by Bruce Feiler
In the months that followed, a period of time that included her second pregnancy, her wedding, and the birth of her daughter, Wynonna began steadily drawing more discreet boundaries between herself and her mother—everything from keeping her at arm’s length at home, to keeping her removed from the recording studio. It wasn’t a full break—the “divorce” that Hazel told me she hoped would transpire between the two—but it was a start. “Yes, she’s hovering,” Wynonna said. “Mothers are like that. It’s the dynamic of the relationship. But she’s been working really hard at it. She realized she couldn’t just come through the gates anymore. Plus, she’ll call and say, ‘I’m getting ready to do this interview. If you don’t want me to say anything about this or that, tell me.’ I give her a lot of credit. Some mothers never get that. They think you can always go in their room and go through their stuff.”
Ultimately, perhaps the best illustration of Wynonna’s emerging independence was her show. For her entire solo career, Wynonna had refused to perform any of the songs she had recorded with her mother as part of the Judds. It was as if that part of her life had been frozen and put into a morgue when her mother retired. Returning from the birth of her daughter, though, Wynonna, for the first time, reintroduced the Judds material into her act. “It was my idea,” she told me. “But when I did it, the first night, I was blown away. It was like, ‘Whoooaaa…’ It shifted into this whole other moment. I didn’t realize that for so many people the Judds are still such a part of their daily diet.” The “Judd medley,” as she called it, included everything from “Had a Dream (for the Heart)” to “Grandpa (Tell Me ’Bout the Good Old Days).” It quickly drew the best response of the night. And Wynonna, hip shaking, voice growling, finger pointing, performed it with stunning confidence. “Do I live by that?” she mused. “Partially. Do I grow by that? No. But it’s part of me, and it’s the essence of who I am. So by God, I better do honor to it because that’s where I’ve come from.”
After all the twists and turns of her epic life, this was the ending no one had predicted: Only by embracing her mother in such a public way did Wynonna finally stand alone.
“There’s an inner peace in knowing that I can do it on my own,” Wynonna told me. “I don’t have to draw on that for strength, but I can dive back into it because it’s a memory that makes me happy. Just like at Christmas everybody loves to sit and say, ‘I remember five Christmases ago….’ It’s that feeling of comfort that you can love something, but it doesn’t have to own you. It’s been an interesting passage into realizing that I don’t have to have the Judds to be somebody. I paved the way myself. It’s like tough love: You say no to somebody, you move forward, then you embrace them again down the road.”
Late in the afternoon, as her show draws closer, Wynonna finally shifts her attention from her family to herself. It’s the part of the day she calls her “preshow ritual.” The sun was reddening outside her window now. The baby was taking a nap. A surreal calm had settled over the room, which still appeared chaotic with its twisted sheets and half-eaten pieces of chocolate cake.
The first thing she did was check in on the Wy-line. As part of her fan club, Wynonna has established a 900-number where fans can call up and receive updates on her life and leave her personal messages. She estimates she gets about two dozen calls a day. One man, she said, calls several times a week reporting news about his car (“I just changed the oil this morning and took it for a drive…”), and one woman calls every morning to read her a different Bible verse (on this day, Colossians 3:13: “Be tolerant with one another and forgive one another whenever any of you has a complaint against someone else…”). Among the messages this afternoon: A woman in Atlantic City called to offer Wynonna free dry cleaning service when she was next in town and a woman in Michigan whose fiancé had just broken off their wedding called for support. The woman said she had been concerned about what she would do in June, the month her wedding was scheduled, until she heard that Wynonna would be having a fan club party that month: “It’s the only thing that could take my mind off the wedding,” she said. “I think it’s the work of God.” The most emotional message was from a woman in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “It’s me again,” she said, giving her name. “My mom was your wisest fan and your oldest fan club member. She received an award at your fan club party several years ago. She passed away this morning, and you’re the first person I wanted to tell. It was one of the highlights of her life, standing up on that stage next to you. I just really wanted to thank you. You made her life happier. On behalf of myself and my entire family, we love you.”
