Mrs. Bartles made a point to catch the shows. When Patsy knew she and her husband were there, she would either join them at their table or invite them backstage.

Mrs. Bartles, always struck by Patsy’s compassion, remembered a show where a family walked six miles to see her perform, “Patsy was so moved, she insisted on taking them home.” Mrs. Bartles went along on the ride and, on the return, was tempted “to broach the subject of how we were related, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

She said that Mrs. Hensley or her Aunt Maud called to inform her family of Patsy’s death. Chet told Mrs. Hensley he’d take her to Nashville. “Daddy put some things together,” said Bartles, “went to his friend and barber Oscar Truax, and asked if he could go to the head of the line. He told Oscar, ‘I just got news my daughter was killed outside Nashville and I have to drive her mother there.’”

Her father and family members tried to attend Patsy’s funeral, but were stymied by miles and miles of backed-up traffic.

After Patsy’s death, noted Bartles, her father “was quite subdued and evasive when people asked him about being Patsy’s father. However, he never denied it.”

Chet Brannon died in 1984 at age seventy-two.

In 2007, asked why she never discussed the paternity issue with her father, or in a later visit with Mrs. Hensley in Winchester, Charlotte Bartles lamented, “It was out of fear of his reaction. He had a dark side others never saw. As far as Hilda is
concerned, Patsy was dead and I simply couldn’t muster the courage to talk about those long-gone days.”

Darwin Henesy, called Bill, of Charles Town, was a descendant, by way of his uncle, the thrice-married industrial visionary R. J. Funkhouser, of the royal house of Saxe-Coburg, with lineage to Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria.

A Republican, Funkhouser ran losing campaigns for governor of West Virginia and for the senate. On retiring, he became a prodigious philosophical writer and, with wife Peggy Morningstar, a preservationist for the homes built by Charles Washington, brother of the first president.

Henesy’s daughter Barbara O’Donnell believes her father and Mrs. Hensley had an affair while he attended Winchester’s Shenandoah College in fall 1931, a month before his eighteenth birthday. “He went one semester and flunked out. He only took three subjects. His main interest was women. ”

She claims Henesy fathered Patsy Cline. “He didn’t want to settle down and marry Hilda when she became pregnant. He was young, had money, and enjoyed playing the field. But he had to do something. Daddy knew Sam from Winchester and arranged for him to marry Hilda and give her baby a name.”

Mrs. O’Donnell, a former interior decorator and wholesaler of objects of fine art, was born in 1946 and resided in Charles Town into her teens before relocating with her mother and younger sister Billie Jean to Arizona and Florida.

She has no correspondence between Mrs. Hensley and her father, but possesses snapshots from 1933 purporting to be of Hilda, seventeen and married about a year, with shoulder-length hair, being embraced by the handsome, dapper Henesy, and some from 1938 in which her hair is in a bob. When shown the photos, friends of Hilda Hensley’s, including Jim Gibbons, said the woman bears a likeness to Hilda but didn’t believe it to be her.

Mrs. O’Donnell recalled Hensley family fishing trips well into the 1950s where, she claimed, her father rendezvoused with Mrs. Hensley. She also recollected being with him at the Hensley home for Sylvia’s high school graduation party while in her teens.

In 2007, when asked why she’d waited so long to come forward, Mrs. O’Donnell responded, “No one wanted to hear my story. Publishers replied that without conclusive proof, such as DNA, they wouldn’t touch it. All I have are my recollections. ”

Mrs. O’Donnell reported that in younger years she was often mistaken for Patsy. In side-by-side photos of the two, a resemblance cannot be doubted.

Before joining the military in the 1940s Henesy helped run several Funkhouser companies, including a mine quarry where he employed Sam and Randolph, his son from his first marriage. He later threw his hat into the political ring, running a losing campaign for state senate.

Mrs. O’Donnell recalled waking up in the wee hours of March 6, 1963, “with a premonition that Daddy had been killed. I was crying and wanted to call him. Mother said if something had happened, we would have been notified.”

