Willie Nelson (48 page)

The jury believed Willie, not the prosecutor. Margie Lundy was acquitted.

After the trial Margie retired from the bar business after a long career of serving beer, hosting musicians such as Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Gimble, and keeping the peace in her honky-tonk.

H
ONEYSUCKLE
R
OSE,
which opened in theaters across America three weeks after Willie’s 1980 Fourth of July Picnic at the Pedernales Country Club, had confirmed Willie’s cinematic career had legs. He responded by making movies like he made records. Over the next five years, he did a cameo before being killed off in
Thief,
a 1981 hard-boiled drama about a safecracker working for the Mafia written by Michael Mann that starred James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Dennis Farina, Robert Prosky, and James Belushi; played the role of Red Loon, an American political prisoner in Siberia in the 1920s in the 1982 made-for-television true story
Coming out of the Ice;
and played an outlaw who’d seen better days as the lead in the 1982 film
Barbarosa,
a stark western set in Mexico that also starred Gary Busey and Gilbert Roland. Coproduced and written by Bill Wittliff, an Austin screenwriter who was working with Willie to make a movie based on
Red Headed Stranger, Barbarosa
was filmed on the banks of the Rio Grande in the desert west of Big Bend National Park for $13 million. Gary Busey’s character is a farmer forced to take up the life of a gunslinger, a trade he learns from Willie’s character, Barbarosa. While making the movie, Willie played a gig to raise funds to buy a resuscitator for the Big Bend regional hospital.

Country music again provided the backdrop for
Songwriter,
the 1984 Willie and Kris buddy movie that, like
Honeysuckle Rose,
was inspired by his real life. Willie assumed the role of Doc Jenkins, a songwriter turned music mogul. When he gets into a bad “bidness” deal, he seeks out his former singing partner, Blackie Buck, played by Kris Kristofferson, to help him.

“The character I was playing was originally written for Waylon,” Kris said. “We had a real good director, Alan Rudolph, who was open to creative stuff right on the set. We would make up whole scenes. He got the joke. He would allow us the freedom to try something, then make a suggestion so we would do it better. There’s a scene where I wake up in bed with an eye mask on. He said, ‘Walk over to the mirror and look at yourself with the eye mask still on.’ I went over and did it. And when I did it, I thought of my crew chief when I was working in the Gulf of Mexico [flying helicopters to offshore oil rigs]. Every morning, he’d look in the mirror and say, ‘You good-lookin’ thing, don’t you never die.’ I said that with the eye mask on. Alan Rudolph said, ‘Perfect.’”

Joining Willie and Kris was Lesley Ann Warren, playing the up-and-coming singer who becomes his coconspirator. Rip Torn based his seedy bad guy character Dino McLeish on Geno McCoslin. Musicians Mickey Raphael, Bee Spears, Jody Payne, Paul English, Bobbie Nelson, Johnny Gimble, Grady Martin, and Jackie King, and associates Poodie Locke, Gates Moore, Larry Trader, Larry Gorham, B. C. Cooper, and Steve Fromholz, all had parts. So did KVET disc jockey Sammy Allred. “There was a scene where I was playing the part of a disc jockey and Willie asks if I take payola,” Sammy said. “I say, ‘You bet!’”

Mickey Raphael actually got some speaking lines, acknowledgment of his tall, dark, and handsome stature and his Hollywood proclivities. Los Angeles had become his new home base when he wasn’t on the road, which led to album and movie work, including three albums with Emmylou Harris, the underrated soundtrack for the film
Blue Collar,
scored by Jack Nitzsche and also featuring Captain Beefheart and Ry Cooder, and a five-year relationship with the actress Ali McGraw.

Willie’s love affair with the camera extended to the HBO special with Ray Charles and to participating in Michael Jackson’s
We Are the World
superstar recording session for Jackson’s USA for Africa project in 1985, which was filmed. He and Kenny Rogers were the voices of country music on the project orchestrated by Jackson, who at the time ruled the airwaves as the King of Pop.

