Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

17. George

J < M < E K < < E George The reason I finally quit the family band at the time I did was because I had gotten a second husband, and he was telling me to. He thought I could do better on my own. This is how that second marriage went. Well, Gene and I were living in the same house in Donelson, but I had made it clear I wouldn’t be a wife to him. He was taking care of the kids when I was out working with the family. Then the school authorities got into the picture. They called and said they wanted to come and talk to us. So we sat down at the table. And one woman said, “It’s concerning your children, Barbara especially. We think it’s having a bad effect on her, with her father at home all the time.” The teacher had asked the children to cut out of magazines pictures of what their mother did and what their father did and glue them on a little poster board. Barbara had cut out pictures of a bus, an airplane, suitcase, and instruments—for her mother. For her father, she cut out a broom, a mop, vacuum cleaners, Geor George 114 / pressing on and dishes. They wanted to know what could I do about it. Well, excuse my language, what the hell could I do about it? But I didn’t say that to them. I was gonna try my darnedest to do the right thing. So I turned to Gene: “Maybe you can get a part-time job or pretend to the kids that you’re going to work. And when you pick them up after school, you can say, ‘I just got outta work.’” Well, he sat there with those three teachers, and he said, “No, I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna go to work, and I’m not gonna pretend.” He was the first Mr. Mom. Now, as I said, I was doing some dating during those years. Actually they weren’t all businessmen. There were some other real interesting encounters. The Priest. He was at a show in Houston. He took a Polaroid picture of me, and I autographed it with my usual, “You really tear me up, Roni Stoneman.” I guess he took it to heart. So we started having this little bit of . . . not real intimacy, nothing like that, just kissy facey. I’d call him at the rectory when my show was over, and he’d come pick me up in his car. He sang like Marty Robbins, and he sang all of Marty Robbins’s songs. He’d go in this low voice: I left you this moornin’ / Couldn’t taaake any mooore. That romance ended when I was the one who left, off to California. He would have followed me, but I had started feeling like a Jezebel. l mean he was a priest! The Jewish Feller. He was a fiddle player and I really liked him. That ended when I suddenly realized he looked just like Jesus! “I can’t kiss someone who looks like Jesus!” I told him. I showed him a picture. “I do, don’t I?” he said. (I encouraged him to marry a nice Jewish girl he knew who was studying psychiatry. If anyone needs a psychiatrist, it’s a fiddler! He did look a lot like Jesus. But it wasn’t a problem to her, good Jewish girl that she was!) There were other dates. There was the guy in Boston who invited me to see where he worked. Turned out he was an undertaker and it was a morgue. There was the Blue Angel, who used to take me out driving in his car and invite me to parties the pilots gave, where there were all these beautiful delicate Polynesian girls—and clunky me with my country dresses. There was the psychology professor. “He just wants to pick your brain,” said Daddy. “He wants to test you.” Then I met George Hemrick. I met him when he hired the family to pressing on / 115 play for a political rally. He seemed real intelligent, was a speechwriter for the governor of North Carolina, a school principal and an English teacher, was even in Mensa, which, he told me, is some kind of organization for supersmart people. In other words this was clearly the husband for me. He was the perfect person to help me educate my kids, right? Get Barbara on the right track cutting out the right pictures! George was also a songwriter and poet and he had spent time at Carl Sandburg’s ranch in North Carolina. Like a poet, George was very romantic with his words and his ways. He would write me love letters and love poems. He typed them from work. “Office of the Principal,” the stationery said. George was living in North Carolina, Winston-Salem, and I was in Donelson. He called me a lot and would come out to where we were performing, even if it was far away. And so eventually I got divorced from Gene, and George and I got engaged. It was 1968. Now, one day the Stonemans were doing a TV show, and June Carter and Johnny Cash were there. I had known June awhile, since we had played some shows with them. And of course we knew of them forever, and Daddy knew the Carter family from the Bristol sessions in the twenties. But we were not real pals with them. The Carter girls were a different kind of girl than me and Donna. We were more sheltered. I also had known John for a long time. I had picked John up off the floor at Linebaugh’s, and I’d seen him pass out in the middle of an aisle on an airplane. All this is in his books. And I remember June and John’s “courting ,” such as it was, when June would come into Tootsie’s—“Where’s Johnny? Anybody seen Johnny?” Anyway, that day we were all in California rehearsing the Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour, with Glen Campbell. George had come out to be with me, and at one point he walked over to my brother Van. “Roni, I need to talk to you,” June said. She took me aside. “Don’t marry that man,” she said. John was standing right by her. “Why?” “He’s not good. He’s evil, Roni.” “Well, he loves me.” “No, he doesn’t. He don’t know how to love anybody. He loves himself .” 