Tammy Wynette

There was plenty at stake here. When George and Tammy divorced, Shorty Lavender had called promoters promising either one or the other would make up their scheduled appearances. But they wanted the package deal, and dates were being canceled left and right. Wynette had to make $35,000 a month to stay afloat, and that required she play twenty dates every month.

Here she was in Mississippi, stumbling around onstage, besieged by hecklers yelling, “Where’s George?” Jones had always handled talking and joking to the audience. All Tammy had to do was stand there and sing. “I didn’t find out I had a personality until I went out on my own,” she said.

Drastic measures were taken. Billy Sherrill instructed her to update her act. Tammy fired backup singer Patsy Sledd and Harold Morrison. “Harold and I was too country,” said Sledd. “They were plannin’ her career for her. She had to turn to somebody because she was very insecure.” In their place she hired the Gatlins, a family of singers who had come up through the church in Texas. Tammy named them “Young Country.” The Jones Boys became the “Country Gentlemen.” She bought new outfits and polished her stage patter.

Her Country Gentlemen grew very protective of her. They were the usual characters—the drummer with an anger management problem, the steel guitar player who left his motel key hanging off his instrument with the room number visible just in case there were any lonely women down front. The only rules on the bus were no drinking, no girls, and no cussing. What you did on off hours was your own business. “Tammy just wanted everybody to be happy,” said Nan Crafton. “She didn’t give a shit. She did not care who you slept with.” That was a good thing for Nan, because she was involved for years with Wynette’s bass player, James Hollie, who just happened to be married. A tall, good-looking Texan extremely devoted to Tammy, James was known to be popular with the ladies. (“James Hollie would fuck a snake if somebody would hold its head,” claimed Nan’s sister Jan.)

Talk to Tammy’s old entourage about any of her road musicians, and the first name uttered is Charlie Carter. From the time Wynette joined up with Jones until she died, Carter was onstage behind her every single night, making sure she had her stool, her glass of water, and whatever she needed. “He was the heart and soul of that whole deal,” said fiddle player Bobby Napier. “Charlie Carter could read Tammy like a book. Charlie could take one glance at Tammy and know exactly how she was feelin’. Those two had a bond.” Another Texan, Charlie was nicknamed “Superstar” due to his Elvis pompadour. “He had star hair,” enthused keyboard player Van Abbott. “He’d be in the hallway of the band bus workin’ on it way before showtime. It took a lotta hair spray to get that up.” (Former hairdresser Wynette was always after him to let her bring his coif up to date. “I put them damn perms in it,” said Carter. “Tammy wanted me to cut it off because the ends of it would get all burned up from that ol’ dryer.”)

Carter was the type who’d “come on the bus with a truck stop tuna sandwich, and he might have half of it in one hand and a salt shaker in the other hand. At the same time he was talkin’ to you, just pourin’ a ton of salt on the tuna, he’d be sayin’, ‘Well, the doctor’s got me on a strict diet. I really gotta watch myself.’ A gentle soul, Carter was loved by all. He knew every old country song in the world and had a prodigious capacity for drinking beer. ”Charlie wouldn’t get in nobody’s face,“ said drummer Charley Abdon. ”He could work with Satan.” And he would’ve taken a bullet for Wynette if need be. ”You couldn’t talk bad about Tammy in front of him,” said Abdon. “He would correct you on it.”

Many of Tammy’s associates maintain that Carter was in love with Wynette. “Charlie Carter told me at one time he could’ve married Tammy,” said steel player Rusty Pence. “According to Charlie, she actually asked him. Maybe he thinks about it every day of his life.” Said fiddle player Tim Watson, “When he’d get drunk, he’d tell Georgette stuff like, ‘I should be your dad.’” When I asked Carter about the rumors, he was ever the gentleman. “That’s just stuff that I’d rather not talk about. We were close for a while, I’ll just put it that way.”

Now that Tammy was single, she had a little trio of outspoken, eccentric, and very entertaining women who often traveled on the road with her. There was author Joan Dew, who had profiled Tammy and was working with her on her autobiography.⁶⁰ Dew lived with Wynette for a spell and cowrote a terrific ballad with her, “Love Doesn’t Always Come (On the Night It’s Needed).” And then there were the terrible twosome of hairdressing sisters, Jan and Nan. Jan, the older one, was funny as hell, and told it like it was. Her sister was the wild one. “Nanette, what a pistol,” said Joan Dew’s son Cliff. “She was an unbelievable Tennessee gal, hot as she could be. That Southern charm, y’know? She would always say and do the right things for Tammy. Tammy really depended on Nanette for emotional reasons, and Nanette depended on Tammy for financial reasons.”

Once again, everyone stressed that Wynette was incredibly generous to friends and employees. “One time we were all layin’ around the pool, and Tammy had left for the jewelry store,” said Nan. “She came back, threw me a box, threw Jan a box. She bought Jan a ring, me a ring, bought her a ring. On Worth Avenue in Palm Beach she’d shop all day long buyin’ stage clothes. ‘Okay, now, Nanette, buy you somethin’.’ ‘I don’t want anything, Tammy.’ ‘Buy you somethin’. We bought for me all day, now we’re buyin’ for you.’” (Added Joan Dew, “If she heard some sad story about one of the band members or somebody she knew, Tammy would help them out financially. Not loan them money, give them money.”) Then there were the shopping sprees out on the road. “We would hit a town, and if Tammy didn’t have a DJ interview or anything for a couple of hours before the show, the first thing she wanted to do was hit the mall,” said Dew. “She had a big paper bag of cash. That’s how they collected their money on the road. In grocery bags!” Afterward, Wynette would “put on a fashion show and try everything on. We’d just giggle and have just as much fun as you could imagine.”

The house on Franklin Avenue was a world of women—Tammy, Jan, Nan, Joan, and Tammy’s daughters. “It was like a girl’s dorm,” said Nan. “Everybody had fun.” That, and the little scene out on the road constituted Tammy’s hermetically sealed universe. “It’s the wildest thing, travelin’ on that bus,” said Nan. “You’re in a capsule. I didn’t have a phone, didn’t read the newspaper. You’re with a star, and nothin’ can touch you. If somethin’ went wrong, Tammy’d fix it just like that. We’d get on that damn bus, listen to songs, tell jokes and laugh, and have the best time in the whole wide world. That Silver Eagle was our world. Nothin’ else existed. They were all my best friends. If I murdered somebody, they’d help me hide the body. Life on the road was so unrealistic. Can you imagine a life like that?”

By the mid-seventies Tammy’s little brood of girls was starting to grow up. Gwen, the oldest, was a serious soul, responsible for looking after the rest. “Gwen was mama,” said Cathye Leshay. “Gwen pretty much ruled the roost.” Jackie, who looked the most like Euple, was quiet and easygoing, and gave her mother the least trouble. “I just kinda wanted to roll with the flow,” she said. Georgette, runt of the litter, started singing onstage with her mother at the age of three, performing “Delta Dawn.” And then there was Tina, the child Tammy had almost lost as a baby. “Tina was the black sheep of the family. She was the rebel,” said Cathye Leshay. “Tina Denise should never have made it. She made it fightin’ and she hasn’t stopped yet. We got right up in each other’s faces on a regular basis. I just loved her.” (Tina, said to possess a fantastic voice, would also tour with her mother in the eighties.)

