Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

25. Husbands 3, 4, and 5

K N < E K P $ = @ M < Husbands 3, 4, and 5 Or, as I said to a country musician who made a snippety remark, “Well, at least I married them.” And they were all totally different, so how was I supposed to know? Anyway, getting back to my family life, it was real clear that George and I had no future together. The final straw was when I came in one day, exhausted from doing three shows in 103–degree heat, and he was laying on the bed so drunk he couldn’t even talk. I got a divorce. My third husband, RichardAdams, I met when I was playing a fair in Bucyrus, Ohio. I was with the Hager twins from Hee Haw. After the show we were taken by two girls to a radio station for interviewing and then to Mansfield, Ohio, to Westbrook Country Club for dinner. Now as Hee Haw fans might guess, Jim and Jon Hager are very hyper devilish little boys, so to speak. They kept saying loudly to everybody who came up to the table, “Here’s Roni Stoneman. She’s the one that plays the Ironing Husbands 3, 4, and 5 pressing on / 195 Board Lady.” “Oh yeah, nice meeting you,” I’d say. I’m thinking, I want to go take a shower, turn on television—get out of here. Then one of the girls brought a banker over to the table. Jim, or Jon, right away says, “This is Roni Stoneman. She’s the Ironing Board Lady.” And I say, “Yeah, nice meeting you.” And Jim, or Jon, says, “Roni’s not married at the present time, are you, Roni?” The banker says, “Oh, you’re not married?” There was a little more chitchat, then next thing you know, Jim and Jon and the girls take off. The banker, Richard Adams, drove me back to the hotel. I had to play two fair dates the next day, and he insisted on bringing me to the first one. I did my show and then we walked around the fairgrounds. He was in awe of everybody coming over to me. I wasn’t paying much attention. He wasn’t appealing to me, seemed too cold-acting. (I should’ve gone with my women’s intuition right then. Any woman out there—honest to God, when you got the vibes, go by them!) Well, then he kept coming down to Nashville to see me. And after a while I got to thinking maybe I oughta go and check this out. So I went up to Mansfield and it was a good visit. Okay, I thought, he has two children but they’re grown, and I have Barbara and Georgia still at home, and I could use some help with them. (Becky and Gene were married. Bobby was in the army.) He’s a banker, on solid ground. And he’s a nice man—everybody in Mansfield likes him, and I like him. Although I don’t like the way he kisses, those hard kisses. But maybe this is just my imagination, and anyway I can change that. (More advice: Don’t ever marry somebody you don’t like to kiss, okay, girls?) So I agreed to marry him. Before we got married, in 1980, Richard had me bring all my tax things for several years up to Ohio. Then he had his CPA man go through all my contracts. I did not know anything about my financial life—I was just all caught up in trying to get work. But I did know enough to say to Richard when he looked at my contracts, “Now, I don’t do this good every year. So don’t be expecting that. This is the music business.” That last year had been very good—besides Hee Haw, I’d been on the road a lot, played thirty-six dates in a three-month period. Well, he was seeing nothing but money. It was a big church wedding. I rode there in a limousine. On the left- 196 / pressing on hand side of the church was a room, and on the right-hand side was a room. Richard was in the right-hand one with his lawyer and one of his stockbroker friends. He came and got me. Now I didn’t want him to see me because I wanted to surprise him with this beautiful dress I had ordered out of New York. But he insisted that he wanted me to sign some papers. I shouldn’t have, but I’m getting ready to go down the aisle, Chet Atkins is already playing, what the heck am I supposed to do? Say, “Wait a minute. Get my lawyers to read the papers”? He was pushing me: “You got to sign these, you got to sign these right now.” I signed them. Now, there was one really great thing that came out of the marriage— the education of Barbara at a wonderful place in Mansfield called New Hope School. That’s where Barbara received excellent training and really got to feel like a human being. Richard went on the board of directors of New Hope School, and he was careful about making sure she got to the school when I was out on the road. When I came back to Tennessee and worked as honorary chairperson for the mental health committee, one of the things I wanted to do was to spread the message of New Hope School. I went to every workshop in the state, helping to teach people that special young adults can be trained, that they can have jobs doing things like setting tables in restaurants. Back to Richard and me. I thought everything was going to be, like, we work together as a team. That’s what you’re supposed to do with your husband. I never talked to Richard about his money, or about his financial situation. It was not romantic, not loving, to talk about money. The girls at the country club in Mansfield, it was a group called the 9 Holers, took me aside and said, “Listen now, if it wasn’t for you, Richard Adams wouldn’t have anything.” I was wondering what they meant by that. I didn’t realize I was making that much more than he was, being that he was educated enough to be a banker and I was just a seventh-grade dropout. It was true that I didn’t see him setting the world on fire, but he did buy a new house (with, I later found out, my money). I told him, “Honey, let’s not try to keep up with the