116 / pressing on Well, I thought, I have those four little children, and he’s an educator, and this will help me. June doesn’t know where I’m coming from. I’m barely making a living. “No, he loves me,” I said, “and he’ll be good to me.” “No, he won’t, Roni. I know why you’re like you are, so eager to be thinking that he loves you. You have that crooked eye. And your teeth is got a space in them. Like mine—I had buck teeth really bad. My dentist capped ’em, and put braces on ’em. Why don’t you let me and John pay for a dentist?” “No, I can’t do that.” I was proud. “Oh, please let us.” And John says, in that low gravelly Johnny Cash voice, “Yeah, we can take care of it.” “No, no.” So we all went back to Nashville. The family was playing at the Black Poodle. I did my show and ran home to pack to go to the airport. I was getting married in a little town right outside of Winston-Salem. June Carter and John came into the Black Poodle. Donna was there. “Where’s Roni?” said June. “I don’t want her to marry that man. I’m gonna stop her from marrying that man. He’s no good. He’s violent.” And then when Donna told her that I had left to pack, she apparently just sank down in a chair and went, “Oh my God!” Well, the day before I was getting married, I was staying at a girlfriend ’s house down there in Winston-Salem. I was in the bedroom, combing my hair. There was a big glass door. I went to the mirror and I looked in my eyes as I was combing my hair, and all at once something in my mind says, “Run! Open that door and run. Get outta here.” That was my woman’s intuition, and I should have followed it (or June’s), but I didn’t. That night, right after the wedding, George and I were driving back up to Nashville because I had to tape a TV show. I knew something was wrong on the way because George started drinking a lot of vodka. We rode with a couple of friends of his, lawyers and politicians, and George was awful, got very belligerent to me. I just sat there real quiet. When we got to Nashville, I had to go right away to the studio. Pat McKenney had given us the key to her apartment to stay in while pressing on / 117 we were in Nashville. By the time we got to Pat’s apartment, after the taping, George was drunk. I didn’t know it because I was used to the loud drunks in nightclubs—“Hey Rooonnnni, playyyy a song!” I wasn’t used to a soft-spoken southern gentleman with perfect English getting drunk. So we’re in the apartment, and I said, “Honey, want me to put your clothes in this closet here?” He got up from the couch and he came over. And he slapped me in the face! He kept beating me and hitting me real hard! I had no idea why. I was crying, sobbing. I ran back in the bathroom , and looked in the mirror. There was a huge bruise coming up on my cheek. I was shaking all over. I thought, Oh, God, what have I done? I made a horrible mistake. What . . . what am I going to do? And I know this sounds ridiculous but I saw my grandfather’s face, my Grandfather Frost. He said, “I didn’t raise you to . . . That ain’t what I would want you to put up with, young lady. Not for one minute!” So I went back into the living room. George was sitting down on the couch and he looked up at me. Now he weighed 250 pounds. I weighed at that time about 100. I said, “Why did you hit me for?” And he says, “I’ll hit you again if you don’t stand still.” So I took my fist, and I hit him so hard in the nose that the blood poured out all over the place. He had to go back and get a towel, and I was cleaning up the carpet with cold icy water. I had a terrible wedding night. I called Gene the next day: “Gene, I made a terrible mistake. I need to have the children stay in the house so I can get something done about this.” “They can’t,” he said, “I already sold the house.” And he took the equity. This was in spite of he hadn’t put a penny in the house. So I went on back to North Carolina with George, and we were going to find a place to live in. The next day I was sitting on a bed in a motel with my arm under my chin, looking at a soap opera, and George was sitting on the other bed. He got up and hit my head, and my neck popped. Then he dragged me out into the parking lot, said he was going to have me run over out there. I don’t know how, but I got back into the room. And I thought, Don’t argue with him, he’s not well, something is very very wrong. I didn’t know that besides the vodka he was gulping amphetamines. I had to go back to Nashville again a few days later because I had to 118 / pressing on do another television show. George took me to the airport in WinstonSalem . And as I walked up the gangplank to the little prop jet, he said, “I’ll be waiting for you, darling.” I looked down at him and I thought, Oh my God! I got on the airplane, trembling. In Nashville I told Pat McKenney everything. I laid down on her bed and