BEATLES, STONES, SINATRA & BEYOND: TERRY O’NEILL TALKS ABOUT HIS COOL ICONIC IMAGES

BEATLES, STONES, SINATRA & BEYOND: TERRY O’NEILL TALKS ABOUT HIS COOL ICONIC IMAGES

 

BURT KEARNS

 

FEB. 19, 2019

 

Legendary British photographer Terry O’Neill started out shooting the Beatles and the Stones as struggling young bands in the early 60s, and went on to create iconic portraits of Frank Sinatra, Elvis, David Bowie, Brigitte Bardot, The Who, Eric Clapton, Faye Dunaway and so many more. He talks to Burt Kearns about the secret of great photography, the Swingin’ 60s scene in London (which he helped create), and the generosity of Frank Sinatra.

 

They’re tearing down the SLS Hotel & Casino at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip, and that got me thinking about Terry O’Neill.

 

They’re tearing down the SLS from the inside, renovating the casino and rooms and turning the place into something called the Grand Sahara Resort. The new name’s a nod to the old name. For more than half a century, since 1952, the building held the real Sahara Hotel & Casino. This was where Frank Sinatra and Buddy Hackett and Wayne Newton and Jerry Lewis packed the showroom, and Louis Prima, Keely Smith & Sam Butera made show business history in the Casbar Lounge. The Sahara is where the Beatles stayed when they played the Vegas Convention Center in 1964 (the Beatles have been Strip headliners since 2006, in a Cirque du Soleil show at the Mirage).

 

The Sahara closed in 2011. Which is where Terry O’Neill, the greatest celebrity photographer of our time, comes in.

 

 

Terry O’Neill at Abbey Road Studios

 

A few years after the Sahara sign was carted off to the Neon Boneyard downtown, some hot shots from Los Angeles came in with the idea of turning the old joint into a hip retro casino. They designed the decor around the iconic Rat Pack photos taken by Terry O’Neill. You know Terry O’Neill. He’s the suave British photographer who married Faye Dunaway. He also helped create London’s Swinging ’60s scene with his photos of its young movers and shakers before taking iconic shots of stars like Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot, Paul Newman — and Sinatra in his Tony Rome period.

 

O’Neill’s Rat Pack photos were blown up supersize on the walls, and even imprinted into the carpets of the casino. The centerpiece of the new SLS was the Iconic Images Gallery — featuring big, expensive iconic images shot by Terry O’Neill.

 Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr – © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

The SLS, isolated from the action on the Strip, never caught on. It was sold a few times, until the new owners gave up on the concept and sold it to someone who’s turning it into the Grand Sahara.

 

But back when the SLS promised to be a swingin’ yeah baby return to Vegas cool, a pal and I were part of the push, producing spots for the Iconic Images Gallery. The short video clips featured Terry O’Neill. That’s when we got to speak to him about his work, the people whose images he made iconic, and the pop culture his work defines.

 

Amy Winehouse © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

PKM: So what makes the perfect photograph?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: Oh God, I wish I knew. Every photographer would tell you there’s no such thing as the perfect photograph, ’cause you never get it. There’s always something wrong with it, and it could be the most infinitesimal thing that’s wrong, but you’re never satisfied as a photographer. When I look back at all my work, I always think, “Oh, I should’ve stayed on longer, I should’ve done this, I should have done that,” so I don’t really get the full enjoyment through what I’ve done.  Do you understand what I mean? I always feel I could’ve done much better.

 

PKM: The fact that you can’t get satisfaction — is that the secret to success?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I mean, I’ve got friends like Eric Clapton. I’d say, “God you were great tonight.”  He’d say, “Yeah, but I coulda done this here, I coulda–” And I thought, God! It teaches you that anybody who’s any good is never satisfied. Ever.

 

PKM: You’ve shot so many photos that are considered iconic. When you approach a subject, do you work to create a mood?

 

Frank Sinatra © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

TERRY O’NEILL: As far as getting moods and things in my pictures, whatever’s happening, I photograph. I don’t try to make a false mood or something. If someone’s angry, or someone’s happy, whatever it is, I try and capture it. I just seem to blend into the background, you know. That’s the secret of great photography.  People forget that you’re a photographer. I learnt that from Frank Sinatra.