Cathye Leshay was Tammy’s governess in the late seventies and early eighties. At first she barely saw or spoke to Wynette, who was on the road constantly. She found the kids a rather unruly mob who knew every trick in the book when it came to the hired help. “Finally Tammy called,” said Leshay. “She was talkin’ to the girls. I said, ‘Is that your mother? Give me that phone!’ I said, ‘Tammy, this is Cathye. Excuse me, but you have never told me what your rules are for these girls, what your limitations are. And if I had an emergency with one of them, I do not have any paper sayin’ that I can take them to the hospital. And I need a phone number where I can reach you anytime—’

That sent Leshay through the roof. “‘Your lawyer? Is your lawyer gonna raise these girls, or are me and you gonna raise ’em?’ I was furious. And I could hear her kind of chuckling.” Leshay’s directness endeared her to Wynette, and she was given a free hand to raise the girls. She would also be one of the very few people that Tammy confided in during the years ahead.

As Wynette was mostly single in the mid-seventies, she had more time to spend with her kids. “The seventies were great because Mom wasn’t sick then. She was a lot of fun,” said Jackie. “She’d put us in the car and say, ‘Girls, we’re goin’ to the beach.’ And she’d put her little bikini and her rhinestone headband on. The guys would just be lookin’ at her. Me and Gwen would be goin‘, ’Okay, how about us?’” Tammy loved to take the girls bowling or join them on the trampoline in the backyard. “In the summertime when Mom played the fairs, she was the first person to get the tickets and take us on all the rides,” said Georgette, adding that her mother was happiest when she was “in her pajamas hangin’ around the house just chitchattin’ and cookin’, havin’ a good time just bein’ one of the girls.” In those days Wynette loved activity of any kind. “It was never boring around the house. Never,” maintained Jackie. “I think Mom liked chaos. She liked having things goin’ on even if they were bad. She just had a passion for life.”

Wynette suffered unending remorse over the fact that her career had deprived her children of her presence, so when she came home, she was a “Disneyland mom,” said Leshay. “She wasn’t there havin’ to go through the daily trials and traumas of raisin’ kids, so when she came home all she wanted was for things to be really, really happy. They pretty much had anything they wanted, they pretty much got to do whatever they wanted.” But Tammy still felt it wasn’t enough. “There was a lot of guilt,” said Jackie. “I would always tell her, ‘Mom, it’s okay.’” Georgette said her mother’s guilt occasionally came in handy. “As teenagers we learned, ‘Okay, if I’m gonna try to get away with somethin’, I need to do it the first day Mom gets home, because she’ll be feelin’ guilty.’”

Not that Wynette was a pushover when it came to her kids. “When it was time to lower the boom, Miss Tammy could lower the boom like you wouldn’t believe,” said Leshay. “Mom was definitely strict,” said Georgette. “She didn’t take any mouth. Boys were never at any time ever allowed to go near anybody’s room. That was a big no-no. And we had to be at home in bed by ten o’clock every night.” As Tammy was fond of repeating, “Anything that you want to do after midnight is just trouble anyway.”

“Nobody had the guts to talk back or be disrespectful to Tammy—except Tina,” said Leshay. “Tina wasn’t afraid of her.” Mother and daughter would have screaming matches on a regular basis. “When the two of them would lock horns, it was really ugly,” added Georgette. “Neither one of them wanted to give.” Tammy was known to give a spanking or two, and when Tina was the recipient, she refused to acknowledge the pain. “There was no way in the world she would’ve cried,” said Georgette. “I can vividly remember her turnin’ around to Mom and goin’, ‘Are you done yet?’ You didn’t do that with Mom. I knew better—if I got a spanking, I was ready to drop to my knees and cry so I could get it over with. Tina would just rather pass out from it than have to admit it hurt in any way.” More than one of Wynette’s friends made the same point: Tammy and Tina were a mirror image of Tammy and Mildred. “But I never would’ve told Tammy that,” confessed one confidante.

Wynette had not kowtowed to Mildred, nor would Tina give in to Tammy. “I’ve taken her horse away from her, I’ve restricted her from the phone, I’ve spanked, I’ve used a switch,” confessed Wynette to Jack Hurst in 1977. Exasperated over Tina’s bad report cards, she had Epic deep-six a Christmas single her daughter had recorded solo.

Tammy wrote a song for her children on a long solo drive from Nashville to her Jupiter, Florida, home. “Dear Daughters” was an album cut on the 1977 One of a Kind, and although never a single, it was a staple of Tammy’s live shows. A spoken recitation, Wynette addresses each of her daughters by name and lists all the milestones in their lives—first date, homecoming queen, graduation day—she missed because of her career. The last line says it all: “I wish I could have been there, but I was gone.” Mothers in the audience would weep whenever she performed the number. “What makes that song so good and so powerful is that it’s so honest,” said Georgette. “She’s not makin’ excuses for herself.”

Yet no one doubted the devotion Tammy had to her children. “I suppose I just know it’s always going to be me and the girls,” she said. A year later she said the same thing, adding, “I have to support them. I always will.” These words would come to haunt Wynette when her final husband entered the picture.

In the wake of Jones, Wynette started dating. Between 1975 and 1978, she’d be involved with New England Patriots lineman Tommy Neville (introduced to her by George Wallace), backup singer Rudy Gatlin, Burt Reynolds, a married country singer, a married politician, and a football coach, not to mention a fling or two. “Tammy loved ’em all,” said Nan. When asked if men responded to Wynette’s charms, Nan shot back, “Well, hell, yeah! What’s not to like? Tammy was gorgeous and sexy and filthy rich! She had it all. She had the world by the tail!”

Wynette’s love life was complicated, to say the least. The Gatlins were singing backup on a session right after she’d dated Rudy, and during that recording an ex-husband was trying to get her on the phone. As Billy Sherrill told Michael Kosser, Tammy “was singing and telling the engineers not to put Don Chapel through on the phone—she wasn’t gonna talk to him. I said, ‘Tammy, you need to slow your love life down a little bit.’” Wynette confessed that the attention her romances received in the press embarrassed her. “I can’t bear to see my name in print linked with this man or that man. It goes against the grain of my upbringing, somehow.”⁶¹

If Tammy had her sights set on a man, look out. It wasn’t hard to deduce when she was in the midst of some feverish crush. “The way she flirted, she might as well have had a neon sign across her forehead,” said Joan Dew. “We have a saying in the South, when a woman wants to get something from a man, that she ‘gets little.’ Now, that doesn’t mean she gets physically little, but she gets kind of helpless and real feminine. Here is this incredibly strong woman, I mean really strong—you never would’ve wanted to be her enemy. But Tammy could get little with the best of ’em.”

Wynette’s passions could change with the wind. “In an odd way Tammy had a masculine kind of thing, in the sense of what she liked was the conquest,” said Dew. “She liked getting the guy to fall in love with her. Whether he was married or not. The proof of love was the proposal of marriage. That’s how you proved to Tammy that you loved her—you married her. And if there was no marriage—or even if there was—she very soon lost interest and was onto another conquest. If she wanted you she was obsessed with you, if she wasn’t obsessed with you she didn’t want you.”

There was something endearing about Wynette’s romantic obsessions, as well as something a little troubling. “Tammy had a very childlike quality about her—I don’t mean this in a negative way—like a little girl excited at the fair,” said Dew. When it came to men, Wynette was “like a junior high girl who gets crushes and thinks about and talks about the guy she has a crush on 24/7. And she’s gonna die if she doesn’t get a date with this guy. It’s very junior high. But it’s like she didn’t grow out of it. Arrested development. Arrested from adolescence.”

