Luck or Something Like It (25 page)

Then you’re together, and it takes your breath away.

So hold on with your heart, and let’s think forever right from the start.

But love’s not forever, it’s just for the rest of our lives.

You’re not my first love but you’ll be my last.

I give you my future. Forgive me my past.

And I know in my heart that this is what I want to do.

If I had one life, one love, there’d be one dream, for the two of us.

And as God is my witness whatever you do

Don’t change a thing ’cause I love loving you.

And as God is my witness I’ll give you all of my love.

I know that, as many marriages as I have been through and survived, it’s hard to believe I could feel this way at this point in my life, but the words in Wanda’s wedding song, “As God Is My Witness,” are exactly how I felt on my wedding day. Ask anyone who knows me. Our relationship is something special.

Wanda wasn’t there for the peak of my success, and in some ways that’s good. At that stage of a career there is no downtime. It’s just go here, go there, and try to keep up. It’s great fun and very rewarding for the artist, but damaging for a relationship. I missed a lot of important moments in my son Christopher’s life because of the pace I was living, and I regret that. As I said earlier in this book, there is a fine line between being driven and being selfish. I have no doubt that because success was so important to me, I crossed that line more than once.

Wanda actually came along at the best time for us. She missed the wave, but caught the crest afterward. We were still traveling in a private airplane—a 731 Jetstar—and had moved back to Beaver Dam Farms.

In 1996, I was working New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas at the Aladdin Hotel and had made a momentous decision. I would ask Wanda to marry me.

So, at ten thirty that night, just before the show, in the coffee shop, with Tonia; Jim Mazza and his wife, Val; and my friend Kelly Junkermann at the table, I literally got down on one knee and asked, “Wanda Miller, will you marry me?” I think everyone at the table was dumbfounded, not so much that I had proposed, but the fact I had chosen this way to do so. It was so out of character for me to do anything like this in public. I wanted her to know she was that special to me. Wanda, obviously, said yes.

We made a decision to get married at Beaver Dam Farms on June 1, 1997, and then we would fly off to the Caribbean the next day for our honeymoon. In the course of living at BDF for many years previously, I had also been in the Arabian horse business and had built a gigantic twenty-stall, 70,000-square-foot barn with an indoor riding-training ring in the middle and a big show ring just outside with viewing stands for shows and for sales purposes. We agreed it would be a perfect spot at a great time of the year for our wedding.

As June approached, we discussed with our wedding coordinator just how to do this. We decided we would build a big white gazebo in front of the outdoor sales ring, across from the stands, with garlands of flowers wrapped around the overhead bracing and baskets of flowers all around the bottom. It would be beautiful, we all agreed. Wanda and I, her dad, the flower girls, and the rest of the wedding party would come out the side door of the indoor arena and make our entrance from there.

Now I know it’s supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the ceremony, but around two o’clock the day of the wedding, I was summoned to Wanda’s area, where she and Tonia had been watching the weather report. Wanda was now convinced it was going to rain on our wedding. She asked about moving the entire event indoors. I reassured her it would not rain; there was not a cloud in the sky, and the gazebo was coming together beautifully. At three I was still confident, and she was more worried. Again I reassured her. At four, still three-plus hours before wedding time, she put her foot down as only a woman getting married can do. Her logic was, men look cute with wet hair, women don’t. The wedding would be inside.

So the transition began. While Wanda’s mom and sister were helping Wanda stay focused, her dad, Charles, who I swear can do anything, had recruited everyone there, staff and guests alike, to build a new gazebo, move the flowers, and polish the brass rails. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that surrounding this indoor ring were brass rails. There must have been thirty people helping in what I honestly thought was a useless process. It was not going to rain.

Believe it or not, by six, it was done. Charles and crew had moved the wedding gazebo, baskets of beautiful flowers, and two hundred folding chairs inside. This place was ready for our wedding. Six thirty, still no sign of rain. At seven
P.M.
sharp, the wedding began.

Wanda was absolutely beautiful, more beautiful than ever. Tina, her mom, and Tonia, her sister, both looked breathtaking. This was one beautiful family. Even Charles in his tuxedo was a really handsome guy, a side of him you don’t get to see very often. The entire wedding party looked spectacular. The barn had taken on a new look.