 

PKM: How’d that happen?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I became friendly with Ava Gardner on a film called Mayerling. We became really great friends, and I said, “I’ve got a chance to shoot your ex-husband.” She said, “Oh, I’ll write you a letter.” So she writes me a letter and I don’t know what it said, but it must have been something really complimentary, because I handed Sinatra the letter and he read it, and said, “Right, you’re with me.” And for the next three weeks, totally ignored me. And I realized at the end of the three weeks that he gave me the greatest gift someone could ever give someone, ’cause I could go anywhere with him. He never questioned anything, nothing. And I realized what that was the secret of great photography. Of being there but just totally being in the background. And that set me up for the rest of my life, really. I mean, when people ignore you and forget you’re a camera, that’s the whole secret of everything, and that’s all I ever wanted to be. There’s a great shot, I’ve got Sinatra. I’m right on top of him, he’s sitting in a chair thinking and you’d never know I was even there, it was like a magic, magic shot.

 

The whole secret of photography is to be anonymous and be invisible and don’t open your mouth unless spoken to.

 

I go down to the Abbey Road, go in and there’s this group in there singing ‘Please Please Me.’ It turned out to be the Beatles. And that was the very first job I had on a national newspaper.

 

PKM: So how did this all start for you?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: Funny enough, it was jazz drumming that got me into photography. Because modern jazz wasn’t making it. Trad jazz was taking over, which I didn’t want to play. Mink Mulligan, The Crane River Jazz Band, Acker Bilk. And all us modern jazz players were getting driven out. Getting to America was the thing, and most people used to go on the boats, like the Queen Mary, and take a job in the band. But I found out that British Airways were flying to New York. It took fourteen hours, and you had three days off in New York, flew back — three days off in London. And I saw this as the way to be the new transatlantic jazz drummer. So I went to BOAC, and they said, “Well, you’ve just missed an intake. If you take a job here in the meantime, you stand a better chance of being taken on next time.” So I took a job in the photographic unit, and hence was the start of my new career. Unbeknownst to me, because I  thought I was going to end up in New York being a famous jazz drummer.

 

Frank Sinatra © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

As a kid, I had a definite normal upbringing. I stumbled into photography literally. I took that up and then I was teamed up with somebody and he died in a plane crash and I got offered his job on a paper. So there I am twenty, twenty-one, working on a national newspaper (The Daily Sketch).  And then the next youngest guy was thirty-one. I mean it was like a ten-year gap in the whole of Fleet Street! And you know how competitive Fleet Street is. And I said to the guy, “Len” — that was the picture editor, Len Franklin —  “I don’t really know what I’m doing.” He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you. I’ve got you here because we’re interested in young people. We wanna beat this Daily Mirror” — which was their competition — “and we wanna get hold of the young people. And we got a big feeling for music and musicians and that’s why we gave you the job.  So I want you to go down and photograph a group.”

 

So I go down to the Abbey Road, go in and there’s this group in there singing ‘Please Please Me.’ It turned out to be the Beatles. And that was the very first job I had on a national newspaper. And I took this really amateurish picture of them holding their things, ’cause I didn’t really know what to do. There really were no pictures of pop groups around at the time. So I got them with their instruments — the picture is so amateurish I can’t tell ya — but I took the picture, went back and the newspaper published the picture three months later when the record came out. ‘Please Please Me’ went to Number One, and the paper sold out that day. The paper turned out to be right. And then Len said, “Right, who else do you want to do?” And I said. “Well, the Rolling Stones are a big group. They’re better because they play the blues.”

 

 The Beatles © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

What happened was I’d got rung up by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who said, “I’d like you to take the Stones’ photos.” And I said, “Well, I can’t, I’m really busy.” “So we’ll come to you.” So I said, “Right, okay,” and off the top of my head, I had this idea to take them down to Tin Pan Alley (the center of London’s music biz). Because I didn’t like the Beatles shot. I know it’s a great shot, but I hated that shot of them holding all the instruments. So I said, “Let’s go down to Tin Pan Alley where all the songwriters are and we’ll do you like the kings of Tin Pan Alley.” So that’s what I did. I took them down to Denmark Street and all that, walking around London with their instruments and stuff to make them look cool.

I wanted to do the picture different than the Beatles shot, so I got them all standing there outside the Tin Pan Alley club in Denmark Street. They showed up looking like five ragamuffins, which suited me right down to the ground, because most of the bands wore suits, mohair jackets, all the ties and all the rest of it, and yet they looked boring. And this lot looked the real McCoy!