It didn’t concern her one iota if the man she was interested in was already attached. “I don’t like to say this about Tammy, but if she wanted a man it didn’t matter,” said Nan. “I was dating Johnny Rodriguez, she slept with Johnny. And then Michael Tomlin—I was datin’ him, she started datin’ him. And then she’d have to get mad at me to make it okay. It was just Tammy. That was her MO.” Nan even claimed Wynette slept with her longtime beau James Hollie. “I said, ‘James, why did you do it? You could’ve been the one that didn’t sleep with Tammy Wynette.’ He said, ‘I just want to see what it felt like to sleep with a star.’”

At one point in the mid-seventies Wynette went out on the road with a very popular group that had roots in the church. She fell for one of the members, a married man, and the affair had tongues wagging all over Nashville. Bus driver Steve Hoker, who drove for Tammy in the early eighties, said she relished reminiscing over the scandalous romance. “She’d come to life when she told me the story,” he said. According to what Wynette related to him, she had instructed the tour manager to make sure her bus and his bus kept in sight of each other en route. In the wee hours of the morning, when everybody was asleep, the buses would pull into a rest stop. “The tour manager paid the bus drivers to walk away and smoke,” said Hoker. Then Wynette would rendezvous with her lover. “Tammy said, ‘He would sneak out of his bus and slip into the back room with me. Ohhh, we would be so deceitful. It was so thrilling, so exciting! You know, he’d stay a little while ... we’d pull over, he’d get back on his bus, no one would be none the wiser.’”

Tammy was fanatical about keeping tabs on her paramour’s whereabouts. “If we lost sight of that bus, she would kick our ass,” said Nan. One night while Wynette was sleeping the bus stopped in Vegas so the band could gamble a few hours. Her boyfriend’s bus went AWOL because of the stop, and when Tammy found out about it, she hit the roof. “God almighty, hell knows no fury,” said Nan. “I thought she was gonna kill every one of us.” The affair went on for over a year. “In her mind, he was gonna get a divorce and marry her,” said Joan Dew. “He never told Tammy that. It just kind of petered out. He backed off big-time. It made her very unhappy—and threw her into the arms of the next best man that came along.” She’d get one song out of the romance: “That’s the Way It Could Have Been.” Wynette told backup singer Karyn Sloas that Mr. X “came to get her off the bus one night, put his hand out, and said, ‘I’m your Prince Charming, I’ll take you away.”’ Tammy responded, “That’s the way it could’ve been.” Before long she was scribbling on her legal pad.

“Thank God for my music,” wrote Wynette, maintaining that writing helped her get over the loss of Jones. “Now when I can’t sleep, I just go to the piano and start writing.” She always kept a pad on the seat of her car or on the bus in case inspiration struck. Although none of the songs were released as singles, the mid-seventies would see some classic numbers written by Tammy: “That’s the Way It Could Have Been,” “Dear Daughters,” “Let Me Be Me,” “We’ll Talk About It Later,” “The Bottle,” “Your Memory’s Finally Gone to Rest,” and “Love Doesn’t Always Come (On the Night It’s Needed).” All but the last were solo writing credits, a first for Wynette. She’d also cowrite two songs for Jones, the fine 1975 single “These Days (I Barely Get By),” a number 10 hit for George—“The way he does it broke my heart,” said Tammy at the time—and “I Just Drove By (To See If I Was Really Gone),” a song that came into being in November 1976 after Wynette fell to the floor from exhaustion in a London dressing room, bruising her face and earning her a three-day stay in yet another hospital. Jones rushed to her side and, while making small talk as Tammy lay there in the bed, mentioned he’d driven by their old home “just to see if I was really gone.” Wynette told him she’d have to steal that line for a song. “Well, half of it’s mine,” insisted George. Even apart, they managed to transform their lives into music.

The year 1976 was a big one for Tammy—four number one singles in a row: “‘Til I Can Make It on My Own,” “You and Me,” and two duets with Jones, “Golden Ring” and “Near You.” But these would be the last number one country singles of Wynette’s career. There were some fine offerings in the next few years, including the touching “One of a Kind,” the Bobby Braddock-penned “Womanhood,” and the highly underrated “No One Else in the World,” which features a steamy recitation (“Last night there was no holding back / I gave it all, I gave it all to you”) and which the Village Voice declared “the most sensual song Tammy has ever done.” Yet only two of her next seven singles would make number 5 or higher. For another artist this would constitute a successful showing, but after Tammy’s unbelievable run it was clear the downhill slide had begun. The pressures must’ve been intense—both outside and within. Years later, when Wynette’s health was failing, Linda Cayson would implore her to quit singing. She told Cayson, “Lin, you just don’t know what it’s like. Once you have a number one song, I don’t think you ever get over tryin’ to get another one. You get on a high, y’know. You’re always tryin’ to get another one.”

It must also be said that Tammy encountered a more complex kind of pressure than what her male counterparts faced. “If you are a strong woman in this business, you’re a bitch,” said Lorrie Morgan. “Tammy fought demons to be a smart businesswoman and a great mother and a wife—and still remain beautiful. A man can get on the bus, he can travel for eight days straight, and he can take a shower—one shower—or he don’t have to, because no matter how he goes onstage, women are going to think he looks hot. If you’re a woman and you’re on the bus for eight days and you try and hit that stage without the correct makeup, freshenin’ up, whatever, you know the first thing they’re gonna say? ‘She looked terrible! She looked just awful!’ And you get the young people comin’ in right behind you, always a little bit younger, prettier. Those things weigh on your mind.”

Somebody like Jones could go on a bender, commit all sorts of egregious offenses, and it would only add to the legend. The First Lady of Country didn’t have that option, especially in those days. She internalized her feelings. No wonder Tammy had so many problems with her stomach. There was no place for all that frustration, fear, and pain to go—other than into another sad song.

Nan Crafton recalled being in London with Tammy very early one groggy morning. “We’d been playin’ all night, they took us straight to a studio.” In preparation for some taping, a makeup artist starting working on her face. “It was so cold, so sleepy in London. Tammy looked over at me and said, ‘Y’know, Nan, it’s not all sunglasses and autographs.’”

Strange things were happening at the house on Franklin Road. Weird phone calls. People walking on the roof. Rocks thrown through windows. Death threats in the mailbox. Someone breaking in and stuffing up the sinks and bathtubs, flooding the place. In a weird replay of the incident in Lakeland, an intruder “had come in through the skylight and written filthy words in lipstick all over my walls and mirrors,” said Wynette.

Then there was the fire. Tammy was in bed; her grandmother and her daughters, plus two of their friends, were home at the time. “I tried to call the fire department, but my wires had been cut to the telephone,” said Wynette. “The burglar alarm system had also been cut.” She called then-boyfriend Rudy Gatlin to stand guard. Fire destroyed three rooms in the house, causing thousands of dollars in damage. Curiously, years later Wynette would blame the blaze on “a little time bomb of some sort.”

The police investigated. “They insisted it was done by someone on the inside,” said Tammy. “We all took lie-detector tests.” For a while Rudy Gatlin was a suspect. “They put him through hell,” said Wynette. Rudy was ten years younger than Tammy, and, according to her, “he made me feel like a kid again.” His brother Larry was against the relationship. “Tammy was a lot older and had a bad reputation with guys,” said Joan Dew. “Larry was protecting his younger brother.”

The fire and the resulting bad publicity were the last straw. “The relationship with Rudy was never the same,” said Tammy, who lost not only her boyfriend but her backup singers. “The Gatlins ended up going to work for Larry.” As far as the fire, “we still don’t know who did it or why,” said Wynette. “No one was ever caught.”

Let’s let a woman explain the heterosexual appeal of Burt. “Burt Reynolds is the quintessential 70’s sex object,” wrote cultural critic Kim Morgan. “First off, he had that much-imitated high pitched laugh; it flowed easily but was abrupt, almost bizarre. And then there was his face—Cherokee cheekbones made his dark features almost exotic, especially with those thick eyebrows that appeared charming and amused one minute (watch any frame of Smokey and the Bandit) angry and insane the next (check his very believable domestic fight at the beginning of The Longest Yard).