Next, Wynonna started pacing the room, drawing strength for her show. “‘Putting on the armor’ is what I call it,” she said of this ritual walking, talking, sitting, praying, and mumbling to herself. “That protection gives me the openness to be vulnerable onstage. It’s one of those things where knowing I’m safe in the arms of God gives me great, tremendous at ease.” It was all part of the larger process of learning to believe in herself. “Here’s the bottom line,” Wynonna said. “I want to go to the mountain and claim what’s rightfully mine. I’m worthy. God loves me.” Whereas five years earlier, Wynonna had said poignantly in an interview: “My strength was always as Naomi Judd’s child. My identity was not Wynonna, child of God; it was Wynonna, child of Naomi Judd.” Now she spoke as a different person. “My biggest identity is that I am a child of God,” she told me. “Period. I’m not Arch’s wife. I’m not Naomi Judd’s daughter. I’m not even my children’s mother. I am a child of the Lord. My soul is eternal.”
At nightfall, Wynonna dresses quietly by herself—black silk pants, a black shirt, and mauve snakeskin jacket with a Nehru collar and jagged black leather Elvis-type cuffs. She puts on her makeup and eyelashes by herself as well and carefully smoothes her hair with a metal-bristle brush. Then she descends the staff elevator and retreats to her backstage dressing room. It’s a small, tastefully appointed space, sort of like the first-class cabin in a 747. There are mirrors on the wall and a purple carpet on the floor. The tables are covered with orange cheese trays and dishes of M&M’s, dozens of bottles of Evian, Barq’s, and Cristal champagne, and a heaping crystal bowl filled with slices of tuna sashimi, chilled stone crab claws, and disks of fresh boiled octopus. Momentarily, Wynonna summons her band and backup singers for their nightly prayer. “It’s sort of a tribal thing,” she explains. “It’s the glue that binds us. We all have a lot going on in our lives. The nights when for whatever reason we don’t pray, we’re too busy or too hurried, and we forget to ask God to be present. Those are the nights when we all know there’s no energy up there, we’re lethargic. There’s no light.”
When the band arrives, the dozen or so members, dressed in elegant black and white, stand in an informal circle holding hands. It’s the most integrated band in country music, a sort of traveling gospel choir complete with rock band and horn section: a Nashville version of Earth, Wind and Fire. “I see you all got your invitations,” Wynonna says. There is a nodding chuckle and a summons to worship, then Wynonna leads the group in a short prayer. “Thank y’all for coming to celebrate with me tonight,” she says. “Just so you know, so I say it in front of everybody, I’m a survivor. I have a lot to be thankful for. Going onstage is my way of celebrating. It’s a way of saying to all those people out there, ‘Dreams do come true. If I can do it, you can too.’” There is a general rocking in the circle, a squeezing of hands. “But I want you to know, none of us can do this without God.” A brief murmuring ensues. The gathering assumes the momentum of a call-and-response invocation. “None of us can do it without God in our lives. He is the source of our light.” “That’s right.” “The granter of our gift.” “Yes, ma’am.” “So we must give into our gift tonight.” “Our gift.” “None of us knows what’s going to happen. We just don’t. So we must go out, relax, and let the music speak through us.” “That’s right.” “Remember, we are the music. We are the light.” “Amen, sister. Amen.”
After a few
minutes of hand-holding and one last communal hug, the band departs and Wynonna is left alone. She pulls aside a chair and gets down on her knees. The first gleeful applause from the crowd can be heard through the wall as the players take their place onstage. Wynonna quietly lowers herself to the ground. When she arrives, she moves herself into a prone position: her legs pressed together, her arms spread apart, and her forehead touching the floor. “Oh, Lord, let me be humble,” she says, her voice pleading and cracking with longing. “Open the door and let me in. Take me into your arms.” Worshipful, even trance-like, she murmurs to herself for several more minutes until there’s a gentle knocking on her door. Then, as if summoned, she stops, lifts her head, and slowly opens her eyes. A smile drifts gradually across her face. She’s ready. But before she rises and steps into the light, she lets her arms reach around her body and utters this hopeful plea to herself, “Love, love, love.”
