by Bruce Feiler
Life in California started well. “That time was probably the most normal we ever were,” Wynonna told me. “Dad wore a tie. My mother had a pixie cut. Sit-down dinners. Get the bike for Christmas. Very ‘Brady Brunch.’” But soon enough, Diana and Michael resumed their fighting. “I saw this commercial recently,” Wynonna told me. “In it a little boy was sitting on stairs, looking through the pickets, and watching Mom and Dad fight. The look on this kid’s face was awful. I remember that feeling. Any divorced kid will tell you they think it’s their fault. Period.” The fights terrified the girls. “They’re so intense,” Wynonna said. “Both my parents. Plus, he really loved her and she didn’t love him back. She was a martyr. They tried to stay together for the sake of the kids, but, of course, that never works.” At times Wynonna would have to separate her parents. “They were brutal,” she said. “I’ve seen Dad deck her, but I’ve seen her deserve it. It’s one of those tricky things: Don’t ever underestimate the power of a woman to be able to push buttons. She provoked him. She was in total control. She is such a mother lion. It’s that real thin line between being a sweet-talking woman and an absolute bitch from hell. I don’t know how he didn’t maim her. She would have made me want to drive my car into a tree at eighty miles an hour.”
Eventually Diana decided to leave, moving with her daughters to West Hollywood. There Diana embraced the Babylonian spirit of the age. She did drugs. “It seemed like a way to smooth things over,” she said later. “I was young, eager, feeling very frisky and desperate for change.” She experimented with various religions, diets, jobs, and men. One such man, whom she described as a James Dean look-alike, battered, stalked, and raped her, she claims, until a policeman she befriended put a stop to it (“As an added bonus, the officer and I really enjoyed each other’s company!”). Christina hated this time, bouncing between hotels and apartments and lurching from one of her mother’s boyfriends to another. That James Dean look-alike, in particular was, in her mind, “the single most worthless scumbag on the planet.” “He was one of those boyfriends from hell that you read about,” she said. And in an event previously undisclosed, Wynonna, who was ten years old at the time, told me that while she and that boyfriend were alone in the apartment, he sexually molested her. “He leaned up against me on the wall a couple of times, pressed his body against mine, and ran his hands across my body,” she said. “Then he walked away and left me there, shaking.” Though she remembers herself as being sassy and outspoken, these events petrified her. She didn’t tell her mother and kept them from Ashley. “If my mother hadn’t taken us to a hotel after he raped her, I’m sure he would have tried more,” she said.
Eventually even Diana realized her lifestyle was destructive. When her sister followed her to Hollywood, Diana noted disapprovingly that she fell in love with California. Diana, on the other hand, was always proud of being from Kentucky, she told her sister, and looked for ways to make her heritage work for her. She had long ago noticed that everyone in Hollywood wanted to be someone else. Armed with this realization, Diana decided to seek out more quirkiness to her life’s story. In the spring of 1975, Diana enrolled in nursing school at Eastern Kentucky University and moved her family into a vacant cabin on the grounds of a friend’s estate. The cabin, called Chanticleer, had no television and no telephone. “I remember it being so abrupt,” Wynonna told me. “We were in shock. Here we were on top of this friggin’ mountaintop with hundreds of acres around us. Now what do we do?” The answer: Entertain themselves. For Ashley, it was make-believe; for Christina, music. “Music saved my life,” Wynonna told me. “I was just an emotional hurricane, very weird. If it wasn’t for music, I would have probably burned down the house.” Once Christina showed an interest, Diana encouraged her, buying her a recorder, guitar lessons, and stacks of secondhand LPs: Hazel and Alice, the Delmore Brothers, the Boswell Sisters. For Diana, who sang along in harmony as Christina played, a new goal was emerging. She resolved to make her daughter into the next Brenda Lee—the teenage singing sensation from the 1950s—or, even better, Brenda Lee and her mother.
Christina, of course, loved the idea. Music was the one thing that prevented her from fighting with her mother. Naturally, once she became aware of her mother’s interest, Christina milked it. When she had neglected to clean her room or complete her homework, she plopped herself down in the kitchen with her guitar so her mother wouldn’t scold her when she came home. “Mom would never get mad at me when we were singing.” This reliance on music only heightened when Diana once again moved her children to California, this time to escape testifying in her parents’ divorce proceedings. For Christina, the move proved providential. To her hillbilly mix of influences, she now poured an assortment of California flavorings: Bonnie Raitt, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt. Diana, meanwhile, busily plotted their ascent, even rustling up a few early singing gigs.