“He’s of a time when men were men, but in their Coors-drinking, shit-kicking way, somewhat dandy in their manliness. These guys wore crotch-tight jeans, enormous belt buckles, cultivated thick mustaches and drove muscle cars without a hint of irony. But it was his easygoing charm, his confidence, his continual amusement at the loony world and his apparent down-to-earth nature that captivated the public—like he was one of them, only a lot better-looking and enjoying a lot more sexual conquests.... Women wanted to have sex with him (remember that nude Cosmopolitan centerfold?) and men not only wanted to be him but be his best friend as well.”

The First Lady of Country and the King of the Drive-Ins: Burt Reynolds and Tammy Wynette were a potent pairing. The relationship, which they tried to keep secret at first, sent the tabloids into a frenzy. “We Find Burt Reynolds and Tammy Wynette in Their ‘Love Hideaway’—Dinah Bitter Over Their ‘Sneak Affair’!” shrieked the January 1977 cover of Screen Stories. Wynette had been in the gossip rags before, but this romance would gain her the dubious status of tabloid queen, and for the rest of her life they’d keep tabs on her.

Tammy met Burt through his friend Jerry Reed. After appearing on a Reed TV special in September 1975, during which she performed a wrenching “‘Til I Can Make It on My Own,” she joined Reed and Reynolds for dinner. Then Burt called her during a recording session at the Quonset Hut. Wynette had to endure the hoots and catcalls of the pickers when they heard who was on the line. Reynolds and Wynette had a few things in common: Baptist upbringing, a love for country music and the state of Florida, not to mention pinto beans and corn bread. Tammy had her maladies, and Burt suffered from panic attacks. “At least I know he doesn’t want to become a singer, or want me to record some song he’s written, and he sure isn’t after my money,” said Wynette. They would see each other off and on the next few years and remain friends for life.

Tammy was completely smitten by Reynolds. As Joan Dew recalled, “He’d say to her, ‘You’ll never know when you’re on the road, the house is dark and you look out there, I may be standing in the back watching you.’ She thought that was so romantic. She really believed Burt was in love with her.” When Reynolds suggested she buy a place of her own in Florida, Tammy found a stunning oceanside estate in the town of Jupiter where her neighbors included Perry Como and Mike Douglas. The residence would be her favorite hideaway for years. The house curved around a swimming pool, and you could see the ocean from every room. Tammy would sit out in the sun for hours with Nan. “The big thing was to get there, run up the stairs, peel off your clothes, and jump in the pool,” said Nan. Jan Smith recalled the drama of Tammy’s bedroom. “She loved nothing better than to open her sliding glass doors as the tides were comin’ in and there was a huge wind. I seen those drapes stand straight out from the wall, the wind would be gusting so hard. She loved that. Tammy loved the ocean.”

Burt and Tammy, a slightly kooky couple. Once when Wynette was staying at the swanky Beverly Wilshire hotel in Beverly Hills, she planned a surprise for Reynolds. Burt loved her Southern cooking, and Tammy enlisted the help of Joan Dew. “We went shopping for what she wanted to make for him, which was pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy, and greens—a full meal, including the banana pudding,” said Dew, who assisted Wynette in preparing it at her Los Angeles home. “We put it in containers you could transport to the Beverly Wilshire, and they agreed to keep it warm for her.” But Reynolds, in the midst of a movie shoot, failed to show up on time. Said Dew, “Tammy kept calling me about every twenty minutes—‘I don’t know when he’s getting here! The food’s gonna be ruined!’” Burt finally showed up at midnight, immediately suffered a panic attack, and sat there breathing into a paper bag to calm himself down. “It didn’t turn out to be the romantic evening Tammy had hoped it would be,” said Dew.

During one visit to Florida, Reynolds had been mysteriously ill and seeing various doctors. Tammy ran a hot bath for him and left him to relax. She thought she heard a voice calling out and finally realized it was Reynolds. She ran into the bathroom to find him unconscious and underwater. “It absolutely scared me to death,” said Tammy. “Finally I got into the tub with him trying to get him out. It never once dawned on me to pull the plug and let the water out.” Reynolds was rushed to a hospital, where it was discovered he was hypoglycemic. He spent three and a half weeks convalescing. When he was released, on Christmas Eve, Wynette had a present waiting for him—a white 1957 Lincoln Continental. Burt was so excited he tossed Tammy into the air and demanded they go for a drive. Wynette had been suffering from a twenty-four-hour bug and immediately got sick. She bravely went for a second go-round and got ill again. Reynolds was “dying laughing,” recalled Tammy. When they got back to his house, Tammy nodded off. “He looked at his mother and said, ‘Boy, that says a lot for Burt Reynolds, don’t it?’”

Reynolds would name a character after Tammy in his 1977 smash Smokey and the Bandit. He invited an excited Wynette to the premiere and told her to listen real close for her name. In the movie Jerry Reed announces to his wife he’s going out for a beer run. As Tammy recalled, “She came to the door with rollers in her hair, a sloppy old housecoat, a cigarette danglin’ from her mouth, and he says, ‘Wynette, I got to ...’” Tammy, who was mortified, “just slid down in my seat,” she said. (Reynolds would cast Wynette as another downtrodden housewife in his 1985 movie Stick, but her cameo was apparently cut from the movie.)

They’d both see other people during the relationship, and Tammy maintained that this was fine with her. “I never checked up on him when we were together, and he never checked up on me,” said Wynette. “We’d have a good time and say good-bye with no promises.” When it came to marriage, this time she claimed to know better. She said she told Burt, “If you and I walk down the aisle and a pretty girl waved at you, you’d be looking back over your shoulder and blowing her a kiss.” Her friends paint a different picture. Jan Smith felt Tammy’s insecurities undermined the relationship. “Burt was too big an achievement for her. He was a big star, and she never realized that she was, too.” Joan Dew felt that Wynette was dreaming of the same old fairy tale. “I think she really believed Burt was gonna marry her. It was very sad, really.”

One day Tammy returned to the house on Franklin Road to find a gaggle of uninvited reporters from the National Enquirer at her doorstep, trying to ferret out the latest on the romance with Burt. Well, she had a scoop for them. There was no romance with Burt Reynolds, because she was going to marry local real estate developer J. Michael Tomlin. Her daughters standing inside the house were stunned. “Gwen and I were speechless,” wrote Jackie. Mom hadn’t said anything to them. Nor did Burt know anything about it. Miss Tammy was full of surprises.

Tomlin, who had dated Nan Crafton, was a smooth operator—drank Dom Pérignon, traveled by Mercedes and Learjet. He appeared to have money. “I don’t want to be known as Mr. Tammy Wynette,” he claimed. According to Joan Dew, Tomlin “was the first successful, well-to-do socially climbing man to come on to her. Before that it was country music and low class.... Tomlin was educated, he was supposedly turned out. It was all a facade. The furniture in his office was rented.” Tammy’s friends tried to warn her, but she refused to listen. “Nothing is sadder than a jaded lady,” she maintained. “When I married Michael I thought this was the fulfillment of a certain emptiness in my life. I thought I had found my Prince Charming.”