crawled up in a fetal position and cried and cried. The next day I performed with the family on the television show and I had to pretend like I was okay. But things got worse and worse. We found a house down in North Carolina, and George moved his furniture in. He had a bedroom set, and as I was trying to clean the bureau , I saw the top drawers were full of pill bottles. “Why do you have all these pills?” I asked. He jumped up and ran to the bureau and told me to leave my hands off his things. The pills were for his back, he said, prescribed by his chiropractor. Gene brought the children down to North Carolina one or two weeks later. I never felt so alone and lost as when he left, when I watched him pull out of the driveway. I thought that if I had a baby, George maybe would be closer to me. But he beat on me even when I was pregnant with Georgia. One time Patsy had to call the cops. She was back in Tennessee, and I phoned her, crying, scared to death. He had beat me, and blood was all over where he busted my mouth and all over my maternity suit. There was a knock at the door, and a policeman said, “Are you Roni Stoneman? Your sister . . .” But I told him everything was okay. I wouldn’t let him in because I was afraid that if he got after George, George would beat me worse when he left. I was always bruised and my face had that drawn look, and my hair . . . well, stress can cause your hair to go bad. It just seemed like it was coming out in handfuls. George would get into an argument, or fight with me, and I would be saying, “I didn’t do nothing! I didn’t do nothing !” He would even accuse me . . . he accused me of Georgia not being his. Of course I’d never been with anybody else at that time but him. I would say, “Yes, she is, honey. I swear to God she is! I swear to you!” I think a lot of his money was going to drinking and pills. I’m not sure, but me and the children were definitely suffering. I was not play- pressing on / 119 ing that much music since it was a lull time with the family. I wanted to quit and stay home and be a mom to the children and a housewife. Later George would want me to quit, but at this point he wouldn’t hear of it. When I suggested it, he beat my head on the wall. We were starving . It was real hard times. And then George had convulsions from his drinking and had to go to the hospital. I had no food in the house. I knew I had to buy some groceries, the kids were hungry. So I looked at my banjo, the Gibson. I thought, I’m gonna have to hock this banjo. Only thing I had in the house that was fit. I didn’t even have a dresser for my children’s clothes—I was using boxes. So after George got out of the hospital, he drove me downtown. He parked way up the street from the pawn shop so nobody would see his car there. It was drizzling rain, and I had a scarf on my head because I didn’t have an umbrella, and I came walking down the street crying. And I thought, I gotta stop crying, gotta have pride. The rain was hitting against my face, and I said to myself, Well, they’ll think the tears is raindrops. So I wiped my face and I went in the shop. “I need to hock my banjo,” I said. The manager offered me a hundred dollars. “A hundred? Is that all?” He said, “Yeah. I want you to get this back.” “Well, I guess . . . if that’s all you’re gonna give me.” “It’s only because I really want you to get it back. I don’t want you to lose this.” I went out the door and I walked up the street crying. I cooked a big dinner that night, meatloaf and mashed potatoes and peas. The kids were real happy, sitting at the table, swinging their legs under the chairs. George was in the bedroom. He never ate with us. That was the banjo that I bought in 1956, the one that I played in all them honky-tonks to support my children. The banjo had scrapes on the bottom, where at the end of the night, after playing five or six shows, I had to drag it off the stage because it was so heavy, and I was carrying a baby, and I’d be too tired to hold it up. The banjo had a mellow sweet sound. And it was perfect for playing outdoors—because in the old days when you had bad skin heads on the banjo, if the weather got just a little bit damp or the sun came out, the banjo went totally out of tune. But there was a very good skin head on this. And then for me to lose it for a hundred dollars . . . 120 / pressing on I couldn’t do gigs. George did drive me to this one bluegrass festival , and people were saying, “Oh, Roni Stoneman, you’re the greatest.” I said, “Well, thank you.” But I was thinking, Oh yeah, right! I was just weak, weak in my body. But I was weak emotionally too, because along with that kind of physical abuse, as so many women know, you also get the mental abuse. You’re not only beat and punched, you’re constantly being put down by someone telling you you’re stupid, ignorant, just a hillbilly, just a piece of trash. You don’t know nothing, you’re incompetent . I learned words like incompetent. And that’s a technical term. George said if it wasn’t for him, I would lose my children. Because he had an education and I didn’t. (And I had heard of that happening to a woman down in Mississippi.) Then all of a sudden I’m at this festival with everybody making a big deal of me, telling me how wonderful I was. There