Willie (31 page)

A few months ago, I decided to give my lungs a real rest and clear my head. I made a deal with a guy who runs a rehab clinic in California. This guy is an ex-junkie who does an excellent job of rehabilitating people. But he chain-smokes cigarettes.

I made a bargain with him. If he'd stop smoking cigarettes for thirty days, I would stay at his clinic and stop smoking weed for the same period. I said I might look like Cheech and Chong driving a diesel the day I left the clinic, but I would lay off the weed until then.

So what do you think was provided all the new arrivals at our orientation? Cartons of cigarettes. I stuck it out with people blowing cigarette smoke all over the place—including the guy who ran the clinic—until I couldn't stand it.

About the fourth day, I was exploding with energy. I sat down one afternoon and wrote the treatment for a TV movie. Two days later the cigarette smoke finally drove me out the door. I took my TV movie treatment and went to L.A. and made a deal with CBS to hire a producer and a couple of screenwriters.

Once again the writer in me had gone into a situation and come out of it with a story, and songs and album and movie to follow. It's a tip for how to survive—try to look at every obstacle as an opportunity.

Things had started going crazy around our ranch on Fitzhugh Road after the first Picnic in 1973. I was getting a lot of national exposure, and my albums had started selling in big numbers. People from everywhere started swarming around, and Connie couldn't stand it. I don't blame her at all. She would get phone calls all night long that were usually drunks looking for me. We made a deal with the phone company to change our unlisted home number once every month, but still it got out sometimes before I even learned it. This wasn't a good way for Connie to live, and it wasn't good for Paula and Amy. Amy had been born on July 6, 1973, so she was starting right off in the middle of all this new attention, but it must have seemed weird to Paula, who was four years old.

I mean by 1975 when my
Red Headed Stranger
album came out there were people showing up at the ranch who thought I could lay hands on them and heal their crippled limbs.

We built a six-foot-high wall with stones three feet thick around the ranch house property. We strung electrified wire along the top of the wall and stuck up signs that said
NO TRESSPASSING
,
NO ADMITTANCE
,
NO HUNTING
,
NO KIDDING
. Out at the main gate about a half mile from the house we put a closed-circuit television system and a
call button with instructions that said, “Press the button but please do not hold the button down.”

Me and Connie got to wondering if we were building ourselves a jail to live in.

She led the move to Colorado. Connie bought a three-story Swiss chalet on sixty acres in Morrison in the Denver area and said she already knew too many people and didn't want to meet anyone else. Connie would never really mean something like that, of course. In Colorado she found a new group of friends who were not bowled over by the fact that she was married to me. She fell in love with snow skiing. Then she found us an even more remote place near Evergreen, close to where we had visited my nephew Freddy a few times. Paula and Amy both started to school in Colorado.

The deal was supposed to be that I would live 50–50 between Texas and Colorado when I was not on the road. When I really wanted to get away, truly needed privacy, Colorado was certainly the place to go. I could step outside the door in Colorado and I was in the forest with the mountains all around and the flowers growing and no sound but maybe the wind in the pine trees. I enjoy that and I need it occasionally. It was sanctuary. There were practically zero visitors in Colorado.

We had the Pedernales Country Club twenty-six miles outside of Austin, and one of the houses we owned there was kept as a home for me and Connie and the girls when we came in from Colorado. But the country club was a hot spot, as far as constant people.

In Colorado I talked on the phone a lot, but that was about it for doing business. My business was in Austin. Out at the country club, I had a first-class recording studio and was set up with an office eventually where I could sit at my desk and look through a big plate-glass window at the hills and at Lake Travis.

And I must admit, my office was a wedge shot from the first tee.

So, one midnight in the Christmas season of 1977 I was sitting at the Backstage Bar across the street from the Austin Opera House, swapping bullshit with my old friend Bud Shrake while we passed a bottle of tequila back and forth.

