Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  After enough such incidents, Wynonna began to realize that her strategy of “letting go” wasn’t working. The reason had to do with the new reality of American media. In today’s atmosphere of “infotainment,” the tabloid coverage seeps into the mainstream coverage, which then seeps into the critical coverage, which, in turn, seeps into prime time. In the mid-1990s it was impossible to read an article about Wynonna’s music that did not mention her personal life. As a result, the public had an impression of Wynonna—bratty daughter, binge eater, adulterous wife—that utterly undermined any respectability she might have once had as an artist. Ultimately, she concluded she had to change. “I’m not one of those people who puts on Christian blinders and just acts like tabloid stories aren’t there,” she explained. “So now my new motto is: Bring it on.”

  The result is a veritable smorgasbord of contemporary plagues. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about being around Wynonna is the sheer volume of issues that clog the air—her children, her marriage, her father, her hair, her weight, even her sexual orientation. With Garth, the biggest issue surrounding him is his psyche: Where is his head? What is he thinking? When will he quit? Why doesn’t he enjoy his once-in-a-generation success? Being with him is like attending a master’s course in the psychology of American celebrity. With Wynonna, the issues are different, broader, and ultimately more exhausting. Being with her is like riding the wave of a remote control clicker. One moment you’re on VH-1, the next the Family Channel. Now let’s check in on Oprah, QVC, CMT, E! Entertainment Television. Oh, God, too shallow. We need to drop in on “The 700 Club.” There, that was reaffirming. Now how about a dose of Home & Garden TV? Through it all what emerges is the manic sense of a woman trying to stay focused, struggling to discover who she is.

  On her weight: “I went to a nutritionist for two years and I came to the realization that I’m not a gorger,” Wynonna said. “I’m a condiment freak. My problem is cheese and mayonnaise and white bread. I come from that side of life where we had fried bologna sandwiches. You have a tomato sandwich and it has about six tablespoons of mayonnaise on it. That’s my problem. I like potato chips with onion dip. Two of the world’s worst foods combined. I like peanut butter and butter sandwiches. That’s a problem. If you take white bread and you put peanut butter and butter on it. How many grams of fat is that, Bruce? It’s a lot of fat.” Her new goal, she said, was to lose thirty pounds.

  On her reported liposuction: “This is the truth. I can’t even believe I’m talking about it. I had fascia problems. It happens to a lot of women in pregnancy. Elijah basically tore up my insides. I had to have surgery to strengthen and sew back my muscle wall. The guy who fixed me is a plastic surgeon in Nashville, and he’s the guy who does all the breasts. And he was ‘Mr. Liposuction’ for about a year. He went in, sewed me up, and gave me a line from here to here.” She gestured across her abdomen. “He removed one mole and did that surgery, so I was linked to him. At first I thought, ‘That’s none of your damn business.’ This is a very personal thing here. I just didn’t feel like going out and talking about what the tabloids said.” And why not get liposuction? “Because it’s the easy way out. Sure, I’d love to fix about sixteen things, but this is the hard part: accepting who the hell you are.”

  On her larger-than-life appearance: “I’ve had hair extensions off and on for years,” she said. “Now I have the smallest amount I’ve ever had. That’s me in a nutshell: You have too many because you’re insecure. Then you start to learn more how to be yourself.” It was the same, she said, with her body. “You make peace with the fact that you’re never going to be a size eight. Would I be any happier if I were a size eight? I have been, and I wasn’t. As a matter of fact, some very interesting things happened that were overwhelming. We had this party in Hollywood and these actors were coming on to me. I had just met Arch. I remember him flipping out. I walked out of that party feeling so bizarre because it wasn’t about the music. The reason that man was coming on to me was because of my appearance. I had this natural ability to be all woman and the attention, frankly, was odd.”

  Wynonna could go on like this forever. She was locked in her own version of what Garth called his Zone.

  On her husband: “I have such a tenderness for who Arch is. He’s such a childlike person. Also, he’s the most generous person I know. All the times I was sick and nobody called but him. The birthday when he threw me the party he put together himself. Plus, you try being a man coming into this family and keeping both your testicles. The burden on Arch is so tremendous. He puts up with all the speculation, all of the talk. I’ve never worried about him cheating on me. Not once. As matter of fact, I’ve had people tell me that when I’m gone all he does is go to church and stay home. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t party. What he wants to do is ride the tractor and be a farmer.”