Joneses. Let’s just keep a nice home that we’ll be happy in.” “What are you talking about?” he said. “We are the Joneses.” Now, I didn’t want my job, my music, to interfere with the marriage. pressing on / 197 We get to feeling guilty that way, girl singers and pickers. We think, “Oh, it’s me, with my career, causing all the problems.” Not only girl musicians, that’s the way all the women growing up in the fifties were taught, that we were the ones responsible for any wrongdoing coming down in the marriage. The men knew that we felt that way. And they zeroed in on it, and they made you feel like you were nothing, not even cotton candy that just melts, that you were just, well, air. So to make sure Richard knew he was in charge, when he came in one evening, I said, “Honey, today I went out and I bought a calendar just for my jobs. And I want you to take this to your office, and when people ask me for bookings, I’m gonna say ‘Call Richard.’” Once in a while I’d get paid in cash. And I’d put it in my pantyhose, under my boots. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about losing it. Then I would go home and call Richard into the room, pull off my pantyhose, and the money would fall out all over the floor. I’d say, “There, I brought some money home!” I was trying to make him proud of me. That’s what I thought love is. I’m your buddy, I’m your helpmate. Turned out all I was doing was making him hate my guts! Actually he would get mad even when I just handed him a check. One day I got a call from Brenda Dean, who worked at the bank with Richard. She was a dear friend. “Well, I guess you brought in a lot of money over the weekend,” she said. “Yeah, I did pretty good. How’d you know?” “Richard’s a jerk today. Every time you come in with money, I know it because of the way he acts.” So I decided that the next time I would just put my check in the china closet and tell him it was there. I would just play it down. I tried that and things went a little bit better. But there was another big problem with the marriage, aside from the money—me. I didn’t fit in with Richard’s life. To give an example, one day at the country club they said, “We’re having this wonderful event. Pierre from New York is a jewelry designer who’s designed for Tiffany’s, and he’s going to be here with his show.” Peggy Stanley, my friend from North Carolina, was visiting, and she and I decided to go. We fixed and we fixed. You had to wear everything you 198 / pressing on had to the jewelry show at the country club. That’s what Richard told me. So I had my Halston shoes on ($250), a long black gown, beautiful rings, and a bracelet and a diamond watch. And Peggy’s also wearing lots of jewelry, all genuine. So we get to the jewelry show, and, after standing around awhile, we go over to the main table. “Pierre” looked down at my hand. “Ohhhh, so you’re the one that bought that ring,” he said. “Yes, I sure am. I sure am.” And I guess just those few words with my accent gave me away. “Oh,” he said, in a small voice. “I designed that ring.” “Well, it’s awful purty.” “Umm . . .” and he sounded real puzzled, “when they told me someone had bought that particular ring, I . . . I assumed that it was a very sophisticated woman.” He had this jewelry store in Ohio, and I had gone in, and out of all those rings I had picked that one because it was very unusually set. And he was surprised that a hillbilly would come along and pick it out. I just looked at Peggy and grinned. That accent business is a strange thing. I was once on the Oprah show. Now Oprah Winfrey started at Channel Five in Nashville, so I knew her a little bit. She’s something else, sharp, attractive, and though she’s got a lot of money, she still has sympathy for other folks, compassion. When I was on the show we were talking about how you get treated different by the accent you have. If you’re up north and you have a southern accent , people have a tendency to believe you’re not intelligent. Richard made it really clear he was ashamed of me. “Roni, come here,” he said one day. Then he took a pencil and he drew a diagram with several parallel lines. “This is the top environment,” he said. “And you’re from the low class. And you can’t climb the social ladder because you can never get out of the low class.” Now I didn’t know a lot about Richard’s family when I married him. But later I found out that his father drank and his old homeplace in Missouri was as bad as Carmody Hills, real shambly looking. So I thought, Why are you after me? Why are you making me feel so bad? Occasionally we would go on trips. One time we were at a bankers’ convention in, I think, Chicago. It was connected with the Harris Bank. pressing on / 199 And there was a lot of etiquette involved. The ladies could not go further than the foyer, and then they had to wait until the gentlemen came and escorted them to a room where there was a cocktail party. I was dressed up the best that I could. I had a beautiful Halston gown on, my Halston shoes, diamond earrings. And Richard said to me, “Now don’t move over to the buffet table because it’s not a proper thing to do. I’m to go over there and get the food and bring it to you. And don’t talk to anyone. You’re fine as long as you don’t talk. Just don’t say anything.” So Richard’s gone.And I’m tired of him putting me down all the time. I looked around to see who’s there, and there was this handsome hunk. He came over, and his badge said “Doctor of Law, Austria.” I thought, Well, if I talk to him, then he won’t know that I don’t have good grammar , and that I’m a hillbilly. So we talked for awhile. The next thing you know, they came to seat us at