Luck or Something Like It (19 page)

At this point, I had been doing some appearances with the likes of Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, and Diana Ross—now, Diana Ross had “people.” She had security, makeup, family, and she had friends. There must have been twelve to fourteen people around her wherever she went. You didn’t get close to Diana unless Diana wanted you close to her. She was a superstar. On the other hand, I had me and Kelly, my tennis pro. No offense to Kelly, but I felt so unimportant in the grand scale of things. So now I’m making a lot of money, and I immediately start looking around for an entourage. Where do you start? You don’t just add for the sake of adding. Everyone has to have a purpose. It was then I realized there must be someone out there who would want to hurt me. Surely I needed security.

Kelly and I were in Atlantic City working at the Golden Nugget, Steve Wynn’s casino, when we met an undercover cop named Rob Pincus. I think the word
undercover
carries its own status and air of professionalism, plus we both really liked this guy. By the time we left Atlantic City, I had hired Rob away from the A.C. police department. I immediately felt twice as important. I now had
two
“people.” By the way, you’re not allowed to count wives in your entourage.

Kelly, Rob, and I set out to increase our posse, but the only people I knew were entertainers who worked as much as I did and certainly didn’t want to be one of my followers. Everyone Kelly knew was either a tennis pro or had been a tennis pro. I knew that wouldn’t work. After all, how much tennis could I play? Diana Ross would never surround herself with tennis pros, so, okay, I wouldn’t either.

We turned to Rob. The only people he knew were policemen or other undercover cops, and God knows we didn’t need another cop. We hadn’t even figured out
who
it was that might want to hurt me, so I didn’t need more security until we did.

Rob also came up with the theory that the more people we had in our group, the more obvious we would be. “Really, Rob?” We now realized he had no clue what he was doing in the way of private security, but I had hired him and we were stuck with him. The good news is, we liked him a lot, and his personality fit us perfectly.

About six months later, we were finishing a long, pretty intense tour and had a couple of days off before starting back again. Kelly and I decided we would go to Athens, Georgia, play some golf, and see my family. Rob would go back to Atlantic City for some needed time with his family as well and wait for us. We were coincidentally working in Atlantic City next.

I don’t think there’s any question we were still impressed with some of the stories Rob would tell, and needless to say, we believed everything. It was great theater. As an undercover cop, he’d had a life of adventure compared to ours, so it was exciting. We hung on every word.

One night on the tour, almost in a moment of shame and confession, Rob admitted to us that he had been kicked out of a casino in Las Vegas for card counting. Kelly and I saw this as both a virtue and an opportunity to make money.

Don’t ask me where Kelly got his share, but the two of us gave Rob $5,000 each and sent him ahead to Atlantic City to win big for us. With his illicit skills, if he didn’t get caught in the process, this would be brilliant.

We would follow in the next couple of days. With a $10,000 bank he should be able to rack up some huge money for me and Kelly to pocket and probably lose back when we got there. That was our game plan.

As we left Athens, the excitement was growing about our plan. We were on my plane so we could use the phone to get the play by play from him. The first time we called, he said it was going slower than he had hoped, but this was a process and he had to be careful. It was his arms and legs they would break if they caught him. Wow, we hadn’t thought of that. It was just like the movies.

Card counting wasn’t illegal, but we knew the casinos frowned on it. So we called him again; he was down a little, he said, but feeling good. “How far down?” we asked. “About three thousand.” We still had almost two hours of flying time before getting to Atlantic City.

We were new at this, but Rob didn’t seem worried, so we chose not to be either. He said he was uncomfortable taking phone calls while he was playing, so we agreed not to call him again. Rob said he would meet us at the airport. We would know then how much he had won. Let the games begin. It was hard, but we didn’t call back.

As my plane touched down, we didn’t see Rob anywhere. We waited a short time, then called him. Rob was uncharacteristically quiet. He finally said we had lost some of our money.

“How much?” we asked.

“All of it.”

