Don't Mind If I Do by George Hamilton

Author:George Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2008-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The Eyes of Texas

I had no idea that my decision to star in a B picture about Hank Williams would win the hearts and minds of the family of Lyndon Johnson, but it did. The whole first family loved Your Cheatin’ Heart. If only a few more families had seen it. The Johnsons thought that I did Southern right. It wasn’t hard. I was just going back to my roots, or at least the other side of the tracks of my roots. Cheatin’ was maybe the first MTV movie long before there was MTV, a country music biopic, a hayseed Glenn Miller Story or Night and Day, but the hayseed was prime stock. Hank Williams was the first entertainer to put country music on the pop charts, the first crossover. And what music it was, every bit as much the sound track of my youth as the big band classics Dad played.

MGM’s music division somehow owned the rights to the Hank Williams songbook. One of the cardinals thought it was a perfect vehicle for Elvis Presley, but Elvis’s Svengali manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said no. I had met the colonel on the lot, and he had taken a shine to me. Not enough of a shine to manage me, as I begged him to do. The colonel’s heart belonged to Elvis and Elvis alone. The Dutchman had begun his career as a barker in carnival sideshows and made it as the manager of country singer Eddy Arnold, assuming the Kentucky colonel mystique. He told me I could always come to him for free advice, which was all I could afford anyhow. I would have loved him to manage me formally, but as he said, anything he could do for me, he should be doing for Elvis.

The colonel was the one who put me onto Hank and to his widow, Audrey, who was the executor of his estate. I had grown up on Hank Williams. His songs were among the greatest American music: “Jambalaya,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and the title song of the film, to name just a few. These were the songs I cried my own blues to while marooned at Gulf Coast Military Academy. Plus Hank’s story had both noble and tragic proportions. Hank literally came from Alabama with a banjo on his knee, and nothing else. By his twenties he was a superstar with eleven numberone country hits. Tony Bennett covered “Cold Cold Heart” and made it Billboard ’s number one, and “I Saw the Light” became a standard in churches around the world. He met Audrey Sheppard in a redneck bar, and she became his manager and wife. But because of a childhood spinal deformity, Hank had become addicted to morphine and alcohol. He died at age twenty-nine. I was twenty-four when I discovered his story. Forget the tuxedos and the debutantes and the polo ponies. This was the story I had to do, and the colonel showed me how.

The top brass at MGM laughed in my face.

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