this round table. I was the only female, six bankers and me. Richard’s sitting on the other side of the gentleman from Austria, and then across from me is another really nice-looking fellow. I remembered to put my left hand in my lap properly, and I’m sitting with my back just so straight. And the waiter came over with a rag on his arm, and said, “Madame, may I suggest a vichyssoise?” Well, I didn’t know what the cat hair a vichyssoise was, but I said it would be fine. I thought, If it’s an alligator, I’ll eat some of it. I’ll pretend I like it. The soup was cold. It was milky with globs of white in it. And I thought, Well, this ain’t much good . . . and I’m not even sure . . . this must be milk. But what’s floating around in it? I was wanting to mash it, to see what it was. I put one in my mouth. I looked over to Richard, and he frowned. But by this time I’m getting peeved. I’m getting . . . like my momma would say, “I’ve had about enough!” And I looked at the man across from me. He smiled. Everybody was being real nice to me but Richard. I picked up the spoon, and I thought, I’ll fix him. But on the other hand I had already put in all that effort. So I also thought, No, don’t do it. And then I thought, Yes, go for it! So I lifted the spoon up out of the bowl, and I just dripped the soup, let it drip. Then I put the spoon near my mouth, tasted it, and made a face like eeeoow gross, like a kid would do. And then I lifted my spoon up very high, and I dripped the soup back into my bowl—drip, drip, 200 / pressing on drip, drip.And the guy across from me—I never seen anybody grin more like a possum in my whole life. Then I looked at the maitre d’ and I motioned for him to come over. “Would you put this in the microwave? It’s cold. It’s not supposed to be cold, is it?” I said. “Madame, it’s vichyssoise.” “Well,” I said, pointing to one of the lumps, “what is that?” “That’s a potato, a potato.” “Well, that don’t look like a tater to me. Mommy used to make tater soup and it was warm and it had a thickening in it. This is nothing but old milky stuff, and it’s cold. Might as well have brought me a bowl of milk to drink!” Richard’s trying to kick me under the table, and hitting the guy from Austria because he couldn’t reach me. The other guys at the table were enjoying it. Richard was all red, and I thought he was going to have a stroke, but I also thought, Well if he does, that’s his fault, not mine. Because I’d kinda had enough of boss, boss, boss. After awhile, I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room. And I ran across some ladies in there and started talking to them. I said, “Where are y’all from?” “Well, it’s real nice meeting you,” that kind of thing. Country talk. Hillbilly City. And with that space in my teeth and my crooked eye, I had a real “hot damn, where’re y’all from” Hee Haw look. The ladies stayed in there and talked to me for the longest time. There was one lady who was really elegant, and it seemed like she was the one that was enjoying it the most. Then a few months pass, and we’re invited by the Harris Bank to go to San Francisco for a big conference. Richard was really excited that he was social climbing. There was a gala dinner, and before we went down to the dinner, I put on this beaded jacket that I had bought in Los Angeles a long time ago. The jacket had a big dragon on the back, a green Chinese dragon, was real beautiful. Richard says, “You’re not going to wear that jacket! That’s too loud. The wives do not wear that sort of clothing.” “This is supposed to be a gala,” I said. “Pretty things are supposed to be worn.” We argued a little more, and I won. I got to wear the jacket. pressing on / 201 It turned out that the theme of the dinner was the Chinese New Year. I didn’t know what a Chinese New Year was. They had set the food up as the four food corners of the earth, and a good jazz band was playing on the stage. You didn’t sit down. You’d just wander over to the tables and say, “Oh, I would like to have a bit of this,” “Oh, just give me a little taste of that.” And then after awhile, I went to the ladies’ room, and there was that same elegant lady from the last convention. We said hello and then she told me how she loved my jacket. I said “Well, thank you, I love your jacket.” When I went back out on the floor, I stood next to Richard, and he said, “I told you not to wear that. You see the other women?” I said, “The lady liked it. The lady liked it.” And then all of a sudden Chinese people came out in a big dragon costume and started parading around all over the place. So it turned out I was dressed just right. The next morning, there’s a knock at the door, a messenger with a note for us. We were invited to join Mr. and Mrs. Harris at the Blue Boar Inn in San Francisco for dinner. And we could invite a couple of our friends that came with us from Ohio. The limousine would be picking us up at such and such a time. Mrs. Harris would love to meet with us, spend some more time with the lady with the lovely jacket! And Richard was “Huh. Bluh,” like a toad frog. But his president of the bank, in Mansfield, Ohio, got to go, and us, and practically no other people. We were taken in the limousine over to the restaurant. And when we got there, Mrs. Harris, the elegant lady, and me was talking, telling jokes, and having the best time. Most of the other people were afraid to move because The Mr. Harris was there. And next thing you know Mrs. Harris said, “Well, sing us a song.” And I said, “Well, how ’bout one of them old Grandpa Jones songs—‘Mountain Dew’”? She said, “Oh, that would be lovely.” So I was singing Oh, they call it that good old mountain dew . . . Then Mr. Harris started to loosen his tie, and picked up a spoon, and was whacking it on the table. And Mrs. Harris said to me later, “I have rarely seen my husband loosen his tie at a dinner. I’m so delighted that you joined us.” Then on the way home, on the airplane, Richard, instead of saying, “Roni, it was great having you with me,” or anything like that, was grumble, grumble, grumble. 