In the time it took us to fly from Athens, Georgia, to Atlantic City, New Jersey, our card-counting undercover cop had lost it all. We didn’t get to play one hand and we were out $10,000. In all fairness, he said he had been kicked out of Vegas for counting cards, not for winning . . . big difference.

Through the years there would be many more things done out of our friendship. These were my people.

Meanwhile, when I wasn’t
working or fooling around with Kelly and Rob, Marianne and I were building a very solid marriage. I was bound and determined not to make the same mistakes I had made earlier on. It took three marriages to show me that the person you are going to share your life with needs to be an active part of that life.

We did everything together, right from the start. She toured with me when it was possible, she was in the audience for television appearances, and she was even onstage with me. When we set up our charities, it was always the two of us, never me alone. Marianne was right there being interviewed alongside me at food drives or hospital openings. I talked about her all the time during my interviews. This time I was going to get it right.

And that started with a home. My dream growing up in the San Felipe Courts was to have a house big enough to have automatic sprinklers. Well, with the means at hand, I kept looking for the perfect home, and after a couple of nice places, I thought I had found it. The movie director Dino De Laurentiis owned a house that had been built by the Doheny family, a legendary L.A. oil family, and wanted to sell the place for a whopping $11 million. This house was so big it had a name: “The Knoll.” At the time, it was on record as being the largest house in L.A., and for whatever reason, that sounded like a dream to me. The place was huge. It was thirteen acres in the middle of Bel Air, had twelve bedrooms in fifty thousand square feet, and even included a couple of guesthouses bigger than most people’s main house.

This was my lucky day. I would like to say I negotiated it down to a cut-rate $9 million, but Dino says I paid full price for it. It allowed me to indulge another one of my passions, home design and remodeling. Before it was all done, I probably put another $4 million into “fixing it up,” so now I was into the place for $13 million to $15 million. Thank you “Lucille,” “Lady,” and all those other hits. Speaking of “Lady”: Lionel and his wife, Brenda, lived in one of the guesthouses for two years.

When Marianne and I got married in 1977, we had decided not to have children right away. We were traveling so much and had such an incredible lifestyle that wasn’t really conducive to children, but we both knew the time would come. Flying back home from a concert one night, Marianne sat down on the arm of a seat across from me and asked if she looked different. I said, “No, why do you ask?”

“Well,” she said, “I will in about eight months.” She was pregnant. On December 4, 1981, our son, Christopher Cody Rogers, was born at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills. We had no problem finding space for young Christopher at the Knoll. He was special then and still is a very special part of my life.

Christopher started school in L.A., but the older he got, the more we became convinced that we didn’t want to raise him in Los Angeles. Marianne’s mom lived in Athens, Georgia, and her brother lived in Dalton, Georgia. This was a much healthier environment for our son, plus I think Marianne wanted to be closer to her family when I was out of town. Even after all that remodeling work, we decided to sell the Knoll and move to Athens for a more livable existence for all of us.

I had met oilman Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara, at several L.A. functions and we had become good friends. The Davises were renowned for their generous charitable giving, but when their youngest daughter was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, they knew they couldn’t buy her a cure. They set about creating a foundation to help underwrite the years of research needed, and today it is still a leading source of JD fund-raising.

Marvin heard I was interested in selling the Knoll, so he and Barbara came by for a tour. They absolutely loved the house and wanted to make an offer, that day—no broker, all cash, sixty-day closing. That’s how wildcat oilmen do things. I told him I wanted $22 million for the place and it was not really open to negotiation. “I don’t have to sell,” I said. “I
want
to sell.” I probably had the lyrics of “The Gambler” rattling around in my head at the time.

My guess is that Marvin Davis had never paid full price for anything in his life, so he graciously offered me $20 million, in cash. “Thanks,” I said, “but no thanks.” He was shocked, and quite honestly so was I. He had made the fatal mistake of telling me how much he loved the place early on. We finally settled on $20 million cash and I would carry $2 million in paper for two years. I guess he had to get something in the negotiation. And I wasn’t taking a big risk carrying paper for one of the richest men in America.