  On reports of her own infidelity: “God, no. There’ve been two people in my life I thought were cute, but I couldn’t go there. I’m too afraid of going to hell. That’s too big an issue for me. Plus, you saw how my road manager just walks through my room. My nanny’s always in my room. I couldn’t have an affair, even if I wanted to. Sure, in my fantasies. But there’s no way. There’s just no time.”

  Finally, on the most persistent rumor of them all, reports that she was a lesbian: “I know people say that about me, but it’s not true,” Wynonna said. “Maybe it’s because I hang around women a lot. The ovary fest around here is quite obvious. It’s like being on Rosie’s talk show. But the truth is, I’ve never even had that fantasy. Maybe the fantasy of walking in on someone having sex. But not the dream of being with another woman. I couldn’t be more hetero if I wanted to.”

  All these issues pale alongside the biggest drama in her life. It’s the one she’s been most reluctant to talk about. But it’s also the one that most prevented her from getting where she wanted to go.

  On Sunday, January 30, 1994, almost exactly three years after their pay-per-view farewell concert, Wynonna and Naomi Judd reunited for the first time in public at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta to perform during the halftime ceremonies of Super Bowl XXVIII. The event was scheduled to be the emotional close to a collection of country performances, a shining postcard of the New South to be beamed around the new world. As it happened, it also turned out to be a watershed moment for Wynonna, one that unleashed a series of events that resulted in her long-delayed coming of age and, as odd as it seems for a thirty-year-old woman whose raw talent had been sustaining her family for years, a modicum of independence from her own mother.

  Though Wynonna had never realized it, Michael Ciminella had always been banned from being backstage with her. Naomi, working first with Ken Stilts and later with John Unger, had conspired to keep Michael completely removed from Wynonna’s professional life. “I was sad because I needed my dad,” Wynonna told me. “I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t invited to things. When he was there, they kept me from being in a room with him by myself. I remember Dad once telling me he wanted to talk, but then, before it happened, Mom and Ken came running to tell me they were worried he was hooked on cocaine again.” At the Super Bowl, it was supposed to have been different; Wynonna had invited Michael herself. Yet, again, something went wrong. “I was getting ready to go on,” Wynonna said, “and the security’s got Dad. They won’t let him in. I’m thinking, ‘What is this? What’s going on here?’” What was going on was that Naomi had outflanked her daughter. “She was in fear,” Wynonna said of her mother. “She had John in a room and they were controlling the situation. Of course, I’m oblivious to anything. All I know is that I’m supposed to ride back on the bus with him to Nashville.”

  That night Michael and Wynonna did ride back to Nashville together, and when they arrived the next morning, Wynonna received a call from her therapist asking her to come to her office at two o’clock that afternoon. When Wynonna arrived, Ashley’s car was there, along with Naomi’s. The two were seated in a private room when Wynonna appeared at the door. Naomi was
crying. Ashley looked stricken. Wynonna was horrified. Something must be wrong. She sat down. Ashley started to speak, but Naomi interrupted, blurting out the news she had concealed from her daughter for over three tumultuous decades: “Michael Ciminella is not your biological father.” Even for a woman who had seen her mother extend to staggering extremes of cunning and manipulation, the depth of this deceit was overwhelming. Wynonna sat bewildered as Naomi retreated to the window to cry. “Of course, my whole life was passing before me,” Wynonna recalled. “‘No wonder Dad was never allowed on that stage. No wonder he was never allowed on the bus. Mom was afraid he was going to tell me. I get it.’ It put everything in its proper place. Each piece of the puzzle went in. Like the year he told me that he always felt a greater connection with Ashley than with me. ‘Now I get it. Now I see.’”