But her identity was still not complete. To crystallize her image, Diana changed her name. “I had never forgotten the little retarded girl named Naomi who stared at me in grade school,” she said. Christina, following suit, changed hers as well, taking her new name from a line in the 1940s song “Route 66”: “Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Wynona” (the second n was added for looks). Wynona, a small town in Texas, was, of course, on I-40 by that time instead of Route 66, but that symbolism didn’t seem to matter. Nor did the symbolism of her mother’s new name. In the Bible, Naomi was a hardworking mother who returns to her homeland after losing her husband and sons. She asks her daughters-in-law not to return with her. Oprah agrees, but Ruth goes anyway, offering up this paean to filial attachment whose words echo hauntingly in the life of Wynonna: “For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest I will die, and there I will be buried.” Detachment, in other words, would never occur.
After shipping Ashley back to Kentucky and taking Wynonna out of school, Naomi Judd embarked on another cross-country journey—through Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Texas—before arriving in Nashville, Tennessee. It was May 1, 1979. Her elder daughter, the “Female Elvis,” as she would be called, was about to turn fifteen.
“I just want to be big,” Elvis once said, “so I can do something for my mother.” That sentiment might also have been uttered by Wynonna Judd in her early years in Nashville. Certainly she wanted to be a star. She daydreamed about the accoutrements of celebrity—the accolades and cream-filled cakes, the lazy afternoons with bonbons and boys. But on the matter of how to get from the run-down, roach-infested motel she inhabited with her mother to the plush, room-service fantasy she imagined, Wynonna had no idea. “My identity was in the strings and the notes and figuring out how to make what I imagined come to life,” Wynonna told me. “I would have trusted anyone, signed anything. I would have been chewed up and spit out a thousand times by the business.” What distinguishes her from other stars of her caliber is that in the all-important departments of drive, ambition, and single-minded obsession, she was entirely reliant on someone else.
As it happened, though, it didn’t matter: Naomi had enough for both.
From the first moment she drove down Music Row in her lipstick red ’57 Chevy (“It was as if we’d entered the Pearly Gates and were riding down streets of gold,” she said), Naomi Judd attacked the puzzle of how to become a country music star with a dedication and cunning rarely seen in a world where most people believed they had seen it all. She needed it: Few were buying her idea of a mother-daughter duo. Naomi, though, knew that her best asset was her heritage. She knocked on doors and handed out a typed biography. She lingered around the parking lot at Channel 4 until she badgered Ralph Emery into giving them a singing slot on his morning show. She flirted her way around Music Row nightspots, eventually wiggling her way into the good graces of some songwriters, including the drinking dean of the lot, Harlan Howard. Her reception varied. Fresh from Hollywood, dolled up to look like a Christmas ornament, driving her car called REDHOT 2, and wea
ring Jungle Gardenia perfume, Naomi petrified women and electrified men. But while many men wanted to sleep with her, none wanted to sign her.
Finally two men told her the hard truth: Her daughter was the one who had the talent. Jon Shulenberger and Mike Bradley were running the Soundshop Studio, the same place where Wade Hayes would later record On a Good Night, when Naomi walked in with her résumé and tape in 1979. The men agreed to produce a demo, but only if Wynonna sang alone. “At her age, she was really where Brenda Lee had been,” Shulenberger recalled. “I always felt Mom was the salesman. She had more drive and determination than anyone I had ever met.” But when they shopped the demo around town, the reaction was the same. No label wanted an underage singer. Also, Naomi was reluctant to give up the spotlight. “Anytime we’d go in somewhere,” Shulenberger said, “the limelight would always be on Naomi, which constantly undercut my trying to pitch Wynonna as a solo artist. It’s difficult when you walk in a door with an artist and her mother radiates all the charm and charisma.”
