by Bruce Feiler
“Ah, nice move there. Squeeze your hand. Oh, God, I love it when you bring your hand up like that. Just like that. Yes, yes, do it again.”
Her voice was growing higher. Wade dared not move.
“Turn your leg this way. Now your shoulders. Put your hand there. No, there. That’s right! Stop. Stop! Yes!! Your arm. Your face. Your hand. Oh, GOD! Yes. Your hand!! Yessss!” Patchink.
“Okay. Take a breath. My God. That was good.”
“Yes, yes, very good.”
Bill Johnson was skipping around his office on the second floor of Sony Music’s low-rise on Music Row, headquarters to its two divisions: Epic and Columbia. It was the following Tuesday now. Bill had culled the two thousand photographs of Wade down to four hundred, which he spread out on four oversized light boards along one giant counter in his office. Alan Jackson was playing on the stereo. Framed album covers of Dolly, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Patty Loveless hung on the scuffed beige walls. Bill’s two Grammy statues were tucked snugly on his bookshelf like trophies in a high school bedroom.
“I like the ones where there’s heat in his eyes,” he said. From the half dozen setups they had shot that day, as well as four more they did that night in Tamara’s studio (the total cost had exceeded $10,000), Bill had managed to find three or four from each that he liked. In particular, he had three or four shots that he was already considering for the cover. One was from the first setup, with Wade leaning back in the chair; one was the Marlboro shot, taken late in the afternoon and printed in a muted sepia tone that made it look as if it belonged on a buffalo nickel; and two were from the middle setting with Wade in front of the red door. In one Wade had his hat on; in the other the hat was off. The latter shot was dark, but Bill said he could lighten it. “With the computer, we can do so many things that we couldn’t do before. We can fix Vince Gill’s lazy eye, for example. Or cut down on some of the baby fat in Wynonna’s neck. I’ve taken eyes from one picture, hair from another, and cropped them onto an entirely different body.”
Several days later, after a second look (and cut), Bill took a package of about 100 photos over to Wade’s management company several blocks away on 17th Avenue, several doors up from Garth’s. In the meeting, Wade said he didn’t like the Marlboro shot and liked the hatless shot even less. He preferred several shots from the late-night session in which he sat at a table strumming his guitar. In those he wore a pea green shirt and his beige hat: He looked relaxed, but with none of the seriousness or masculinity he had originally said he wanted. Wade’s manager, Mike Robertson, a forty-something Louisianan who also managed Lee Roy Parnell and Pam Tillis, preferred a different shot. And Carol Harper, Mike’s deputy, preferred still a different one. Now totally confused, Bill went back to the office to make mockups of their choices, cropping the pictures to the requisite four and three quarters square inches and experimenting with assorted typestyles for Wade’s name and the album’s title, On a Good Night, chosen for the new up-tempo song added at the last minute.
Throughout, Bill couldn’t shake the idea of using either the sepia Marlboro shot (“It’s just so personal,” he kept saying) or the hatless shot with Wade in front of the door. Finally he decided to use both. In what he knew was a risky move because of Wade’s reluctance to appear without a hat, he used his computer to lay a sepia outdoor shot of Wade in the background. Then he took Wade’s face from the hatless pose and superimposed it in front of the other shot. The effect was magnificent. It had one shot with a hat, one without. Also, the tension between Wade’s pinkish face in the foreground and his broad-shouldered, elusive pose in the background perfectly captured the mix of darkness and light in the music. As the mock-up made its way around Sony, a collective enthusiasm rose up in the building. “This is the best album cover I’ve ever seen,” Allen Butler, the former record promoter turned executive vice president, wrote in a memo to the art department.
Bill was thrilled, but circumspect. “It’s a gamble,” he said the afternoon before he sent it over to Wade. “I think the no-hat thing is a little sexier, a little more revealing. He’s such a soulful singer. But with the shot in the background he’s also manly and tough. This treatment may be one of my favorites of all time. If they can make an adjustment here—if they can accept the shot without the hat—we’re fine.”
“And how often do you get what you want?” I asked him.
He thought for a second. “Ninety percent of the time.”
This would be one of the 10 percent.