 

You’ve got to remember that they were a pop group who played in a little club down in Richmond (in southwest London), just a street band, a little rock ‘n’ roll band, and I wanted to give them some strong presence. At the time, they didn’t actually have a recording contract, but I wanted to make it look they had. And that’s why, as opposed to the Beatles shots, I shot them very strongly. So I shot them outside this club, and it went down a storm!

 

You can see that they had something from the way they stand. I mean, they were five individuals. The Beatles, they all looked different, but you just knew they were a quartet, where the Stones looked like five individuals. I always remember that. I remember when I took the pictures in, the picture editor said, “God, they look like freaks! They bloody look like wild men!” I said, “Well, that’s the way they are.”

 

So anyway, I knew about another group called the Dave Clark Five, and I went to photograph them, and they ran it as “Beauty and the Beasts.” That was the first double-page spread ever on pop people in newspapers, and that was start. The whole ’63 thing and everything just took off.

 

 

Chuck Berry © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

You can see that they had something from the way they stand. I mean, they were five individuals. The Beatles, they all looked different, but you just knew they were a quartet, where the Stones looked like five individuals. I always remember that. I remember when I took the pictures in, the picture editor said, “God, they look like freaks! They bloody look like wild men!” I said, “Well, that’s the way they are.”So anyway, I knew about another group called the Dave Clark Five, and I went to photograph them, and they ran it as “Beauty and the Beasts.” That was the first double-page spread ever on pop people in newspapers, and that was start. The whole ’63 thing and everything just took off.

 

PKM: Those photos not only captured, but helped create, the Swinging ’60s scene in London.

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I wanted my pictures to tell a story. Most of the groups in those days were shot in studios and they’re all boring, like the shots of the old-time movie stars. I had a 35 mil camera and I could take it anywhere, and I could take pictures in any light and I was really ahead of the game. And that’s what got me to where I was.

 

PKM: You were photographing a revolution.

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I came along at a time when young people were given a chance. I mean, Fleet Street and the whole world was run by fifty-year-old men, and suddenly I’m a kid given a chance to express myself! And I went and I photographed the Beatles, the Stones, and then I photographed David Bailey, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton. And I was photographing all these people who made the Sixties. And we all worked together. We had no idea the effect on the world and where the Beatles were gonna go.

 

 

David Bowie © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

We used to go out every night. And at that time, a photographer was like the king, like the chefs are now! It was all photographers, because I could get them into the newspaper. (David) Bailey got them into Vogue and (Terence) Donovan got them in magazines. Having the access to people like that, you wouldn’t get it today. Then, they were crying out to have their pictures taken, and wanted their pictures in newspapers. There’d never been a picture of a pop group in a newspaper, so I was a big deal. I could get them into newspapers! And I was around their age, I could converse with them. Plus, I was a musician myself.

 

And we used to sit around talking, saying, “What are we gonna do when this is all over?” Because we’re all convinced that one day in the next year it was all going to grind to a halt. I mean, Keith Richards thought the whole thing would last two years and that was it. And look at the Stones now! They’re still rocking away. Ringo, for example, wanted to buy a chain of hairdressers for his wife and things like that. And we all thought we’d have to get a proper job and we used to laugh our heads off at Mick Jagger singing at forty, the old man. It was a joke and he’s still rocking it out now!

 

 

Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin by © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

 

That time was the best time ever. There’ll never be another time like it. It was just a freak of nature, that everything came in that way of the young. And we didn’t misuse it, either.  In fact, this was the first time young people were ever given any credence at all. We created fashion, we created new models, because everything was always very “gloves on” and all that. And everything just loosened up. It was an incredible time. I wish it would come back.

 

I’d got rung up by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who said, “I’d like you to take the Stones’ photos.” And I said, “Well, I can’t, I’m really busy.” “So we’ll come to you.” So I said, “Right, okay,” and off the top of my head, I had this idea to take them down to Tin Pan Alley…

 

PKM: You went on to create some of pop culture’s most iconic images of stars, from Sinatra to Elton John, Brigitte Bardot to David Bowie —  I know you married Faye Dunaway (1983-87), but did you become friends with any of the others?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: I never get too friendly with artists and people I work with, because if you get to know them, you’ll be the one ending up sitting having a drink with ’em, and someone else is taking the pictures! And I’ve learned that with Frank Sinatra, because when you’re around somebody a lot, naturally, you’re with ’em after hours and all that. And I realized with him that I don’t wanna be the one sitting and having a drink with him and having a laugh. I want to be the photographer. So we sort of went our own way for a couple of years, because if he extends this friendship to you, it looks like you’re rebuffing him. But really, I was just being smart. It’s best for him and it’s best for me. I didn’t want to become part of the entourage because I wanted to keep my own opinion and unbiased eye on whatever I saw. That’s my game.