Mildred, highly upset over this latest Prince Charming, thought Tammy was making a terrible mistake and reached out to George Jones. “Mildred called me the day before she got married in that tent to that ol’ Tomlin. She said, ‘I wish you would give Tammy a call. You probably won’t do any good, but just say somethin’ to her. This man is after what she’s got.’ Well, I did it. I called Tammy and said, ‘None o’ my business, you’re as free as the breeze, but—and I’m not sayin’ this for me, I’m sayin’ it for you—you’re fixin’ to get in trouble again with a guy that’s only got dollar signs ringin’ in his ears.’ That’s the worst thing I coulda ever done. That put the seal on it!” According to Maxine Hyder, Jones showed up at Tammy’s house for the ceremony “but he couldn’t get enough courage to come into the wedding.”

The nuptials took place at Tammy’s home on July 18, 1976. Her first ceremony not to occur hastily at some courthouse, it took place “out in the monster front yard of her mansion,” said photographer Marshall Fallwell. “Hundreds of her so-called closest friends.” Orchids everywhere, the grounds were done up like “the movie set of a Polynesian paradise,” said Tammy, who’d foot the bill for the extravaganza. (Best of all was the irresistible pillow-talk version of “Hawaiian Love Song” she’d recorded just for the service and which wound up on her 1976 album ‘Til I Can Make It on My Own.) The atmosphere only turned more carnival-like when the minister came out on behalf of the husband and bride-to-be to ask her band members “to refrain from selling albums and T-shirts at the reception.”

An inebriated Nan Crafton tried to talk Tammy out of the marriage right up until the last minute. “Just hop on this golf cart, and we can make a run for the street before it’s too late,” she told Wynette. Marshall Fallwell felt sorry for Tammy. “Everybody told her what a wonderful life she was living. She was sort of bewildered.”

Ominously, when she’d gotten into the car to head for the ceremony, what should come on the radio but her and Jones singing “Golden Ring.” The marriage was to last a mere forty-four days. As Tammy had to perform at the White House for then-president Gerald Ford, bride and groom left the reception in a helicopter. Jan had been out on the road with neighbors of Wynette—Minnie Pearl and her husband, Henry Cannon. As they drove down Franklin Road they looked up in the sky to see the chopper floating away. “Minnie said, ‘Oops, we missed Tammy’s wedding.’ And Henry, who had the driest sense of humor in the world, said, ‘Oh, that’s okay. We’ll catch the next one.’”

Tomlin and Wynette honeymooned in Hawaii, and already the bickering began. Tammy, now having trouble with her gallbladder, wound up in the hospital pumped full of drugs. She claimed Michael racked up bills left and right. Back in Nashville, Wynette had gallbladder surgery, then headed to Jupiter to recuperate. According to Tammy, Tomlin fired off a pistol on the beach, scaring her kids. She told Michael it was over. On her way back to Nashville, her incision opened, oozing fluid during a layover in Atlanta. She was taken to a local hospital. She called Burt Reynolds, who was in town filming Smokey and the Bandit, and asked if he could recommend a physician. “I think she wanted to see Burt as much as she wanted to see a doctor,” noted daughter Jackie.

Reynolds came to check up on her. It was an emotional visit. She’d never told Burt about the marriage and was too humiliated to confess it was already over. “I guess you know it should’ve been you and me,” Tammy told him. She’d hang on to that line, asking Sherrill to craft a song out of it, resulting in the delicate “You and Me.” (Sherrill’s cowriter and Wynette’s next husband, George Richey, offered a different story, saying the song was inspired by Richey’s then-secret love for Tammy.) Told from the point of view of a woman who’s with one man but thinking of another, Wynette sings most of the song in a highly intimate whisper, belting out a line here and there just to stand your hair on end. There is a great clip of a tanned and very blonde Tammy doing the song on a Burt Reynolds TV special. He interviews her beforehand, and she seems so smitten by Burt she can barely answer the questions.

The aftermath of the Tomlin marriage was a gruesome affair. Tammy wanted the marriage annulled; Tomlin held out for a divorce. “Michael was strictly after my money,” said a crestfallen Wynette. “He said that he would give me a divorce but first he wanted a three-hundred-thousand-dollar cash settlement. I said, ‘You’ll get it when hell freezes over. You’ve already gotten plenty of money from me.’” (Tomlin denied the charges in an interview with the National Enquirer.) Wynette said she finally paid him fifteen grand to go away.

The situation deeply embarrassed Tammy. “The worst thing about the marriage to Michael was what it did to me mentally. I’m beginning to really get paranoid and bitter ... I’m beginning to lose faith in myself, and I’m hurt by the talk it’s brought—‘Four marriages? What’s she trying to do—set some kind of record?’”

Following her hysterectomy, she had been having constant problems with her stomach. Adhesions kept developing in her intestines, wreaking havoc on her digestive system. “It would look like there was a grapefruit protruding from her abdomen,” said Joan Dew. “She was always talkin’ about how painful it was.” Jan Smith remembered heading over to a late-night pharmacy on Twelfth Avenue in Nashville to pick up the first narcotics Tammy ever had. Wynette was suffering severe stomach cramps, and, said Smith, a doctor “innocently prescribed” Demerol, an extremely powerful and highly addictive painkiller. Tammy’s adhesions kept returning, which necessitated repeated operations—and more and more painkillers to enable her to work. Thus began a terrible cycle. “Everything was a catch-22 with Tammy,” said Jan. “More operations, more keloids, more drugs, more obstructions.”

Unfortunately Wynette started taking the drug even when she wasn’t in pain. “She wasn’t like a person who went out into the street to get high,” said Joan Dew. “Tammy wasn’t even the kind of person who really drank. She was one of those people—this is not uncommon in her era—that if the doctor gives you the prescription, it’s okay. He’s not gonna give you somethin’ that’s gonna harm you in any way. The doctor’s word is law.”

Not only that, but physicians are prone to the same sort of celebrity worship as anybody else. Georgette Jones, who worked as a nurse, noted that her mother’s addiction was not unlike what “happened to Elvis. Doctors want so badly to impress and make friends with celebrities that they prescribe things that they wouldn’t necessarily prescribe for just their average patient. And it’s a terrible thing, because it makes the person feel like it’s appropriate when it’s not.”

The end result was that one way or another Wynette had easy access to narcotics and she quickly developed a tolerance. “I have seen her go onstage and do a show with enough Demerol in her to knock a two-hundred-pound man out during surgery,” said Dew. “She started needing Demerol shots because the pills weren’t working anymore. So we would go into a town, and usually James Hollie would find a doctor for her, explain what was going on, and the doctor would come on the bus and give her Demerol. That would keep her for the night, and we’d go on to the next town.” Her entourage aboard the Silver Eagle kept her secret. “I can tell you, everybody on that bus has given her a shot,” admitted Nan, who said a Nashville doctor “took me into his office and taught me how to give her a shot. He would give us thirty cc’s of Demerol and thirty cc’s of Valium every time we went on the road.”

As Wynette’s need for the painkiller intensified, it became harder and harder to get the drug in her hometown. “The doctors in Nashville all caught on, and they would not give her any more prescriptions for Demerol,” said Joan Dew. But she found one in Atlanta that would. And one in Vegas. “She had doctors all over the country.” Many a sleepless night on the road was spent hunting down emergency rooms so Tammy could get medicated. “Sixty-milligram stop at one, then another—get another sixty milligrams,” said Nan. “The magic number was 250 milligrams,” said Jan.

It was at a concert date at an Iowa racetrack when Joan Dew realized just how grave the situation was. “Tammy was in pain that day, and James hadn’t been able to find a doctor. She hadn’t done a very good show and she was almost doubled over in pain.” Joan and Nan were helping her down the steps backstage when Tammy mysteriously acquired a sudden surge of strength. “She pushed us both aside with such force it almost knocked Nan over. Tammy wanted to prove how much pain she was in. She threw herself down the steps on purpose.” Wynette got her a doctor, and her Demerol.