  What happened next, though, was even more surprising. “I think everyone was terrified about what would happen,” Wynonna said. “Would it mean that Mom and I wouldn’t speak for ten years? Would it mean the end of our relationship?” Instead, the news meant a subtle shifting of roles: Suddenly the person who had been kept powerless for so long was holding the power in her hands. For a spiritual woman like Wynonna, a woman who had just found out she was going to become a mother herself, that power was transforming. “I don’t want to sound like Mother Teresa here,” she said, “but after a while, I got up and I went over and hugged Ashley and Mom. I was so caught up in their pain. This was such a burden for everyone else for so long because they knew. I didn’t know. Dad told Ashley when she was in eleventh grade, so she carried it around. Mom carried it around for thirty years. Imagine what she had been through.”

  As noble as that sentiment was, didn’t Wynonna want to strangle her mother? At least for an instant? “No,” she said meekly. “She’s my mother.” What about her father? Why hadn’t he bothered to tell her? “It’s a really tricky thing,” Wynonna said. “It wasn’t his place. It was Mom’s place. She orchestrated everything. She picked Dad, and he loved her, and he married her because he felt it was the right thing to do, regardless of whether it was right ten years later.” As soon as she left her therapist’s office, Wynonna went to see Michael. “It was one of the best talks we’ve ever had,” she said. “He said, ‘Do you understand it was not my position to tell you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

  In the months that followed, Wynonna’s sense of liberation only grew. “For six months, I was in a state of bliss,” she said. “The truth was out, which brought Mom and I closer. It also brought Ashley and I more together because we had to work harder at letting each other know that ‘This doesn’t change our love for each other. Period.’ Ashley wept in my arms and said, ‘I love you and you are my sister. It doesn’t matter how much of your blood is running through my veins.’” As Wynonna observed dryly, “The grace was flowing.” Also, Wynonna was struck by the reaction of her biological father, Charlie Jordan, who was married and living in Kentucky and whom Wynonna first saw pictured in a tabloid, not long after the revelation. “I’ll tell you when I knew that ‘Hey, this guy must really be a good guy…’ is that he never asked anything of me. I’ve got a brother; he knows. I’ve got a grandmother; she knows. The whole town knew. But I kept thinking, ‘What a decent guy Charlie must be because he doesn’t want anything from his daughter.’” (Contrary to reports, the two have never met: “And don’t worry,” she cracked, “I’m not going to do it on Oprah.”)

  Eventually the bliss came to an end. For months after she first learned of her parentage, Wynonna focused on her son, whom she was about to deliver. “I wanted to concentrate not on the shock of finding out about my real father, but on life, touching my belly, speaking to Elijah,” Wynonna said. “I realized something that I never had before and that is: ‘I’m not a body with a spirit. I’m a spirit with a body.’” It was a personal epiphany, she said, but one that almost ruined her. “By the time Elijah was born,” she said. “I was a wreck.” Several weeks later, attending church in Brentwood, the collective emotion of her experience surged through her body. “I broke down,” she said. “I purged. I wept from the time I walked into church until the time that I left. I just went through this thing where all of a sudden it all just hit me. My grandmother, Michael’s mom, had died without telling me. We were very close; I still wear her wedding ring. And what struck me was that she had dug me despite it all—more than she did anybody in that whole friggin’ family. She and I had a spiritual connection, and that’s what did it for me, brother. More than anything else in my life. Because I knew that I had been chosen by her. She put her sights on me and her affections on me. She picked me. And for the first time in my life, it made me feel wanted.”

  As momentous as that experience was for Wynonna, it was still deeply private. She had yet to confront the public reaction to the new wrinkle in her life. That wouldn’t happen until the following year, and when it did, it would further widen her distance from her mother.

  In May 1995, NBC planned to air the two-part miniseries Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge, based on Naomi’s book. Originally “mortified” at the thought of a miniseries, Wynonna was even angrier when she saw the script. “I was miffed with Mom,” she recalled. “She spent more time building the media image of the Judds than I did, but still she let NBC turn our life into this sensational mother-daughter fighting thing. I told her, ‘You can go there and sit all day long on the set and watch this happen. I’m not.’” Wynonna never set foot on the set, a gesture Ashley emulated. “This was a real lonely time in my life,” Naomi told People magazine. “I tried to tell them it was important to support me in the emotional struggles I was having.”

