Honky Tonk Angel (14 page)

It didn’t go smoothly. Patsy told Bradley her heart just wasn’t in it. When they listened to the playback, Patsy begged, “Please, Owen, let’s try it one more time.” He assured her it was fine.

Bradley and Charlie observed that Patsy was never completely happy with anything she recorded. “No matter how close to perfection she came,” the producer said, “she felt she could do it better.”

At the end of convention week, Patsy was back in Washington on “Town and Country Jamboree.” Gay had her booked on enough package show one-nighters to keep her busy through Thanksgiving and into the Christmas season. The season for giving was at hand and Patsy, who had extravagant tastes, was flat broke.

She called McCall and asked for money. He reminded her she had yet to earn a penny in royalties, but since Patsy’s recording of “Walkin’ After Midnight” flushed him with the $weet $mell of $ucce$$, he offered her five hundred dollars and a two-year renewal, dated November 29, 1956. Patsy was contractually tied to him until September 29,1960.

On December 8, there was an atmosphere of great expectancy at the rehearsals and final run-through for the “Jamboree” telecast. Gay was hanging about more than usual. Dean was “a more hard-driving commander in chief” than ever. Attention was paid to things that never had attention paid to them. No one knew what was going on.

Minutes before the show went on, Dale Turner rushed into the dressing room. “Everybody do your best tonight!” she exclaimed. “Arthur Godfrey’s at home watching the show.”

Godfrey, a Virginian, maintained a residence in Leesburg, about thirty-five miles from the capital, and was tuned to the Town and Country Network.

Since she was never allowed to audition for the TV star, this would be Patsy’s moment. She went onstage and sang like she never sang before. When she got home to her mother’s house in Winchester, she told Mrs. Hensley, “Arthur Godfrey was watching the show tonight.” There was no response. “Mama, Arthur Godfrey was watching the show tonight!”

“I heard you, honey.”

And Mrs. Hensley knew it would start all over again. Once more she said her prayer.

When she came back from a Front Royal club date Sunday night, Patsy was exhausted. She’d worked hard all weekend. Monday was her day off. She told Mrs. Hensley she wanted to sleep late. When the phone rang at 11:00 A.M., Mrs. Hensley ran to answer so it wouldn’t wake Patsy.

“Oh, my goodness!” she blurted. “Just a minute. I’ll see if I can get her.” She ran to Patsy’s room. “Patsy, it’s long-distance. It’s the Godfrey people!”

“Who?” she asked, half asleep.

“It’s the Arthur Godfrey show! They want to talk to you.”

“Here, a major television show was calling with the call we’d been hoping for,” Mrs. Hensley said later. “But, oh, that girl was cool.”

Patsy shot up. “Let them wait a few minutes. They let me wait. Tell them I’m next door.”

“What?” asked Mrs. Hensley. “Patsy, are you crazy? You get to the phone!”

Patsy enacted a charade. As Mrs. Hensley told the caller she was on her way,
Patsy went to the front door, opened it, and slammed it. When she took the receiver from her mother and began to speak, she spoke very matter-of-factly.

“Hello . . . Yes, this is Patsy Cline. . . ‘Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts?’ Oh, hi, Miss Davis. How ya’ll doing? . . . You remembered me.”

Davis said, “We want you to come to New York and do the show.”

“Well, okay,” replied Patsy.

“Who will be your talent scout?” Davis inquired.

“My mother—”

“Oh, no, you can’t do that—”

“How come?”

“It might prejudice the audience. See if you can find someone to bring with you. We’d like to have you on in January.”

“That’s next month.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No. No, I think it’ll be all right.”

Mrs. Hensley jabbed Patsy in the arm. Patsy told Davis about her latest recording session and asked if she’d received her new record. Details were discussed and a date set. When Patsy hung up she nearly soared right through the roof. She and Mrs. Hensley huddled to think of who they could get to sponsor Patsy. Patsy told Hilda she wanted it to be her.

“But,” advised Mrs. Hensley, “there’s no way around it. Rules are rules.” There was silence as Patsy thought. “Patsy, what’s running through your head?”

“Mama, I’m Patsy Cline and you’re Mrs. Hilda Hensley of Winchester, Virginia. You’ll be my talent scout,
not
my mother!”

“I should’ve known I could depend on you for some kind of scheme!”

Patsy mapped out her conspiracy. When Davis phoned the next day, she gave the name of her talent scout.

“Mrs. Hilda Hensley?” repeated Davis.

“That’s right.”

“Is she a friend?” Davis asked.

“Yes, ma’am. My best! She’s known me all her life.”

Patsy and Charlie were hotter than the coals on a fire. He’d be the first to admit he’s “one hell of a partying man.” He was, in the words of one of Patsy’s colleagues, “a connoisseur of booze and gave Patsy an appreciation of it.” From other accounts, Patsy may have taught Charlie a thing or two.

Theirs wasn’t always the perfect relationship. Charlie may have swept Patsy off her feet, but, according to close friends and associates, he sometimes did it with strong doses of male chauvinism.

“Patsy and I became quite close on the ‘Jamboree,’” Jimmy Dean related.

“We’d be in a dressing room talking and she’d go into tirades about Charlie, calling him names and saying things like ‘That no-good so-and-so treats me like you-know-what.’ I asked, ‘Do you love the son of a gun?’ and she’d tell me how much they loved each other. ‘But, Jimmy,’ she’d say, ‘all we do is fight.’

