The next day I went back out to the pay phone and called Mamma.
“Mamma?” I said. “This is Katie.”
“Katie who?” she asked.
“Your daughter Katie,” I said.
“I used to have a daughter,” Mamma said, “but she went to Hell.”
“Now Mamma,” I started to say, but she had hung up on me.
I stood there in that phone booth looking at the Parthenon in the park across the street. You know it is an exact replica of the real one in Italy. It’s real pretty, with perfect proportions, as this hippie fiddler would tell me later, who went to Harvard. He said the Parthenon was Art.
Right then I wasn’t studying on Art. I missed my girls, and the money I’d saved up was going fast. I kept trying to get ahold of Dawn Chapel, but it was hard to get the call through, and then when I finally did get her on the phone, we had the strangest conversation.
At first she was real nice.
“You know I just loved that song you sent me,” she said when she finally remembered who I was. “I still get requests for it all the time. I’m going to put it on my new album, The Best of Dawn Chapel.”
“Wow! Great!” I said. “I can’t tell you how honored I am, Miss Chapel.”
“Dawn,” she said. Then she asked me if I’d been writing any more tunes. At this point in the conversation, she was still being real nice.
“Why, yes ma’am, as a matter of fact I have,” I said.
“Dawn,” she said. “Call me Dawn.”
This is the point where, if I had played my cards right, I might have gotten someplace, at least I might have gotten her to listen to some more tapes. But I was still upset about Rose Annie, and more desperate than I realized. So I said, “As a matter of fact I have just recently moved to Nashville, and I’m trying to get somebody to listen to me sing. Do you have any ideas, Miss Chapel? Who is your agent, anyway?”
A silence as definite as a black blanket fell over the line.
I cleared my throat and went on. “I cut a record with Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops in 1952,” I said, “and then I did ‘New Eyes’ for Four Star, and it did pretty good. Maybe you heard that one? I could bring it by,” I said, “if you’d like to hear it.”
Dawn Chapel’s voice got funny and faraway, like I was a Jehovah’s Witness that had come to her door, or somebody selling burial insurance. “That sounds nice,” she said. “Call my agent, honey, why don’t you?” And then she hung up without ever telling me who her agent was, and I stood there looking at the Parthenon.
No matter how big I get, I will always remember this moment. I will always try to be nice to the kids coming up in this business and treat them decent, not like Dawn Chapel did me. It’s a great feeling to help another artist who’s really struggling as a new-comer. And I know what it means to a new artist for someone else to just speak up for them a little bit.
So I will always be grateful to those people that finally did help me, especially Jim Reeves and Chet Atkins, and Tom Barksdale, who signed me with MCA and produced my first album, Call Me Back When You’ve Got Time, which featured “New Eyes” of course, but also the tune that turned out to be a surprise hit, “You Made My Day Last Night,” which went on to be nominated by the Country Music Association for Single of the Year. So I bought the house on Harding Place and brought Rhonda and Don and the kids up here from Shreveport at last. They just loved Nashville from the start, all of them, taking to it like a duck to water! Tommy had his first drum set by then, so he could take lessons with the best. Rhonda ran into Patsy Cline in the grocery store at Green Hills the day after they got up here, and almost died she was so excited! Rhonda took over running the house and Don took over some of my business for me, as it was getting to where I just couldn’t keep up with everything.
They were all right there when I got invited to sing “You Made My Day Last Night” on the Grand Ole Opry. This is a night I will never forget, April 10, 1964.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much it meant to me because of all the nights in my life I had listened to those Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on the radio, dreaming of someday being there myself and meeting some of the greats, like Ernest Tubb, who turned out to be the first person I happened to run into backstage. I couldn’t believe it!
“We’re mighty proud to have you on here tonight, darling,” he said. He seemed real warm and did not appear to notice my outfit one way or the other, which was good.
I was worried to death about my outfit.
The truth is that during the period while “You Made My Day Last Night” was climbing the charts, Tom Barksdale stuck onto me like a leech. He told me where to go, what to do, who to talk to. I gave in to him on everything, including image. So not only did my first album have a real smooth, contemporary sound, but I myself was no longer the same girl I’d been in my appearances with Wayne Ricketts. Tom Barksdale had me wearing my hair long and straight now, “California hair” he called it. I had on white cowgirl boots and the littlest white fringed skirt you ever saw. I didn’t know what folks on the Opry would think of my outfit, but since that’s what I was wearing on the album cover, it had become my trademark at that time. Tom said we were aiming for a bigger audience now, and that I’d be cutting my next album in L.A.
Tom said Nashville was dead and L.A. was where it was happening. He was switching all his operations to L.A.
Tom was not backstage with me at the Opry that night, though—I put my foot down. Tom Barksdale had long blond hair and wore things like turtleneck sweaters, and while I knew I was real lucky to have him produce my album and all, I just didn’t want to let him come backstage at the Opry with me.