“There were a lot of times Tammy wanted the drugs, and the pain wasn’t there,” said her governess, Cathye Leshay. “She’d do all sorts of little tricks to make you think she needed ‘em.” One Christmas Tammy was entertaining some friends and “she went back in the bathroom and got bath powder, put it all over her face to make her look pale, came out, and said, ‘I don’t feel well. Do I look pale?’ And you could see that she had put powder on her face.” According to songwriter Jerry Taylor, Wynette once stuck a pencil in her ear to get drugs.

“I know that Tammy would fake pain,” said singer and friend Jan Howard. “She called, had a bad toothache and asked who my dentist was. He told me later, ‘Jan, your friend has a problem. There’s nothing wrong with her tooth. I’m not prescribing anything because there’s nothing wrong with her.’” Wynette stormed out of a hospital in San Antonio because doctors wouldn’t give her painkillers without a full diagnosis. Joan Dew said that working on Tammy’s autobiography became more and more of a challenge as Wynette fell deeper into drugs. “It would go in cycles. She’d be fine for a few days, really in pain for a few days, then really out of it a few days.”

Yet Wynette never complained. She was of the school that the show must go on, and often it went on when she was in agony. “Tammy could knock twenty-five thousand people out of their chairs with the best show you’ve ever seen in your life and then just pass out from pain comin’ off the stage,” said Cathye Leshay, who noticed that Tammy had a little trick where she’d hold the mic in one hand, letting the cord stretch across her stomach, which she’d then press on “to get a little bit of relief. It was just so sad. Because you felt so helpless. There wasn’t anything you could do. I would just cry. We all would.”

“I’m by no means a swinging single,” confessed Tammy to Gallery magazine in 1976. Despite the many romances, Wynette did not enjoy being husband-less. “Mom’s compulsive gallivanting was not so much a pursuit of amusement as it was an escape from the void that always consumed her when there was no man in her life,” wrote her daughter Jackie.

Ask people about George Richey and you’ll get some curious responses. Merle Haggard toured with Tammy and had briefly utilized Richey as a producer, but when I inquired about him, Merle simply said, “I’m gonna take the Fifth.” What kind of guy was George Richey? I asked Billy Sherrill. “Weird. Just out of it ... way out there somewhere,” he said, not wanting to linger on the subject. When George Jones was asked if he thought Richey had had Tammy’s best interests at heart, he paused uncomfortably and said, “I believe a lot of things went on that shouldn’t have went on. Let me put it that way.” When I quizzed Lorrie Morgan on what she thought drove George Richey, she said, “Money,” and then let loose with a smokey chuckle. Patsy Sledd found Richey as “phony as a two-dollar watch.” A few people even entertained me with their Richey impressions, which consisted of reading glasses perched way down on the nose and intoning commands in a sonorous, somewhat regal tone.

George Richey is easily the most controversial character in Tammy Wynette’s life. After she died her daughters took both Richey and Tammy’s last doctor, Wallis Marsh, plus UPMC Presbyterian and University Health Center of Pittsburgh, to court over allegations concerning her final years and demise. (Richey was later dropped from the suit, which was settled out of court.) Jackie Daly’s 2000 book, Tammy Wynette: A Daughter Recalls Her Mother’s Tragic Life and Death, painted a highly unflattering picture of Richey, which was only amplified in the media, particularly in the tabloids.

While they are certainly in the minority, Richey does have his defenders. “I think George Richey was among the greater things that ever happened to Tammy Wynette,” insisted bodyguard Steve Chapman. “He looked after her every need.” Sue Richards, who sang backup for Wynette for fifteen years starting in 1977, said that Richey “pulled me through some tough times.... In 1984 I lost a child. It devastated me so bad I didn’t know if I’d come out of it. And Richey just insisted that I come back to work. If it wasn’t for Richey I don’t know exactly where I’d be today. He was good to me.”

On the rare occasions Tammy felt strong enough to discuss him in private, she told a different story, at least according to friends and family. “I think Richey played the role of the good guy for a very long time in front of people,” said Georgette Jones. “It wasn’t until he was behind closed doors that he did what he did. Which was manipulate and control.”

Wynette had odd taste in men—there seems to be no common thread when you put them all in a line—but George Richey was definitely the oddest. Add up the cockeyed grin/sneer, the permed hair, mustache, and beard, plus the open shirts, gold chains, and gaudy rings (“He’d always twirl this ring on his finger,” noted Cliff Dew. “It was like he was conniving, thinking, scheming all the time”), and the persona is more that of a third-rate magician holding on to a lounge gig in Reno than any sort of Music City legend.

George Baker Richardson aka George Richey came into the world on November 30, 1935. The son of a Baptist preacher, Richey was born in Promised Land, Arkansas, and raised in Missouri. Barbara Hutchison recalled joining Richey and Wynette on a trip to see the house where George grew up in Malden, Missouri. “He took us ridin‘, got down into dirt roads. We came upon this shack.” Barbara was shocked, noting that the broken-down house where Tammy lived with Euple was “a mansion compared to Richey’s. This place was like a shantytown. I think they were seven of ’em in this little two-room shanty house, didn’t have wallpaper in it. They must’ve been very, very, very poor. Lord, no wonder Richey was desperate to make it to the top.”

Richey left school at age fourteen for the world of gospel music. “My favorite gospel singers were James Blackwood, Jake Hess, and Denver Crumpler,” he said. A formidable gospel pianist, he played with the Foggy River Boys on Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee TV show. “I then moved into country music for two reasons. I had started to love country music and I couldn’t make a living in gospel. Gospel music is still my first love.” Two of his other brothers went into the music business, Paul—a mediocre singer and songwriter who’d be deeply involved behind the scenes—and Wylie McPherson, who put out a single or two as a solo artist.

Richey also worked at a mortuary in 1962. During one of Tammy’s hospital stays, Barbara Hutchison heard Richey tell a nurse how he had “started out in the undertakin’ business.” She claims he went on to relate “how he locked his brother Paul, who was extremely afraid of dead people, in a room with a corpse. He was screamin’ to let him out.” Richey found it amusing. “That gave me the willies,” said Barbara. “Just sent chills down my spine.”

After a stint in the army, Richey entered the world of radio, working as a DJ at KMOP in Tucson, KAYO in Seattle, and KGBS in Los Angeles. He then went to Capitol records as head of A and R, beginning a long career as a producer. “He’s produced the greats—Burl Ives, Tex Ritter ... ,” said Tammy. “I can’t begin to name them all.” Not everyone was thrilled to have Richey in charge. Charlie Louvin, who worked with Richey at Capitol, recalled a session where the producer spent the first forty-five minutes or so talking to some woman. “We had the Jordanaires in the studio, six or eight musicians,” said Louvin. “All this expense comin’ out of my hide.” To avoid wasting any more time, Charlie proceeded to start work on his own.

“And almost at that exact second George turned on the mic so he could hear what was goin’ on in the studio. He jumped up, ran in, and said, ‘Who changed the arrangement on my goddamn session?’” Louvin informed him no arrangement had been changed, as thus far there wasn’t any. “He repeated one more time—‘Nobody changes the arrangement on my goddamn session.’ Finally I handed him the words to the song and said, ‘If it’s your “goddamn session,” here’s the words, you record it. I’m outta here.’” Louvin called Ken Nelson, head of Capitol, and asked to record with someone else. Nelson informed him Richey was in charge. Charlie told him, “If we go in the studio again together there’ll be a killin’.” Louvin actually left the label over it.