Outside, overhead, the tabloid helicopters were whirling around to get their shots, while outside the gates, a crowd had gathered, including some fans and, of all things, some protesters. This was at a time when I had Kenny Rogers Roasters chicken franchises all over the country. Two people in the group had dressed in chicken outfits with signs that read
KENNY KILLS CHICKENS.
What a sight that must have been.

Inside, things were moving pretty quickly. I had written the song “As God Is My Witness” for Wanda and had asked friends of mine, a group called the Katinas, to sing it for her. It was a special moment for Wanda, her family, and me because it said everything I felt.

So the music started and we came down the aisle with flower girls and rose petals scattered in front of us; Charles gave his little girl a squeeze and gave her hand to me. I saw Tina and Tonia in the back crying. As the minister started the ceremony, “as God is my witness,” it started to downpour. Not just a little shower. It poured.

Wanda just looked at me as if to say “don’t ever doubt me again.” Even in the middle of the wedding, I couldn’t help but visualize what the two chicken outfits out front looked like about then. What a night . . . for everyone.

My sister Barbara, her husband, Don, my sister Geraldine, my brother Billy and family, my other brothers, Randy and Roy, and my sister Sandy were all there to help us get married. My two older sons, Chris and Kenny, were there as well. I think Chris really loved Wanda right from the start. She had suggested we include him on a trip we took to Birmingham, Alabama, when Michael Jordan was playing baseball. Once he met Michael, he knew she couldn’t be all bad. One of my favorite moments of that night was when Wanda, who was concerned about how my sons would react to my marrying someone so much younger, was introduced to Kenny Jr., who was two years older than her. Without even saying hello, he put his arms around her neck and said “Mom.” That spoke volumes to all of us.

Here’s one small example of how Wanda began to change my life, in her own words:

Kenny has always felt young at heart, but I swear sometimes I think he thinks he is indestructible. Honestly, I thought he was, too, but then again you have to remember Kenny and I weren’t even married when this incident occurred. We had been dating about two years, I think, when I realized we were both wrong. At that moment, he was hurt bad, but I didn’t know it and he wouldn’t admit it.

Every year Kenny and the group would do a Christmas tour, with an annual show in Glens Falls, New York. There was this beautiful park in the middle of town and it was the middle of football season.

No matter who toured with Kenny at Christmas, they played touch football against each other for bragging rights. Testosterone was at an all-time high with all the guys.

Kelly would organize their traditional game every year. I got the feeling this was a big deal for everybody. I was too new to the group and really too young to say anything. I was maybe twenty-eight and most of the guys were at least forty, and though they would not admit it, they were all getting a little old for this.

This particular year, the opposition was Shelby Lynne and her group of musicians. Kenny was quarterback for his team, and as he went back to throw a pass, Shelby’s three-hundred-pound trumpet player rushed in, leaped, and landed right on poor Kenny.

Kenny’s shoulder went limp and made a crunch like I have never heard a shoulder crunch before. Everybody was so sure he was hurt, but with his high threshold for pain and tremendous ego, he finished the game, went on to do the show, and finish the tour. He would learn later that year that he had torn the rotator cuff in his shoulder. In January, we scheduled the surgery and we were told he would have to take a few months off while it healed.

It was early in the year, so he decided, what the heck, his other shoulder was bothering him, too, so why not get them both done. He actually had rotator cuff surgery on both shoulders at the same time. Well, rotator cuff surgery is, as I came to learn, a very painful operation and demands a good time of rehab afterward. He was all bound up and miserable.

However much he needed to lie back and recover, he immediately rushed back into action. Within a week or two after the operation, I caught him, loaded with Demerol and feeling bulletproof, out on the golf course with Rob and Kelly, attempting to hit golf balls. There was hell to pay for all of us. Ken Kragen called about then and went ballistic. He kept yelling, “Get him back in the house before he hurts himself.”

I don’t know what came over me but I felt I needed to say something to him since no one else would. Now, remember here I am twenty-eight years younger than him, and relatively new in his life. So what did I do?

I grounded him!