The Opry was for me in a way that I knew Tom would never understand, as he was a northerner from Michigan who had gone to the Berklee College of Music. “A technical genius,” people were calling him.
Maybe so.
But I preferred to stand by myself at the right side of the stage, where I could see everything that was happening, and if anybody minded my outfit, they sure didn’t show it. They were nice as pie, making me feel like it really was one big happy family, as it had always seemed to me, and for that night anyway, I was part of it. Lucile White asked me where I was from, and I got to hear Roy Acuff sing “Great Speckled Bird” and work his yo-yo. He’s great with the yo-yo! Skeeter Davis was on that night, and the Wilburn Brothers. And Jim and Jesse, who I have always been crazy about, were making a guest appearance, too.
Standing back there waiting for my turn, I got real nervous for the first time in years. I wanted a drink so bad! Of course, I had tossed back a stiff one across the alley in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge before I went in the Ryman. That’s what you do. You go in Tootsie’s first. Because of course you can’t have a drink at the Opry, those people are real straight-laced. The only thing you can get backstage is a Coke from a machine, or coffee and orange Kool-Aid, which they’ve got laid out on a table.
There was something like a church about the Opry in those days when it was still at the Ryman Auditorium—why, shoot, the Ryman used to be a church, come to think of it. It’s got those pews, and the balcony, and stained glass in the windows. There’s something solemn about the crowd, too—even now, over at the new Opry House—something worshipful, which has to do with how far the fans have driven to be there, and how long they’ve been listening to their favorites, which is years, in most cases. For you know, the country music fan is like no other, they’ll follow you for years, through good times and bad, and never tire of hearing your old tunes one more time. They are the biggest-hearted, most devoted folks in the world, and they are the ones that have made the business what it is today. It is not the stars. It’s the fans.
Standing backstage at the Ryman was when I really realized this, watching them get up and slip forward as their favorites came on, walking one at a time right up to the footlights to take their own photos to carry back home. It’s exactly like people going up for Communion in a big Catholic church, if you ask me, t
he fans moving forward in a steady stream to pause and snap, pause and snap, and then move on, back to their seats, back to Ohio and Maryland and West Virginia and all the places they came from, where they will get these pictures developed and put them in frames where they can point to them and say, “I was there. I was right there.” It was just wild when “Pretty Miss Norma Jean” and Porter came on, you never saw so many flash bulbs! It was like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Norma Jean must have been seeing spots before her eyes. You sure couldn’t tell it from her performance, though. On her way offstage, she passed real close to me, and reached out and squeezed my hand. She was pretty as could be. “Good luck, honey!” she said. And I’ll confess, I was star-struck! I felt like I was a kid again, instead of a grown woman with my own kids in the audience. I felt ridiculous in my outfit.
I could look out and see my own girls right up front, and Tommy who looked so much like Wayne Ricketts it spooked me, like he was a ghost sitting up big as life in the Ryman Auditorium, waiting for me to come on.
There was a Martha White commercial (“Martha White self-rising flour! The one all-purpose flour! Martha White self-rising flour has got Hot Rize!”), and then I heard them call my name.
As I walked forward with my guitar, I just couldn’t believe it—the fans were streaming forward for me this time, the cameras were flashing for me. For me! So some of these were my fans. Mine! I couldn’t hardly quit grinning long enough to sing my song. After it was all over with, everybody gathered around backstage to congratulate me and say how fine I did, and I left that stage feeling like I was walking on air.
But when I finally made it back to the dressing room—they have these big dressing rooms—to get my purse and my coat, there was Lucile White, taking off her wig. She looked awful without her wig. And she was not even all that old, fifty-five I would guess. But she looked like she had been rode hard and put up wet, as Virgie used to say.
Lucile White was once the most beautiful woman in Nashville—this is how everybody described her, as the most beautiful woman in Nashville. She still looked great onstage. She had the prettiest smile, which she smiled at me right then, in spite of getting caught with her wig and her blouse off, smoking a cigarette. The great stars are real friendly.
“You did so good,” she said. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
Now Lucile White had been a child star, so she had been a member of the Opry practically since she was born, but she could tell what I was feeling.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is. It’s been a long time coming,” I said. “I got here in kind of a roundabout way.” I was thinking about all the hard times I had had in Shreveport with Wayne Ricketts while Lucile White was an established star.
“Sweetie, let me tell you something,” she said, leaning over so that I could see how folded and crepey the skin around her neck was. “There ain’t no free ride. And a body can get tired. Real tired.” Then she smiled her famous smile, and a twinkle came into her eyes. “You know, it ain’t hard to figure out who to fuck to get on the Opry,” she said. “The hard thing is figuring out who to fuck to get off.” Then she just about died laughing, so I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. But I sat down and smoked a cigarette with her, and she put some bourbon in my Coke from a little silver flask she carried in her purse.
So this was another peak moment for me, sitting in the deserted Opry dressing room with Lucile White after the show, putting our feet up and talking girl talk.
