A Little Thing Called Life

by Linda Thompson

  My hopes are floating in the clouds

  The wind repeats your name out loud

  Ohhh

  Heaven holds the ones I love

  LYRIC: LINDA THOMPSON

  Chapter Nineteen

  Voices that Care

  After David and I got back together, it didn’t make any of the problems that we’d been having go away, but we both seemed to understand much more clearly that we wanted to be together, wanted an incredible life as one, and so we got to work making that vision a reality.

  One of the things that always brought us all together was traveling. In addition to our annual trips to Canada to visit David’s family, we took our children just about everywhere. Ski vacations to Whistler, Banff Springs, Lake Louise, Lake Tahoe, and tennis camp in Florida. Trips to Disneyland, Disney World, Knott’s Berry Farm, Medieval Times dinner theater. We traveled all over Europe, went to Japan, and explored Africa. We toured the White House and saw Broadway musicals; we hired private yachts to cruise the Greek Islands and St. Bart’s; we went to Hawaii many times. David and I both wanted to widen our children’s horizons.

  Everywhere we went, and whatever we did, we tried to lead by example for all our children, and I aimed to instill positive values in my sons. I felt a very strong responsibility to raise my boys to be understanding and accepting of other people and cultures, our similarities and our differences. Through all this travel, they got to see firsthand that the world is a very diverse place, with different cultures, religions, languages, values, histories, ideas, and even definitions of beauty. These teachings were especially critical, I believed, because my sons would no doubt one day find it necessary to try to understand the truth about their dad and his gender issues.

  They also came back to Tennessee with me quite often, and actually lived there with me for a month at a time when I filmed Hee Haw twice a year. Not only did I want them with me, but I also wanted to imbue them with at least some of the culture in which I’d been raised. They got to eat fried catfish and turnip greens. They were exposed to generous helpings of country music and the blues. They got to absorb at least some of Southern gentility and sensibility. We caught fireflies in the summer months and even released them in our hotel room and watched them light up as they flew free. I’ll never forget one day when Pappaw said, “Let’s go over yonder directly.” Brandon asked, “Mommy, just where is Yonder and when exactly is ‘directly’?”

  Sometimes that open-mindedness they learned while traveling even had to extend to David who brought his own peccadillos to each trip. David is terribly claustrophobic, and I was protective of him, trying to avoid situations that might make him feel closed in. He hasn’t taken an elevator in well over thirty years because of his claustrophobia. He has been known to climb forty flights of stairs to avoid getting on one.

  One year we went on a grand tour of Europe with a huge group of people. We took my brother and sister-in-law, five of David’s sisters, their husbands, some of their kids, and all of our children; plus each of our kids was allowed to bring a friend. We had so many people with us that we had taken over most of an entire charter bus. On one leg of the journey, our whole group had gotten off the bus to go see the Eiffel Tower.

  It was raining and David and I had seen the tower before, so when David decided to stay on the bus, I agreed to keep him company.

  “We have to lock up the bus,” the driver informed us. “You can stay on if you want, but we’re going to lock it.”

  David agreed, not thinking about the fact that he wouldn’t be able to get off the bus until our group came back from their tour. The driver locked the bus and walked away.

  “Do you think they left the door open?” he asked, looking around.

  “No, he said they were going to lock the bus,” I said.

  He quickly began to panic, having heart palpitations and pacing the aisle.

  “Come and sit here, and I’ll scratch your scalp,” I said. “I’ll rub your shoulders. I’ll try to relax you.” Thank God I stayed with him. He would likely have broken the windows otherwise. I loved the times when David and I connected for each other like that.

  The highlight on our travel calendar each year was our summer trips to British Columbia. And it was on one of those trips, in 1990, that David and I had a chance encounter with someone who would become an important part of our lives for years to come.

  Usually the whole family—the boys and I, David, and his daughters—would spend weeks out on the boat together, but this particular year we were in a bit of a tiff, and we mutually decided that David would stay on land with his daughters and visit with his family, while I’d head out to Desolation Sound with the boys and the captain for a week.

  Then David received a call from his friend, Richard Baskin, who was a composer and producer, and around this time, Barbra Streisand’s live-in love.

  He asked if a friend and his wife could go out on David’s boat with us.

  “Linda is taking the boat out with her kids, but I suppose they could go out with them,” David said. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Kevin Costner and his wife,” Richard said.

  “The hell I’ll let Kevin Costner get on that boat with my girl,” David said, recalling, I’m sure, that I always commented on how handsome the actor was. “No way.”

  When I arrived at the boat with Brandon and Brody in tow, ready to embark, I was shocked and confused to see David there, waiting for me, clearly ready to go out with us. The girls were not with him.

  “I’ve decided to come on the boat with you,” he said.

  “I thought we had agreed that the boys and I would go alone,” I said. “Why are you coming with us?”

