The Devil's Dream (41 page)

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.

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, “Kevin 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.

“Listen,” I said finally, pushing Paul away, “I've got to find Tom,” but when I went into the big living room he wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere. Everybody was leaving, but nobody said good-bye. I went in our bedroom to get some aspirin, and was surprised to find the drapes all drawn, shutting out the great view of the ocean. In the shadows I could just make out the king-size bed all messed up, and a girl's rump sticking up. “Honey?” she said, hearing me open the door.

I shut the door. I went back out to the kitchen and got drunk with Paul Murray, and we went outside and I posed naked for him on the deck. It was sunset. I kept laughing. It all seemed real funny at the time. We kept on drinking, and I don't know what happened after that. But the next day, Tom was sweet as ever and said he didn't know who the girl in our bed was, if there
was
a girl, and he wasn't even jealous about me and Paul. I was kind of hurt because he wasn't. I was not sophisticated enough for Tom, I guess.

But for a while, it
was
kind of interesting. Tom got dead set on improving my mind and teaching me things such as history, which I have never been very crazy about. He also gave me a little book to improve my vocabulary, with a quiz at the end of each chapter. He wanted me to listen to a lot of strange music, too, and he tried to tell me unpatriotic things about the United States of America.

“Listen, this is my country you're talking about,” I said to him once.

“Well, it's my country too,” he said. “If I didn't care about it, I wouldn't criticize it, would I?”

For which I had no answer, as I have never been one of those people given to standing around worrying about the state of the world. I'm too busy figuring out when I can get to the grocery store, if you know what I mean. I believe it is mostly
men
that are given to this train of thought, anyway, and to that other kind which Tom Barksdale was prone to, such as the following.

One time when we were laying out on the beach in the sun and Tom was on his stomach, letting the sand run through his fingers, looking at it real close, he said, “We are nothing but grains of sand, Katie. Insignificant in the universe.” Of course he was always smoking dope.

“Speak for yourself!” I said. I sat straight up, he made me so mad.

At that, Tom just cracked up, and laughed so hard I finally had to laugh, too. He was real cute when he laughed, and real good-looking, the way rich people usually are. I don't know why this is true but it is, they have these perfectly regular features.

By then I was starting to get tired of it, tired of Tom Barksdale's perfectly regular features, tired of having perfect weather every day in California, tired of the parties, tired of the great view, tired of dubbing and overdubbing, tired of not being able to answer the phone, and tired of him trying to improve my mind. I have to say, a person can stand only so much improvement!

One day I walked out of the studio crying, and stood there on the sidewalk in the bright hot sun looking at a hedge full of big red flowers.

Tom came out after me. “Those are hibiscus,” he said.

“I don't give a damn,” I said.

“Honey, what's wrong?” he said, putting his arm around me, pulling me close.

“I reckon I'm homesick,” I said.

That album has been called a crossover album, but I never felt like I crossed over anything, to tell you the truth. It was Tom Barksdale's album, not mine. By the time he got done with it, it was
all
his, too. And who was I to complain? I'd gone along with everything, and now I was making money hand over fist, and I got asked to sing “California Is a State of Mind” on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. I flew up to New York City to do it, taking Annie May along.

Right after I got done singing on that TV show, a boy handed me a note that said:

“Where did you get this?” I asked the boy. “Is he out there in the studio audience?”

When the boy nodded, I wrote on the back of it for Ralph to meet me outside after the show, which Ralph did, and this is how we got together.