The final batch of covers arrived at Mike Robertson Management on Wednesday, April 3. Mike and Carol hated the design. “We have established Wade as a hat act,” they said. “We don’t think we should confuse the image. He’s a product. You don’t change your image midstream. There’s a reason Bayer Aspirin has the same package every time.” They forwarded it on to Wade, who agreed. “I hear they’re having trouble booking people with hats on TV,” he told me, “and that’s why they want my hat removed. But my feeling is, TV bookers don’t buy records. Fans do.” He preferred the friendlier shot with him sitting at the table, smiling into the camera. “That’s my Wade,” Carol said when she looked at the mock-up.
Now at a full-fledged standoff with the label, the two final cover designs were sent to Don Cook, who worked out of a separate office in Sony’s publishing division. He would make the final call. “Don’s an executive now,” said Scott Siman, the vice president of Columbia. Don, in the first sign of a creeping conservatism that was beginning to affect Wade’s career, chose the lighter of the two covers. “It just seemed like the right thing to do,” he said.
The team at Sony was crushed. Bill quietly turned his attention to the rest of the package. Marcia, the marketing hand, shut her door and sobbed. Scott Siman was openly rueful. “It doesn’t hurt us,” he said to me on the afternoon he found out. “But it doesn’t help us either.”
SEVEN
THE FACE
The sight of Wynonna without makeup was startling. It was midafternoon, the Monday after her triumphant three-day return to the stage at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles (“She is, without a doubt, one of the best singers of her generation,” wrote Robert Hilburn in his review in the Times), and Wynonna was sitting in a director’s chair in the second-floor dressing room at “The Tonight Show,” where later that afternoon she would tape an appearance with Jay Leno, along with “talk-show host and comedian Jon Stewart, six-year-old actor Luke Tarsitano, and those wacky ambassadors of goodwill, the Harlem Globetrotters!” About to begin a preshow hair and makeup session, Wynonna was wearing black bell-bottom pants and black suede pumps. Her T-shirt was a vivid forest green, a striking color-wheel complement to her reams of near-neon pumpkin hair. Her hair (with extensions, as the tabloids had reported) wasn’t draped around her shoulders, but was rolled around oversized powder blue rollers, each one about the size of a hot dog bun.
“Come in, come in,” Wynonna said. Her voice was casual, with distinct Southern roots, alternating with a Hollywood, I-glide-above-it-all air and an occasional belly laugh. It was when she offered that self-deprecating laugh that Wynonna was most winning. “We just finished lunch,” she said, chuckling. “My favorite time of the day.”
I pushed aside a cardboard box and a few scattered jackets and settled into the couch, nearly sitting on her tiny, black-and-white rat terrier, Loretta Lynn. The room was small, with two couches and a makeup chair taking up nearly all the space. A wardrobe was filled with Wy’s black coats and multicolored silk shirts, various options for the evening. Her backup singers were just across the fluorescent-lit hall, the band next to them.
“So where do you live?” Wynonna asked me. We had first met several nights before in her dressing room at the Universal Amphitheater (“I know who you are,” she had said, “You and I are going to be cool…”).
“I just moved to Nashville,” I said.
“Oh, really?” She perked up. “Nashville’s a really interesting place right now. There’s a spiritual awakenin
g occurring there. People are coming from all around the country. I’ll have to show you around to all the cool places. Church, the farm, all the meat and threes.”
“I’ve been wondering about that term,” I said. “Where I come from, they call that kind of restaurant a ‘meat and two.’”
“Well, that just goes to show you,” she said without missing a beat. “In Nashville, we’ve got more of everything.”
We started talking. She was delighted with her wedding, she said, though peeved at all the tabloid coverage (“I did not stumble down the aisle,” she insisted, then added of the doctored photograph in the Globe, “and I’ve never worn red nail polish in my life…”). She was pleased that Ashley had come to her debut in Los Angeles, but baffled that she only wanted to watch the NCAA Basketball Tournament (“I’m just not like her,” she said. “I’m much less intense…”). Above all, she was thrilled with the review in the paper. “So many people don’t even bother to listen anymore,” she said. “They think they know me. They think they know the life I live. They don’t…” She interrupted herself to ask if I was married. Not yet, I said. Then she asked how old I was. We were born the same year, I told her. “So you understand!” she exclaimed, almost reaching to embrace me. “We’ve had our fun. We’ve had our wild times. Now it’s time to settle down.”
