Willie (26 page)

If there's any man I'd like to have run off with my wife, it would be Willie Nelson. The reason I say that is, Willie already did it. He sneaked Shirley right out from under my eyes. Just like you hear in the songs on the jukebox, I was the last one to know. I might have caught on earlier, except I was too much in love with Shirley to be suspecting anything.

Also, I have to admit Willie didn't pull no gun on Shirley to make her leave with him.

It was a pretty ironic situation all around. Shirley was the first girl I ever really fell in love with, but not the first one I married. My first wife was the ex-wife of Floyd Tillman, who was Willie's idol at one time. I don't truly remember meeting Willie until 1960—after I was married to Shirley—but our paths had kept crisscrossing until we finally collided in a room at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville.

The year I brought Shirley to Nashville with me for the annual disc jockey convention, Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran showed up at our room with Willie and some more songwriters. They picked and sang and carried on. Little did I know there were seeds being planted in the hotel room between Willie and Shirley. I heard later
that Willie and Hank had a bet to see which one could make Shirley first.

Shirley and I went back to California after the convention. It seemed like no time at all before Willie came to California for a recording session. Joe Allison phoned and asked if Shirley would like to do a duet with Willie Nelson. This may be the first duet he ever did. The story I got was Willie offered Joe a piece of one of his songs if Joe could put him and Shirley in the studio together.

And I went out and promoted their records. One of 'em was called “Willingly.”

I came home one day and there was a note from Shirley on the kitchen table saying she had to go to buy a dress to wear on Allison's
Country America Saturday Night
TV show.

Well, that must have been some hell of a dress, because she wrote the note in 1962 and she ain't back yet.

Days kept going past, and I didn't know where Shirley was. I had no idea if she was dead or alive. Shirley had talked about suicide before.

After three weeks of worrying, I heard she was living in Nashville.

Then Shirley started calling me out of the clear blue sky. It was weird. She'd say, “I just got out of the emergency room again. I'm having emotional problems.” I thought, well, sweetheart, so am I.

People knew Shirley was with Willie by now. They weren't married yet. I guess he was still married to Martha. But people would phone and say, “Don't you know that SOB stole your wife? Why do you keep playing his records on your radio show?”

I'd say, “Hell, it's my job to play the best music, and Willie is one of the best no matter whose wife he's with.”

I wish I could say I was never mad at him, but that wouldn't be the truth. See, when Shirley and Willie took off, she had my American Express card. They used my card to rent a car and drove it for weeks and weeks. I got a rent car bill for over $2,000. That year Willie probably made $120,000 in royalties while I was making $15,000. But they stuck me with the rent car bill.

American Express took my card away. I never did get it back. Shirley is Willie's second ex-wife.

The day I ran away from Bif, my husband, I flew to Seattle to meet Willie, who was on the road working for Ray Price and the Cherokee Cowboys. The tour was about to take them across Canada for thirty days. I wanted to prove to Willie that I was serious about being with him, so they hid me on Ray's bus while we went all the way across Canada and back into the United States.

Willie and I went on to Atlanta together. We would walk down the streets and look in the windows and laugh and go back to the motel and eat Chinese food or pizza and tell each other who we were and what we wanted to do. We were so happy. Willie was still trying to get away from Martha, and I was still trying to get away from Bif. I wish everybody could experience falling in love the way Willie and I did. It is a magical feeling—totally out of sight.

When we finally got back to Nashville, we took my money I'd made on my TV shows in California out of the bank and used it to live on until Willie could get his royalty checks. We didn't care about money. Willie wasn't such a big success as an entertainer, but we had a great family life at our farm at Ridgetop until things started to fall apart in about 1965 and finally smashed to bits in 1969.

When we first got together and Willie was writing I would get very upset because the way he wrote was he'd lay down across the bed and get real quiet. It frightened me because I thought maybe he was having second thoughts about us being together. In fact, he just withdrew into himself. You would almost have to see it to understand. I didn't realize what he was doing. Later on, he would write when I was in bed. When I got into writing a little bit, I would put things down on the recorder and then when he would come in, he would play those things. I've got some beautiful notes, love notes, that he would leave me—thank you for being the way you are with me and thank you for loving my children and all. They're beautiful love notes.

I called Martha and asked if we could have Billy come live with us first, because he was the youngest. He was like my own little boy to me. I sang him all the songs I knew. We went everywhere together and we played and he was just mine, always. Then his sisters came to live with us at Ridgetop. One night Billy and I were sitting in front of the fireplace and he said, “If you ever leave, if you ever go away from here, would you take me with you wherever you go?” I said
yes, I would. I had no idea of ever leaving. But it was a lie that I would take him. I couldn't take him. If I had picked him up and taken him with me, they would have come and got him. He didn't legally belong to me. But I didn't explain it to him. I still have very guilty feelings about Billy. I feel I have added to Billy's problems in life, and I didn't mean to. I pray that one of these days he's going to listen to me and believe I love him.

I prayed that Susie and Lana would become my friends, too, and listen to my side of the story.

Things started coming apart in Ridgetop when Willie decided to go on with his dream of being an entertainer. He enjoyed being a gentleman farmer for a couple of years at Ridgetop, even though he didn't have much aptitude for it. But when he started going on the road for weeks and months at a time, our family life began slipping away. Willie and I began having really terrible fights. He kept kicking down doors—he always had this thing about kicking down doors even if the key was in his pocket. I was hearing rumors that he was running around on me. I didn't want to believe it, but it was tearing me up. One night I got so mad that I actually shot at him a couple of times.

It was only an accident that I found out about Connie. When the bill arrived from the Houston hospital saying Paula Carlene was born, I just couldn't handle it. I thought it was my fault. Maybe I wasn't a good enough mother. I never did think Willie did anything wrong.