 

I think an important part of my work is that I didn’t look at the fame of the person. I always looked at the person. For example, Harrison Ford was a carpenter, and that’s the way that I looked at him. And Sinatra was a waiter. And different things like that. I always realized that people, before they were famous, had ordinary jobs. I mean, fame is a nothing thing, you know. You wouldn’t like to be famous, believe me.  Because everyone’s looking at you.  You walk into a shop —  I mean it would drive me mad.

 

Fleet Street and the whole world was run by fifty-year-old men, and suddenly I’m a kid given a chance to express myself! And I went and I photographed the Beatles, the Stones, and then I photographed David Bailey, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton. And I was photographing all these people who made the Sixties. And we all worked together.  We had no idea the effect on the world and where the Beatles were gonna go.

 

PKM: So you’re retired from the game. Do you ever get the urge to follow any of today’s celebs?

 

TERRY O’NEILL: To be honest, I don’t have much interest in taking pictures now. That’s mainly because no one excites me. You know, when you’ve done people like Sinatra, Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Brigitte Bardot, where do you go? All today’s lot, they all seem the same to me.

 

Terry O’Neill

 

When I look back on my life I feel I’ve been lucky. I have really been lucky and you know, as far as thinking I’m talented, I don’t even think of myself as a talent.  I just think I was somebody who met the Beatles, who met the Stones, and I did this and I did that and something and something and something, and it was just my way of life. I just did something different every day. It was just natural for me to take pictures. I didn’t really think of talent or ability or something. In fact, I hate cameras. I know this sounds funny, but I hate cameras. I have to use them to get the image, but I’m not really into it all.

 

And when people tell me I’m an extraordinary talent, I find it hard to believe. I just look at all my pictures and I think, “I coulda done that better, and if I’d only done this, and if I’d waited until he’s moved another six foot forward or something.” I see all sorts of faults in them, but people see them as something different. I don’t think any true artist is happy. In fact, I haven’t really met one. They all drive themselves mad along with me, so join the club.

 

Find Terry O’Neill’s work at IconicImages.net

 

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Terry O’Neill:

Photographs:   iconicimages.net

Instagram:  instagram.com/terryoneillofficial

Twitter:   twitter.com/terry_oneill

Facebook: facebook.com/terryoneill

 

BURT KEARNS

Burt Kearns wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. His new book, THE SHOW WON'T GO ON, was written with Jeff Abraham and will be published by Chicago Review Press' A Cappella Books in September 2019.

 

WHO WAS KILLING 
THE COUNTRY STARS? 
STRINGBEAN, 
THE GRAND OLE OPRY MURDERS 
AND NASHVILLE’S 
DAYS OF FEAR

Lost in the shadows of the Watergate hearings and disco fever, four grisly murders riveted and terrified Music City USA, rekindling a wave of paranoia reminiscent of the Manson Family killings

December 19, 2018

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

When the Hee Haw and Grand Ole Opry star “Stringbean” and his wife were murdered at their home outside Nashville, Tennessee in November 1973, the story made national news. Then, it was quickly lost in the shuffle of Watergate, Skylab and the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III.

 

In and around Music City, though, the hillbilly homicides were only the beginning. Not many days later, another Opry performer and his lady friend wound up dead in a pool of blood with bullets in their backs, and Nashville entered a period of fear that could only be compared to Hollywood in the days following the Manson murders. It was a time from which the city, and music scene, never recovered. 

 

Stringbean was Dave Akeman, the long, tall, sad-faced virtuoso banjo player and country comedian who made himself look even longer, taller, and stringbeanier by wearing a costume of a shoulder-to-ankle shirt tucked into a little short pair of blue jeans belted way down below his knees (so he looked like he had an extra-long trunk and tiny little legs). Born in Kentucky, Stringbean was one of the best clawhammer banjo pickers ever. He’d been a country music star since he joined the Opry in 1942, playing with Bill Monroe. He’d been a bona fide national star since 1969, as part of the cast of the television variety series, Hee Haw.

