Willie (39 page)

I think under different circumstances, somewhere in another time, Martha and I would have made it together. But me being a picker, and Martha loving to party, it was just an impossible situation. If Martha and I couldn't understand it, how could we expect Lana, Susie, and Billy to understand it?

You know you fall in love and you go together a while and you decide this is it, this is the perfect deal, it can't get no better than
this, and you get married, and you're no longer lovers any more, you're husband and wife. Then from wherever you come from, whatever raising you've had, you start drawing on that knowledge of how you're supposed to act as a spouse. What do I expect my husband or my wife to do? That's where all the problems come in.

I've been married nearly my whole life, and I've been a road musician nearly my whole life. And I know those two are incompatible.

I'm fifty-five years old. I've been married to three women. Maybe it's not supposed to work for me.

My marriages weren't really failures. I've got a whole gang of great kids. No matter what, I'll always have a big family around me. Someday I'll hear them saying, “Here comes Great-Granddaddy Willie again. That old son of a bitch must have just finished his new TV show.” I mean, my family ain't going to forget me, and I ain't going to forget them.

Back when Lana, Susie, and Billy were little, and I was with Shirley and Martha was getting a divorce, I wasn't allowed to talk to my kids. About four or five months before Martha's divorce was granted in Las Vegas, I wrote my kids a letter trying to explain myself to them.

It has been a different story with Paula and Amy in that they grew up without ever knowing what it is like to be broke.

When Lana, Susie, and Billy were little, I'd go in to buy a pack of cigarettes and they'd have these toy racks where you could buy little, cheap toys. I bought a lot of that stuff. It was all junk, but the kids liked it anyway.

With Paula and Amy growing up, the price of toys shot through the roof. Not their toys, necessarily. My toys, too. We were surrounded by the trappings of success and by mobs of people we sometimes didn't even know.

Once Paula and Amy came along, Connie couldn't travel with me anymore because she had to be a mother. We started spending time away from each other. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, regardless of what people say. Maybe it will for a few days or a few weeks. But if you start spending too many hours or days or weeks away from each other, things start happening.

Probably everybody around me feels that some of the people around them are using them to get to me. Some of it's true and some of it isn't. Still, you have that paranoia. You never know whether someone likes you for you or for another reason. I think Susie felt that and all the kids felt that, and maybe still do to some degree, but they've toughened up some and come to realize that it's not that serious. People just react differently around celebrities, that's all. But
Connie wanted to spare Paula and Amy all of that and raise them like normal kids, whatever
normal
means.

Normal
is just a word our society uses to describe kids who fit the pattern the authorities have laid down at the moment. Kids are people, and people are different in different ways for different reasons that have to do with working out their Karma. You can't tell a kid to be good and expect it to work automatically just because Father said so.

I've watched kids raised in all sorts of ways, following every theory ever invented by parents. I've seen kids who were poor and neglected and abused turn out to be outstanding people. On the other side of the coin, some of the worst people I ever met have had what seemed like ideal childhoods—loving, undivorced parents, plenty of money, a good education.

I guess having money and nice homes made it even worse for me to be at the golf course when I should have been at home. But I couldn't really convince Connie and the kids to move out to the golf course and stay with me. It was just a matter of where do you want to live? You may say it's not important but it damned sure is. When you've got time off you want to spend it with the people you love, but you also want to spend it at home, a place that feels like home to everybody. That seemed to be our problem. We were all too scattered and what was home to one of us wasn't to the other. What I had wanted everybody to do was to move back to Abbott and all the kids go to school there where I'd gone to school. But that wasn't necessarily what they wanted. You force your ideas on everybody, it doesn't work. Yet me being stubborn as I am and was, I tried and tried and then I would get upset because I couldn't make it happen the way I wanted it to be.

One thing I do know. In a few more years—a lot sooner than they realize—my kids will look in the mirror one morning and realize that while they may still feel like kids inside, they are in fact grandmothers or grandfathers.

I trust when that morning comes they will understand—if they don't understand already—that I did the best I could.

Go hug your daddy. It ain't too late to save him.