  The big battle, though, was yet to come. In fine Judd punch-and-hug tradition, Ashley ultimately agreed to provide the show’s narration, and Wynonna recorded portions of the soundtrack. The two also agreed to appear, yet again, on the cover of People magazine. But Naomi wanted more. She wanted the entire family to go on Oprah to promote the series. After initially agreeing, Wynonna backed out, fearing a backlash against her unwed motherhood and a spate of questions about her paternity. She was also concerned about feeding rumors that a Judds reunion was in the works. “I’m trying to work on starting over and not living in the past,” she said at the time. In the end, though, she did agree to appear. “The reason I decided to do Oprah,” she told me, “is that I had just found out about my dad and I said, ‘I would rather go on Oprah and be faced with this as a family than sit back and let Mom speak for me.’” Arch, she said, encouraged her. “He said, ‘If you don’t ever stand up for yourself again, do it now, so that you’ll know what it’s like.’”

  The night before the Oprah show Wynonna and Ashley gathered on the bed in their mother’s suite to watch the first half of the miniseries. Even after all the buildup, Wynonna was stunned at what she saw. “I was really pissed how they portrayed me in the early years as such a snob,” she told me. “I remember sitting up in that hotel room crying and being devastated about the family watching the show. I was hurt. I was upset. I would just sit there and go, ‘I didn’t do that. I don’t remember doing that…’ and thinking, ‘This is what America is seeing?’”

  The following morning Wynonna, for what she told me was the first time in her life, confronted her mother as an equal. “That was the turning point in our relationship,” Wynonna said. “I went to her and said, ‘Mom, I want to speak for myself. Anybody asks any questions, I’m talking about this. If you say one word, I mean one word, against Dad or anybody else, I will never do another thing with you again.’” Naomi, concerned with her own problems, initially dismissed Wynonna’s concerns. “She was worried about herself,” Wynonna recalled. “She thought she was going to be stoned in the town square. She kept saying, ‘I’m going to get crucified. I’m going to get punished.’” By the time the limo arrived to take them to the studio, the tension had reached its highest point in years, with Naomi worrying that Michael was going to storm the studio and Wynonna threatening to back
out of the show if she didn’t get certain assurances from her mother. “In the limo that morning was probably the hardest I’ve ever been with Mom,” Wynonna told me. “I stayed on her from the time we left the hotel till the time we went on camera. I remember her hairdresser looking at me and going, ‘Holy crap! What’s going on?’” Finally, just before showtime, Wynonna heard what she wanted. “Mom said, ‘I understand. I will honor your request.’”

  It didn’t matter. On the May 15, 1995, episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Naomi Judd looked as insecure as she had ever appeared in public. Flanked by her two daughters, who were chilly at best, Naomi had to admit that she had deceived the public on three separate occasions: first in presenting her life story as a fairy tale come true, then in recasting it in her book as the tragic story of a long-suffering woman who triumphs over all the men in her life, and finally in retelling it on television as the heart-wrenching story of a mother who had to choose, Sophie-like, between her two daughters. In one of the more explosive moments on the show, Oprah asked Naomi what scene in the miniseries was the most difficult to watch. “The scene where I had to say good-bye to Ashley so we could chase our dream,” Naomi said. “But, Mom!” Ashley shouted, nearly springing from her chair. “That’s invention. It’s fiction! The producer told me he needed to add a Sophie’s Choice element to the story to give it more of a dramatic punch.” Naomi, faced with such mutiny, meekly retreated.

  But the damage had already been done. First, the show further splintered Naomi’s relationship with her daughters. “That started a whole family fight for about a week,” Wynonna told me. “That’s why I don’t like doing those things in public.” Even worse, it brought the feud into the public eye. “One thing I’ll have to say about myself and compliment myself,” Wynonna told me, “is that I’ve never hung my mother in public, nor would I ever.” Instead, she opted to let her mother hang herself. “And she did,” Wynonna said. “I saw her not only hang herself, but be ridiculed and looked down on. And that was hard because I was watching my own mother be a victim.” But, she knew, it was also important. “There was this real balance I had to achieve, which was to honor thy mother, but also to stand up for what you believe in. I stayed focused on the best thing, which was to remain calm. For me, the whole episode was a real awakening.”