In a matter of about an hour, Marianne and I had sold our “dream” house and were headed for Athens, Georgia. I forgot to tell Marvin that Lionel and Brenda went with the house. They continued to live there for at least another year. One more thing about the Knoll: Aaron Spelling, an occasional golfing partner of ours, soon built an even bigger, 55,000-square-foot house. Was he just trying to top his old friend Marvin?

The next move for the family was to our new place, Beaver Dam Farms in Athens. Around this time in the ’80s, we made the only theatrical feature in which I was the star,
Six Pack.
Produced by Marianne’s ex-husband, Michael Trikilis, it was a movie about a washed-up race car driver who couldn’t afford a pit crew and conspired with a group of orphan kids to “borrow” parts for his rig. If you look really hard, you can see Chris in his mother’s arms in a crowd scene. Future stars Diane Lane and Anthony Michael Hall were two of my pint-sized pit crew.

Again, acting in this movie reminded me of one of my favorite stories about okay actors like me. Randolph Scott, a very successful star in Westerns, applied for membership at the L.A. Country Club, a place notorious for rejecting actors. When he was told this by the membership board, he reportedly replied, “I’m no actor—and I have fifty-one movies to prove it!”

That’s kind of how I’ve always felt about the profession.

The same year that Marianne and I got married, 1977, I did four concerts in Sikeston, Missouri, for the twenty-fifth anniversary four-day Sikeston Jaycees Bootheel Rodeo. During my visit there, I was approached by a couple of guys who were local Jaycees who had to be ten years younger than me. They told me how passionate the Jaycees were about doing something special for their city and their kids, and that they wanted to build a children’s therapy center that would provide care for children with special needs. It’s hard not to get caught up in that kind of emotion about such an incredible cause.

At the time, I was raising Arabian horses, and I had this beautiful stallion named Borraabby. Realizing I was about at the end of my horse-raising era, I donated Borraabby to help them raise money for the center. He raised $75,000 at auction. This apparently was more than they needed to break ground on a new center and get their dreams started. It was shortly after this donation that the Jaycees informed me the therapy board wanted to name the new center after me. Obviously, I was very flattered and wholeheartedly agreed.

The Kenny Rogers United Cerebral Palsy Center started off as a relatively small operation in the ’70s, treating around twenty kids, but it has blossomed into the Kenny Rogers Children’s Center, providing physical, occupational, and speech therapy to children with all types of special needs. Today the center treats well over four hundred children (with more than one hundred on the waiting list) and helps them function more independently, attend public school, and gain the confidence they need to lead more active and productive lives. Amazingly, no family has ever been charged anything for the services they’ve received. A third expansion of the center was recently completed—a 7,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, million dollar addition—with a plan to provide treatment well into the future at no charge to the children served.

I’ve had the pleasure of going back to Sikeston periodically over the years—first with my friend Dottie West in 1978 and 1979—to do fund-raising concerts to benefit the center. It never ceases to amaze me how a few young men with a dream—the Jaycees, and in this case, the great people of Sikeston and the surrounding communities—can make such incredible things happen. I am so proud of my friends in Sikeston and thrilled to be associated with this amazing project.

One thing I’ve learned is the more successful you are, the more you can accomplish with just a little effort.

Back home in Athens,
always antsy to do something between recording, touring, and playing tennis, I decided to undertake the construction of an eighteen-hole golf course on the property. I might not have had good sense, but as Kelly said, I had stamina. I liked to play golf, and the idea of a whole course came gradually. I started by adding a couple of short greens for fun, then spotted a great place across a lake for another hole. I brought in a landscape designer, Joe Gayle, my brother-in-law, Don Thumann, and probably thirty University of Georgia students, including football great Herschel Walker, and we set out planting and moving trees, digging sand traps, and laying sod.