Along the way Richey had a brief and unsuccessful career as a singer. “When I was quite young I really wanted to be a recording artist,” he wrote on his Tammy Web site. “I found out much to my dismay that I wasn’t a great singing talent.” He had a handful of singles on Hickory and Ascot, most notably the truly abysmal “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” in which Richey sings in a flat, nasal monotone but which actually charted. He said he cut the record as a joke: “It occurred to me that if it did become a hit, that I would have to sing through my nose the rest of my life.” His frustrated desire to become a star might explain some of his behavior during his marriage to Tammy. “Richey was ... different,” said Nancy Jones. “I think Richey loved the limelight more than Tammy did.”

In 1967 Richey moved to Nashville and landed at Epic with Billy Sherrill, working as a staff writer and sometime producer. It was there that George first encountered Tammy. Richey started cowriting songs for her, beginning with the beautiful “Come on Home” from Wynette’s 1968 album D-I-V-O-R-C-E. “He’s written I guess half the things I’ve done in my career,” said Wynette in a 1980 interview. (I only count about a dozen cowriting credits for Richey from 1966 to 1980, including a pair of songs for George and Tammy. All were album cuts, save for “‘Til I Can Make It on My Own,” “You and Me,” “Let’s Get Together (One More Time),” and “We Loved It Away.” He also cowrote “A Picture of Me (Without You),” “The Door,” “The Grand Tour,” and “The Battle” for George Jones.

Richey also had a successful publishing company, which held the rights to such moneymakers as the Billie Jo Spears hit “Blanket on the Ground,” as well as the Kenny Rogers smashes “Coward of the Country” and “Lucille.” From 1970 to 1977 he was musical director of Hee Haw. In his book about the show, producer Sam Lovullo wrote that Richey left Hee Haw “under less than perfect conditions,” but he didn’t care to elaborate much when asked. “Without getting into the personal aspect of why he was gone, George was very, very much involved in his publishing company. He was forever promoting songs ... It was a case in point of absentee once in a while, okay?”

Richey’s first marriage was to Dorothy Ann Tippitt, with whom he raised two children, Deirdre and Kelly, before divorcing her and then marrying Sheila Hall in 1974. Hall had worked as a secretary for Kelso Herston. “She was a good-lookin’ dame,” said Kelso. “She had that vulnerable look about her,” added singer Dianne Sherrill, cousin of Billy. “She was a lovely person, befriended me when I came to town, opened her home to me. She was a great gal.”⁶² Through Richey she got to know Tammy and the rest of the crew. Sheila “was very submissive,” said Jan Smith. “She always was doin’ laundry.”

The Richeys were extremely close to Tammy Wynette. When Tammy overdosed on pills during the demise of her relationship with Jones, it was Richey that came to the hospital. Joan Dew thought it strange that whenever Wynette broke off a relationship, George would suddenly appear. “Every time she’d be between men in her life, you’d look out the back door, and here comes George Richey. I swear to God, it was like he had a Tammy detector, some kind of homing device to let him know she was between men.” During the many weird break-ins and threats at the Franklin Road house, she turned to the Richeys for help.

Sheila Richey was “one of Tammy’s very best friends, and would travel with her on the road a lot of times,” said Dew. “She was around all the time. Sheila was funny—she was one of those kind of people who enjoys being a celebrity’s friend but wasn’t obnoxious about it. She always carried this huge purse. It was always a joke on the bus—anything you could ever want from a Band-Aid to I don’t know what, she had in that purse.”

“Tammy didn’t have a lot of people surrounding her that she could trust,” said Sheila’s brother Jerry Hall. “My sister was one person she could. At one time they were like sisters. Sheila knew Tammy’s secrets.” Jerry said Sheila was so loyal to Tammy she rarely shared anything she knew even with him.

George and Sheila’s marriage was a turbulent one. They “used to fight like cats and dogs,” said Hall, who alleged Richey “would take her formal dresses and he’d throw ‘em in the fireplace and burn ’em.” In June 1975, Sheila filed for divorce, alleging “cruel and inhuman treatment.” She maintained she was “dreadfully afraid” of Richey, who she claimed threw her out of the house in her underwear one winter night. Sheila showed up at the door of neighbor Nan Crafton, wearing only a pair of loose-fitting pants she’d pulled up over her chest. “She had come through the woods barefoot,” Nan recalled. “Richey was mean. Mean.” The divorce was dropped, and the allegations were never proven in court. Friends say Tammy was well aware of such stories.

According to what Richey told Ralph Emery, he was “drinking heavily with two women” one mid-seventies night when he stopped by the studio to visit Tammy. When she went to kiss him hello, Richey “just pulled her into my lap. I had had just enough sauce to have enough courage to say whatever I wanted.” He confessed his feelings, and after the session, off into the night they went. The next day Joan Dew received a “guess what I did last night?” call from Wynette. “Tammy told me she’d slept with him after a recording session one night—they went to the ‘No-Tell Motel.’ I said, ‘How was it?’ And she said, ‘Wonderful!’—which she said about every guy she slept with. Sex was important to Tammy the way it was with my aunt who was married five times. It wasn’t about really loving the act of sex, it was about feeling a man wanted you.”

Richey wanted Wynette with a vengeance, and some of her friends were suspicious. They found him arrogant, controlling, and sporting a false air of spiritual superiority. “He always pretended to be very religious,” said Joan Dew. “He didn’t go to church or anything.” Once Richey took over Tammy’s affairs, he’d call any band member on the carpet for swearing. “He didn’t like foul language—or pretended not to,” said Dew, who maintained it was fine for George or his brother Paul to cuss. When it came to “bad language,” said Charlene Montgomery, “George Richey was one of the worst. Richey was rough, rough talkin’.” Dew found Richey to be “very two-faced and hypocritical. I wouldn’t have trusted him behind a screen door with my grandmother.”

The affair worried Dew, as she knew Richey wouldn’t be as easy to shrug off as Wynette had her other flings. “I was concerned and fearful. He had been waiting for years for an opportunity. Oh, my God, had he been waiting! If Richey got her, I knew he would do whatever it took to stay with her. To keep her.” George Jones was stunned when he found out. “Of all people, I would never dream she’d marry Richey,” he said.

Complicating matters was the fact that Richey was still married to Sheila at the time.⁶³ “When George moved in with Tammy, his wife didn’t know it,” Joan Dew continued. “Sheila didn’t know they were quote-unquote separated. Much less that Richey was seeing Tammy.” When friends informed Sheila her husband was seeing Wynette, she was devastated. She considered Tammy a best friend. Wynette, however, was intoxicated by the illicit affair. As she admitted in a 1981 interview, “We slipped out of town and hid out for a few months. It was all so romantic. Just that feeling of, ‘It’s the two of us and nobody else knows.’”

“That’s the kind of thing Tammy would do with absolutely no qualms,” admitted Dew. “No sense of, ‘Hey, maybe this isn’t the right thing to do.’” Not only that, but friends have accused Richey and Wynette of cruel behavior toward his soon-to-be ex. “They would call Sheila all hours of the night, hang up on her, do mean things to her,” said Nan Crafton. Some feel Richey was to blame for such shenanigans. “Tammy was led by the person she was in love with pretty easily,” said Jan Smith.

Others have admitted that Wynette had a troubling side to her. “There were a few things that Tammy did when I was with her that were horrendous, and I would never tell what they were,” said Joan Dew. “They weren’t illegal or anything like that, just things you would do if you wanted to get even with somebody. It didn’t happen often, but it gave you a picture that Tammy was someone you wouldn’t want to mess with.” And yet her friends forgave her for such behavior. How did she get away with it? “Because she was Tammy Wynette!” said Dew.