Bud had just quit a great job at
Sports Illustrated
magazine, where he worked for fourteen years after leaving the newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas. Bud had written half a dozen novels by then and two or three movies, including
Kid Blue
, starring our amigo Dennis Hopper.

We talked and drank far into the night and came up with an idea
for a movie. He would write the script and I would star in it. We would be 50–50 partners. The story involved a country songwriter getting fucked by Nashville who moves home to Texas and figures out how to fuck Nashville back and come out on top. The movie was going to be about greed and power and loyalty and love. A musical.

We dreamed up our star cast: Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Dennis Hopper, and me. By the time we came up with a title—
Songwriter
—it must have been about daylight, and me and Bud hugged each other and bragged about how smart we were. This movie was going to be the simplest thing in the world to put together. Everyone would love it.

I phoned Waylon in Nashville who jumped in as an equal partner. He met us at the suite I used to keep as a hideout in the old Gondolier Hotel on the shore of the river downtown.

The suite had a balcony that looked down on the boats at a dock and across the river to a green slope and then the office buildings of Austin. It was a nifty hotel, not expensive but convenient and with that nice view. Waylon kept getting up and going to the bathroom while we were talking. Once he went into the closet and shut the door. When he came out of the closet he said, “I'll tell you one damn thing. If the law ever puts either of you on the stand and asks if you saw Waylon Jennings do drugs on whatever day this is, you sure as shit don't have to perjure yourself on my behalf.”

Dolly and Emmylou liked our idea. We couldn't find Dennis.

That afternoon I played Waylon and Bud a tape of the new album I was going to send CBS. It was
Stardust
. I glanced at them while we listened to the tape. Bud started crying during “September Song.” Waylon already had tears streaming down his cheeks.

When the tape ended, Waylon said, “God damn, Willie, I've heard them songs all my life but I never realized they were so beautiful. Where did you find all them songs?”

“There's a big book full of them,” I said. “If this album is a success, I can make a living in cocktail lounges the rest of my life.”

Bud got a call from Marvin Schwartz, who was now a Buddhist monk and was just stopping through Austin on his way back from India. Marvin Schwartz sort of empitomized the 1970s. His story is like
A Star Is Born
crossed with
The Razor's Edge
. Marvin produced movies starring John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Burt Reynolds, Dennis Hopper and Rock Hudson. Marvin was literally chased out of Hollywood by the studio and his ex-wives' lawyers. He walked across Africa. He arrived in Nepal and became a Buddhist monk—Brother
Johnathan. Brother Johnathan, who was now destined to produce
Songwriter
, we thought.

I leaped in and made my movie debut with the part of Robert Redford's manager in
Electric Horseman
. I just called Sydney Pollack on the phone and asked to be in the movie.

I had started appearing on national magazine covers and I picked up a good movie reputation on
Electric Horseman
, but our
Songwriter
still wasn't happening. I couldn't find out why. Marvin gave up as producer and went back to India. He said Hollywood was wrecking his tranquillity.

Then one night after a concert I did in Reno, a chunky guy named Mark Rosenberg walked in. He said he was head of production at Warner Brothers. He wanted me to star in a script they had. It was called
Honeysuckle Rose
. The story was about a country musician who is on the road a lot and falls in love with a young girl and nearly loses his marriage.

Mark Rosenberg took a check out of his pocket and gave it to me in Reno. I signed up to do
Honeysuckle Rose
instead of
Songwriter
.

When Bud heard I had signed for
Honeysuckle Rose
on the day still another of our
Songwriter
deals was supposed to come through, he drove out to see me at the ranch on Fitzhugh Road in Dripping Springs. He was hung over and upset, but after I told him they put the money in my hand, he said he didn't blame me for taking it. He said, “We believe in Karma, don't we?” I said, “I don't know if I done right or I done wrong with this, but we will someday find out.”

So I made the leap from guitar picker to movie star.

When I was a kid going to the movies, I used to like Roy Rogers' clothes the best but I preferred Gene Autry's horse.