 

Everybody in Nashville knew the stories about Stringbean. You see, even though Stringbean was most surely a millionaire, he lived in a tiny little cabin on the top of a hill like some kind of hillbilly. His only extravagances, if you could call them that in 1973, were a color television set and a Cadillac car. Stringbean bought a new Cadillac every year, and he paid cash. Not that he knew how to drive. His wife Estelle drove him everywhere. Stringbean and Estelle were known to flash wads of green when they came into town. Word around Music City was that Stringbean didn’t trust banks, not since so many of them failed during the Depression. Any money he had, folks guessed, he carried around on his person. Or, they figured, he kept piled up in his cabin. Stacks of money. Maybe in the walls. Maybe under the outhouse. Maybe millions.

Stringbean and his wife Estelle

 

On Saturday night, November 10, 1973, fifty-eight-year-old Stringbean performed at the Grand Ole Opry downtown at the Ryman Auditorium.  After the show, Estelle, who was sixty, packed Stringbean’s banjo and costume into the back of the Cadillac, and drove him home to their three-room cabin, tucked away on 142 acres at 2308 Baker Road, just outside Ridgetop, north of the city. It was just another night, until the next cold and frosty Sunday morning, when Stringbean’s neighbor Louis Marshall Jones arrived to pick him up for a hunting trip in Virginia. Jones was well known, too. He was Grandpa Jones, a banjo player and old timey singer who often performed with Stringbean at the Opry. On Hee Haw, he and Stringbean were joined at the hip.

 

Grandpa Jones encountered Estelle’s dead body in the weeds, next to the driveway about twenty yards from the front porch.  It looked as if she was running away when somebody shot her in the back. Stringbean, covered in blood and also shot dead, was face-down, inside the house. Stringbean’s banjo, a priceless instrument willed to him by the legendary Uncle Dave Macon, was on the porch.

 

“This is so sad. Why would anyone want to harm String?” Opry star Roy Acuff pleaded when he and others arrived at the scene. “He was such a gentle guy, always helping others. Money, I guess. That’s why they did it. Look at that little house. That’s the way String wanted to live.  He could have bought ten farms that size, with ten mansions on them, but he preferred to fish, hunt and sit in that rockin’ chair and look up at the mountains.”

 

Roy Acuff said that Stringbean’s killers should be strung up.

Roy Acuff (center) with police at the Stringbean murder scene

 

Stringbeans’ cabin the morning after

 

Police said the motive surely was robbery. The cabin had been ransacked and some of Estelle’s things were missing.  There was evidence that there may have been three killers, since the fatal bullets came in three different calibers. A bullet hole at the back of the cabin indicated Stringbean may have gotten off some shots himself. He was known to carry a gun in his car, but police couldn’t find it. Odd, though, with all that talk about Stringbean not trusting banks, that detectives found seven bank books in the cabin. All added up, they showed that Stringbean had entrusted the bankers with more than half a million of his dollars.

 

Odder still, after police were done and Stringbean’s body was carted off to the funeral home, the mortician found $3,500 stitched into his overalls. When they cut the brassiere from poor dead Estelle, her breasts and $2,200 spilled out. Seems the police, and whoever shot up the couple, overlooked the $5,720 they were wearing.

 

Tuesday night, November 27, seventeen nights after Stringbean and Estelle pulled their Cadillac up to their cabin for the last time, police were called to Milson Alley near the intersection of Jo Johnston and 12th Avenues in North Nashville. The body of fifty-five year-old Jimmy Widener was sprawled out in the brush near the alleyway. Splayed across his legs was the body of Mildred Hazelwood. Both had been beaten up and shot from behind, twice, he in the back and neck, she in the back and head, with a pistol, execution-style.

 

“From the angle of the bullet wounds, it appears they may have been forced to lie on the ground before being shot,” Metro Police Lieutenant Tom Cathey told reporters. “Robbery was the motive, but I won’t say what (was taken).”

 

Mildred was forty-seven, the widow of performer and songwriter Eddie Hazelwood. She lived in Laguna Hills, California, a long way to travel to wind up dead atop Jimmy Widener’s legs. Jimmy was a guitar player. He’d been a resident of sunny California himself, but that was more than thirty years earlier, when he played with cowboy singers Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. He’d been in Nashville since the early 1940s, and for the past ten years, played rhythm guitar with The Rainbow Ranch Boys, the backing band for country star and Opry regular Hank Snow.

