I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  I had opened the Old Plantation Music Park to fulfill a lifelong dream. It had been a three-year runaway hit. But something in my life had to give, and I decided it would be the park. Besides, our music careers were too hot for us to be living in Florida. We needed to be in Nashville. So I sold the park, estate, and all of the land that went with it.

  That was not a decision I made easily.

  The profit was enough to buy a home on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, a Nashville bedroom city, and a farm with about 350 acres in Springfield, Tennessee, a small town about thirty miles north of Nashville.

  I put a herd of cattle on the farm and commuted back and forth to Hendersonville. Tammy and I went out for short tours with the band, then I went to the farm and fed cattle, mowed hay, and did anything else I could do that was rural and had nothing to do with country music.

  Then I bought a third house, this one on Tyne Boulevard on a hill overlooking Nashville. As you know, I’ve never had an aversion to spending money. I’ve gotten into trouble because I’ve spent it when I didn’t have it. (I was always better at making money than managing it.) But in the early 1970s, it seemed as if my buying power would be forever unlimited.

  Besides my hits with Tammy, I had come out with “A Good Year for the Roses,” a Jerry Chesnut song that rose to number two in 1971, “We Can Make It,” which peaked at number six in 1972, “Loving You Could Never Be Better,” which topped at number two in 1972, and “A Picture of Me (Without You),” which rose to number five in 1972.

  Tammy, in 1968, had recorded “Stand By Your Man,” a song that remains the biggest hit of her career twenty-eight years later. She had ten number-one songs from 1968 through 1972, including “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Singing My Song,” “The Ways to Love a Man,” and “Bedtime Story,” just to mention a few.

  Making money was as easy as going up on our performance fee. So many promoters wanted us for so many shows, we hired someone whose job was more concerned with rejecting offers than accepting them. We didn’t have to take more shows, we simply had to accept more money for the ones we took.

  And I was still sober.

  On September 12, 1971, Tammy threw my fortieth birthday party. I didn’t take a sip.

  I might have gotten overconfident. Not long after that, I pitched a drunk, and it was as if I was making up for lost time. I stayed wrecked for about three days. You have no idea how I dreaded facing Tammy. As I recall, I went to our house on Tyne Boulevard because I thought she’d be at one of the others. But she wasn’t.

  Then Tammy did something that, despite my drunkenness, I still remember. She agreed to cook for me, and I thought that was awfully nice of her, what with me coming in loaded and all.

  I probably had no business eating because I was so full of booze. My stomach was probably too upset to hold normal food. It certainly couldn’t have held rotten food.

  And that’s what Tammy served me.

  I don’t know where she got the stuff, but she actually put moldy and decayed food on my plate. The meat was brown because it had started to spoil. The green vegetables were brown.

  I took one bite and, even in my drunkenness, knew what she had done. I accused her of serving me spoiled food and maybe even accused her of trying to poison me.

  Much to my surprise, she admitted that the food was spoiled. It was her way of getting back at me for getting drunk. I’m thankful I didn’t eat it. Can you imagine putting food poisoning on top of a hangover from a three-day drunk?

  Tammy found another house she wanted, this one on Franklin Road, and I bought it for her. I had to borrow against my royalties from my record label again, and I did. I tried to buy her anything she wanted, and Tammy had expensive tastes. Maybe I was trying to ease a guilty conscience from all of the times I got drunk.

  A lot of folks think that if it hadn’t been for my drinking Tammy and I would have had a storybook marriage. But that isn’t true. We argued about things other than the bottle. Tammy, I suspect, has changed a lot since our divorce in 1975. But there was a time when she was a high-spirited and opinionated woman. I was always more passive, especially when I was sober. Tammy used to worry about things, while I had a policy of letting things ride. Sometimes she’d get worried when she thought I wasn’t getting worried.

