I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  There is such a thing as smothering a person.

  I loved Tammy. I had proved that. But I needed a break. I remember deciding that I wanted to get away for a little while, so I told her I had to go out of town. The truth is that I checked into a Nashville motel. I called an airline to see what time the flight I was supposed to be returning on was arriving. I called Tammy and asked her to pick me up at the airport. Then I called a taxi and planned to get to the airport about the time the flight did.

  There was no way Tammy would know that I wasn’t on board, I thought.

  Tammy went to the airport with James Hollie and heard over the loudspeaker that my flight would be delayed by thirty minutes. I wish I had heard the announcement. I came strolling down the hall with a piece of luggage.

  “I’m back,” I told her. “My flight has arrived.”

  “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a passenger get here before his plane did,” Tammy said. “Where have you been for three days?”

  The argument was under way.

  Such was the stormy and passionate courtship of George and Tammy. And just think, all of the above happened to us even before we were legally married.

  Chapter 12

  Tammy and I were booked for an extended engagement in Atlanta, and I suggested that we slip over to Ringgold, a tiny town on the Georgia-Tennessee border where they provide quick marriages to out-of-state residents. Marriage is one of the town’s principal industries.

  Other Nashville acts wanting to avoid publicity have gotten married there. Dolly Parton was recording for producer Fred Foster on Monument Records when she married Carl Dean in a quick ceremony at Ringgold. Foster had told Dolly he didn’t want her to get married because the publicity would jeopardize her recording career. So she and Carl sneaked off, and the press and Fred were never the wiser for a long time.

  Tammy and I had that same kind of secrecy. We tied the knot on February 16, 1969. The problem was that everybody in Nashville thought we had been married for months. We drove back to Atlanta for our show and broke the news to the Jones Boys.

  “We’re married,” I told the band on the bus.

  “We know,” they said. “That’s why we gave you gifts last August.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but we were just kidding. We’ve actually been playing house. But we really did get married today.”

  It was so outrageous that it seemed totally logical to my band. We did the Atlanta shows, and Tammy and I went to our room. We were still in Georgia when she had some additional news for me.

  She was pregnant.

  I remember that her announcement made me feel we were starting the marriage on the right foot. I was going to be a dad again at thirty-eight. Maybe, I thought, I could be a real father, instead of an absentee one, as I had been for my boys by Shirley and my daughter by Dorothy.

  I walked on air for a few days but then had an abrupt letdown when Tammy miscarried.

  Not long afterward we moved to my house in Lakeland, which I had been using as a vacation home and a place to get away from the music business. We became friends with Cliff and Maxine Hyder, our next-door neighbors, and Billy Wilhite immediately went to work hustling a deal that would enable Tammy to own her own trailer park. Our intention was twofold: First, we wanted a place for some of Tammy’s folks to live. Second, we wanted an investment in Florida’s tourist industry and retirement community. I thought we could do well financially by providing some of those folks a place to live. My hunch proved to be right.

  Billy cut a deal with a mobile home manufacturer whose terms said that Tammy and I would do a show for him on Monday or Tuesday night, our usual free nights, and he would give us a mobile home as compensation for each show we played. We put the trailers on fifteen acres that I bought for $100,000 and called the park Tammy’s Courts.

  Billy had pictures of him and me digging a ditch for sewer pipes and water lines by hand, but he lost them in a house fire a few years ago.

  But there we were working, building, and investing. The press called Tammy and me “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music.” I felt like “Mr. and Mrs. Suburbanite.”

  We owned residential and commercial real estate. We became a fixture of the neighborhood, whose residents treated us like people, not celebrities. I loved that.

  I went to a sporting goods store and bought bats and balls for every kid in the neighborhood. We had exciting softball games with stiff competition. I became the kids’ buddy, and I don’t think half of them even knew, or cared, what I did for a living.

  Cliff, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease, had been withdrawn before Tammy and I moved next door. He is a former naval officer who was apparently demoralized when he lost some of his physical fitness. But he really came out of his shell after we became friends. He even became the starting pitcher for my softball team.

  Later, he, Maxine, Tammy, and I regularly went deep-sea fishing or out to eat. Cliff designed personalized boards for a parlor game called Aggravation, and the four of us became regular opponents.

  Dog racing is a big deal in Florida, and we frequently went to the track. I even started an antique car collection.

  It was so wonderful to be out of Nashville and have a life that bordered on normal. More and more I temporarily drank less and less. I might have a glass of wine or two with a meal. Maybe a beer now and then. Except for a rare binge, I wasn’t drinking heavily and for the right reason: I didn’t want to.

  At that time, I was happier than I’d ever been.

  Contentment wasn’t the only reason I was sober more often. Billy, while reminiscing for this book, talked about a trick that Tammy and he played on me to curb my drinking on the few occasions when they saw a bender approaching. I never knew about their conspiracy until years later.

  I didn’t especially like for Tammy to drink, and I hated for her to get drunk. A couple of times when I was starting to get loaded, Billy and Tammy cooked up a scheme with airline flight attendants. The attendants, who were in on the trick, served Tammy a soft drink, although Tammy had faked an order of vodka and a mix. She began to belt down the decoy drinks, and I became worried about her. My concern put an abrupt halt to my own drinking.