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The story emerged they were just friends, if that. Mildred had come to town to sell some songs and unreleased recordings from her dead husband. Jimmy was thinking of going solo. They were walking to the Holiday Inn, where Mildred was registered, when The Reaper approached. No wallet or purse was found with the victims, so the robbery theory sounded right. Even so, Bud Wendell, manager of the Opry House, exhibited a big case of the willies. “Killed? I can’t believe it!” Wendell said he’d seen Jimmy Widener on his last day on earth, “right here at the Opry House, meeting with artists, promoters and bookers.”

 

“First it was Stringbean — a good guy. Now it is Jimmy Widener — a good guy,” Hank Snow said. “I wonder when it’s going to stop.”

 

Eighteen days, four corpses, two of them Opry performers killed after visiting the Opry. Who was killing the country stars? After Stringbean and his wife were murdered, Nashville stars made sure to lock their doors. In wake of this latest countrified double murder, country music greats, like the movie stars in the canyons and hills of Hollywood four years earlier, hired security, added extra locks to their gates, slept with a gun under the pillow. Everybody, from Roy Acuff to Tex Ritter to Bill Anderson, wondered who was going to be next. 

 

They wondered for a few days, at least. On Thursday, November 29, two nights after the Widener and Hazelwood bodies were found, Lt. Harold Woods and three other Nashville Metro detectives led a raid on the Cayce Motel in South Memphis. They took two suspects outside the motel into custody, but when they went inside to arrest a third man, he started shooting. The cops unloaded their firepower, lobbed in some tear gas for good measure, and managed to clip Maurice McKinney Taylor in the chest as he tried to flush credit cards and jewelry down the toilet. Taylor was thirty years old. They took him away, along with the two others, twenty-four year-old Richard Benjamin Dunn and Phillip Glen Mason, twenty-three. The trio had come all the way from Los Angeles. 

 

Once they carted them to the Memphis jail, the cops called Memphis Gas Light & Power to dismantle the toilet.

 

On Saturday, Taylor, Dunn, and Mason were charged in the deaths of Jimmy Widener and Mildred Hazelwood: two counts each of murder, armed robbery and auto theft. The Nashville detectives lugged seven packages of evidence out of the motel, including jewelry, credit cards, the alleged murder weapon (a 9mm pistol), and in Mason’s pink suitcase, the keys to Jimmy’s turquoise and black 1966 Lincoln Continental. Memphis cops found the Continental nearby, and said the killers had driven it from the murder scene.

 

Lt. Woods and Det. Sgt. Luther Summers loaded the shackled prisoners into a car for the ride to Nashville. Det. George Warren drove a car loaded with evidence, and Det. Harold Hamm got to drive Jimmy Widener’s Continental back for more tests.

 

News of the arrests of three black men for killing Jimmy Widener and Mildred Hazelwood, twenty days after the Stringbean murders, did little to calm the paranoid stars of Music City U.S.A. It was determined that the trio had nothing to do with the Stringbean murders. Whoever killed Mr. and Mrs. Stringbean were still out there, and no one knew when they’d strike again. The calendar page turned to a new year and it looked like the police were making no progress. The reward money added up to $25,000.

 

The story hit the wires on the seventeenth day of 1974: “Four men, including three brothers and a cousin, were arrested Wednesday on charges of killing David ‘Stringbean’ Akeman…”

 

John A. Brown and his cousin Marvin Douglas Brown, both twenty-three, were charged with two counts of murder. Marvin’s brothers, Charles Brown, thirty-one, and twenty-six year-old Ray Brown, were charged as accessories to murder, and with receiving and concealing stolen property.

 

These weren’t African American invaders in the — with all apologies to Charley Pride — pristine cracker lily white home of country music. These were rednecks, local yokels, Stringbean’s neighbors, raised in Greenbrier, a few miles from his cabin.  They grew up hearing stories of the Opry star and his caches of cash, and the visions proved more intoxicating than George Jones’ White Lightnin’, so much so that they were willing to kill for a slug.

 

The arrests were the result of a “sixty-seven day, around-the-clock investigation,” Assistant Police Chief Donald Barton announced. “A long, drawn out investigation,” acting chief Joe Casey said.  “We have been gathering evidence practically from the time this happened until today.” The police said the Browns knew they were under surveillance for quite a while, but none made a move to get out of town.

 

According to the police, cousins Marvin and John Brown had been inside Stringbean’s cabin for hours, waiting for the star to return from the Opry and lead them to the cash. The Cadillac pulled up, and Stringbean went inside, where he confronted the country cousins. There may have been a scuffle. The cousins got the drop on Stringbean and blasted him in the living room. When Estelle realized what was happening, she turned and ran toward the Cadillac. She begged for her life. She was shot three times.