NINETEEN
THE AWARDS
LeAnn Rimes was in control—sort of. Two hours before the thirtieth annual Country Music Association Awards, the fourteen-year-old superstar was standing at the back door of the Grand Ole Opry House giving orders like a wannabe grown-up to her considerably grown-up entourage. “No, I don’t want to pull my hair back, Mom,” she said as her mother tried to tug at her shoulder-length blonde hair. “Wait, I’ll stand here,” she said to the top-hatted chauffeur who was preparing to open the door for her. “Hey, can I go in first?” she chirped to the producer from “Entertainment Tonight” who was busy negotiating with her mother, her father, her publicist, and her agent about the order in which the various members of the party should enter the rented limousine. “Actually, um, we sort of have to hurry,” the driver said. “I have to pick up Tim McGraw in half an hour.”
Eventually they hit on it: LeAnn would enter first in her blue taffeta and black suede ball gown that under the circumstances seemed more suited for the prom; she would be followed by Mark Steines, the reporter from “ET,” dressed in tuxedo trousers and shirt with one of those ubiquitous banded collars. The cameraman, soundman, and segment producer, all in rented tuxes and black tennis shoes, would remain outside and shoot the stars’ entrance. Then, once the crew got what it wanted, LeAnn and Mark would turn around and get out of the limo again, at which time the producer, cameraman, and soundman would get in and shoot the entrance again from that angle. At that point the limo would make a circle (actually, it ended up being more like a ten-point turn) in the cramped parking lot and deposit the entire crew on the meager red carpet—about the size of a large bath mat—that was poised at the building’s entrance, about fifty yards from where we were now standing. There they would repeat the double ins and outs again for the purpose of shooting LeAnn’s “arrival.” “All this for maybe twenty seconds on the air,” the producer joked.
In fact, after twenty minutes, when the limo had not yet left the starting position, the scene became so clogged that LeAnn’s parents, Wilbur and Belinda, plump, proud, and clearly the source of their daughter’s Miss Piggy-like joie de vivre, decided to jog alongside the limo like two Secret Service agents trying to keep up with their daughter. “I’d love for her to win both awards she’s up for,” Belinda shouted to a radio reporter who scurried up to her during her run. “But she’s already won just by being nominated so quickly as far as I’m concerned. I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. This is a dream come true.”
The CMA Awards are Nashville’s annual application for Hollywood-style glamour. Begun in 1967, the three-hour, black-tie, prime-time broadcast takes place every fall on the dolled-up stage of the Grand Ole Opry House and is the centerpiece of a weeklong series of assemblies and awards dinners that comprise the culmination of the year in country music. Because it’s one of the few times of the year when the national press turns its gaze however briefly on Nashville, it’s also a good indication of what is hot at any particular moment. At this moment it was LeAnn Rimes. “Limousine…openin’ up the show…fourteen years old!” Mark Steines gushed in the back of the car. “Boy, you’ve got the world by the tail, don’t you?” “Yeah,” she said with a giggle, “I kinda do.”
LeAnn, a bright-eyed, marshmallow-cheeked bundle from Dallas, Texas, arrived in Nashville in the middle of its commercial plateau and rode her phenomenal voice and fresh-faced story to a yearlong lock on the country album charts. Born in 1982 (she’s actually younger than the CD itself: “I used to go to my grandmother’s and listen to records!” she boasted), the Mississippi native decided at age five that she wanted to be a professional singer. At first she fashioned herself after Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, then she moved on to Patsy Cline, Reba McEntire, Wynonna. “If I had to model my career after anyone, it would have to be Reba,” she told me. “She’s made some great business decisions in her career to stay around for twenty years, and my biggest goal is to stay around for a long time.”