  “Don’t serve her anymore,” I ordered the stewardess. I never failed to look after Tammy on the rare occasions when I thought she might be getting loaded.

  That scheme didn’t work so well when we traveled on our bus, where I could see what was being poured into Tammy’s glass. So Billy and Tammy put a plant next to her. When I started to get drunk, Tammy would order a mixed drink and Billy would mix the real thing in front of me. He’d hand it to Tammy, then say something to me so I would look in his direction. While I wasn’t looking, Tammy would pour her drink into the plant pot.

  “I’ll have another drink,” Tammy would say, and Billy would fix her one. I thought she was belting them down awfully quickly for an infrequent drinker and became afraid she was going to get sick.

  I’d order Billy to stop serving her, and I wouldn’t drink myself since I had said she couldn’t. Looking back, I wonder why Tammy didn’t use those tricks more often if she really wanted me to lessen my drinking.

  My happiness reached its peak when Tammy told me she was pregnant again. I was a husband and potential father living the sane life. I loved being concerned about the things that never concerned me before, such as how to rid the lawn of weeds or whether it was time to clean the shutters.

  I don’t think I threw a doozy of a drunk until the fall of 1969, when Cliff, Maxine, Tammy, and I went to Nashville so Tammy could appear on the national Country Music Association Awards show telecast. She was nominated as “Female Vocalist of the Year” for the second consecutive year, and she won. We saw old friends before the show, and I had a few drinks. And then a few more, a few more, and you know the rest of the story.

  Alcoholics Anonymous teaches that the alcoholic must “change his playmates and playground” if he is to become sober. In other words, a person who is trying to give up alcohol can’
t hang around old drinking buddies. I had been away from them in Florida but fell in with them again during that return to Nashville. I thought I could take a drink or two, but the drinks quickly overtook me.

  I wound up getting soused, but I went to the awards show at the old Ryman Auditorium anyway. Tammy wouldn’t sit with me, and I don’t remember who I eventually sat beside. But I was on my best behavior, and I don’t think anybody knew I was drunk. I didn’t want to spoil the evening for Tammy, and besides, I was eager for her to accept her award so I could get back to my good life in Lakeland.

  Later, my band came to visit Tammy and me in Lakeland. I got drunk and fired them all. Most of them didn’t take me seriously because they remembered when I used to get drunk and give them all the boot. They figured I’d hire them back the next day. So they got into the bus and drove back to Nashville and, because I was drunk, I got mad.

  I called the police and reported a stolen bus.

  The cops picked them up somewhere out of state. I guess it’s not hard to find a forty-foot-long, two-tone bus bearing a sign in four-foot letters that says, MR. AND MRS. COUNTRY MUSIC.

  I never filed charges, and the whole thing was forgotten as soon as I got sober.

  Now it had gotten to where drinking, which had once been so important to me, became an intrusion on my personal happiness. I was having too good of a life on a natural high. I didn’t want to interrupt it with booze.

  And then I found our dream house. It took a lot of renovation and remodeling, but I have to say that it became my favorite of all the houses I’ve ever occupied (until the one Nancy and I built in 1994).

  The Lakeland mansion, and that’s what I eventually made it, had sixteen rooms, including six bathrooms. It, and five acres, were priced at $100,000. I got it for less. (Later, I picked up some land next door, which expanded our holdings to forty-two acres.)

  The place had been vacant for a while, so it was in dire need of repair. I told Tammy I’d have it in tip-top shape by the time the baby was born, and I went to work. I tore almost everything old out of the house and replaced it with new. Billy and I rode bulldozers to change the landscape.

  And once again, my dream to own a major country music park surfaced. I determined that I would have one like the one I had while married to Shirley, except that it would be bigger and better. I planned to feature the biggest names in country music and figured I’d draw enough people to the theme park to pay for the house while turning a tidy profit.

  A lot of folks would be surprised to learn that I enjoy interior decorating. I can walk into a shell with a roof and tell you what it would look like after six months of work. Then I can walk through a furniture store and tell you just what would go with what and in what room.

  That’s the kind of personal interest, or passion, that I took in Tammy’s and my Lakeland home.

  At first, she didn’t seem too keen on the place, but I didn’t mind. I planned on doing all the work and knew that when the place was finished she’d fall in love with it. As far as I was concerned she could lie by the water at our old house, which she loved to do, while I built the new one.

  So Billy, some employees, and I worked while Tammy’s pregnancy progressed. I vowed that our new child would come home to our new house.

  Tamala Georgette Jones lived at our old address only a few days. Then the three of us moved into the big house, which I had named the Old Plantation. By the time we arrived, I had personally overseen the painting, papering, carpeting, and all the rest for every room in that sprawling house.

  Tammy and I were still working our one-nighters and extended engagements during this time, as I had to keep up our cash flow to pay for all the physical improvements to our lives. Our booking agent put us into Las Vegas for a week.

  We had never worked a swanky Las Vegas hotel as a duo. I wasn’t crazy about the engagement because I didn’t know how Vegas would accept country music. Remember, this was 1970. I was afraid they’d make fun of the music and of us.