 

Stringbean killer John A. Brown

 

Stringbean killer Marvin Douglas Brown

 

Police wouldn’t reveal the evidence but said some of Stringbean’s money had been recovered. (It turned out the thieves made off with some guns, a chainsaw, Estelle’s handbag, and $250 they fished out of the front pocket of Stringbean’s overalls. They left the Cadillac and drove off with Stringbean’s station wagon, which they dumped.)

 

Six months later, on July 23, 1974, Nashville Police Sgt. Sherman Nickens waded into a murky pond near Greenbrier. He was accompanied by a reporter and photographer for the Nashville Banner and suspect John Brown. Cousin Marvin told police to search there, promising they’d find evidence. The sarge fished out a rotting vinyl handbag. Like O.J. Simpson’s Louis Vuitton bag would be twenty years later, this bag had been the subject of an intense search by investigators. 

 

Inside the bag were $3,300 in uncashed checks, two recording tapes, some Hee Haw scripts, Stringbean’s crushed straw stage hat, his horn-rimmed glasses, and most tragically and damning to the Brown clan, his costume, that one-piece set of long shirt connected to those tiny midget pants that made Stringbean look like such a stringbean.

Stringbean and Grandpa Jones

 

On Monday, October 28, 1974, close to a year after the reign of terror, Nashville’s Trial of the Century got underway downtown in the Davidson County courthouse — or to be more accurate, the Trials of The Century got underway.  There were two of them, simultaneously. The accused murderers of Mr. and Mrs. Stringbean were in the courtroom of Judge Allen R. Cornelius. Criminal Court Judge John L. Draper presided over the trial of three men accused of killing Jimmy Widener and Mildred Hazelwood.

 

Security measures at the courthouse were unprecedented. Metal detectors, like the ones they used at airports, were at the entrance.  Sheriff’s officers were working overtime. Briefcases, shopping bags, camera bags and any other “unnecessary objects” were banned from the courtrooms. “Our number one fear is Brown against Brown,” Sheriff Fate Thomas told a reporter. “Our second fear is the irate spectator.” Their third fear were black militants. The Widener suspects were believed to have a connection.

 

Two Nashville television stations were broadcasting live reports from the corridor outside the courtrooms. An attorney for Marvin Brown complained about the circus atmosphere.

Nine men and three women were empaneled for the trial of Marvin and his cousin John Brown. The first witness was Grandpa Jones. He testified that the night of the murder — and Stringbean’s last performance at the Grand Ole Opry — he and Stringbean had made plans to go grouse hunting in Virginia. When he arrived at Stringbean’s cabin the next morning, he found Estelle’s body in the front yard. She was covered in frost.

 

“I ran to the house, opened the storm door, looked inside and saw Stringbean lying face down in front of the fireplace in the living room,” Grandpa testified.

Stringbean and his wife Estelle

 

After Grandpa left the stand, Marvin Brown surprised everyone by pleading guilty to killing Stringbean, but not Estelle. When his co-defendant was asked to enter a plea, he said not a word. John Brown said he didn’t even remember being at Stringbean’s cabin because he was so whacked out on booze and drugs that night.

 

There was equal hubbub in the neighboring courtroom. Two of the men who were originally charged with two counts of murder were allowed to plead guilty to being accessories after the fact (the police just couldn’t place them at the murder scene). Judge Draper sentenced them both to four- to seven-year terms, leaving Maurice McKinney Taylor, the one who shot it out with cops in Memphis, to face murder charges alone.

 

A celebrity witness led off the testimony here, as well. Hank Snow said he paid his guitarist Jimmy Widener $400 a few days before he was murdered. A waitress at the Pitt Grill testified that Taylor entered the joint while Jimmy and Mildred Hazelwood were dining there. She said she recognized the suspect because she’d argued with him earlier about a sandwich and glass of milk he’d scarfed down, but claimed he hadn’t ordered. This time, she said, Taylor didn’t order anything. He left the eatery at 9:40 PM and walked south, in the direction of the Ramada Inn. Jimmy and Mildred left ten minutes later. They walked northeast, toward the Holiday Inn. A civilian identification technician in the Metro Police Department with the classic country music name of Jimmie Rogers testified that Taylor’s thumbprint was found on a drinking glass in Mildred Hazelwood’s room at the Holiday Inn.