The movie that was closest to my heart all along was
Red Headed Stranger
. I talked to Shrake about writing a script in 1976, but he said he didn't know how to write a story where the hero shoots a woman to death for stealing his horse. An old hang-around buddy tried writing a script, but it didn't feel right. I knew this was going to be a movie, but I didn't know how to make it happen.

One day in 1977 Bud introduced me and Connie to his old friend Bill Wittliff and Bill's wife, Sally. I liked Bill and Sally right off. I had seen a TV movie Bill wrote with Johnny Cash in it, and I knew he and Sally owned and operated Encino Press, a very high-class regional book publishing house, which impressed me.

Bill and I went for a long drive in his pickup truck and played the
Red Headed Stranger
on his tape machine. Bill said he would write
the script. We got a development deal with Universal and they gave me a suite of offices in Burbank. Bill turned in his first draft of the script, which followed the story line of the album pretty close. The story is about sin and redemption, set in the West in the 1870s. An idealistic preacher falls all the way to the bottom because he can't control his animal nature, but he finds the power of love draws people around him to perform a heroic act and save themselves from tyranny.

Universal put the pencil to it and came up with a budget of 14 million.

Then they sent the script to Robert Redford to play the
Red Headed Stranger
.

What was going on here, I found out, was Universal wanted me to sign with MCA Records, so in 1978 they set up Willie Nelson Productions on the Universal lot for me to develop the movie
Red Headed Stranger
—but not necessarily for me to star in. Basically, I think, they wanted my music contract a lot more than my classic profile on the screen.

Giving the script to Redford froze the project at Universal. The moguls said our movie would only be made if Redford would do it. Bob and I had become acquainted up in Utah, where I had bought a ranch not far from Redford's place. Bob sent word to me that he liked the script and was thinking it over. He thought it over for the next two years. He wouldn't say yes and go ahead and do the movie, but he wouldn't say no and release us to try it somewhere else.

I had mixed emotions about this. Though I very much wanted the movie
Red Headed Stranger
to be made, deep down I didn't want Redford to do it. This was a movie I felt I was meant to star in.

By the time we finally shot
Red Headed Stranger
in 1986, nearly eight years after Universal first gave the script to Redford, I had already starred in
Honeysuckle Rose
for Warner Brothers,
Barbarosa
(written by Bill Wittliff and co-produced with me and Gary Busey) for Marble Arch, and
Songwriter
(which finally got filmed in 1984, only six years later than the six months we had figured on at our Gondolier meetings) for Tri-Star, and had played smaller roles in
Thief
with Jimmy Caan and in
Electric Horseman
. That's on the big screen. I had co-starred with John Savage in a TV movie,
Coming Out of the Ice
, and had been executive producer and co-star (with Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings as my main pals) in a TV remake of
Stagecoach
that amazed the industry by knocking out its competition and becoming the highest-rated TV movie of the year.

To get
Red Headed Stranger
done independently, we had to pay back Universal the money they had advanced me and the money they'd paid Bill to write the script.

I built an 1870s Western town on the hills across the road from my golf course. It cost about $800,000. We did a new budget and cut Universal's $14 million, which by then, eight years later, would have been up to $25 million, down to $1.8 million.

Then with the help of God and friends and good luck and very hard work, we all pitched in to shoot
Red Headed Stranger
and brought it in on time and under budget. I'm proud of that movie. I think all our years of frustration and all our struggles resulted in making it leaner and stronger. You certainly can't tell when you see it—the beauty of Neil Roach's photography and the authentic costumes and all—that we could have made fifteen movies like
Red Headed Stranger
if we'd had the budget some studio spent on making another so-called Western,
Silverado
, that same year.

The movie business and the music business have interchangeable parts. It's kind of like the phone company and the IRS. I think they all work for each other. They all seem to use the same lawyers. There's good people and bad people in both businesses, and sometimes it takes quite a while to tell them apart.