He would never admit it, but I think he was glad I made him quit.

His shoulder has never healed properly. He has never played another touch football game or loaded himself up with painkillers again but once after that. He was in so much pain he was taking enough Percocet, a painkiller, to drop a full-size horse. Since he had been grounded, the only thing he could do was watch TV. As I walked by one day, he was watching a commercial that ended with “I love alpacas.” Kenny looked at me, eyes at half mast, and said, “I think I do, too.” He ordered three.

Chapter Eighteen

Comeback

Meanwhile, along with my
marriage to Wanda and along with the movies and the other TV appearances that kept me in the public eye, Kelly and I were cooking up one new scheme after another.

“Success breeds confidence; confidence breeds more success.”

That’s the only way I can explain the stupid, unrealistic things Kelly and I have tried since I’ve known him. We have pulled off things that if we had ever considered failure, we would have never attempted.

It was around 1997, and I had been telling Kelly about Bryant’s five-and-dime that had been such an important part of my childhood, and how Mr. Bryant had a toy soldier that had been handed down from generation to generation in his family. It had been given to him when he was a child by his father and he had placed it up on the shelf so all the kids who came in could see it, but no one could touch it.

He would tell us kids as we sat around the story of the great Civil War, the North against the South, a moment in history we could not possibly relate to except for this little toy soldier that had been in his family since 1862. It had once been his great-grandfather’s. He made his story sound and feel so real, none of us could move as we listened. We were riveted every time he told it, and we couldn’t hear it too many times.

At one time the toy soldier, he said, had been carrying a rifle, but when his great-grandfather went to war, he had been shot and killed by a Yankee soldier with a rifle just like that, so someone in his family had removed the rifle and thrown it away, but the soldier had been kept all these years as a way of remembering his great-grandfather’s bravery. His great-grandfather had seen the need for the military at the time, but hated the killing.

The more Mr. Bryant told the story, the more real the war, the history, and the soldier became to all of us. This toy was a part of his family. Somewhere along the way, the grandkids had named the soldier “Captain William Bryant” in memory of his great-grandfather. He had been a decorated war hero in the Civil War. Mr. Bryant showed us that he was actually in the history books. You almost felt like you knew him and you were there.

Kelly loved the visual of kids sitting around a toy store being told stories about the history of old toys. He asked me what had happened to the hardware store, and I told him it had recently been forced out of business and taken over by a large chain of restaurants.

We were in about the tenth year of doing Christmas shows when Kelly and I decided to write a one-act play about the feel of Mr. Bryant’s storytelling. Instead of a five-and-dime store, it would be a neighborhood toy store that was being forced out of business by a money-hungry old man, Mr. Baxter, who wanted to open a Baxter Burger store in its place. It was classic tale of good versus evil.

This toy store, we decided, would represent everything good. It had been in the neighborhood for a hundred years. In it would be large, life-sized toys that had great history and deep meaning to the affable store owner, Hank Longley, who would be played by me. The toys would literally come to life the moment the store closed its doors. At night, while the toys were active, they would dance, sing, and discuss among themselves the problems facing the toys and Mr. Longley.

Some of the toys were old and broken but protected by Mr. Longley’s theory that “Just because they weren’t perfect didn’t mean they didn’t have value.” One of Hank’s most prized possessions was a carved wooden doll with only one leg. He had been named “Mr. Perfect” by the kids. On the back of Mr. Perfect was a poem that read:

ALL ARE EVEN IN THE EYES OF GOD

SOME GET BETTER STARTS.

BUT IT’S THOSE WHO HAVE THE LEAST ON EARTH,

WHO ARE CLOSEST TO HIS HEART.

Hank would tell stories to the kids about the origins and meaning of these old toys. One of them was about Hero the dog, the very first stuffed animal ever made. I loved writing both lyrics and narrative and especially loved short lines/lyrics that had heart. For the song about Hero, I wrote:

We all need heroes.

Someone to believe in.

Someone who believes in you . . .

That’s why they’re heroes . . .

They don’t try to be heroes . . .

Just doing every day . . .

What everyday people don’t do . . .