The next person Naomi approached actively embraced Naomi’s involvement. Brent Maher was a producer whom Naomi met while she was a nurse. She took the opportunity to give him a tape, and when he found it in his car weeks later, its mix of bluegrass, country, and blues almost drove him off the road. “Who are you?” he said to Naomi when he called. Maher stopped by their home and brought along Don Potter, the spiritual, New York-born guitarist. “The first time I sat in their living room and heard them sing ‘John Deere Tractor,’” Potter said, “every hair on my body stood up on end. I looked at those two girls and said to myself there was no way they wouldn’t be number one stars.” Soon, Naomi met Woody Bowles, an affable young public relations expert, who agreed to manage them, along with Ken Stilts, a former insulation magnate. By the end of 1982, three and a half years after their arrival in Music City, Naomi and Wynonna Judd were poised to have their big chance at stardom. The only problem: They were no longer speaking to each other.
The relationship between Diana and Christina, always complicated, only worsened as Naomi and Wynonna inched closer to realizing their dream. “The power struggle had begun,” Wynonna told me. On the surface, the tensions were easy to understand; the two are dramatically different in temperament. As Naomi once put it, “She’s messy and can’t ever find her stuff; I’m an organized neatnik. She loves TV and I don’t. I’m punctual, while she’s always running behind. Sometimes she was like a banana peel on the floor.” But beneath the surface, the true nature of their relationship was even darker. “I had decided early on that I resented my mother because of how much I needed her,” Wynonna told me. “I have been my mother’s child since the moment she knew I was within her body.”
Because Naomi had concealed Wynonna’s true parentage, Wynonna believes her mother always overcompensated. “Mom always felt toward me that she had to make up for something. She had to give me more, baby-sit me more, spoon-feed me more, hold me more, love me more.” Wynonna, naturally, lapped up the attention. “I was very high need,” she said. “I was born into chaos. My family was always fighting. I was very sensitive. I was the kind of person who would get up into somebody’s lap I didn’t know. I was just hungering for love. I wanted desperately to be held.” Naomi, though, had little time. “Mom’s life was not very good during those early days in Nashville,” Wynonna told me. “There was about a five-year period where she spent a lot of time having no sleep because of working two or three jobs. Then I enter the picture and give her a hard time.” To make matters worse, Naomi had begun a relationship with Larry Strickland, a former background musician with Elvis. “It was awful,” Wynonna said. “He’d cheat on her and she’d take him back. She was smoking a lot of pot. I didn’t respect her at all. It pissed me off.”
During this time, Wynonna’s relationship with her mother often turned physical. “She would provoke me, like she did with Dad,” Wynonna said, referring to Michael Ciminella. “The fights would often be about the three of us, with me being protective of Ashley. Mom was hard on her because Ashley was smart and popular and beautiful and everybody loved her.” In a pattern Wynonna said was repeated dozens of times, the two ended up in nasty brawls. “I would just get outraged and come after her,” Wynonna said, “then she’d grab me and that’s how it would start. I’d get bruised. Occasionally she’d bloody me. Eventually she’d just walk out: ‘See ya!’”
The two were locked in a battle that would be repeated throughout their lives: a question of who was the mother and who was the daughter. “I wanted to be in charge,” Wynonna told me. “I felt like the man of the house. Sometimes I’d hurt her, sometimes she’d hurt me. She’d dump me out of the car or lock me out of the house. Then I’d turn around and throw her keys away. Then we’d cry, hug each other, and express our devoted love forever.” More than normal bickering, the two needed each other—desperately needed each other—to achieve their dreams. “It was that control/power thing,” Wynonna said, “where I knew she couldn’t do it without me and I used that.” While Naomi was out trying to launch their career, Wynonna often played hooky or threw wild parties at home. “Boy, was I awful,” she snickered. After Naomi found pictures of one such incident, she kicked Wynonna out of the house and sent her to live with Michael in Florida.
At this point the Judds’ saga almost ended prematurely. Wynonna, living with Michael, felt trapped, especially after he took advantage of his rare parental opportunity by forcing Wynonna to prepare for college. It was his chance to get back at Naomi by squelching her dream. But it was also Wynonna’s dream he was squelching, and Wynonna sought relief. In an episode largely left out of the Judds’ public story, Wynonna tried to kill herself during this period by driving her father’s car into a tree. “I attempted suicide by deliberately going out and drinking and driving,” she told me. “I was coming home on a long, deserted stretch of highway in Ocala. I was so wasted I don’t even remember what happened, but I do remember attempting to run off the road. The car spun around three hundred and sixty degrees, at least twice, and I ended up in the middle of the road facing the other way.”