He also appeared in the 1983 historical documentary about the California motorcycle gang,
Hell’s Angels Forever,
alongside head Angel Sonny Barger and musicians Jerry Garcia, Bo Diddley, and Johnny Paycheck; did a cameo on
Pryor’s Place,
comedian Richard Pryor’s 1984 kiddie television series; and was in the cast of 1986’s
The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James
alongside Kristofferson, Marcia Cross, and June Carter Cash, with David Allan Coe playing a bit part. He had his own bit part in the Roger Corman B movie
Amazon,
playing the Good Wizard who leads the Amazons before he is killed off, and he sang the title song in the 1988 HBO movie of Dan Jenkins’s
Baja Oklahoma,
starring his friend Lesley Ann Warren. He played opposite Delta Burke and Jack Elam in the 1988 Burt Kennedy–directed TV western movie
Where the Hell’s That Gold!
which was filmed in southern Colorado; was a credible bad guy in the 1988 CBS network film
Texas Guns,
also directed by Burt Kennedy; and did two made-for-television movies playing a lovable safecracker pursued by Kris Kristofferson and Rip Torn’s Texas Ranger characters in
Pair of Aces
and
Another Pair of Aces,
written by Austin writers Bud Shrake and Jap Cartwright, which aired in 1990 and 1991, respectively.

As long as movies didn’t interfere with his main line of work, he was always good to go for a turn in front of the camera. “Making movies never took over thirty or forty days and sometimes only seven or eight days to do the bit parts,” Willie said. “It never got in the way of the music. It was just something to do that was a lot of fun.”

“I don’t think he took movies seriously,” his financial adviser Mark Rothbaum said. “He’s Willie. I don’t think he’s particularly thrilled to sit around and wait all day [which is the case with most films]. He does it on his off times. Willie didn’t want to do
Wag the Dog,
so I said, ‘Fine.’ He was going to be the band in it, and I had asked for the bigger role of Johnny Gray, and they said okay. I got them Haggard for the band instead. So everything’s set, and Willie says, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ So I say, ‘Great! Do you mind if I offer Cash the role? It’s too good of a role to give up.’ So he says to me, ‘I said I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it.’ He was so loved on that set.

“He’s the best third guy in the business,” Rothbaum believed. “If you are a director and producer, and you have a role that you need a third fella for, get Willie. He is the best guy on a set, especially with temperamental artists, because the crew loves him, the actors love him, it’s a party, the bus becomes a great place. He’s just like Dean Martin.”

Movie money helped underwrite construction of a second studio, the twenty-four-track Arlyn Studios, adjacent to the main room of the Austin Opry House, operated by his nephew, Freddy Fletcher.

The studios led to a glut of Willie product, which worried Mark Rothbaum. “I had to adopt a mind-set that [all the albums were] good for his career, when privately I knew it wasn’t. At the same time, there were people at the record companies who earned money through billing, so four records at once from their hottest artist may not be good long-term, but these record executives weren’t there for the long term. They were going to be there until they made their money and could retire, which is in fact what happened. They would welcome [more records], even though they too did not believe it was best for his long-term career.”

No one spoke up about Willie being overexposed other than Colonel Tom Parker, who had opined that no way would he let Willie play as much as he was playing—not if the Colonel were running the show—and Bruce Lundvall of Columbia Records. “I had to tell him to stop,” Bruce said. “There were too many Willie Nelson records. I told him he’d lose his special attraction. He wouldn’t listen, but he was such a sweet man.”

Bruce Lundvall remained friends with Willie after Bruce left the label in 1982 to run Elektra Records. He knew signing him in 1975 was one of the wisest career moves he’d ever made. “People like Willie and Norah Jones [another Texan who Lundvall would sign to Blue Note Records, twenty-six years later] are completely and utterly unique. When you find one, man, you don’t ask questions. I learned that from John Hammond. He was my mentor. He couldn’t spot a hit record but he could spot a unique artist every time. You don’t even need to see the lyrics. That was Willie.”

From the outside looking in, he had it all. In August 1983, Willie was featured on the cover of
Life
magazine, sitting on a fence post, guitar in hand, headband holding back his hair, surrounded by Connie and his daughters Amy and Paula Carlene on their beautiful Colorado spread next to the headline “Where C&W’s Top Star Hides Away with His Family.”

The
Life
cover was ironic in two respects. It wrongly suggested Willie actually stayed in one place for more than a few nights. And it ignored what many around him knew too well. Amy Irving remained in Willie’s life.