In 1962 I was nine years old and we were in Nashville right when Daddy and Mama were fixing to break up. “Mr. Record Man” had been recorded by Billy Walker. “Hello Walls” had already been a hit and we had gotten to move into a pretty nice house on the outskirts of Nashville.

I kind of wished Mama and Daddy would get a divorce because they fought so much. I always figured if they could get away from each other and not be together, maybe that was the answer. In order to get divorced, Mama took us to Las Vegas. She had to be a legal resident for six months in order to be able to get the divorce. It was kind of exciting. I wasn't very happy or anything, but it was something different. Mama was trying to make it, and she wasn't doing a very good job of it. Where before it was her and Daddy fighting, now it was her being really depressed over them being broke up, so it didn't solve anything, them breaking up, like I thought it would.

Daddy was on the road and he had met Shirley and they were living together and Mama was really pissed at that and she wouldn't let Daddy come around or bring Shirley or have anything to do with us for quite a long time. Shirley had supposedly been a friend. She
and her husband socialized with Mama and Daddy. Mama hated Shirley more than if it had been anybody else, I think.

Mama had a way of driving Daddy really to the edge. He was driven to the edge quite a lot. Mama had such a bad temper. She was always instigating the physicalness of the fight and putting him on the defense. With Shirley, I noticed later, it was the opposite. He'd get mad at her to the point of wanting to hit the walls and throw things and stuff, and she'd be on the defense.

He wrote us a letter about life when he was with Shirley. That was during the time when Mama wouldn't let us kids see him. Letters and Candygrams were basically our communication, other than his songs. The first song I remember him singing to me was “Red Headed Stranger.” I was about two, I guess. I can remember being in a crib and him singing that song. That's my earliest memory of him.

I'll take you back to being in Nashville. About the time that Patsy Cline recorded “Crazy.” Soon after that, she was killed. I can remember the morning she was killed. I guess Mama and Daddy had already split up, because we were staying at a babysitter's and Mama would come pick us up in the morning when she got through with work. And we watched the news that morning about Patsy Cline's plane crash and Mama goes, you know if there's one woman in the world I hated, it's that Patsy Cline. So I can just remember that. That's my memory of Patsy Cline, Mama saying if there's one woman I hate, it's Patsy Cline. I thought it was kind of cruel since she just died that day, but . . .

I remember when we were in Houston and when Daddy was gonna sell “Family Bible.” I think it was when I must have been about four. Daddy came home and told me he had sold “Family Bible.” I just cried and cried and cried. You remember when you heard there was no Santa Claus? I felt like that. I wanted everybody to know that he wrote it, that it was his song. He told me it doesn't matter whose name is on it, he wrote it, and he will always have wrote it, so not to worry. Some day he was gonna buy me so much stuff and some day we were gonna have as much land as far as we could see, and don't worry about a thing, that this was just one song. So that was when I decided, well, ya know, he's gonna be this big star. So that was when I started planning on being his secretary, when I was four years old. I groomed myself for years, to grow up and be his secretary. Worked out real well, too.

I've seen him through many happy times. I remember when I had my son Nelson, I was sixteen and I woke up and Daddy was there in
the room and Pop, his daddy, was there and Steve, my husband, was there. It was pretty nice. Daddy was beaming pretty good then. His first grandbaby. Who looked like this little bitty Indian papoose with a bunch of black hair and everything.

Steve and I had started having fights. He beat me up. We had to go pick up the kids at Daddy's house one night. He heard that I had been hurt. I had told Susie the truth, she told Daddy, Daddy and Connie came into our house. I'll never forget Connie had on this white fur coat, it's like this white full-length mink coat, and her white hair was striking and Daddy was flinging through the house in the fur coat that Shirley had bought him that made him look like a brown standard French poodle. Steve had broken out the plate-glass window and the door and the screen and the glass and all the crystal and everything, and it looked like a bomb exploded inside our house. Daddy comes in and he and Steve have a big fight. Daddy said to me, “Are you gonna stay with this son of a bitch or are you coming with me?”