  Tammy used to lose her temper and physically attack me. The band used to love to watch that because I wouldn’t fight back. I couldn’t bring myself to hit her when I was drinking, and I sure couldn’t do it sober. Tammy, more than once, got me down on the floor of the bus while pounding me. I didn’t know what to do except take it. It sounds funny, but it hurt nonetheless. Even a little kid can hurt you if you just lie there and take it without fighting back.

  “Get this woman off of me!” I shouted, usually to James Hollie. After these attacks I would routinely ask to be let off at the next town that had an airport. From there I would fly to our next show or to our home if that was our destination.

  Despite Tammy’s temper and her nagging about my drinking that often drove me to drinking, she could be a compassionate human being to members of my family. My two sons stayed with us one summer in Lakeland, and she treated them like her own children. My mother loved Tammy, and Tammy and I never told her we had marital difficulties. It would have upset Mama tremendously.

  Mama used to visit Tammy and me in Lakeland, and we would take her to the dog races. She was a lifetime Pentecostal and didn’t believe in gambling, but she’d tell Tammy which dog she thought was going to win. Tammy would fuss over her and sometimes bet on the dog Mama favored. If it won, Tammy would try to give Mama her winnings, but Mama thought it was sinful to collect.

  Mama got sick, and I’ll bet that Tammy flew with me to Vidor to see her at least four times. Sometimes my sister Helen would call and say that Mama was bad off and that we’d better come quickly. We might have to cancel a show or leave in the middle of the night. Tammy was always by my side and never complained once.

  Tammy, the Jones Boys, and I went to the International Festival of Country Music at Wembley Stadium in London on April 12, 1974. It was after midnight when the phone rang in our suite. I answered and heard the static-coated voice of Helen in the United States, where it was daytime. Helen didn’t think Mama would live until nightfall.

  Tammy and I got up, packed, and caught the first flight to New York City, on to Houston, then rented a car to drive the ninety or so miles to Vidor. We traveled for twenty-four hours with no sleep and lots of jet lag. But we were too late.

  Mama died on April 13. She was seventy-eight. She spent the last two weeks of her life in a coma inside a hospital.

  Mama had suffered a heart ailment when she was seventy-two, and her body resisted a pacemaker. So surgery was performed that threw her body into shock. She never fully recovered in the six years before her death.

  Tammy and I, my brother, Herman, and my sisters went to her funeral at the Memorial Funeral Home in Vidor. It was a simple ceremony for a wonderfully simple woman. Someone sang “Precious Memories,” and as I stood there, my mind was flooded with them.

  I had bought my parents a house about two miles from mine when I was married to Shirley. I’d get on a drunken rampage and Shirley wouldn’t know what to do, so she’d call my mama.

  Mama was the only one who could settle me down. She’d hold my hand, call me Glenn (she always called me by my middle name), and tell me that she and Jesus loved me. I might have been filled with rage, but the sight of her presence and the sound of her voice never failed to soothe me. Like a child, I would often fall asleep.

  “I’ve seen him so drunk he couldn’t talk,” Helen would say years later. “But I never saw him say a cross word to Mama. She could always put him to peace.”

  In the wake of our divorce, Tammy took a Bible that Mama had given me. I got it back years later, and Helen found a note inside written by Mama to her children, mostly to me. The note referred to Carolyn, a woman who had tended Mama in her final days. Its handwriting was crooked and its English br
oken. I can’t read the letter to this day without crying.

  “You all know I love you all dearly,” Mama wrote. “I done the best I could for you. Carolyn gets the Bible, got her name in it. You all be sure and keep flowers in our vase on the graves. I want George Glenn to have my new Bible and for him to be sure and read it for my sake and his. I love him so much. I made a failure, but I hope we all meet in Heaven.”

  Those were Mama’s final words to her children in care of the one child who didn’t find them until years after her passing. Mama, I know, thought she had “made a failure” in me because of my drunken ways. My lifestyle broke the heart of an old woman who never gave anything but kindness to others. I want to see her in Heaven. I want to tell her I’m sorry.

  During her funeral I thought of Daddy and how he was so upset by something indirectly involving me that he was thrown into a stroke on a Thursday and died on a Saturday.