Writing all this was a daunting task since none of us had ever written anything like this before. Once we agreed on the specific toys and their backstories, we needed music. Warren Hartman and Steve Glassmeyer, both band members of mine for twenty-plus years and great songwriters, were the perfect guys to help. We each have our own strengths as songwriters.

Warren had the best sense of Broadway. He knew better than any of us how to make things flow with his unique songwriting skills and lush orchestrations. Steve had the best ability to write the fun songs the toys would sing and dance to. It was his job to make the audience laugh and smile.

I specialize in songs of the heart. It was my job to make them cry. So between laughing, crying, and Warren’s music, we gave it a try. The chances against this working were astronomical. In truth, that’s what made it fun for us.

So here we are, a former tennis pro, a country singer, and two musicians from the band, about to undertake the biggest gamble of our lives. More honestly, of my career. I have often said, “Kelly has had a great career by taking chances with mine.” We were, I guess, too stupid to even think about what could happen if this thing didn’t work, God forbid.

We had a friend, Diana Martinez, the producer of a Chicago theater group who helped us cast the toys and get the costumes made. A friend of Kelly’s who had helped us on several movies, Maia Javan, designed the sets. Maia, to no one’s surprise, has become one of the top Hollywood production designers.

We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. And we would write and rewrite and rewrite. At one point we needed a song where one of the children needed to learn something from Hank, and Hank needed to learn something from her. While riding my lawn mower cutting my greens at the farm, I wrote “If Only I Had Your Heart.”

Help me find a way

To finish this journey we started today.

No one may know

This deed that you do.

It’s simply a moment between me and you.

These are the times that set you apart

If only you have the heart.

At the time I lived in Athens, Georgia, so that would be where we performed it first. There were two halves to the show: “The Toy Shoppe” and a Christmas-hits section called “The Chosen One.” We had performed “The Chosen One” and knew that it would work, so we would close with it. We would start with “The Toy Shoppe.” If it didn’t work, we would always have the Christmas hits to fall back on.

During “The Toy Shoppe,” we were shocked to see people in the audience crying. Much to our surprise, at the end of the play, the audience gave us a standing ovation. This was a brand-new play, something they knew nothing about, yet they got it. They laughed and they cried. From that night on, we did the hits first and closed with the play.

For two years, we toured with it and honed our skills and fixed all the little things that were wrong with the show. Diana and her friends out of Chicago were a big help. This was all new to me. I had done a lot of things but never gone onstage acting with a group of kids. I was much more comfortable doing movies. You don’t have the luxury of retakes in live performances. As I remember, the kids did a better job with their lines than I did.

In year three, we actually played the Pontiac Superdome at Christmas. The stage had been set up like a Broadway show, and all the action played to a “front” audience. There were more than twenty thousand people there that night. Some of them had to be seated behind the stage. That was really strange for all of us. The seats in the back got no “theater.” They were treated to our set changes and all the backstage stuff you’re never supposed to see. Believe it or not, they loved it.

To show you how professional we were, if you were on the tour, you were in the show. The moms of kids, including Wanda, made appearances. Doug Dean, the tennis pro who had taken Kelly’s place when Kelly was on tour, had been cast as the deliveryman. He was brilliant in his delivery of the now-famous line: “Got some more toys for you, Hank.” Doug was always unusually nervous. A friend of his, Robbie Halmi, a guy Doug hit tennis balls with, was the head of Hallmark Entertainment and came to see him one night. Robbie enjoyed it—so much so, he offered us six weeks at the Beacon Theatre in New York at Christmastime.

Now we had to step everything up a few notches. We needed to have Broadway quality in our little play. So we created a couple of new toys, wrote some new songs, and basically made it feel professional and more interesting for a more sophisticated New York audience.

We auditioned the best young girls in New York for the part of Katie, a little girl who, in our play, was full of magic and wonder. This role required her not just to sing, but to really sing.

We found the perfect girl for the part. She was from a little town just outside of Philadelphia. Her name was Jillian Arciero. She would be with the show for the next five years that we performed it. She was an amazing talent. As a bonus, when we went back on the road she had three sisters—Gabby, Dominique, and Olivia—who also came along to help round out the cast. We had no idea the amount of talent that the four Arciero sisters possessed. Another of our permanent cast members was Taylor Bugos, the daughter of my longtime production manager, Keith Bugos. Taylor had been doing our Christmas show since she was five years old.