  Folks have a right to their opinions, and I could always handle it if they didn’t like country music. But I could never handle it if they made fun of it. I took that personally.

  Tammy and I had a comedian in our road show at the time named Harold Morrison. He was good. The only time I ever saw him fail to make people laugh was when we played an Indian reservation somewhere in the Southwest. No matter what joke Harold told, the people just stared at him.

  After the show, when all of us were signing autographs, an Indian walked up to him and looked him straight in the eye.

  “You know,” he said, “I watched you and listened closely. I want you to know it was all I could do to keep from laughing at you.”

  The guy had no idea he was supposed to laugh. Harold fell out cackling at the man.

  I was more confident in Harold’s ability to go over in Vegas than I was in Tammy’s and mine. So on the afternoon before our opening night I eased into a casino next door and had a drink to settle my nerves. I eventually got so settled that I couldn’t move.

  I sat there in a crowd of hundreds all by myself. My name was in six-foot letters on a marquee next door, but my spirits were lower than the casino floor. Slot machines were ringing, and people were laughing and carrying on. There is a special sadness that goes with feeling alone while those around you are having a big time. Then, because you feel alone, you drink to ease the loneliness. That makes you more lonely.

  God, I’m glad my drinking days are past.

  On this particular afternoon, as the Nevada sunset turned Las Vegas into a flashing wonderland, I knew I was too drunk to go onstage anywhere, especially in a major entertainment center inhabited by the world’s best acts. So I stayed at the neighboring casino until after Tammy had started our show without me. Then I slipped into our hotel, up to our room, and went to sleep. I flat-out missed the opening night of a very important booking for Tammy and me.

  One Vegas reporter, familiar with my reputation for getting drunk and missing shows, called me “No Show jones.” I wonder if he thought he was being original. My head was throbbing the next day when Tammy woke me up complaining. Tammy never needed an excuse to nag me about my drinking, and often that was all the excuse I needed to drink.

  She went on and on about how I had embarrassed her in front of the hotel manager and some very important press. To make matters worse, the show I had missed was on her birthday.

  I let her pitch her fit and went on that night. I made every show for the rest of what became a very successful run.

  On the last night, I played blackjack all night and won several thousand dollars. Tammy later said that I got drunk at the table and into a hassle with the pit boss. She said I had a physical struggle with the guy and had to be evicted from the casino.

  I don’t remember that and am skeptical about the story.

  Tammy and I performed mostly one-night shows for the rest of the year. During that time I was able to finish my Lakeland country music park. The mere opening of the park was a victory in itself because I had had to fight city and county officials so hard to get the commercial zoning I needed. Some of the city and county fathers didn’t want the park. Their city was growing fast enough as it was, they thought, and they didn’t want the additional commerce that eleven thousand visitors would bring every weekend.

  I thought their thinking was selfish and backward, and my lawyers had many heated battles with the Lakeland power brokers. Many times I was convinced that they were going to keep their little town the way they wanted it and no country music singers from faraway Nashville were going to improve it. They’d see to that.

  I won’t bore you with all of the details of the legal wrangling. But the day of the grand opening came at last. I remember standing spellbound in front of a giant sign that said, OLD PLANTATION MUSIC PARK. With the land, construction, landscaping, and legal fees, I had invested a quarter million dollars, a sizable chunk of change back then.

  My house, which fans could see from the park, had
white antebellum-style columns on the front porch. I put similar columns on the stage of the Old Plantation Music Park. The stage also had red carpet and was illuminated by a chandelier shaped like a wagon wheel.

  I wanted the park to be a place where all of my friends in the country music industry would want to play. So I built nice dressing rooms. Most, like me, were accustomed to the cramped and worn dressing rooms of the old dance halls where we often played. And none of us ever had dressing rooms when we worked outdoor shows. So my addition was a nice touch.

  The weather is nice year-round in Florida, which is one reason I decided to build the theater there. But I wanted to take no chances on a show being rained out, so built a flat roof over the eleven thousand seats.

  I had planted every kind of shrub that grows in Florida, and I had other plants imported that would thrive in the climate. Flamingos and peacocks strolled the grounds. I had small carnival-type rides for the kiddies and concession stands and hot dog and hamburger restaurants around the grounds.

  Tammy, by then, had more relatives living at her trailer park, and I moved them off of that property and onto the grounds of the Old Plantation. Some guys have their relatives under one roof. I had mine under several.

  Billy Sherrill, one of the most successful record producers in Nashville history, was producing Tammy and me at the time. He flew down for my grand opening, and I was proud for him to see where I was showcasing the music that we made in a Nashville studio.

  I’m going to confess that I was worried about opening day. As I indicated earlier, Lakeland, Florida, had never seen anything like the Old Plantation Music Park. And we didn’t sell a lot of advance tickets. Country music used to attract mostly working people to its concerts. Many of those folks lived from paycheck to paycheck and had no spare money to buy tickets in advance. They bought tickets to a country show on the day of the show. Promoters called them the “walk-up” crowd, and they comprised the majority of any country music audience in the 1960s and 1970s.