202 / pressing on When I went down to Nashville for the next Hee Haw taping, I was also playing at Faron Young’s place. So I’m performing there and the divorce papers came to me. They served me the papers on the stage. It could have gone either way, but Richard got there first. He called it “mental cruelty.” That didn’t seem fair to me, but it certainly was true that we didn’t get along. I was married to him three and a half years, long enough for him to take what money I made and invest it in his name. I blame this on myself because I wasn’t thinking enough about the financial side of things. There were warning signs before the wedding, other than the first impression and his being a bad kisser. Peggy Stanley said, “I just don’t like him. I just think he’s not good for you.” (She was the June Carter of my third marriage!) My body said the same thing. The day before the wedding, I broke out in hives as big as silver dollars. I should have paid attention. : I was back living in Nashville when I met Bill Zimmerman, my fourth husband. I had a girlfriend with me, and we stopped in this bar and grill after a long day of taping at Hee Haw. All the guys were throwing darts. I said, “Oh, can I try?” I took the darts. They felt funny—I had never held darts before. I threw them and they went blap, blap, blap, blap. Four bullseyes. I sat down and said, “I’ll take a Coke.” There’s a guy sitting on my left, at the bar, drinking a beer. “Hi, you’re not from around here, are you?” I said. “No.” “I could tell from the way your face is.” “What way is that?” “I don’t know. Where you from? What part of the North are you from?” “Iowa.” “Oh, welcome to Tennessee. What are you doing here?” “Going to school, electronics school. I just got out of the army.” “Oh.” “I was a warrant officer.” “Oh.” pressing on / 203 “You throw darts real good.” “Thank you.” We continued talking and later he came down to see me. We went to the movies. Then we went out to the mall. Then we went to the movies again. And it was court, court, court. He had “Bill Zimmerman, Warrant Officer” on a nameplate. And I thought, Well, that’s wonderful. He said, “Do you know what a warrant officer is?” “No.” Then he explained a little about how it was a special kind of officer that it’s hard to get to be, and he told me he was twice in Vietnam. One day he said, “Well, let’s go up to my apartment. I want to show you my apartment.” So I went up there. He had Soldier of Fortune magazines in a pile against the wall. “What’s this soldier of fortune thing?” I said. “That’s what I was thinking about getting into.” I looked through one of the magazines, and it was all these articles about going to war and pictures of guns. “Well, there ain’t no war going on,” I said. He looked at me like he was thinking, This is a real idiot, I need to marry her. “There’s lots of things going on,” he said. “You know, out there in Colombia and Nicaragua. Like the Contras.” “Well,” I said, “why don’t you join ’em if that’s what you want? What are they supposed to do, the soldiers of fortune? Do they help people?” (I swear I said all this! I had been so busy trying to earn a living and raise the kids, I knew nothing about the world, zilch.) “We go in the jungle and we do this and that.” “You get paid for it, don’t you?” “Yes.” “Well, you oughta get to going. You got enough magazines, you ought to know how to do the stuff! My opinion: Just join up with those contraries or contras.” I peered at one of the pictures. “That’s a bad-looking gun,” I said. “Jesus, it’s not a gun! You don’t call them guns. They’re weapons.” “Okay.” 204 / pressing on He pursued me something bad. He kept begging me, “Marry me, marry me.” Bill was very handsome, tall, about six-two, six-three. He wore cowboy boots and he drove a pickup truck and he was just, well, a good old boy. Very different from a banker that was trying to be king of the city and man about town. Bill was sensuous. And he thought I was. Which I was. I was loving, caring, romantic. So I thought maybe I’d marry again. (My thoughts are always getting me in trouble.) We were married in the spring of 1985. Two or three days after the wedding, Bill started complaining about the electrical engineering. And I said, “Well, Bill, you can do something else. You’re very very smart. Go back to college.” He was younger than me, but he had seen things that I will never see and done things that I’d never done. So I figured he was a little bit older than me mentally. I didn’t know about the other effects of being a vet. He kept on complaining. I said, “Well, just quit. And go on to something else.” So he quit his electronics school. Now one day I’m in the kitchen, fixing chicken or steak or whatever, and he comes in the back door, and he’s carrying a big box. He puts it on the table. Blamp. Right in the middle of the table that I had set real nice. He opened the box up and inside there were hard plastic camouflaged packets of jungle survival food. The kind where you can eat the stuff right away. “Here, taste this! Taste this!” he said. And he took his knife and cut the top off. “Here.” And his eyes are glaring, weird. “Bill, for God’s sake, I know I’m a bad cook but that’s ridiculous! I’m not gonna eat jungle survival food. We’re