And why did she do it? “Wouldn’t you?” she said. “I was being forced to go to college. To me, that was prison. It’s that feeling of: ‘I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to leave the country. Because I’m getting ready to be shipped off to someplace I don’t want to go.’ I was probably the lowest I’ve ever been. My dad had me go and get my hair cut up to here. He wouldn’t let me wear makeup. He took my guitar away from me. He was going to turn me into something else. He made me get up and read every day and listen to classical music and do stuff that was so bizarre. That was very different from what I wanted. I wanted to be Elvis and play my guitar and put on my lipstick and go out there and jam.”
Several days after her abortive suicide attempt, Larry Strickland was playing nearby. Wynonna took a bus to meet him. “We sat up in his hotel room and he said to me, ‘You’re a singer if ever I’ve known one. I know this is corny, but to me you’re Elvis. You have as much charisma as any person I’ve ever known.’” The next week Wynonna returned to Nashville. Still unable to get along with her mother, she moved in with manager Woody Bowles, his wife, and their twins. “Naomi would come over to the house,” Woody told me, “and lock Wynonna in the bathroom with her. Then she would yell and scream at her for hours, ‘You’re a fat, lazy child. You’re nothing without me. You owe everything to me. You should be grateful, you lazy slob!’” According to Woody and his wife, who listened, horrified, the shouting sessions went on night after night, often ending with bloody screeches, shower curtains being ripped, and shampoo bottles being upended. At one point Wynonna was hospitalized for throat damage because she had been yelling so much.
Just at the point the relationship seemed on the verge of crumbling, Bowles and Stilts, with the help of California-based executive Mike Curb, who signed the Judds to a production deal, arranged an unusual audition for Naomi and Wynonna in the office of Joe Galante, the aggressive young head
of RCA Records. At 6 P.M. on March 2, 1983, surrounded by half a dozen executives, Naomi and Wynonna, accompanied by Don Potter, sat down in Galante’s office and sang several songs. “I was mortified,” Wynonna told me. “The meetings where they shine the white light in the criminal’s face—that’s how I felt. It was me against them.” When it was over, Galante, dressed in Hawaiian shirt and tennis shoes, asked them to wait outside. Fifteen minutes later, Bowles appeared. “Congratulations,” he said, “you’re RCA recording artists!” “It was almost like winning the lottery,” Wynonna told me. “You’re floating around the room, you’re numb, but there’s just too much information. Everybody else was so excited, high-fiving and champagne, and I was kind of going, ‘Wow, what now? I guess I’ve got to produce it.’ And that was terrifying.” At eighteen, the youngest person signed to RCA since Elvis Presley, Wynonna Judd was still wearing braces.
Back at “The Tonight Show,” after nearly an hour in Wynonna’s dressing room, Kenny, the makeup artist, was nearing the end of his task. On top of the layer of Hollywood tan, he had brushed large patches of rust-colored blush. Underneath her jawline, he painted deep brown for shadowing. Together these lent her face a starker, more statuesque feel. Her eyes, though, got the most attention. Around the edges, Kenny painted a pair of catlike red flames. On her upper and lower lids, he penciled in thick black lines. What followed was, for me, the most fascinating part. Instead of using Carol Channing-like fake eyelashes, Kenny opened a green compact, inside of which were tiny ridges. Using a tweezers and working with his most concentrated silence, Kenny plucked individual artificial eyelash hairs from those ridges, dipped them in a gluey substance, and pasted them one at a time along the impossibly fine line of her upper lid. Wynonna closed her eyes for this inlaying and turned her head toward the light. When she opened her eyes again, the lashes and the brown rainbow enlivened her naturally cinnamon irises. As a pièce de résistance, Kenny dabbed black paint on the mole alongside her right eye. Wynonna grinned, and when she turned to look at me, the change was remarkable. From the pale, vulnerable farm girl she had looked like earlier she had been transformed into a brash young star—jaunty chin, snickering smile, wicked eyes. The sinful daughter once. The sassy mother now.