When she rang the store later, she recalled shop assistant Ruby Shewbridge informing her that her father was alright but quite broken up over Patsy’s death.
“What?” she responded. “Patsy’s dead?” When she asked for her father, she was told he was getting a flight to Nashville.

Many claim that some statements Mrs. O’Donnell made are improbable, such as her father attempting to have Patsy buried in the Funkhouser or Henesy plots in Winchester Cemetery.

She said that when she wanted to discuss all this with Mrs. Hensley, friends advised against it. “Even Charlie said not to bother,” she admitted. “I spoke with him on the phone. We had a very interesting conversation. There were things about his family he needed to know.”

No one interviewed mentioned a relationship between Henesy and Hilda Hensley. Those who might know are no longer alive to verify O’Donnell’s account. She admits that her father never out-and-out said that he was Patsy Cline’s father. However, she firmly believes it to be true and alleged that besides Patsy, Henesy sired five other children out of wedlock, including two who went on to international fame as singers.

Henesy died in 1970 from head injuries suffered when a car hit the vehicle he was a passenger in. He was fifty-six.

Patsy told Dottie and Del that Sam had molested her. When the
Sweet Dreams
production team interviewed Mrs. Hensley for their film, she informed them that Sam didn’t so much desert his family in 1947 when Patsy was thirteen but was asked to leave.

Dottie revealed to Patsy that she’d been molested by her father from age twelve to eighteen. When she reported the abuse to authorities, Dottie testified against him, resulting in his serving forty years in prison.

Until early December 1956, Patsy and Sam were estranged. However, when Mrs. Hensley told Patsy the news that Sam had been diagnosed with lung cancer, they visited him at the hospital. With Mrs. Hensley present and as a witness, she called him “Daddy.” This was their last visit. He died a few days later.

Well into the 1980s things were often tense between Mrs. Hensley and Charlie. A friend mentioned once that when she was upset, Mrs. Hensley “gritted her teeth and swore that if she could, she’d get rid of him. She was expressing how she felt after the many things Patsy told her and how he treated her. The pain went deep.”

This dislike had to be difficult for Mrs. Hensley because she and Charlie’s mother, Mary, had been longtime, devoted friends.

The friend, like many, “found Charlie to be a likable guy but his dark side bothered me. When you hear things over and over, that usually confirms it. He hurt Hilda over the years, and it was a challenge for her to be civil. She only did it for the sake of Julie and Randy. ”

Mrs. Hensley alleged that when she requested Charlie send her Patsy’s awards, costumes, and clothing, he shipped them C.O.D. Mrs. Hensley, caught unawares, didn’t have enough cash. Peeved, she left the deliveryman on her front porch and went to her bank.

In her will, Patsy was leaving Mrs. Hensley “all money which is in my possession
at the time of my death or any income to follow . . . to use in any way to benefit and educate my children Julia and Allen Dick . . . [with] any royalties paid to me ... to go to the care and education of Julia S. and Allen Dick.”

The only things Patsy bequeathed to Charlie were “my western designed den furniture, a hi-fi stereo record player and radio, records and albums and tape recorder and blond floor model television set . . . [and] whatever make car we have at the time of my death.”

He got Patsy’s Cadillac—and a lifetime of huge royalties.

Patsy Cline’s fans now number in the millions and come from every walk of life. Many never intended to become fans. They came across Patsy accidentally, liked her, but thought it would just be a phase; then they couldn’t tear themselves away.

One of those is Lisa Flood. “I got hooked so easily. It’s amazing that I still feel the same excitement with each song. Patsy’s voice is something you hear once in a generation. She appeals to the teenage angst that lies within some of us long after our teenage years. Her vocals sound bruised, loaded with pain and feeling. It’s raw, not processed or polished. She’s lived it and her hurt acts as a healer. Even though ninety-nine percent of us never had the chance to meet her or attend one of her shows, we cling to her memory and cherish it.”

Rose Marie Flynt, remembering her friend, said “Patsy valued loyalty and honesty above all else, but the thing I admired was that she knew what she was capable of and wasn’t jealous of anyone. That’s evidenced by the fact she helped Brenda, Dottie, and Loretta.