getting ready to eat dinner.” “I got four or five boxes out there in the truck. It’s not bad. Here, taste ’em. We can live off of these!” And he started pushing it in my mouth. Well, a little later that same evening, he proceeded to get his knife and show me how you kill people. The knife had a double edge on it, with the ridges on the top. He said, “We did it like this. We ripped this way and that way.” Then shortly after he did that, he started going into a depression. He’d just sit there in the chair and glare straight ahead and hate you. You didn’t know what for. I figured it was the memories of war, thinking about the jungle, show- pressing on / 205 ing me the survival food, and reliving the killing. He had talked about Vietnam before. He said, “The first time, I was in the navy. I rode the boats up and down the river, collecting bodies in body bags.” First tour he might have had to go in, I don’t know. But the second time, he signed up. So I have a hard time understanding all this. He was smart. He could learn anything he wanted to learn. He said the thing that was most hurtful to him was coming home from Vietnam and everybody spitting on him. The hippies spat on him as he was changing airplanes. That is so awful. I just know that I’m thankful for the boys who went to Vietnam. And at that time I didn’t understand fully the problems that some of them came back with. A lot of folks didn’t. I told him to write about it. I said, “I can understand if you’re sad. Well, honey, write your thoughts down. Maybe it will help you cope with it.” But sympathizing was one thing, living with him something else. Aside from the depression, he would have violent reactions to things. There was the time he got so mad about painting a little shed that he started cussing and just hurled the whole bucket of paint on it. Another time the lawn mower, it was a nice new big one, rolled over a coat hanger and just stopped. Bill got furious. He hoisted that lawn mower way up over his head and threw it. It bounced. He was strong. All the neighbors went “Aaahhh.” But although he could lose his temper real bad, like in those incidents, he was never violent against the kids or me. Even if he was provoked by the kids, or if he thought I was nagging at him, he never laid a hand on us. And he was really helpful with my Barbara. He went back to school. He was going to take up photography. He’s the one that took a lot of my best pictures. He was real talented. And he was doing writing and journalism. That was great, I thought, very promising for him to have a future. He didn’t have to stick with me if he didn’t want to. I just wanted him to be successful for himself. I was trying to figure out the situation. I was trying to truly understand the Vietnam thing. And trying to understand the future of the marriage . So we had a discussion. When I asked him point blank whether he loved me, and he said he wasn’t sure, I decided to call it quits. It was honest, and it was the way to go, for both of us. 206 / pressing on Then one day a few years later, we were playing a Stoneman reunion at the Station Inn in Nashville, and Van came in and said, “It’s ex-husband night, ladies! Bobby’s out there, Donna! Bill’s out there, Roni!” Talk about a tough audience! As I passed Bill, he said, “Roni, I found out what was wrong with me.” “You did?” “Yes, I went to the veterans’ hospital, and they said I had a chemical imbalance.” “Well, I’m glad, Bill. I’m really glad!” “Don’t get smart with me!” And of course, I wasn’t being smart with him, bless his heart. I was really thankful for him because I can imagine how awful it is being depressed all the time. And it was understandable after what he’d gone through. Sometimes I blame myself for not helping him more. But I don’t know what I could have done. I never saw him again after that night. Patsy and Donna ran into him. And from what I gather, he got married again and he was writing for a newspaper in some small town. I would like to see him and say, “Hey, Bill, how ya’ doin’?” And wish him and his wife well. I really would. So that was my deal with Bill. He was not a mean sort. He was a fine man who was going through a really bad spell. But the marriage was not good for me. And it added another husband to my life, which is something I didn’t need to add. : Because five husbands sounds really bad. And I was about to get a fifth. His name isn’t really Barry Denton, but I’m going to call him that because I don’t want to give him any publicity. He’s got so little sense he would think it was nice to have his name in a book, no matter how bad what I’m going to say is. How I met him? That was my own fault, and I should’ve known better. Again I went to a bar and I met this guy and I started going out with him. Daddy used to write songs about tragedies, natural disasters like the mighty Mississippi Flood and the Titanic. My husbands are my natural disasters. pressing on / 207 Barry was a very handsome man. He had pretty eyes, and he was clean-looking, dressed nice. But he was among other things, a liar. He lied about owning a house, and he lied about his job, which was housepainting , trying to make it sound as if he owned this big construction company. I didn’t realize he was lying. Though later it made me furious —even though of course I didn’t care that much about the house or the construction company. Later I also found out that he had been in the pen. He was a felon, counterfeit money and robbing a store. “When I was in Joliet . . .” he once said, but I didn’t at first get what that meant. His uncle was “in Joliet” too. Anyway, back when I started dating Barry, I was thinking, Well, this