As she spoke, Kenny, her makeup man, appeared. He opened a tackle box and began fiddling with makeup containers. Base and powders on the bottom, pencils and blush on the top. In no time the room began to smell like the ground floor of a department store. Wynonna squirmed a bit, but kept her face still. Undecorated, it was a surprisingly plain-looking face, almost vulnerable. Her skin was pale with a fresh-from-the-bath tangerine tint. She had a few faint freckles on her nose and cheeks. With pigtails instead of curlers and overalls instead of silk, she could have passed for a genuine Appalachian farm girl.
“You know, it started out really cool, really special,” Wynonna said of the years with her mother, “just two Kentucky girls with a guitar. Then it got really out of hand. It got weird. It was hard for me to accept that I was just another product in the American entertainment machine.” During that time, she said, people constantly harangued her about being irresponsible, about being lazy, about being late. “It got so bad that it was all I could think about,” she said. “I worried and worried and worried. I wasn’t free to be myself—to be spiritual. It was like being an alcoholic, in that scent of dependency. I was performing to please my manager, my mother, everybody but me.”
Her arms had started swinging slightly. Her road manager stuck his head in for the third time in thirty minutes, a sign that perhaps she needed to be alone. “It’s okay,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “It’s important that he be here right now. We’re merging.” Then she pushed the door closed with her foot.
“I remember after I got pregnant,” she continued, “my manager sat me down and said, ‘Okay, we need to decide when you and Arch are going to get married.’ I felt like, ‘No, that’s not the way it should work.’ Arch and I should be sitting down and deciding when we’re getting married and then we should be telling you. For the last year and half, I sat out at the farm feeling guilty—for Mom, for God, for my fans. Then I realized, ‘I don’t have to be perfect. Nobody else is.’”
She looked in the mirror to check on the status of her face. Her Kentucky roots were covered up now, submerged under a layer of Hollywood tan—the only perfect color in the rainbow. Kenny moved on to her eyes.
“If you really want to understand where my life’s at right now,” she said, “everything you need to know is in that box.” I opened the box beside me on the couch to find a complete set of Stephen Covey supplies, Living the Seven Habits: a book, a planner, audio tapes and videotapes, a completely shrink-wrapped course in made-to-order self-esteem. “My new manager gave it to me,” she said. “He wants me to use them. I’m trying. I’m trying. But if you saw the way I lived my life, you’d know how hard it’s going to be.” Then, for the first time, Wynonna turned and looked at me directly. “Which reminds me, how much do you know about my life?” she asked.
Apparently not as much as I had thought.
By the mid-1990s, Wynonna Judd and her mother had been a gossipy staple in American life for almost two decades, but in the larger context of country music, only two stories are really important: first, the tale of how Wynonna, the wounded genius with the immortal voice and the fractured soul, rose to become an unlikely and, at times, unsteady symbol of women in country music; and second, the often warped, self-serving version of that story that her mother pawned off on the world.
Even after three decades, the most basic facts have been slow to emerge. The future Wynonna Judd was born on May 30, 1964, at King’s Daughters Hospital in Ashland, Kentucky, an Appalachian river town of ten thousand people in the northeast corner of the state. Her father, Charlie Jordan, was a senior at Ashland High School. Her mother, a classmate with whom Chuck had a brief relationship, was Diana Judd. Diana (she changed her name to Naomi as an adult) was a flirty, popular child, the oldest of four children. Diana’s father, Glen, a stoic, flinty man with few indulgences, ran a filling station in downtown Ashland. Her mother, Pauline, was a housewife and nursery superintendent at the First Baptist Church. Though Naomi would later romanticize her upbringing as quaint, quirky, and filled with country people with a “natural, endemic Appalachian wisdom,” even she admitted that the chilliness between her parents left her with a driving desire to escape. As she said in her intimate, though often deceptive 1993 book, Love Can Build a Bridge (in which she somehow neglected to mention Wynonna’s real father): “I now know why I’m such a demonstrative person…I never had enough communication when I was little girl. I walked around like a great big piñata, wishing someone would break me open so I could spill out my emotions, secrets, and feelings.”