When Willie moved the kids out of Ridgetop, I phoned my parents and asked if I could come back home. I've stayed pretty much out of sight since I went home to my folks to get well. I don't want to be on the road. The road is just not my life. I'm a small-town person. It took me nearly ten years before I was strong enough to see Willie again. I sent word to him that I was coming to his show in Las Vegas. He called me out onstage to sing “Amazing Grace” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with him.

Later I told Willie, “You're so thin.”

He laughed and said, “Yeah. If I'd stayed with you I'd probably be fat and sitting around the house.”

I had been so afraid that the Willie I had known ten years ago wouldn't still be there. I didn't think I had the courage to see him in his beard and earring and all. But he's still the same heart, the same man who's so full of love, the same sensitivity as that guitar picker I fell in love with. I have never come close to remarrying. I can't make a commitment to anyone, because I love Willie. I'm happy with that. At last, I can handle knowing there's nobody else for me.

You think ole Will can't talk to the birds and the beasts and all God's creatures? Well, I'm here to tell you he can do it.

Me and Will was sitting around a campfire one night on the bank of the river in Austin, out back of a house he used to have in Westlake Hills. Just the two of us. We was dreaming up stuff for the first Picnic he was gonna have in Dripping Springs. We was talking about going down to the Armadillo World Headquarters, where Charlie Rich was playing, and asking him if he'd perform at the Picnic. Hell, I think Will had already announced Charlie was coming, but we thought we might as well go ahead and ask him anyhow.

This tree limb had fallen into the water about fifteen feet away. I looked down and saw a snake on the limb watching us. This was a four-foot water moccasin. I don't like nothing about snakes no way. He's got these little bitty eyes, looking at us, and I said, “Oh, Will, that be a snake fixing a stare on us. Maybe we oughta move back a little.”

Willie says, “You know, snakes respond to shadows.”

I say, “Oh, yeah?”

Will puts his forefinger out in front of him a foot or so and starts making a slow, circular motion, six or eight inches, clockwise. And this old snake raises up off this tree limb and his head starts following Will's finger round and round. Will would start again and the snake would start, his old head going round and round following Will's finger.

The snake finally got spooked, hisself, by Will. The snake run over to the right of us about eight feet and hid behind a log. He'd stick his head up and look at us, but he didn't want no more of Will's finger. That cottonmouth knew he had met his master.

I drifted off to sleep. When I woke up it was early daylight, and hundreds of birds flew into the tree I was sleeping under and set in the branches right above me. I was awful tired and didn't want to move.

I said, “Hey, Will, please tell them birds not to shit on me.”

He said, “Go on to sleep, B. C. You'll be all right.”

When I woke up again there was birdshit all around me but not one drop on my person. You think I'm lying? Anybody who thinks I'm lying just don't know Will.

With a record company you can have a whole room full of people who all put their heads together and grind away at a problem and still come up with the wrong answer. One company I was with, we used to have meetings and say, “We've got to stop Dolly Parton from wearing those terrible wigs. She looks like a hooker!”

When we signed Willie on RCA I remember somebody at a meeting saying, “Willie has got to be big. He's got style and he's different and he's a great songwriter and his time is going to come now, damn it. Just like Roger Miller, Willie's time has got to come.”

I said, “Well, he sounds great in Texas. What we've got to do is spread him out of Texas.”

So that was going to be our thing—promote the hell out of Willie and sell his records all over the country.

But we didn't do it.

I was just about the worst at promotion and sales. I didn't care anything about that part of the business. What time I wasn't working in the studio, I was off somewhere playing my guitar. I would fall asleep playing my guitar. I just didn't have the time—or take the time—to promote and sell records, mine or anybody else's.

It hurt Willie a lot to have a guy with my attitude about sales as the one who was supposed to push his product. I guess the timing just wasn't right. So much of what happens in show business for good or bad is timing.

When I came to Nashville in 1976 to run the marketing operation for CBS Records, Billy Sherrill had already brought Willie into the company. The album
Red Headed Stranger
had come out, and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” had been released as a single while I was working across the street for Fred Foster at Monument Records. The single was taking off, becoming a pop hit, and Willie was approaching stardom.

I went over to meet him for breakfast at the Spence Manor Hotel. Willie came jogging down the road at 8:30
A.M
., all covered with
sweat from his five-mile run, and we went inside and ate eggs and hash and talked about music and philosophies of life. And got stoned. Here it was, 8:30 in the morning and I wasn't worth a damn for the rest of the day.

But Willie was already on the rise. It was happening so fast that all I had to do was grab the ring and hold on.
Red Headed Stranger
was a hit for all the wrong reasons. It didn't follow the formula, the fashionable mix of the day. There were 1,000 reasons that record should not be a hit. But the
Red Headed Stranger
project took on Willie's personality and became a hit for all the right reasons—because it was Willie Nelson. It was Willie's statement.

There were at least two Willie Nelsons in the public mind at that time. One wrote this brilliant concept album,
Red Headed Stranger
. Another was the great ballad singer who sang “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” It was months before the Willies joined in the public mind so that people who reacted to him as a singer also got interested in the album. Then Willie took on the superstar image he has today.

Willie's contact with CBS Records has been sort of on the run. Three months will go by and we don't hear from him. Then suddenly we hear from him three or four times in a day. But I always take great care to leave him alone to create. With Willie, you just trust him and say, “Go lead us somewhere and we'll follow.” The key to the whole thing is Willie is not now, never has been, and never will be predictable. Willie doesn't need advice. It's important for CBS Records to recognize that. I think Willie appreciates our attitude. We appreciate his music. So it works.