 

That thumbprint, Assistant District Attorney John Rodgers said in his summation, proved that the suspect approached the couple as they were about to enter Mildred’s room, and followed them in. “This man was so callous that not only did he rob them, but he had a drink in that room!” he thundered to the jury, as Maurice Taylor smiled thinly. “Fearing the alarm would be sounded before he could leave the motel,” the prosecutor theorized, Taylor then forced the couple into Widener’s car, and made the guitar man drive three blocks to Milson Alley.

 

“He told them to stand outside in the cold, wet alley, with their backs to the car. The defendant slid across the seat and took his position in the driver’s seat. At that point, the defendant executed Mr. Widener. Then he executed Mrs. Hazelwood.”

 

Metro Detective R.C. Jackson testified about finding the bodies. He said he removed “a few dollars” in cash from Mildred’s coat pocket, and he removed her Holiday Inn motel room key — from Jimmy Widener’s pocket. That last detail raised an eyebrow or two, but it had no bearing on the murders.

 

Widener suspects – The Tennessean Dec 11, 1973

 

A major difference between these Trials of the Century and ones to follow was their swiftness. In the Stringbean trial, the defense took a little more than a day to present its entire case. One witness was John Brown’s wife. She testified that her husband was “moody and quiet” when he returned home at one AM, the morning after the murders. “I asked him if he was all right,” she testified, “He said, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I didn’t sleep well. I knew something had happened.”

 

The following afternoon, she said, John took her aside and told her, “‘We robbed somebody last night and it’s some important people. We went to rob Stringbean and they’re dead now.’ I asked him why. He said, ‘I don’t know why. Stringbean came in shooting and Doug said I killed him and that’s all I remember.'”

 

That couldn’t have helped the defense much.

 

The case against Maurice Taylor went to the jury on Thursday, Halloween. Taylor’s public defender had asked on Wednesday that the trial be delayed just 24 hours so he could get a fingerprint expert in from New York City to challenge Jimmy Rogers’ thumbprint ID — the lynchpin of the prosecution’s theory.  The judge said “No.”  The jury — also nine men and three women — deliberated for a little over three hours before coming back with a guilty verdict. They recommended two life terms, to be served concurrently.

 

Grandpa Jones carries Stringbean's coffin

 

Three days later, the Stringbean jury also deliberated for a little over three hours. On Saturday, November 2, they came back with a verdict. John A. Brown Jr. and Marvin Douglas Brown were both guilty of first-degree murder. The jury recommended 99-year sentences on each of two counts. They, too, asked that the sentences be served concurrently, but Judge Cornelius decreed that the terms would run consecutively. That could put the Browns away for 198 years.

 

The trials were over.  The juries were dismissed. The convicted men were sent away to prison. Nashville, once a music capitol whose stars pretended to be ordinary folks and where everyone felt they were part of a big small town, changed. It was never quite the same after the murders of Mr. and  Mrs. Stringbean, Jimmy Widener, and Mildred Hazelwood.

 

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Grandpa Jones performed his last Grand Ole Opry show on January 3, 1998, at the Grand Ole Opry House in the Nashville suburbs. He was backstage, on his way out the door, when someone stopped him for an autograph. According to Louvin brother Charlie, Grandpa made one last attempt at a joke, saying, “It looks like I’ve hit a snag.” Then he hit the floor, victim of a stroke.  Several more strokes followed. Grandpa was placed in the McKendree Village Home Health Center in Hermitage, Tennessee on February 10. He died there nine days later, age 84.

 

Marvin Douglas Brown died of natural causes in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in 2003. He was buried in the prison graveyard. His cousin John Brown was released on parole in 2014. It’s not known what became of Maurice Taylor. His victims were not so famous.

 

One last note: In 1996, the most recent owner of Stringbean’s cabin noticed that one of the bricks in the chimney was loose. When he removed it, he found a hidey hole with twenty thousand dollars in cash stashed inside. The money was so badly deteriorated it wasn’t usable. It’s not known how much more had rotted away.  Stringbean had hidden away his money in his cabin, after all.

 

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The Akeman Family hosts the Stringbean Memorial Bluegrass Festival at Stringbean Memorial Park in Tyner, KY. The 23rd Annual Festival will be held on June 20-21-22,  2019

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BURT KEARNS wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM have written a book about performers who died onstage. THE SHOW WON’T GO ON will be published by Chicago Review Press / A Capella Books in September 2019.