  Because Shirley was frequently angry at me about my drinking, she decided to take it out on my parents. She neglected to make the payments on their house, even though there was money to do so. My parents were caught totally off guard when a man from the sheriffs office showed up to evict them. Daddy argued that the payments were current. Then he asked why, if they were behind, he hadn’t received any past-due notices.

  Shirley had thrown all of them away.

  My folks had been given their final notice to make a house payment and didn’t even know it. The sheriffs deputies set their belongings in the yard before their very eyes and for all their neighbors to see.

  That was the nicest house Daddy had ever lived in and the only one I’d ever bought him. His simple mind couldn’t handle seeing strangers in uniforms take it away.

  I had no idea any of this was going on and couldn’t be found, of course.

  After Daddy died Mama lived with her children. She finally moved in permanently at Helen’s place, where I built a room on to the house. Eventually, we hired a woman to help Helen.

  I was feeling so much remorse at Mama’s funeral. Celebrity, wealth, hit records, travel, and all the rest mean nothing in the wake of the death of blood. Tammy understood my pain.

  We worked our personal appearances throughout the summer and fall. That year I had three records that together spent forty-two weeks on the Billboard country chart, including “The Telephone Call.” “The Grand Tour” and “The Door” went to number one. Tammy and I released two more songs that together spent twenty-five weeks on the chart.

  My career was red-hot, and our duet career was pretty warm.

  But Tammy’s solo career didn’t fare so well that year. She had only one record, “Woman to Woman,” make the Billboard country chart in all of 1974. It peaked at number four. Previously, Tammy had recorded fifteen number-one songs in six years. So she thought the fact that she only had one hit in one year, and that it failed to top the chart, meant her career was getting cold. She didn’t handle that well.

  Tammy fell apart one December night as we lay in bed. She cried and complained literally all night. She said she was afraid she’d never get another hit. She was going through disputes with Epic, our record label, and even wondered if the decision-makers there intended to release any more of her records. It was a ridiculous concern from a woman who’d made so much money for them. Besides, she and I had recorded a duet for Epic only the night before.

  Nothing is harder than a lack of rest on someone with a drinking problem. In Alcoholics Anonymous recovering alcoholics are warned against getting too tired. Tammy’s crying binge simply wouldn’t stop. By sunrise I was exhausted.

  Shorty Lavender, our booking agent, was building new offices. I was helping with the work. I’d promised him I’d come by about 10 A.M. I had probably been up since about eight the previous morning. That meant I had gone through a full day’s activity, a recording session (which had gotten stressful), and an all-night pity-party with Tammy.

  I had virtually been without sleep for about twenty-six hours. Anyone’s nerves would have been shot. The nerves of someone who used to drink heavily for weeks were shattered.

  When I headed toward Shorty’s office my hand was shaking on the steering wheel. So I stopped at Ira’s steak house before 10 A.M. for a double shot. In fact, I had four double shots, eight ounces of liquor, in the space of twenty minutes, on an empty stomach.

  I was drunk in no time flat. And I drank all day.

  I didn’t want to go home in that shape. Tammy had seen me like that plenty of times before, but she hadn’t seen it lately. I had vowed she’d never see it again. I had no defense. Anything I’d say was something I’d said before.

  So I drove to Franklin, a neighboring city, and got a motel room. I slept it off and called Tammy the next morning. I told her truthfully what I’d done, told her I was so glad I no longer did that routinely and that I’d be home in a little bit.

  “No,” she said, “you won’t be at this house, you son of a bitch. Not in a little bit or not ever. Don’t you ever come around me again.”

  And she meant it.

  I went to see my friends Peanut and Charlene Montgomery in Florence, Alabama, and stayed drunk. I called Tammy a couple of times. She hung up or told me again not to ever come around.