Sheila filed for divorce once more in October 1977, alleging adultery. Everybody in Nashville knew who “the other woman” was. “If you were writin’ about Tammy, this would be the dark pages,” said one friend of Sheila’s who shall remain anonymous. “It wouldn’t be a pretty chapter. When you have a woman steal another woman’s husband—and that husband is this woman’s life—then you got a reckless triangle, and somebody’s gonna get hurt really bad. In this case it was Sheila, because George and Tammy fell head over heels in love. And that’s when Sheila was left at home all alone. I’d never seen her take a drink or smoke a cigarette until all that happened. It really did drive her to drinkin’.”

Friends say Sheila Hall never got over the betrayal. One night Sheila was driving back from seeing Dianne Sherrill perform at Printer’s Alley. She was drunk and ran into a telephone pole. The accident left her with a severed Achilles tendon, crippling her. “She couldn’t walk, and many times she fell,” said Dianne. “She said, ‘That’s the end for me.’”

On October 16, 1981, Sheila Hall was found dead in her Nashville apartment at 514 Doral Country Lane. By her side was her pet poodle, Elsie, given to her by Richey, and the pooch had no pulse either. Sheila’s death was ruled an accident, although an unnamed Nashville cop assigned to the case told a tabloid that Hall “took an overdose of drugs. It seems she killed her dog, then killed herself.” Her brother isn’t so certain. “I won’t say she took her own life,” said Jerry. “I say there was the possibility that it occurred.” Others have whispered for years that foul play was involved.

Nan Crafton insisted that even if Sheila had committed suicide, she would’ve never let the world see her in the disheveled state she was found in. “I knew Sheila well, and she didn’t let anybody see her unless she was absolutely to the nines—false eyelashes, full makeup. Her hair would be done—always, always. They said she killed herself and she killed Elsie. I just never have believed that. Never, not one second.” When Jerry Hall was cleaning out his deceased sister’s home, George Richey called. There were two possessions he wanted back: Tex Ritter’s hat, and a rifle. “He never showed up,” said Jerry. “I think he was afraid to see me.”

Seven years later author Randall Riese wrote about the Richey-Tammy-Sheila affair in his compendium of Music City scandal entitled Nashville Babylon. Hairdresser Barbara Hutchison had innocently bought the book while she was on the road with Tammy. Back on the bus she mentioned the tome she’d purchased to Richey, who, with one eyebrow cocked, picked it up and flipped through the pages. “I got back into my bunk that night and read the stuff about Tammy telling all about Sheila,” said Barbara. “I went, ‘Oh, my God.’ I thought, ‘Ooooh, I don’t want Richey to read this book.’” When they got to the next venue, Hutchison left the copy of Nashville Babylon with her other belongings on her bunk. “I came back from the concert that night and that book was gone—and never did reappear!” Barbara was certain Richey had gotten rid of it. “He knew that book was out and didn’t want anybody to discuss it openly on the bus.”

“I always said I would never live openly with a man with my children around,” said Tammy in 1978, failing to take into account that she’d lived with both Don Chapel and George Jones before heading to the altar. “It was against everything we have ever been taught ... But his divorce wasn’t final, and we needed each other.”

When Richey and Wynette marched into Sherrill’s office to tell him the news, he was his typically irreverent self. “Your boobs are bigger,” he pointed out to Tammy. She informed him that she’d just been sick and lost weight. Then she dropped the bomb: she and Richey were tying the knot. “Oh, my God. I just told you your boobs were bigger,” he said, cracking them both up. Billy had one other pronouncement to make that day, albeit a more serious one. “There will be no more sad songs written,” he told Tammy. He was only half right. Once Wynette married Richey, there would hardly be any songs written, sad or otherwise.

Richey’s divorce was finalized in May 1978. George and Tammy married on July 6 of that year, on the beach in Florida. Some have felt that Tammy’s aunt Carolyn Jetton, who’d been like a sister to Tammy, had a lot to do with the wedding’s taking place. Carolyn was dying of cancer and had one last wish. “Tammy promised Carolyn she’d marry Richey,” said her old Florida friend Maxine Hyder. “I think she did it because she knew that Carolyn was gonna die, and Carolyn didn’t like ’em livin’ in sin.”

The fact that Jetton was desperately ill didn’t stop Tammy from wheedling some drugs out of her the day of the wedding. “Carolyn was on Demerol for pain,” said Joan Dew. “Carolyn really needed Demerol.” On the day of the ceremony, Wynette proceeded to finagle some of the painkiller out of her dying aunt. “That day when she got married to George Richey, Tammy was stoned out of her mind. That’s the kind of thing that in a million years the old Tammy would never have done. That’s how desperate she was.”

Once George and Tammy were married, big changes occurred. Richey called Cathye Leshay into his office and told her, “I cannot start a life with and build a relationship with Tammy and her girls when I’m livin’ in a female dormitory ... I guess I gotta get rid of everybody.” And over the next few years, get rid of everybody he did. Gone was Tammy’s longtime lawyer, John Lentz. Save for Charlie Carter, one by one the band departed. As for her friends, “Richey ran us all off,” said Nan Crafton. “George Richey got rid of everybody that Tammy liked,” said Joan Dew. “So he could be totally in control. She wouldn’t have any other confidants.”

The marriage to Tammy “creates no problem for me,” boasted Richey to the press, adding proudly that he was “often referred to as Mr. Wynette.” He’d state repeatedly how he felt that Wynette had been victimized before he’d arrived on the scene. “I felt she was being used by a lot of people,” he said. “I was determined to make certain ... it wouldn’t happen any longer.” He “weeded out the bloodsuckers, leeches, and joyriders” from around Tammy. There are those around Wynette who find such comments darkly ironic.

“When Tammy married George Richey, she married that entire friggin’ family,” said songwriter Jerry Taylor, who wrote for Tammy and worked with Richey. “So what happens? The first thing we do is start a Cadillac dealership in Malden, Missouri. Who’s runnin’ it? The Richardsons. We start a publishing company, First Lady Songs. Who’s runnin’ it? Paul Richey.”

Tammy was no longer in charge of her finances, her friends, or her life. Now came years of illness, drug addiction, and isolation. Even Jones was cut off from her. “When Richey married her, you had to go through channels—you couldn’t even call direct to Tammy anymore. I couldn’t even call and check on my daughter—‘Well, Miss Wynette will call you, Mr. Jones. When the time is right, we’ll get back to you.’ You’ll get back to me?! Richey took over her business, everything that pertained to money. He took over the bank accounts, bookings, everything. Everything.”

You know what I think? You were tired. After you married Richey, you gave up on romance. The obsessions that drove your art had worn you down. Over and over, searching for this crazy ideal. Reality had smacked you in the face a few dozen times. You couldn’t take it anymore. And the kind of misery you were trapped in now produced no artistic dividends. There was nothing to sing about. So you just checked out.

There is this song of yours from 1979, “Let Me Be Me.” It has been on my mind constantly as I’ve been writing this. It’s a simple ditty, at least on the surface. Let me be free, let me be me. Truly beautiful, the slow and deliberate way you sing it. Then comes the jaunty little middle eight where you ask to be molded, fitted, hammered, and welded into the Perfect Wife. Let me be versus Whatever you want. It’s two completely opposite points of view car-crashed together into one song. I can appreciate the split personality, Miss Tammy. It’s you in spades.

Last night I had a dream. We were starring in a remake of that old black-and-white melodrama Something Wild. I was playing the Ralph Meeker part, you the Carroll Baker. And Ilocked you in that cheap apartment until you answered every question and solved every riddle in this book. A love story in other words.