Last night Charles and I settled in for the night to watch the Lifetime “premiere” TV movie Patsy & Loretta. As you could probably guess from the title and the faux-“country” lettering of the title in the credits, this was a film about the friendship and mentorship between country star Patsy Cline and up-and-comer Loretta Lynn between 1961, when they met, and 1963, when Cline died in the crash of a private plane one of her band members had bought in hopes of making it to and back from gigs without costing her too much time away from her home, husband and kids. The film is competing with two big-budget theatrical movies from the 1980’s, the well-received Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (with Sissy Spacek not only starring as Lynn but doing her own singing — and quite effectively, too — while Tommy Lee Jones got his star-making career as Lynn’s all-too-often straying husband, Doolittle Lynn, variously called “Mooney” or “Doo,” the subject of some of her greatest songs, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” and “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on Your Mind”) and the less well-received Cline biopic Sweet Dreams (with Jessica Lange as Cline and Patsy Cline’s old records used for the soundtrack, but with the original accompaniments digitally erased and new ones added à la Clint Eastwood’s Bird), and though I never saw Sweet Dreams the memories I have of Coal Miner’s Daughter (with Beverly D’Angelo indelible as Cline even though she got only about 10 minutes of screen time) are of a better movie than this.
What’s strongest about Patsy & Loretta is its depiction of the relationship between the two women and how much it bonds over two key commonalities: their mutual dedication to their music and the problems each has with their husbands. Megan Hilty grips the screen as Cline, not only acting the role but doing her own singing — and doing it with complete authority even though Cline’s surprisingly jazz-like phrasing (I’ve written elsewhere that it was Patsy Cline who was “the white Billie Holiday,” not any of the white women jazz singers who deliberately tried for that title: much of Cline’s actual singing reminds me of Billie, particularly the way she hung behind the beat and the “dying falls,” the downward glissandi with which both Billie and Patsy liked to end a line so the lyric became a kind of sigh) pretty much eluded her. She projected more vocal authority than Jessie Mueller as Lynn — but then Lynn herself didn’t have the gripping, almost tragic dramatic sense of Cline. What made Loretta Lynn great was less the voice per se and more the sheer audacity of her material — at a time when the conventional wisdom in the country world was that a man could sustain a career on songs he wrote himself (like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash), a woman didn’t have the chops to do that and would have to rely on professional songwriters, Loretta Lynn not only wrote her own songs but gave the Nashville establishment an in-your-face defiance by calling one of her albums Loretta Lynn Writes ’Em and Sings ’Em. As I’m writing this I’m listening to the Lynn CD All-Time Greatest Hits (including her cover of Cline’s hit “She’s Got You”) and it seems like an almost day-to-day diary of her and Mooney’s marriage (the only song missing that would have completed the story would have been “I Can’t Hear the Music,” the absolutely heart-rending song she wrote after his death based on his literal last words; I remember a TV special on Lynn through which an annoying announcer, Joan Lunden, babbled her way through the show and kept undermining the effect of just about everything Lynn sang … until Lynn tore up the stage with “I Can’t Hear the Music” and the effect was so emotionally intense that for once in her life Joan Lunden just shut up). The soft-rock singer-songwriters that dominated the L.A. music scene in the 1970’s thought they were inventing the art of basing your songs directly on your personal life — only Lynn and other country singers had been doing it way before that.
Indeed, much of country music’s appeal lies directly in the emotional bond between singer and audience; Ken Burns’ recent Country Music documentary recounted that when Patsy Cline released her song “I Fall to Pieces” she got a fan letter from a woman who had just been through a bitter breakup and had finally overcome enough of her traumas to go out and accept a friend’s invitation to a party — only who should turn up there but her ex. So the woman wrote to Cline and basically said, “How did you know? How did you know what I was going to feel?” The film Patsy & Loretta was, among other things, yet another triumph for the women filmmakers Lifetime has given opportunities to even while feature-film assignments remain one of the thickest glass ceilings (almost as bad as the Presidency) — the director was Callie Khouri, who’s made two theatrical features (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Mad Money) and shown her chops as a director of films about country music with episodes of the TV series Nashville, and the writer was Angelina Burnett — and judging from her whole list of credits Khouri’s specialty seems to be stories about women bonding and supporting each other in the face of abuse by men. In Patsy & Loretta both Cline and Lynn are physically assaulted by their husbands (though Cline’s abuse is shown only elliptically, when Lynn points to the bruise on her face and calmly says she needs more makeup to cover it before she goes on stage) and the only two real quarrels shown between them come when Lynn makes a remark about how much time Cline is staying on the road away from her kids. Cline reacts to this like Dracula to the crucifix and eventually she tearily confesses that the reason she’s so concerned about being accused of not caring enough about her children was that she was herself sexually abused by her father. Casting director Susan Edelman deserves credit for getting first-rate actors to play the male leads — maybe Joe Tippett isn’t quite as demented-looking as Tommy Lee Jones as Mooney, but he’s got just the right mix of machismo and vulnerability he’s believable even though when he goes out honky-tonkin’ he might as well wear a warning sign saying, “Go to bed with me and Loretta Lynn’s next record will be about you.”