From her earliest days, Diana Judd invented fictitious stories of herself and her family. Because Mark, the younger of her two brothers, was so “beautiful,” she said, “I told people he won lots of beauty contests.” As for herself, Diana often imagined she was an Indian princess, the misplaced child of some Cherokee or Chippewa royalty. As Wynonna told me: “My mother is the kind of person that feels the need to develop her own reality to spare her from the heartache of the truth. For instance, her dad was an alcoholic. He would be sitting there at the kitchen table with the newspaper drinking a Coke and they would be walking out the door going to church. She thought it was because he was just so exhausted from working the night before. That was her reality.” In eighth grade, a neighbor of Diana’s threw a costume party. One girl came dressed in a leopard-skin leotard with a wig that covered her face. She sat in a corner and pounded rocks together, finally revealing herself at evening’s end to be Diana. As one of her friends recalled: “You know, most kids who would do something like that, they might keep it up for a few minutes before they would yell, ‘Hey, it’s me! Didn’t I fool you?’ But Diana just went on and on with it.”
At age sixteen, Diana Judd’s need for fantasy was amplified by two traumatic events. First, her brother Brian was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease (in her book, she takes credit for discovering the first lump). The illness ruptured her family. “That’s when I realized,” she wrote, “our home was not really the cozy Walton-esque existence I had constructed in my head.” That image was further undermined when Diana discovered at the start of her senior year that she was pregnant. “All the daydreams and illusions I had created were stumbling over each other and mixing things up,” she said. “It was a living nightmare. I was still in high school, I wasn’t married. I got $1.50 allowance per week. Brian was downstairs on the sofa throwing up…Mom’s losing her mind and our family’s falling apart. Pinch me! Hit me! Wake me up!” Instead, she tried to commit suicide—first with a knife in the bathroom, then by throwing herself off the local water tower. When she lost her nerve on both occasions, she finally resolved to tell her parents. “Do you love him
?” her father asked. “No,” she said. Her parents insisted she get married anyway. She did, to a different man.
Michael Ciminella was an Italian Catholic, son of a prominent businessman, and a smitten young man who had been in love with Diana Judd for years. The two had met when she was fourteen. Michael drove up in a shiny Chrysler Imperial wearing his military school uniform and smelling of Old Spice, and Diana was hooked. He was the perfect screen for her fantasies, she said, and a wonderful vehicle for her imagination. Also, he was rich. The country club was where “privileged and worldly people went about socializing on a plane that no Judd had ever reached.” The two dated off and on while Michael was in college, but Diana rebuked his request for marriage. When she got pregnant by another man, he agreed to marry her. “He loved her so much he married her anyway,” Wynonna told me. The two tried to elope, but, without their parents’ permission, were turned down by the sheriff. Finally, on January 3, 1964, Diana Judd, age seventeen, and Michael Ciminella, age eighteen, were married in the Baptist Church in the safely distant town of Parisburg, Virginia. The couple spent their wedding night in Michael’s bedroom at home. Almost exactly five months later, Christina Claire “came into the world screaming on key and searching for harmony.” The first of those statements was entirely believable; the latter is the one that seems invented from the start.
Within no time, Diana and Michael’s relationship became strained. Even after they moved to Lexington so he could continue college, the two teenagers bickered—over his lack of a job and her jealousy of his fraternity lifestyle. In one of the least generous sections of her book, Naomi, who never credits Michael with marrying her, maligns him for neglecting their daughter, for being arrogant, and for feeling “saddled with a wife and a baby at the exact moment he wanted to be out chasing cheerleaders and attending keg parties.” It didn’t matter, the two had struck a bargain and were stuck with each other, moving first to Illinois for his first job out of college (he “barely graduated,” Naomi tartly reports) and then to Southern California, where Diana gave birth to her second daughter in 1968. Ashley Taylor, she observed, was “very different looking from Chris and clearly in full possession of Ciminella genes.”