As we rehearsed the new show, we realized things were totally different in New York than they had been on the road. For one thing, we would have a stationary, more permanent set. We now had a two-story set and a fireman’s brass pole that I could slide down. This would get me to two fighting boys in the opening scene faster and gave me a more exciting entrance for the show. We had gone Broadway and high tech in one move. It was great.

The pole itself was pretty impressive, but the exciting part was watching me slide down every night. I found out quickly, you wrap your sleeves around the pole and slide down; if you grab the pole with your bare hands, your fingers lock on the brass and you “s-c-r-e-e-c-h” down the pole, creating blisters on every part of your hand. I did that only once. That was enough.

Of all the things I’ve been fortunate enough to do in my career, writing, singing, and being a part of these live acting performances may have been the most challenging and at the same time the most rewarding.

By the late 1990s,
as much as I liked doing “The Toy Shoppe” and the TV movies, I needed to get back to making hit records. Jim Mazza, who originally championed me at Capitol, had become more involved in my musical career, to the point that he had found an investor and started his own record label, Magnatone Records. I recorded a couple of albums there with him. We had some success with the Christmas album
The Gift
and the Christmas special of the same name, which we shot at the famous Ryman Auditorium.
The Gift
actually became a Top 10 album and went on to be certified gold. One of the songs that we recorded was “Mary, Did You Know?” I sang it with Wynonna Judd, and it remains one of my favorite Christmas songs. Steve Glassmeyer, Warren Hartman, and I also wrote a narrative/montage that drove the album called “The Chosen One,” which we went on to perform in our live Christmas show for a number of years. But it took a lot of clout to get radio airplay, and Magnatone just couldn’t compete with the bigger labels.

Jim really believed that there would be more hits for me. He had another idea: Why don’t we form our own company—record label, management, touring, and film and television? This time we would have a distributor who would guarantee to provide the money to promote the songs we would be cutting. Jim would head the label, Ken Kragen would head the management, Kelly would head the film and television, and a friend of Jim’s, Bob Burwell, would head the touring. We would be a management team. It sounded great on paper, and we all agreed to move forward. Ken and Kelly would stay located in Los Angeles to give us a West Coast presence, and the company would be based in Nashville. We would call the company Dreamcatcher. It seemed like I had come full circle having my own label again. Many years ago, in the early 1970s, thanks to Mike Curb, it was Jolly Rogers Records.

Mike, now president of Curb Records, had put up the money for Jolly Rogers, a label that probably didn’t have much of a chance as our logo was a skull and crossbones. We had a few records, none of which did well, and I felt bad for Mike. He had believed in me, and I had let him down.

Once that label closed its doors, there was a contractual payout to me for $250,000, which I split with my brother Lelan, who had been running the label. I think Lelan had had his fill of the music business and was ready to retire. He bought forty acres of land in Checotah, Oklahoma. How he picked this place to retire, I will never know. This was to be his new home. There was a cattle herd and an old farmhouse on the property. Lelan had a horse that I had given him years before named Dude. The previous owner, an older man who had live there most of his life, agreed to stay on and show him how things worked. Lelan, at about fifty years old, and this old man sat on the porch the first day just to watch the sun go down. It was what Lelan had dreamed of all his life. About three in the afternoon, Lelan noticed that his cows were gone. In a state of panic he jumped up, saddled up Dude, and took off down the road. About thirty minutes later in a cloud of dust came Lelan’s cows, with Lelan herding them back into their pen. This was really Western. He unsaddled his horse, realizing he had done this all by himself and was very proud. He would survive here. At about four he glanced over his shoulder to tell the old man how happy he was to be here when he noticed his cows were gone again. As he jumped up to saddle Dude again, the old man said, “Mr. Rogers, unless you just want to play cowboy, if you just sit right there in that chair, those cows will come down that road at about five and go straight to that feeding trough. Hell, you can’t run those damn cows off. They have been doing this all their life and they ain’t about to change.”