  “Because Kevin Costner is coming with his wife,” he said.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, knowing just how David thought and how jealous he could be. I had to smile, and then he and I both broke into a giggle.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a Polaroid picture of me letting you go out into the open sea with Kevin Costner,” David howled.

  The truth is that I was so happy and relieved to see David. I was always anguished when we would argue because I wanted nothing more than to just be loving together. When we were in that loving frame of mind nothing was better.

  Later that day Kevin and his then wife, Cindy, arrived. They were darling, the most down-to-earth people imaginable. They even showed up with their own candy bars, in case we didn’t have any sweets on the boat. Anybody that shows up with a little brown paper bag of candy bars, just to be safe, is my kind of people, I thought.

  “I just finished making this film,” Kevin told us when we got to talking.

  “Oh, really, what’s it called?” I asked.

  “Dances with Wolves,” he said.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “I think I’ve heard about that.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “It’s a long film, and I directed it, and I starred in it. And I’m exhausted. I’m just depleted.”

  As was his way, Kevin understated the significance of his film, displaying his characteristic humility. Dances with Wolves was not only a blockbuster film, but also one of the most beautiful cinematic experiences any movie enthusiast could ever have.

  Kevin was a guy who loved to be in the water, loved to be out on the dingy, loved to fish. He was a real guy’s guy, but also very suave and charming. Cindy was a doll, too. As I remember, when they met in college, she played Snow White at Disneyland as her summer job, which seemed appropriate. We got to be good friends and stayed in touch after our boat trip.

  In fact, Kevin invited David and me to the Dances with Wolves premiere in November 1990. And while neither David nor I realized it at the time, this idle boat trip with Kevin and the friendship that it formed would end up spurring one of our most satisfying and successful collaborations ever.

  The longer that David and I were together, the more we came to understand that part of achieving the vision of what our relationship could be came from the fact that we were both such social creatures.
Gone were the days of staying home and watching TV with Elvis or going to bed early so I could rise with Bruce and the sun. Instead, David and I enjoyed a vibrant and invigorating social life, and over time that became one of our most rewarding ways to spend time together.

  David and I always enjoyed ourselves when we went out together, and became known as something of an “it” couple, with abundant invitations to all kinds of parties.

  “As soon as you and David got here, the party started,” people always said afterward.

  David was, and still is, quite charming and very entertaining. He had a fantastic sense of humor to go along with his incomparable talent. That’s the David I fell in love with, and that’s the David who made me fall in love with him again and again. When we were socializing, I could tap back into that original feeling of love he’d inspired in me, even though we experienced so many contentious moments in our private life. Our natural, affectionate rapport in public did a great deal to repair our private rifts and hold us together as a couple.

  David loved being the center of attention. He didn’t like to just blend. When we arrived, he started snapping his fingers.

  “You got a piano?” he almost always asked the host.

  He sat down and started playing, people sang along, and the crowd loved it. Many times hosts even asked him to bring in singers to entertain their party guests. David was kind of like the go-to party entertainer. He and I even had this little routine we did a lot. David brought me into his act like, “Let’s tell the joke about the couple from Pensacola,” and given my fifteen years on Hee Haw, I could certainly deliver a punch line. I used to joke that David was the dancing chicken at these festivities, and I was his sidekick. Over time, it became a running joke: Oh, I’m with the piano player. But, of course, David was not just any piano player. He is a musical genius, and he was the man who held my heart in his talented hands for many years. I appreciated his talents and enjoyed his showmanship as much as anybody. I was always proud of him when we went out, and he was the center of it all.

  During these years, Hollywood mogul Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara, often hosted lavish, glamorous parties, and through them we met many people who became dear friends. I reconnected with Don Rickles, whom I still remembered so fondly from my time in Las Vegas with Elvis. We met Sidney Poitier, Jackie Collins, and Michael Caine, all of whom we would vacation with many times over the years. That was one of the best things about my relationship with David, other than our symbiotic creativity: all the friendships that we both shared and loved, and the many good times we had with them.

  We must have been highly entertaining, because David often didn’t seem to have a clue about propriety, which could lead to awkwardness at many of these elevated social functions but made him all the more lovable. He was completely unbridled and unfiltered. He was so funny and talented that he almost always got away with it, and his irreverence became a part of his appeal. Even in the most extreme cases, like the time we met Nancy Reagan.

  We were at a party and Nancy was with us when David started telling the most profane, off-color joke imaginable. As soon as I knew where he was going, I was practically kicking him under the table.

  “No, don’t tell that joke,” I warned. “That’s so inappropriate.”

  When he got to the part about licking a goat’s penis, no one laughed and everyone just looked at each other. Then there was a slight, polite murmur.

  “That’s quite the joke,” Nancy Reagan then said, always her gracious self.

  David the party guest was great. If I could have had that David all the time, I’d probably still be married to him. But the David that I brought home with me was not always the same person who had performed for the crowd.