  A couple of weeks later, I found out that Tammy had put my clothes on a boat we kept on Old Hickory Lake. She had put them in garbage bags and hadn’t tied them shut. When the bags were thrown onto the bow they opened and clothes went in all directions. They lay on the deck, absorbing sunshine and rain. Many were designer clothes that had been made for the stage. Many were ruined forever.

  I had my car and perhaps two thousand dollars with me. I owned a lot of other things, but they were in our joint names.

  And I also had a knowledge that I’d never had before. I knew that Tammy wasn’t going to let me come home. Maybe it was the way she totally refused to talk about making up. Or the way she wouldn’t listen to an apology for one of the few times I’d ever gotten drunk for one night only.

  It was nine days from what was to be a very lonely Christmas. My body was with Peanut and Charlene, but my mind was with Tammy, and my heart was with our little family—a family I would never see as mine again.

  So I did what drunks do best. I drank.

  In the midst of it all, I got word that Tammy had been hospitalized for a drug overdose. Was it accidental? Was it done to ease hurt she might be feeling about our separation? If so, I thought, then why not get back together?

  But Tammy never answered my calls; instead, someone always said she didn’t want to talk to me.

  Our net worth together was into seven figures. But our divorce decree, finalized on March 21, 1975, was a mere six pages.

  The divorce was not complicated because I didn’t contest it. I didn’t even go to court. I told my lawyer to tell Tammy’s that she could have whatever she wanted. She wanted most of all we had.

  I wasn’t thinking right and assumed that if she got the house we had on Franklin Road she would also get the payments. I found out years later that those house payments were being deducted from royalties Epic Records owed me. We had paid about $1 million for the place.

  Besides the house, which Tammy lived in until 1993, she took our children, our touring bus, our real estate in Alabama, my stock in the Shorty Lavender Talent Agency, and one thousand dollars a month in child support for Tamala Georgette, who Tammy agreed to let me see two days a month for eight hours a day. (I made the first child support payment, and when I wasn’t allowed to see Georgette I stopped. Tammy eventually sued me for forty thousand dollars in back child support and won.)

  I got the house on Tyne Boulevard. Tammy and I owed seventy-five thousand dollars to the Commerce Union Bank. The divorce decree said I had to pay off half of that when I sold the Tyne house.

  Tammy might argue that she lost during our marriage. There is no argument about who won during divorce.

  I’m glad the telling of this part of my story is finished. Tammy and I have had a quarter cent
ury in which to mellow, and I feel we’ve done that. We recorded together in 1994 and 1995 and toured together the following summer. Fans and critics were astounded. I’ll tell you more about that later.

  I have no regrets about my marriage to Tammy except for my heavy drinking. And I regret that period.

  Tammy’s life has been difficult since the divorce, and she’s stood up bravely. She’s been in and out of hospitals perhaps twenty times or more. I actually thought we were going to lose her when she contracted still another ailment in 1993. Nancy and I were fortunate enough to be among the first to her bedside. That time, Tammy suffered a bile duct infection that left her in critical condition for a week.

  Once again, her tremendous inner strength dominated, and she pulled through when some doctors had written her off.

  She made big news with that one.

  After me she married another guy, and that lasted only a few days. She married George Richey in 1978, and they had their problems, some of which were financial. Those were made public in the early 1990s. Tammy had always hated seeing her personal life spread out for public viewing.

  Tammy Wynette has sold more than thirty million albums. She became the first female country singer, in fact, to record an album that sold more than one million copies.

  I have nothing but respect for her artistry and the woman, indeed the lady, behind it. The things I’ve talked about in these pages are old news. Very old.

  Concert promoters were reluctant to book Tammy immediately after our divorce. They wanted the two of us, as we had become an established act on the country music touring circuit. One of Tammy’s first acts after the divorce was having our bus repainted to cover the sign that once read, MR. AND MRS. COUNTRY MUSIC.

  Tammy toughed it out and went right on working.

  I went right to the bottom. I had no idea the bottom could be so low.

  Chapter 14

  I opened my second Possum Holler club the day my divorce from Tammy was granted.