Lucile White was always real nice to me after that, and gave me a lot of breaks. I opened for her several times, and sang on her Forever album. When she died of an overdose five years after I met her, I couldn’t hardly get over it. She always acted like she was having a ball. But then it came back to me what she’d said in the dressing room that night, “There ain’t no free ride.”
The official cause of her death was heart failure.
6
California Is a State of Mind
Well, I’m not real proud of this next part of my life, nor do I feel awful about it, either. For we all go through phases and stages, as in Willie’s song which is one of my favorites, “Phases and Stages.” I did go out to California to cut my second album at Tom Barksdale’s new studio in L.A., and I did let him do a lot of mixing and arranging and adding in strings and horns, and I did stay with him in his rented glass house that hung right out over the Pacific Ocean, halfway into the sunset, it looked like. While I was staying there I wasn’t supposed to answer the phone, in case it was Tom’s wife calling. She was rich. She was the real money behind Apollo Records. Tom had her picture and his kids’ pictures all set out on the windowsill in the kitchen next to the cookie jar where he kept his drugs.
Tom’s wife’s name—her first name—was Brandon. She was one of those girls that went to a girls’ school and now owns a big estate outside Nashville, in Brentwood, and runs the Junior League and plans the Swan Ball. I knew the type. I’d been seeing them around town for years.
Nashville itself has kind of a split personality—there’s the folks in the music business, and then there’s these old families with big houses and a lot of money they’ve had for generations. They belong to the Belle Meade Country Club. Most of them are kind of crazy. And since all of this is happening right here in Nashville, it’s bound to get all mixed up together sometimes, as in the case of Minnie Pearl and the case of Tom Barksdale, who married a woman whose grandfather had been the governor of Tennessee.
Of course I never really thought for a minute that he was going to leave her for me.
So what was I doing, you might ask, drinking vodka on his deck in the sunset, wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses? What did I think I was doing? Now when I look back on it, I swear I just don’t know! You might say I got carried away by the times. I was just out there trying to make a living, I told myself, but it was more than that. I missed my family like crazy, the whole time. I reckon that really I was just trying to make it through the night, as in the words of Kris Kristofferson, who was a friend of Tom’s. Just trying to make it through the night, and a long way from home.
It seemed like everybody else out there was a long way from home, too—everybody was from some little town, like me, and didn’t know how to act in California, where there were no rules at all, where you could do anything you wanted to do, or be anybody you wanted to be. I couldn’t get into it, actually, though I tried to for a while. I grew my hair out real long and got a tan. I was trying to please Tom, since he had been so good to me, and so good for my career, and I was grateful. But I couldn’t get used to the way people moved in and out of the beach house, people I didn’t even know, and sometimes Tom didn’t know them, either. They were friends of friends of his. One time somebody brought a real young girl out there, and when I was showing her where the bathroom was, she grabbed me and started crying and saying all she wanted to do was get back to North Carolina, but this man she was with wouldn’t let her out of his sight and she didn’t have any money. I slipped a hundred-dollar bill in the back pocket of her jeans as they were leaving, but she was high then, and I never knew if she found it, or if she knew what it was for. I never knew what happened to her.
Another time a guy who really was a friend of Tom’s, from college, came in and locked himself in one of the bedrooms and wouldn’t come out for days, you could hear him in there talking to himself, having a regular conversation. Finally Tom called an ambulance to come and take him to the hospital, they had to break down the door. We had to get a cleaning service to come out and deal with that bedroom. I never knew what happened to this guy, either. It was so easy to lose people in California. I worried about him, but Tom didn’t. Tom made it all into a great story, I heard him telling it to several people on the phone. Every time he told it, he’d add more to it, he’d make it more dramatic, he’d make the guy more weird.
“What a character!” he’d say on the phone. Tom lived on the phone.
“Listen here,” I told him when he finally hung up, “K
evin is not a character. He’s a real person, and he got real sick here.”
“Katie, Katie,” Tom said, stroking my hair, the way he did. “I know that. But it’s a story too. You’re too literal, babe. You need to take a more cosmic view.”
At first when he used these big terms like “literal” and “cosmic” I just shut up, since he was so well educated, and so smart. Later I started asking him what this meant and that meant, and this is when he started trying to educate me, which is what finally broke us up in the end.
Anyway Tom was smart, and he was writing a novel, and sometimes he’d get it out and work on it far into the night, then wake me up to have real intense sex, which at first I mistook for passion. But it wasn’t. It was just intensity, which is what Tom wanted all the time, what he craved, what he lived for.
Some of this life was too much for me. I remember one all-day party in particular. It had mushroomed out of noplace, and I got trapped in the kitchen by this friend of Tom’s named Paul Murray, who was a photographer. He kept getting right up in my face with his camera, snapping pictures. He wanted me to go outside with him to take some more. We were drinking vodka. “No,” I said. I kept saying it, but he wouldn’t leave me alone. I hadn’t seen Tom for an hour or so.