  I’m sure David had his own complaints about me, too, but it felt to me like David only cared about impressing others and had no concern for how his everyday behavior impacted me. The prospect of marriage seemed uncertain. I didn’t care that he was inappropriate—God knows Elvis had that same instinct in spades. It was more that I felt David seldom seemed to afford me the kindnesses that he showed others, especially when we were alone and there was no one for him to impress.

  In fact, the subject of marriage had become ammunition of sorts during our regular confrontations. I was genuinely torn. I knew he was difficult. He was the most difficult man I’d ever loved. And, needless to say, I’ve loved some complicated, difficult men. I didn’t like how he treated me. I consistently felt like he didn’t show me the respect I deserved. But I was also deeply in love with him, so we always made up. It was a tumultuous, complicated, and yet enduring love affair.

  Fortunately, whenever there was doubt and tension between us, there was also music. And perhaps in the end, that was the real glue that kept us together; for every temporary rift we experienced, we had a creative collaboration to reunite us.

  In 1991, we joined forces for one of the proudest moments of my career. When the Gulf War broke out, my sons were seven and nine. I looked at them and thought: Oh my God, if they were draft age, and the draft was implemented, my kids would have to go. I’d move to Canada. I’d move to Australia. I’d take them anywhere to keep them from having to go over and fight in this war. Even thought I am a proud patriot, I found the Gulf War a difficult one to stand behind. And every patriot’s heart has to be challenged when your child is involved in conflict and exposed to danger. I felt such sadness for the parents of the kids who did have to go into battle. I wanted to do something to reach out to our soldiers in the Persian Gulf to extend our best thoughts and love to them during what must have been the most difficult time in their lives. I conceived the idea to create a song and an event that would be completely apolitical. It wasn’t for the war. It wasn’t against the war. It was meant to comfort those the war impacted most directly.

  “I want to do a song for the soldiers,” I said to David.

  “Okay, I’m on board,” David said.

  David enlisted Peter Cetera, one of the founding members of the band Chicago, and together they wrote the music for our ambitious undertaking. And then I wrote the lyrics, titling our song “Voices That Care.” The whole idea was to let our soldiers know that though they may be far from home, they were far from forgotten. We were all reaching out to them through our voices.

  David and I agreed that if we could get Kevin Costner on board, it would help the project immensely in terms of publicity.

  “I’m in,” Kevin said, when I called to ask him if he’d participate.

  “Can we use your name?” I excitedly asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  With Kevin on board, David and I both started making phone calls to PR people, managers, and some of the major stars of the day. From there, the project instantly built momentum. There was a wonderful feeling of energy and positivity in our house during that whole time. Once I got the inspiration to reach out with this ambitious project, I was obsessed with making it happen. Having Kevin involved inspired all these other major stars to participate, and we soon had more than one hundred lined up to sing, including Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mike Tyson, Magic Johnson, Billy Crystal, and Brooke Shields.

  On the appointed day, all of the celebrity participants gathered on the Warner Bros. lot. Robert Daly was running Warner at the time, and he and Terry Semel opened up the studios for us. Irving Azoff agreed to put out the single on Giant Records. Everybody involved was generous with their time, their expertise, their devotion, and their love. We recorded a television special, too. All the money from the sale of the single went to the USO and the Red Cross. With our record sales, we raised several million dollars for both organizations.

  I had so many soldiers reach out to me in the wake of the song. Even now, twenty-five years later, every once in a while I’ll hear from former military personnel.

  “That video, and that record, really sustained us when we were over there,” they’ll say. “Because when you feel all alone, to know that people are thinking of you back h
ome, and reaching out like that, really means the world. It was incredible to know that everybody from John Doe to the biggest star in the world was thinking of me.”

  Not only was it the biggest project I’d done with David until that point, it was also significant for me because I landed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music, and I’ve been with them ever since. It was one of those times in our marriage when everything—our careers, our family, and our love for each other—converged into one project. All I could do is hope that we’d have many more moments of such harmony.

  “Voices That Care”

  Lonely fear lights up the sky

  Can’t help but wonder why

  You’re so far away

  There, you had to take a stand

  In someone else’s land;

  Life can be so strange

  I wish we didn’t have to choose

  To always win or lose

  That we could compromise

  But I won’t turn my back again

  Your honor I’ll defend

  So hurry home, and till then …

  Stand tall; stand proud!

  Voices that care are crying out loud

  And when you close your eyes tonight

  Feel in your heart how our love burns bright

  I’m not here to justify the cause

  Or to count up all the loss

  That’s all been done before

  I just can’t let you feel alone

  When there’s so much love at home

  We’re sending out to you

  All the courage that you’ve known

  The bravery you’ve shown

  Clearly lights the way

  We pray! To make the future bright

  With no more wars to fight

  For this we’ll sing your praise

  Stand tall; stand proud!

  Voices that care are crying out loud

  And when you close your eyes tonight

  Feel in your heart how our love burns bright

  You are the voice

  You are the light