Steve was laying on the floor bleeding and crying, and Daddy, it seemed like he was doing pretty good. Steve had kept yelling, oh, don't hit me, Willie, don't hit me, Willie, I got anxiety, I got anxiety. In a way I felt sorry for him and I figured well, ya know, he's all right tonight, and well, I'm gonna make this work. I had two kids and was just eighteen.

By now, Mama and Daddy had become friends again. Mama had married after she and Daddy got the divorce. She had two more little boys during the time that I lived with her. We traveled around, we went to California and New Mexico. Gradually, she let Daddy call and then she let Billy live with Daddy, and then she let Susie and me visit him in the summertime and eventually one summer we just stayed with him in Nashville.

Shirley was the lady of the house at the ranch at Ridgetop. We had chickens and pigs, it was a fun time. Shirley was doing a lot of writing with Daddy. At the time of the shootout, Mother was living with us in Ridgetop. She was working as a waitress in a truckstop where Steve's mother was the cook and she had rode to work with Steve's mother, who had to bring Mama home only she couldn't bring Mama home to our house because it was all trashed out and Daddy'd just shot up Steve's car in the front yard. So we had to have Mama come to Daddy and Connie's house. Steve's mother had to drive up in that territory and let Mama off and all the way over there she's saying if they've hurt my Stevie, I'll just kill somebody. And Mama says fuck your Stevie, and they get in a fight on the way over. So here's Mama, she's mad, she comes in, and there's Connie, and
there's just a whole house full of people, and Steve drives by, and he's shooting up the house. Mama's running through the house screaming we're gonna get killed, we're gonna get killed. Connie tackles her in the hall and says get down, Martha, you're gonna get killed. Bullets were flying everywhere. After everything was over and years passed, that was one of the funniest things I ever saw—crawling on my knees to see Connie tackling Mama who was running wildly through the hallways, yelling, we're gonna get killed, we're gonna get killed.

Looking at the lights shining in the windows of Daddy's cabin, I just remembered Mama getting me, about two or three years old, and pulling me in the light to look at shirts that Daddy had worn the night before to see if I could see the lipstick traces. Because she was saying lipstick was there and Daddy would say, Martha you're crazy, there's nothing there. She would get me in front of the window and say, Lana, do you see that lipstick? I'd always say no, Mama, I don't see a thing. She'd get so mad.

She used to send me to sit on his lap and ask him for more money when they were getting a divorce. She'd say tell your daddy that you need, that we need, that Mama needs more money. And I'd go say Daddy, Mama wanted me to tell you she needed more money.

Listening to “Mr. Record Man,” I can remember when Mama and Daddy were getting a divorce, and this song was on his very first album. I remember playing the single over and over and over. When she was getting a divorce, Mama would play Ray Charles, all those really sad, sad songs—“Your Cheatin' Heart,” “I Can't Stop Loving You”—and she'd just cry and be depressed. She loved Daddy. I think she loved him maybe more than anybody else I've ever known him to be with. They really got along the worst of anybody I've ever seen him with. Mama heard Daddy singing “Mr. Record Man” on the radio. She knew the songs because they were written when they were together and were just now getting recorded as they were breaking up. He bought her a Cadillac in Nashville right before they got the divorce.

The saddest I ever saw my dad was when his mother died.

We tried to get to the funeral. Daddy had his Lear and Mount St. Helens had just erupted. His mother lived close to Mount Rainier, in Yakima, Washington, where the funeral was. We had to fly over Mount St. Helens. Weather forced us to land four hours away from the funeral. We radioed for a limousine to meet us. When we landed, the limo was two hours late.

We missed the funeral oration, but they waited to bury her body until we got there. In a way it worked out just perfect for such a sad thing. There had been so many people, so much press earlier. When we got there nobody was in the whole funeral home except for us. It was about midnight. We had traveled for twenty-four hours. We had our own private ceremony, and that was the saddest I ever saw him, but then he started feeling a little better. He started feeling at peace, thinking about her, because she had been in terrible pain from cancer, so she was much better off. And we started laughing about her looking at us and watching us and we could hear her laughing at what we were doing and what we had on. We started back, two or three hours over the mountain, to the airport. The limousine catches on fire. We can't go any further.