is an Indiana farm boy, a good guy. Barry was from Mt. Vernon. I’d gone there quite a few times with him and I saw the wooden covered bridges in Indiana, how beautiful they are. In the fall of the year we went coon hunting there with his buddy. I loved the coon hunt. Beautiful brisk Indiana weather and you’re sitting on the back of a pickup truck and the moon is shining and you hear the dogs holler “Aooohhh,” and you know which one has got which voice and you know they’re going after the coons and how they’ve been trained for it. So in 1987 I married him. Barry Denton was not a good guy. He turned out to be greedy, brutal, and unfaithful. I let him handle my money, and that was a big mistake. I had this idea. I was going to have a yearly Stoneman family festival in honor of Scott. It would have a fiddling contest, banjo contest, guitar contest, and singing contest. Oh, my God, I worked so hard on it. Now, Barry found this piece of land up on a hill a few hours from Nashville. I said “Barry, we shouldn’t go this big in the beginning.” “Well, we gonna build a house up here and . . .” blah, blah, blah. So he talked to this lady and got the land. I gave her ten or twelve grand down on it. And I told her that after the next Hee Haw taping was over, I’d come up and give her the rest. Well, we had the first contest. The signs said “Scotty Stoneman’s Fiddling Contest, Stoneman Park.” I put every penny I could into the festival. Besides Hee Haw, of course, I was doing shows. I’d run off and do a bluegrass festival, go home, and then bring the money up there. I was walking around in a daze, because I was so busy making the money and trying to arrange everything. I had an asphalt road built so RVs could go up there, I paid Jimmy Dickens thirty-five hundred dollars to 208 / pressing on perform, Charlie McCoy three thousand dollars. Then I paid out all the prize money right after the people won. The contest was a big success. But next thing you know, my land was taken from me. The woman hid from me, would not let me pay her the rest of the money for the property. The sheriff and city officials laughed when I called them asking where she was. Something was clearly up. I had to declare bankruptcy and give up the festival. When I eventually found the woman, she said, “It’s Barry. The city officials said he did some things I don’t know anything about.” So she had sided with the city officials and hidden from me. Barry also took all the money I earned doing shows in Florida. We’d go to Florida and I worked those little RV resorts. We had gotten a used RV and I was traveling in it. The first time we went down, we didn’t know where we were going. We were staying in this awful place. I had Barbara and Bobby with me, with Barry and myself, living in this little trailer, and it was really a horrible existence—roaches like you wouldn’t believe!—but I had to start somewhere. I had to live there and find out what places I could go to play at. And I did it. I pulled it off. But it wasn’t easy. Before I went down the second year, I would call and have posters made, and send them to be put around the coffee shops. This is what I’d say: “Hello, this is Molly Brown, representing Roni Stoneman. And she’ll be down in Florida in your area and she would like to play the RV resort. She’s the gal from Hee Haw, the Ironing Board Lady, and she plays the banjo, and would you be interested, etcetera, etcetera?” They were interested. So I’d send them the publicity. (The name Molly Brown meant something to me—as in The Unsinkable!) I started to do pretty well. For the month of January one year, I only had one day off. There ain’t an RV resort or campground in Florida that I don’t know. Across Alligator Alley and up and down the coast. But Barry took the money. And when I asked him for some, it was rough. One time I accidentally walked in the bathroom, and he had money piled up high on the commode lid. I said, “Oh, Barry, give me some money ’cause I got to pay the bills, gotta pay the car.” He grabbed my wrist and squeezed it hard and said, “Leave that money alone, bitch, or your brains will be running off that bathtub there!” I turned around and looked toward the old-fashioned bathtub we had, and I could just see my brains running down the tub. pressing on / 209 The violence was truly awful. Whenever you’re married to somebody as viciously mean as he was . . . He was like Hitler. I never saw Barry drink a whole lot. He didn’t need to. He was born mean. George was bad news, but he did have a softness about his soul, whenever he got sober, or wasn’t on chemicals. Barry was totally different. Sam Lovullo saw it. Sam barred him from all the grounds at Opryland . They put the word out front that the guard was not to let Roni Stoneman’s husband come in. Not only did he mess me up financially at that festival, he was also cheating on me with another woman there on the new land, and he about like to have killed me about that. I was doing this show up in Pennsylvania . And the family came to play with me. I get a call at the motel from a woman I’ll call Mary. She said, “Roni, this is Mary. I want you to know that me and Barry’s been having an affair.” And she went on to tell me what all they’d been doing together. I was in shock. I shouldn’t have been. I should have known. But I had ignored the telltale hairpins in the bed when I joined Barry after a weekend away. I went and knocked on Barry’s door. “Barry, I need to talk to you.” “What about?” “Mary called me. Would you come outside and talk to me about it?” I was speaking in a real calm tone of voice because I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He