At fourteen, the challenges of battling the industry were even greater than for her elders. For starters, she ran the risk of seeming like a freak. When we first met, I tried to avoid using industry jargon. Referring to the new custom of releasing an “electronic press kit” on videocassette, I said, “I was just watching this video they sent out on you—” when suddenly she interrupted me, “Oh, you mean the EPK.” Later she even dropped the term “rack jobber” in conversation, referring to the wholesalers who stack discount retailers. The only other artist I heard do that was Garth Brooks. “I love to do this,” LeAnn said, explaining her facility with the business details, “but it’s basically like a job to me. I’m around adults all the time. That’s basically who all my friends are. I have no friends my age.”
Another problem of LeAnn’s age was that her mother had to sit in on interviews. In our first conversation, I asked LeAnn to describe what she looked like. “They say I look like a young Claudia Schiffer,” she said. “I’m five-foot-five. I have blonde hair and blue eyes. My hair is right past my shoulder.” And then, from across the room, her mother added, “And she’s stacked.”
Perhaps worst of all, LeAnn was being forced to go through adolescence in public. When our conversation turned to her home life, LeAnn and her mother started bickering. “You can’t date right now,” her mother said, correcting her daughter’s response to a question. “We’ll let you go out with friends.” “But I’ve done it before,” LeAnn muttered. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that.” In the limousine with Mark Steines, the subject came up again. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked. “Not yet,” she answered. Then Steines picked up the telephone. “We need to get a boyfriend back here quick,” he said. LeAnn grinned. “I need to get a date for the CMAs!” she echoed. The giggling moment was one of the few that made it onto “ET” the following night.
Once LeAnn disembarked from her limo and disappeared backstage, the crew from “ET” set up the small bank of cameras arranged on the curb to shoot the arrival of the stars. This was the real showtime: Nashville’s answer to the runway. But with so many artists demanding starlike treatment and with so many executives trying to flatter themselves, the industry quickly exhausted Nashville’s supply of limousines. A few reserves were brought in from nearby, a few more from as far away as Atlanta, but still the demand outstripped the supply, which meant one thing: limo recycling. The drivers would drop off their stars at the red carpet, then hurry the quarter mile or so to the guard booth at the Opry, where other stars would be waiting in their pickup trucks or buses for an empty limo to escort them to the door. All of this made for a quite comical scene on what was supposed to be the most enchanting night of the year. Shania Twain actually showed up in a golf cart. Tim McGraw drove up to the door in his pickup. And John Michael Montgomery, stepping out of his sedan in blue jeans, seemed so surprised to see cameras staring him in the face that he muttered, “Oops, I’m in the wrong place,” jumped back in his car, and drove around to the back door.
After an hour, the steady stream of artists in front of the “ET” camera was almost numbi
ng: Sawyer Brown, Ty Herndon, Trisha Yearwood, Faith Hill, Mindy McCready. A few, like Garth and Wynonna, snuck in through the back. But most ran the gauntlet, answered several questions, and were hurried along by their publicists to the next camera, the next interview, then inside the door. After a while, I almost lost track—Neal McCoy, Kevin Sharp, James Bonamy—until suddenly, out of the pack, Wade appeared. Having not seen him in several months, I was startled. He seemed taller and a bit more poised. Nominated for the prestigious Horizon Award, Wade had earned his place in front of the camera.
“Hi, Wade. Nice to meet you,” Mark Steines said. “Are you nervous?” Wade thought for a second, as if he had been asked a tough question. He was wearing his black Manuel jacket and a crisp white tuxedo shirt, which made his green eyes stand out. He was sweating slightly under the lights. “Actually, I’ve been okay,” he said. “I was out here awhile ago, went through rehearsal. I thought, ‘Gee whiz, I hope I stay cognitive.’” “How about the competition?” The others up for the award were Bryan White, Terri Clark, Shania Twain, and LeAnn Rimes. “I can honestly say that I know all the people in my category very well,” Wade said. “I hope they all win.” “And so what did you do today?” Mark asked. On this, Wade didn’t hesitate. “I rode my hog around,” he said, referring to his one indulgence so far in his career, a brand-new Harley Fat Boy.