Connie Nelson had hoped the relationship between her husband and his leading lady in
Honeysuckle Rose
had been an impulsive fling tied to moviemaking. What Connie didn’t know was that Amy Irving had broken up with Willie instead of the other way around. He’d arranged to throw a party for Amy in New York in February of 1982 following her short but successful run as the female lead in
Amadeus
on Broadway, her first project after
Honeysuckle Rose
. But when he showed up at the party, she treated him like a country bumpkin rather than her lover. He walked out of the party and around the corner into an alley where he wept openly.

But their affair was on again. When Connie got a call tipping her off that Willie was shacking up with Amy in condo number one at the Pedernales Country Club in 1983, she flew from Colorado to Texas to confront Willie and to tell Amy Irving to keep her paws off her husband. She showed up well past midnight, very drunk and very pissed, and tried to punch out Willie when he opened the door naked. She broke her hand instead. Even as she struggled with him, Connie hollered at Amy to come downstairs so she could whip her ass, but Amy stayed upstairs. “I all but stalked her—literally—just to keep her at a distance,” Connie said.

Somehow Willie and Connie talked it out and patched things up, but Willie and Amy kept coming back to each other.

In February 1985 Willie went into Pedernales Studio to make an album with his longtime bud Roger Miller. Mary Miller and Connie Nelson were close friends and came to the sessions too. But when the recording was finished, Willie informed Connie he wasn’t going back to Colorado with her. He wanted to stay in Texas, he said, and he wanted to see Amy Irving again.

However, Amy blew off Willie one last time and married movie producer Steven Spielberg, her longtime fiancé. Connie moved the girls back to West Lake Hills, west of Austin, to try to be closer to him, but the flame that lit their marriage was flickering. The return was not the happiest homecoming. Paula was at an age when being pulled from her high school was as upsetting as it had been to Susie when the family moved from Tennessee back to Texas. And the Nelson girls’ reputation preceded them. “Paula got into drugs at Westlake High,” Connie said. “The drug crowd could have cared less if Willie was famous or not. They cared if she could get them pot. Paula fit in good.”

Paula knew the drill too well. “They weren’t interested in me,” she acknowledged. “It was just because I was Willie Nelson’s daughter.”

Willie Nelson’s mother may have had similar feelings, knowing people were interested in her only because of her famous son, but it didn’t bother Myrle Harvey. She enjoyed letting the world know who she was. There was more than a little of Willie in her, as was revealed in a handwritten note on lined notebook paper that she had composed:

I fully realize that no wealth or position, can endure unless built upon truth and justice.

Therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects.

I will succeed by attracting to my self the forces I wish to use. And the cooperation of other people. I will endorse others to serve me, because of my willingness to serve others.

I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism by developing love for all humanity because I know that or negative attitude to record? Others, can bring me, success. I will cause others to believe in me. Because I will believe in them, and in my self.

I will sign my home to this formula, commit it to a memory, repeat it long once a day with full faith that’s will gradually in chance. My troubles on actions as that I will become a self reliant and successful person.

Myrle M Harvey Rt 8, Box 291 d., Yakima WA 98908

On December 11, 1983, Myrle departed this earth in Yakima, taken by lung cancer, the same disease that took ex-husband Ira Nelson. She had been living in eastern Washington state for nine years after moving from Eugene, Oregon, with her third husband, Ken Harvey. The sassy gal and gypsy rambler who taught her daughter and son a few things about moving down the highway was gone. Willie Nelson and Family tried to make the funeral service, but their flight was delayed due to bad weather. By the time three black stretch limousines pulled into the Terrace Heights Memorial Park cemetery, the crowds had departed. It was pitch-black dark. The only people left were the grave diggers, waiting to do their business after her son and his family said good-bye.

I
F
Willie’s life sometimes seemed too large to believe, his friends only magnified the myth. Houston lawyer Joe Jamail was representing the Pennzoil oil company in a high-stakes lawsuit against petro-rival Texaco, and the night before presenting his final argument in court, Joe was interrupted by Willie and Coach. They’d been golfing at Willie’s course, as usual, when Willie suggested flying over to Houston to cheer up Joe. He had a jet at his disposal. Why not use it? So instead of spending the evening preparing his presentation, the lawyer welcomed the coach and the musician, and three regular guys who happened to be the best at what they did spent the evening telling lies, knocking back drinks, and listening to the musician play music until two in the morning.