came outside and I said, “Barry, Mary told me some things that I feel awful bad about.” And then I repeated what she had said. He got angry. You know how some men will be when they get caught? He grabbed me by the throat and he fractured my neck. They always put their thumb hard aginst my throat when they choke me, but Barry choked me so hard and jerked me so viciously that it cracked my neck. I didn’t know that at the time, but I knew I was in severe pain and I got away from him. There were some thorn bushes with real long thorns. And he said, “I’ll throw you right in the middle of that,” and he called me every name, just as if Satan himself had come alive and was truly after me. So I ran, and it was, I guess it was about 1:30 in the morning. It was real dark in the parking lot, and those bushes were all around. There was a big rock, big as a table. And he said, “Your brains’ll be running off of that.” Just like with the bathtub. He was dangerous. He’s not to be reckoned with in any way, shape, or form because he’s very very evil. 210 / pressing on I rode all the way back from Pennsylvania to Nashville with a scarf around my neck so my family wouldn’t see the bruises. I never had such pain in my life, but I had to be really quiet. I had to play it his way until the family got paid. I was so scared, driving all that way. I can’t . . . there’s no way to describe how frightened you get. You’re walking on eggshells to please them. When I got home, I went to a chiropractor and he took an x-ray. He said, “You have a fractured neck, Roni. If you ever have a car accident, you’re going to be dead immediately.” I had trouble with it for a long time, bad pain and my neck would swell up. But God over time healed it. It was not only the violence that was awful, it was also the other women. I should’ve seen trouble from the beginning. Okay, here we were married four days, and a package comes, a wedding gift, I thought. It was a foot-long rubber dildo. With a bunch of dirty books and an obscene note from one of Barry’s former girlfriends. I went into the bathroom and vomited. Later there was another Mary-like phone call. I pick up the phone and a woman says, “Is this Roni Stoneman?” “Yes, it is.” And right off she says how she’d been having sex with Barry, “down here at the parking lot of Piggly Wiggly. He’ll be home in a little while. We do it a lot.” His ex-girlfriends seemed to have some kind of compulsion to talk to me. ThelastsuchphonecallcamesoonafterBarryleftme—becausestrange as it may seem, Barry’s the one left me. Anyway, the phone rang. “Hello,” I said. “I want you to know that I have special bras made for me,” a voice said. “Okay, who is this?” “This is Francine.” (Again, I’m disguising her name.) “Oh, yeah, yeah, how’re you doing?” “Oh, I just came back from my bra maker.” “Bra maker? Like brassieres?” “Yeah, I just came back. I wear a size K cup.” “A K what?” “Cup. A size K cup.” “A K?” pressing on / 211 “Yeah, like A B C D E F G H I J K.” “Oh!” “There’s a woman in Madison who makes them special for me.” “Oh.” “Barry’s with me now.” And I said, grinning into the phone, “Well, honey, you’re fighting with weapons I don’t own.” I mean, a K cup!!!! I couldn’t comprehend, me with my 32 triple A! I don’t think Dolly’s that big—not a K cup. That sounds like the slingshot that David killed Goliath with. Well, as I said, Barry left me. We had been in Florida, and I had worked hard that whole winter, earned a lot of money. We came home, and as usual, he had the money. He said he’d be back in an hour, said he was going to service the RV. But he left for good, took the RV and all my money. I had real financial problems. Big time. I didn’t have a cent, nothing, zero, zilch. But I was so happy when he left. Now at least I got to keep what money I could earn. I really wanted to be divorced from him. I went to a lawyer. But I could not find Barry to sign the papers. Finally, seven years after he left, I did manage to get ahold of him. It sure wasn’t easy though. Here’s how I did it. Now, I have a good friend, name of Ronnie Buff. He’s an old country boy, works in construction, but he also writes good songs, sings good, and plays good guitar. He calls me one day. “Ronnae, how’re ya doin’ Ronnae?” “I’m doin’ fine, Buff, how’re ya doin’?” “Walll, I gotta find out how my best girl is.” You know, one of them kind of boys. Great big fellow with a beard and his hair’s all black, and all the girls say in a high voice, “Can I feel your muscles?” “Guess who I saw the other day?” “I can’t imagine, Buff. Who’d you see?” “Well I was in this little ol’ convenience store and this guy came up to me and we was talking, and he said ‘I write songs and I was married to Roni Stoneman. I made a star out of her. Yeah, and then she leaves 212 / pressing on me, abandons me.’ I says, ‘Oh, is that right? Well, I play guitar with Roni every now and then.’ And he got real quiet and he said, ‘Well, good God, don’t tell her where I’m at.’ And I’m thinking, Well, why in the world did he say that? So I thought I’d tell ya!” And apparently Barry told Ronnie Buff that he was living with the girl working behind the counter at this convenience store. I said, “Is that right?” And then I said, “Buff, you gotta help me. I want to get this divorce over with and done. I gotta think of a plan. Can you call me back in the morning?” Next morning when he calls, I said, “I want you to help me, Buff.” “Anything you want me to do, Ronnae, I’ll do it. You want me to whup his ass?” “No, no, no, I don’t want you to whup his ass.” “I would, you know, and I can.” “Yeah, I know you can, Buff, but I don’t want you to whup his ass. That ain’t gonna do any good. I’ll tell you what I want you to do.” My plan was for Buff to get Barry’s phone number by saying he needed him to judge a coon dog contest. Buff did, and I called the number . I got an answering machine. I said, “Hello, this is Roni Stoneman, would you please tell Barry to give me a call, that I would like to meet him to get him to sign these divorce papers? I have them all ready. And I’m sure that you would like for him to get this out of the way. I know I would.” Well, the plan worked. Barry called back. Just like I guessed, he had not married this girl because he kept telling her that he wasn’t divorced yet—that I was so awful that I wouldn’t give him a divorce. But my message on the machine ended that lie. After the divorce, it was like I was walking around in a daze, I was so happy and relieved. : But what I said to that snippety country musician about at least I married them wasn’t strictly true. There were a number of men I dated but didn’t marry, as I mentioned earlier. Dating to me is really interesting. To round out this account of my love life and my history with men, here’s a story from shortly after the Barry disaster. pressing on / 213 I was dating this surgeon. He was a handsome hunk, and he knew nothing about country music or about my history. That was wonderful to me because I could dress up prissy and be Veronica. Not Roni Stoneman , Picker. But Veronica Stoneman, Woman! Now, the best place to eat in Nashville was the Stockyard, good steak, tablecloths, enough silverware for an army, and really atmospheric. Buddy Killen owned it. He was just a picker from the old days and he ended up with his own publishing company, which he sold to Sony Music . We were always proud of Buddy Killen. So when this surgeon came to town, and he was so nice and looked so good with his cashmere coat, I said, “Well, let’s go to the Stockyard.” I was dressed up real proper. Ablack dress to make me look chic and stockings with lines up the back, makeup on just right. So we’re sitting there, eating dinner and talking. Then he said, “I hear music downstairs, and they have informed me that it’s rather good country music. Perhaps we should go down.” Oh God no, I thought to myself. I knew the band—it was Tommy Riggs and the Bullpen Lounge Band, some of the best pickers in Nashville . I was sure if I went down there, they would call on me to play, and then, well, goodbye, sophisticated Veronica. “No, no, let’s not go downstairs now,” I said. “It’s so pleasant here.” “You don’t like country music?” he said. “Well, no, it’s not that exactly.” “I think some of it is really okay. Of course you have to get used to it.” “Well . . .” I’m fiddling with the salt and pepper shakers, wondering how I’m gonna get out of this. “And someone told me this band is good.” I picked the pepper shaker up, tilted it and watched the little sprinkles fall into my palm. “Well now,” I finally said, “let me tell you, honey, if you really really want to go down, well . . . you should know that I occasionally play music myself . . .” “You do?” “So the band members might know me . . . And sometimes I get up and play a little, just a little.” 214 / pressing on “What do you play?” “Oh I play guitar . . . and a wee bit of a banjo.” I’m still fooling around with the salt and pepper shakers as if I’ve never seen such critters before. “So if the musicians know me, don’t think anything. You know, they’ll always be friendly to me.” “Sure, no problem.” “And if anybody happens to recognize me in the audience . . . Well, most of my fans, actually I have some fans . . . And a few of them have hardly any teeth. So because of my space and my smile, they always kind of think like . . . like I’m one of them.” “Oh, well, that’s all right,” he said, leaning back. “I wouldn’t mind that at all.” “You’re sure?” “Of course not.” So we go downstairs. The band is superb. They’re going, “Hi, Ron, Hi Ron.” And I waved a little delicate wave. “See, I told you the band might know me,” I said. And I’m sitting there and I’m really still trying to act nice and refined , and about this time somebody grabbed me by the shoulder, and he stooped down, and it was Hillbilly City. I mean bigtime, a real mountain man. Something like I’d marry. “Hot damn!” he says. “I sure do like you! You’re my fa-vo-rite!” “Well thank you.” “And there’s my Maw over there. She’s never been to Nashville, always wanted to come to the Grand Ole Opry. She’s gettin’ up in years, so we brought her.” He waved to another table: “Hey, Maw, c’mere!”And here she comes, with some brothers of his. My friend’s sitting there like the gentleman he was, and his eyes so big around. “Will you take a picture with my Maw?” “Yeah, sure,” I said. “C’mere, Mom, I love you, honey.” I stood up, and of course I realized that I really mean it, I love them, I really love these people. She grabbed my arm, and then hit me on the back. Knocked the breath out of me. I went, “Aahhh.” Her son got me around the neck. It was like a wrassling hold, an armlock. And my head was sticking out, and again I go “Aahhh.” And he said, “Wilbur, look! By golly she’s just pressing on / 215 like us!” And he dragged me over to their table, where there were some more brothers, to take a picture with the whole family. My friend’s sitting back there. And I thought, How am I gonna be able to get him back on the track? But there was no way. That was the end of him. And he was a fine dude. But I asked myself, What is more important, my fans or my love life? And I thought, From the looks of things, my love life has let me down. My fans have not. Ever. The answer was clear. My fans were more important. ...