“One day they’d be happy as a barrel of monkeys and on the outs the next.
Patsy carried on about how she was going to leave him, then two breaths later tell you how much she was in love with Charlie. I told her, ‘Hey, make up your mind!’”

Dean reported that more than once Patsy showed up “bruised from where Charlie had whipped hell out of her.” He remembered an incident when Patsy and Charlie were cruising around Winchester in Patsy’s car. “He’d been drinking and when they began battling, she stopped and kicked him out. And he didn’t go voluntarily.”

When Patsy came to work with a black eye, Dean thought it was sad but had to laugh. “He hit her and she had him arrested. Then Patsy mourned about it all night and got him out the next day. When he drank, Charlie was a different person. They were rough on each other. Sometimes that can be a form of love. Patsy’d take anything Charlie dished out and had no problem standing up to him. She had a way of getting back at Charlie. She’d embarrass the daylights out of him in front of others. To me, it didn’t sound dirty. It was vernacular with Patsy.”

Dale Turner reminisced, “Patsy and I were friends but not bosom buddies. She didn’t cry on my shoulder. Personal things were personal. We were a close-knit group, so there were things you couldn’t hide. But everybody minded their own business.

“All I remember about Patsy and Gerald was there was an age difference and they didn’t have the same interests. When Patsy and Charlie started dating, he didn’t so much hang out with us as he was just always there. They were boyfriend and girlfriend. There weren’t a lot of questions. She never talked about his getting drunk and beating her.”

Everyone but Herman Longley of Elkton had lost track of Patsy’s father, Sam Hensley. All vestiges of the great dynasty that his grandfather Benjamin and father Sol Hensley had begun were stripped away. After deserting his family in 1947, Hensley went to Ohio and lived a vagabond existence for a year. When he returned to Virginia, he lived in a boardinghouse in Harrisonburg.

Having worked around coal most of his life, starting back when he was a boiler fireman at the Virginia Military Institute, he developed lung cancer. As the illness became graver, it fell on Longley, now a public accountant in Elkton, to care for Hensley. Finally, in late 1956, he admitted him to Newton D. Baker Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Martinsburg, West Virginia. On his way home from the hospital, Longley stopped in Winchester to visit Hilda and tell her the news. Mrs. Hensley informed Patsy.

“Mama, I know what-all he did,” said Patsy, “but it seems he’s real sick and may not make it. In spite of everything, I want to visit him.”

To her surprise, Mrs. Hensley told her she’d accompany her. During the visit, Patsy excitedly informed Sam Hensley, “Daddy, I’ve been accepted on ‘Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.’”

Though he could hardly talk, he admonished her, “Now, Virginia, I don’t want you going off to New York. It’s too big and it’s not safe. You don’t need to be running off up there. You stay right at home.”

“Daddy, just think what this could do for my career! Appearing on nationwide TV with Arthur Godfrey!”

“I don’t care. I don’t want you going up there.”

“Daddy,” she replied angrily, “after being out of my life for seven years, you sure picked a fine time to start showing concern. I’ve been to New York before and I’m going. And you ain’t going to stop me!”

When she saw she was frightening her frail father, Patsy backed off, telling him she’d be extra careful. Before she left, she asked him to be sure and watch her. “Daddy, you’ve never really heard me sing. I’m pretty good!”

Patsy Cline said her good-byes to the father she was so ambivalent about. Sam Hensley never got to hear his daughter. He died December 11, 1956. On the night of the funeral, Hilda Hensley asked Herman Longley to reserve a plot next to Sam’s in Winchester’s National Cemetery.

Jimmy Dean’s favorite dictum was “Time is a man’s most valuable asset.” He considered punctuality next to godliness, and Patsy upset his apple cart. Suddenly she was constantly late for rehearsals, then defied Gay by refusing to do the square-dance segment following the “Jamboree.”

In the argument with Gay over not dancing with audience members, he fumed, “People who start at the top, young lady, usually end up at the bottom, so I advise you to watch your step. You’re going too far. You’re late, you won’t dance, and then you have the gall to come and ask Jimmy and me if you can have time off to go to New York to be on Arthur Godfrey!”

Patsy told Gay that appearing on Godfrey would be good for the show. He shot back, “I’ll decide what’s good for the show!”

However, Gay knew the extent of Patsy’s popularity. She was the main attraction for the male viewers, who went out and spent money on his show’s sponsor’s products.

If there was doubt, it was erased the next Sunday, December 30, when, with Dean, Dale, and Mary Click, Patsy was on the cover of the
Tele Vue
magazine of the
Washington Star.
She was a valuable asset. Godfrey’s national telecast would make her more valuable. And he needed Dean and Patsy now more than ever.

CBS was planning to cancel its 7:00 A.M. “Will Rogers Jr. Show” and create a new country program. It would be a gamble. Was coast-to-coast America ready for country music that early in the morning? As CBS vacillated, everybody wanted in on the action. Competition became fierce among the WLS “National Barn Dance” in Chicago; Shreveport’s “Louisiana Hayride”; the “Ozark Jubilee,” already a proven TV success; the Grand Ole Opry; and Connie B. Gay’s empire. WTOP, the network’s D.C. affiliate, had alerted executives of the popularity of “Town and Country Jamboree” in that region, and they were already in touch with Gay.