Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [59]
This is how Doolittle looks 364 days a year—whether he’s backstage at the Opry, out on the ranch, or traveling with me. Somebody once looked inside Doolittle’s hat and saw the words: “Like hell it’s yours.” He’s very protective of what he thinks belongs to him.
17
Patsy
Someone said that time heals sorrow
But I can’t help but dread tomorrow,
When I miss you more today than yesterday….
—“I Miss You More Today,” by Lorene Allen and Loretta Lynn
Once we were living in Nashville, we began to get regular dates, and I found myself being invited back to the Opry week after week. But then I ran into some jealousy, and if it wasn’t for Patsy Cline, I don’t think I would have lasted.
It seems there were a lot of girl singers who were trying to get to the top at the same time. When I came along they got jealous and started complaining at the Opry because I got invited back so much. Then they started telephoning me and saying I ought to go back to the West Coast.
One girl asked me who I was sleeping with to get on the Opry so fast. It hurt so much that I cried day and night. My husband said, “If you don’t quit this crying, I’m gonna take you back to the West Coast and forget it.” And he would have.
But that’s when I met Patsy. She was around twenty-seven, and she’d known plenty of hard times trying to make it. Just after I got to Nashville, she was in a car accident that almost killed her. I was on the “Ernest Tubb Record Shop” radio show that they do every Saturday night, and I said, “Patsy has the Number One record, ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ and she’s in the hospital.” Patsy heard it and asked her husband, Charlie Dick, to bring me to the hospital. She was all bandaged up. We talked a good while and became close friends right away. From then on, if she had a fight with her husband, she’d call me. If I had a fight with Doolittle, I’d call her.
The main reason we became good friends was we were both struggling. Patsy had gotten cut out of a lot of money on a couple of her hit songs, and now she was in the hospital all banged up. We both felt we wouldn’t try to hurt each other.
I guess the other girls didn’t know about me and Patsy being friends. They called a party at one of their homes to discuss how to stop me from being on the Opry, and they invited Patsy! There were about six of them, younger ones just coming up. I’m not saying who they were, but they know it themselves. The only thing I will say is that Kitty Wells wasn’t one of them. She’s always been my idol, and she was on the road at the time. Plus she’s too good and religious a person to do what the others did. Anyway, inviting Patsy was their mistake. She called me up and told me what the deal was and said we both should go to that meeting. I said I didn’t have anything to wear, and besides the meeting was about me. She said going was the best thing to do. She told me to get my hair done, and she came over to my house with a new outfit she had bought for me and she made me go.
When we got to the house, there were all these Cadillacs belonging to the top women singers in the country. We went in there, and they didn’t say a word. That ended their plan. Patsy put the stamp of approval on me, and I never had any problems with them again. In fact, they are all my friends now. But I made a point of it when new girls came along to give ’em all a chance, because I wouldn’t treat nobody the way they treated me. If you’re good, you’re gonna make it.
Me and Patsy got closer together all the time. She taught me a lot of things about show business, like how to go onto a stage and how to get off. She even bought me a lot of clothes. Many times when she bought something for herself, she would buy me the same thing. She gave me rhinestones—I thought they were real diamonds, and I still have the dresses she bought me, hanging in my closet. She gave me