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Profile in Pizzazz - Judy Helton

November 2008

By Amanda Newton

Helton’s gift is truly amazing. She can take any photograph, or magazine picture, and draw or paint an exact replica. Helton, 70, can do this never having taken a lesson or any kind of formal training. She just does it. It is not difficult for her to do and she loves doing it.

“My mother claimed I kept in the lines (coloring) when I was a little bitty baby kid,” Helton said. “Now, you know how mothers are. But I have always loved to draw.”

Helton was born in Austin and raised in Dallas. She had a childhood that helped her develop her gift, she said.

“I had a privileged childhood and never had to work so I had the time to develop (it). A lot of people have tremendous talent but have to slave away and work and never have the time to give to it so it can come to its full fruition.”

Childhood asthma kept her out of school and she had to be tutored at home. The asthma didn’t, however, keep her from her second passion: singing.  

The first time she sang at a “honky-tonk” she was about 15 years old. She was soon joined by her brother and sister and they became a regular act for a local show, the “Big D Jamboree.” Many Nashville stars sang on the program and Helton and her siblings would sing back-up. She met many stars from the Grand ol’ Opry through the show and developed a love for country music and the people who played it.

She and her siblings also did a lot of studio singing in local recording studios. She met Waylon Jennings during this period and “was very fond of him” before anyone had even heard of him.

“When I was singing, Willie Nelson was first starting out,” Helton said. “He was young, clean-shaven and had this lovely pompadour like Elvis. He was not this grizzled hippie that he is now. He was just a well groomed, quiet and soft-spoken young man.”

Helton sang for several years with Jan Garber’s Orchestra at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and later at The Golden Nugget with Norro Wilson’s show. They often performed six shows a night for a couple of weeks at a time. The first show would start at 8 p.m. and they would finish the last one around 6 a.m. Helton said she is a night owl because she kept musician’s hours for so long.

Even though Helton hates to travel, and in fact employed an agent during her years of painting so she wouldn’t have to travel, she wanted to sing at the Golden Nugget so badly she put up with the traveling it entailed.

“I either went on the Greyhound bus or in a huge station wagon with about seven guys and guitar necks sticking out the windows,” she remembered with a laugh. “We would drive straight through. We would stop at a service station in the desert and I would just soak every stitch I had on sopping wet and 15 minutes later it would be bone dry.”

For many years Helton sang at the Aragon Ballroom in Dallas. She loved singing in the “cavernous building” with a western swing band filled with former musicians from Bob Willis’ and Hank Thompson’s bands.

After the Aragon closed she was out of sorts and needed something to do. She began painting and her former employer at the Aragon helped get her set up with a studio and gallery. Her agent would go out to the West Coast and contact celebrities for her. They would send her photographs of themselves and she would paint their portraits. She also did a lot of work for the rich and powerful in the Dallas area. She painted Brenda Lee’s two daughters, Henry Mancini, and Phyllis Diller, “right after her first facelift.”

“She looked quite beautiful and very glamorous,” Helton recalled.

Perhaps one of her favorite celebrity portraits, and one with the best story attached, wasn’t a commissioned piece at all.

In April of 1972 “Cosmopolitan” magazine ran a near-nude centerfold of actor Burt Reynolds. It was quite scandalous at the time. Helton, thinking she could make a lot of money selling it to the right person, painted an almost life-size rendering of the magazine photo. It took her months of work but she never found the right buyer. She kept the portrait in her studio.

One day, Reynolds was in Dallas filming and a mutual friend told him he should go by Helton’s gallery. It was winter and Helton recalled they barely had time to get the studio warmed up before Reynolds arrived. He admired and “really seemed to appreciate” all of the paintings in Helton’s outer gallery. She then told him she had a surprise and took him to her studio where she had the painting of him on an 8-foot easel.

“He went back there and sat and just studied it…looked and looked and looked. He laughed and told me I had ‘done it’ and I asked him what it was I ‘had done.’”

“He told me ‘you got it. It is just supposed to be a joke. The twinkle is in the eyes. It was just something fun to do. It wasn’t supposed to be all that scandal and you captured it.’”

“I told him I was glad he liked it because I was giving it to him,” Helton recalled.  

“He looked up and asked if I was kidding and I told him I was not. The look on his face - money couldn’t have bought that,” Helton said. “He had it crated up and transported it in his personal trailer to his ranch in Florida. I didn’t need the money so why should I put the bite on him. He just loved it and was so happy with it.”

These days, Helton lives at NurseCare in Shreveport. She props herself up in her bed with her cat, Fluff E. Katt, stretched over her lap and paints for the residents and the people who live there. The only subject she does not require a picture of to paint is her roommate, Wanda Newport, and Jesus Christ. She has done many amazing painting of Jesus and said he is her favorite subject.

She loves living at NurseCare and loves to use her gift to bring happiness to the people around her, she said.

“I don’t sell them (paintings and drawings),” she said. “I look at it like this - I was given the talent and I made a ton of money when I had my studio. I still have the talent and now I am using it. I got it free and I give it out free. These people here don’t have anymore money than I do and that shouldn’t stop them from having these.”