Kyle Schmid is a bit too unassuming for Cline’s husband Charlie Dick (her second husband, actually; it was a short-lived first marriage that gave her the last name “Cline,” but naturally Dick feels insulted and ashamed when someone addresses him as “Mr. Cline”[1]) but he’s believable, though I wish screenwriter had shown the incident in which Dick woke Cline up at 4 a.m. to tell her he’d found the perfect song for her next record: “Crazy,” from a demo recorded by a then little-known songwriter named Willie Nelson. In the movie Cline finally listens to the song and is taken by it — and we hear Willie Nelson’s voice on the soundtrack in what’s supposedly his demo but is probably a re-recording he made years later, after Cline’s death and in the full flush of his own fame. (I first knew Willie Nelson wrote “Crazy” when he sang it on the premiere episode of Austin City Limits in 1975 and thanked Cline for launching his career by recording it.) Cline sings along with Nelson’s demo and learns the song that way, though in the Burns Country Music documentary Harold Bradley, director of the session band that his brother, ace producer Owen Bradley, used on his records, recalled that Cline wanted to record “Crazy” at the tempo Nelson had used on his demo. Owen Bradley wanted it slower, and he ended up recording just the backing track so he could get the tempo he wanted and had Cline add the vocal a day later. (This would become the common way of recording rock in the late 1960’s but it was still unusual in 1961.)[2] Indeed, one of the best things about both Cline and Lynn was they managed to make great, soulful records even with Owen Bradley — the architect of the string-laden, usually syrupy “Nashville Sound” of country-pop — producing them; Cline resisted a string orchestra until her very last session, on which she made “Sweet Dreams” and her awesome cover of Bob Wills’ “Faded Love” which turns a simple honky-tonk lament into a deathless romantic tragedy; much the way Billie Holiday did when she recorded with strings, Cline buzzes with unquenchable integrity and raw emotion and triumphs over the rather cloying arrangements.
The only thing I could have done without about Patsy & Loretta was the three appearances of Patsy Cline’s ghost — or at least Loretta Lynn’s imagination conjuring her up — after her fatal plane crash (and it doesn’t help that Khouri and Burnett anticipated it by having Cline’s last scene shot in slow motion and accompanied by dire instrumental strains: one wants to yell at her, “Patsy! Don’t do it! Don’t get into that little teeny plane in the rain! Does the name ‘Buddy Holly’ mean anything to you?”), including singing a duet with her on Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at a tempo midway between the two most famous versions of the song, Monroe’s original and Elvis Presley’s uptempo cover on the B-side of his first Sun Records single. If she had to do a duet after Cline’s death, the person she should have been shown doing it with is Connie Smith, an aspiring country singer Lynn picked up in a pay-it-forward way and tried to mentor the way Cline had mentored her. Otherwise, though, Patsy & Loretta is a beautiful, moving tribute to women’s solidarity as well as two of the most formidable talents ever to perform in as unfairly maligned and slighted a genre as country music — and Cline and Lynn are two of the people I cite when I point out that despite country’s reputation as a music of melodramatic excess, its greatest performers have wrenched and moved their audiences’ emotions precisely by being understated, delivering their laments in a matter-of-fact tone quite the opposite of the 1920’s and 1930’s “torch singers” who introduced a lot of the songs in the Great American Songbook … until great jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald took out the phony cries and sobs and showed just how good, and how emotionally timeless, those songs actually were. So are the songs of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, and the powerful understatement with which they sang them.
[1] — Indeed, one of the big issues filmmakers Khouri and
Burnett hint at — though, praise be, they don’t get preachy about it — is how
intensely macho men like Charlie
Dick and Doolittle Lynn must have felt when their wives became superstars and
made far more money than their families had ever dreamed of having — but at the
cost of being away from home most of the time, which forced these men into the
“womanly” role of taking care of their kids.
[2] — One irony is that the Ken Burns Country Music documentary told another story about a singer being
awakened to hear a song at 4 a.m., and also involving Willie Nelson. It seems
Nelson was in the middle of recording a duet album with Merle Haggard and in
the wee hours of the morning he happened to be listening to an Emmylou Harris
album and was struck by her cover of Townes Van Zandt’s song “Pancho and
Lefty.” Nelson decided that would make a great song for the album and woke Haggard
up at 4 a.m. to play him the song and record it then and there. Haggard
protested that he didn’t want to sing his vocal until he’d had a full night’s
sleep, but he went ahead and he and Nelson recorded the song. Then he went back
to sleep, and when he got up he wanted to redo his vocal. Nelson said no, and
the record went out with their 4 a.m. vocals on what turned out to be its title
song.