was one person there—him and his wife had an RV. “Did you bring your banjo?” he asked. “No, I left it at home.” “C’mon up here, I wanna show you a banjo.” So he took me to the RV. And so I sat there on a couch with a cotton dress and a leather vest that was twice my size. And I played a banjo he had handed me that was made out of aluminum painted green. The man said, “This friend of mine makes these banjos and I’ll have him send you one and he can sponsor you.” “Oh, will you?” I said, because it was the only way I was gonna get a banjo. “That’ll be wonderful!” So the friend sent me a banjo, a little green banjo. It didn’t have the tone it should. But I was thankful to get anything. I played it for a long time, pretending like this was what I wanted. And I truly am to this day grateful to the man in the RV and his friend. We moved back to Nashville. Why we finally left Winston-Salem? George drove into some parked cars, coming home from school drunk. Well the school board told him either resign or they were going to fire him. Dale Catlett, a friend, helped me leave first. It was so dangerous for me because I was really isolated in North Carolina. George was telling everybody I was on pills, I was drinking, because he was making excuses to cover his own irresponsibility. Dale got a truck for me to get my things moved up to Nashville. Then George followed. There’s a picture of me with Eugene at that time, early 1972. I look like death. I didn’t get my banjo back for nine years. Nine whole years later, I get pressing on / 121 a call from my “cousin,” Bill Stanley. I think of him as my cousin because he’s as close as any relative I’ve had. Bill Stanley says, “Roni, yer banjer is . . .” He talks country and he plays guitar, banjo, and fiddle, but he’s real smart, a wonderful man. He was known as the best car salesman five years running in the whole state of North Carolina. And his wife Peggy’s my dear dear compadre. Well, Bill called me and he said, “Roni, there’s a woman advertising your banjer in the trades. I know it’s your banjer. It has the work your father did on the neck and that peg your father put in.” The banjo broke when I was flying one time. They made me check it, which is ridiculous because I could have put it above. It came off the conveyor belt and hit neck first. (I can just see all you musicians out there wincing.) Well, rebuying the banjo wasn’t all that easy—there were complications—but eventually I flew down to North Carolina and Bill drove me over to the woman’s house and we retrieved it. I got in the car, and I didn’t even put the banjo in the back seat. I sat in the front and hugged it. I was just ecstatic. I was so happy, I was out of breath. And the reason is . . . that banjo . . . well, sometimes you have to learn to carry on. You can’t let emotions eat your soul. You can’t let the love of a thing . . . Now a child, an innocent child, is a whole new ballgame. They come first before everything. But a banjo? You know, like hey, that ain’t no big deal. But you know what I thought when I saw it? I thought, It’s got the laughter of people in it. You could feel the audiences inside the resonator, thousands of people. And it had not only the good times. There was all the dirt around the brackets, the smoke from honky-tonks. It also had in it every cigarette and every drunk yelling out, “Helloooo, play me another banjo number!” All the laughter, good, bad and indifferent. That banjo had my life in it. And when I got it back, I suddenly had this vision of myself—I would be with my stomach out, in a family way, ’bout ready to have a baby. So I’d be playing the banjo over on my hip. And the banjo paid for the baby’s birth. Back to my marriage. Abusive men . . . well, in my experience, it’s unlikely the man that has an abusive heart is ever going to get better. Now they can claim they’re gonna go to therapy, but it’s real hard to change their already made-up stuff. George was always calling me names, and accusing me of things. It was a standard speech—I was incompetent, stupid, etcetera. Finally, in 122 / pressing on my own way I rebelled. One day I said, “George, I’ve written down some words that you haven’t used yet to me. I was on the road and I found this Chaucer book and here’s some new words that will help you.” I was fighting back, I guess. I had thought of every kind of thing I could do to assert myself. But he was still pounding it to me. Anyway, that time he got quiet, turned around slowly, and walked back to his bed and picked up a book. I tried to get the children involved in a lot of things outside so they didn’t hear so much of the abuse. I would “cover,” like every woman in that situation will do. I would cover in the way I acted and I would use Max Factor pancake makeup. It’s water-based and it will stick to your face better and stay longer. I put that on and then a darker makeup over it. But even so, when the kids were getting ready to leave for school the morning after a beating, I would be keeping my cheek turned away so the kids didn’t see it. Women hide things from children partly because they’re embarrassed. But most important, they don’t want the children to be afraid. It doesn’t always work though. Georgia got nightmares. She got nightmares a lot. ...