Luck or Something Like It (22 page)

I think the Forester Sisters with their amazing harmonies were the first act to be on the Christmas tour. Trisha Yearwood, Faith Hill (who wanted a puppy from the show), Emmylou Harris, Shelby Lynne, Linda Davis, Sawyer Brown, Mark Chesnutt, Little Texas, and Rebecca Lynn Howard are a few of the others who have joined me.

Suzy Bogguss is one of my favorite visual memories of the Christmas tour. The two of us were sitting on stools, cozying up to each other, singing, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” while she was seven months pregnant, and as big as a barn. It added a whole new dimension to the song.

For the past few years, it’s been my pal Billy Dean who has joined the kids and choirs to make Christmas a special time.

I’ve always been a very trusting person, so when someone tells me they can train doves to fly from the back of a theater to the top of a Christmas tree onstage, that struck me as a great idea. A magician told me just that, so I set her up with Kelly and we came up with our theme “The Magic of the Season.” Off she went to train the birds.

During the first day of rehearsal, she put some kind of special dove food on the top of the Christmas tree, went to the top of the theater, and released two birds. They flew in circles to the top of the building and were retrieved only after someone put bigger portions of dove food on the rail halfway down. Four stagehands and two cast members finally captured them.

“Tomorrow would be better,” she assured us, and it was. This time they made it all the way to the stage, but they didn’t land. They just circled . . . and circled . . . and circled until finally they were retrieved. The magician explained that it was probably the loud noise of the music that they weren’t used to. I reminded her this was going to be the grand finale of the show. There would not only be loud music but a thirty-voice choir, seven kids, me, and whoever was working with us in that show.

“We’ll have them there by showtime!” she responded reassuringly.

The third time would be the charm. It was our dress rehearsal and she would start them from a few rows at the front of the stage. They would get to the tree and it would be no problem on opening night. We all waited anxiously to see what would happen, and much to everyone’s surprise, some headed straight for the tree, right on cue, and then headed backstage; others ended up in the front row. They would have been fluttering in somebody’s Christmas hairdo. It was not going to be a pretty picture. That was it for me.

To her credit she would not give up. Opening night, I looked over during the finale and there she was with a dove in each hand, throwing them like darts at the Christmas tree. They circled the tree, then flew off together to the ceiling of the theater—and circled and circled and circled. I told Kelly, “Fire the magician.”

After about ten years of touring with the “Christmas only” show, we returned to the Fox Theatre in Detroit. In the middle of “Away in a Manger,” someone from the back of the theater (I would swear it was the same guy who started this mess years earlier) yelled out, “Hey! Kenny, do ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.’ We wanna hear some hits!”

I know you can’t please all the people all the time, but God knows I try. In the last five years or so, I have been doing half hits and half Christmas. As you can tell, I stay right on the cutting edge of audience research.

As we were traveling
the world and in the midst of all these memorable days on the road, my “real” life was taking a very sharp turn for the worse. After living without my father since 1975, my mother was starting to fade.

When my dad died, it really crushed my mom. Even with all his drinking, and his reluctance to travel more than fifty miles from home, she had loved him more than any of us realized. He had been her anchor through so much pain and joy. They had been married since they were kids and then he was gone, and it had happened so quickly. She hadn’t had the time to get prepared to be alone.

Mother started trying to get out a little and go on vacations with my sister Geraldine and her family, who traveled every summer to somewhere new and different. They had always been great about taking the younger kids on vacation with them when we were young, including me.

For Mom, though, summer and summer travel just didn’t come often enough. She was a woman who was ready to go at the drop of a hat. At one point after my dad died, I took her in my airplane to see one of my shows. The show was in Huntsville, Texas, only about 160 miles from the Crawford area. She hated flying, but she wanted to go. She was so proud of my success, not because of the money, but because she saw how happy it made me.

Knowing her hunger to travel, I came up with a great compromise for her and a chance to pay her back for my not being there to help the family when Janice and I had to get married. I had not forgotten the looks on their faces and the financial drain on the family I had caused back then. This would be my chance to make amends.

I called a friend of mine named Alan Hill who had worked with a number of big country stars, and together, we showed up in Crockett, Texas, in a big, shiny black-and-brown Prevost bus with the name Lucille on the scroll in front. My mom thought I had rented it just to come see her and was thrilled. When I told her it was a gift to her from me, I thought she was going to faint. She now had her own private coach, and Alan signed on as her own personal driver. This may be the only time I ever heard Kenneth Ray used as a term of endearment, when she said, teary-eyed, “Oh, Kenneth Ray . . . You shouldn’t have.”

I was about to call my pilot to come and pick me up when she announced, “Oh, no, wait. Alan and I will take you home on the bus.” I reminded her it was about a thousand miles to my home in Atlanta and she said, “Is that one way or round trip?” She had made up her mind that she was going somewhere that day. “Alan doesn’t care, do you, Alan?”

She adjusted to this personal driver concept very well and very quickly. They took me home to Atlanta in “Lucille.” I think I enjoyed it more than she did.

I kept thinking, what a shame it was that my dad wasn’t there to see all of this. Then I remembered how much he hated to travel. It was probably good I had waited. No question, they would have gotten a divorce over this bus.

I can promise you this, Alan had no idea what he was signing on for when he agreed to drive Lucille. They were a perfect pair. He didn’t need to talk, and she couldn’t stop. I had given her wings, and his job was to keep her flying. In the first year alone, she and Alan put several hundred thousand miles on that bus. He was a perfect choice as her driver. He was about the same age as my older brother, Lelan, so she looked at Alan as she did her sons, and I think he must have looked at her as he did his mother. Rumor has it, she never went to the back part of the bus to cool out. She wanted to sit up front in the passenger seat next to Alan and wanted to travel only during the day and never at night. She didn’t want to miss anything. I could probably have just bought them a car to drive and accomplished the same thing.

Was it from my mother that I got my very early impulse to move around, way back in the day of the Bobby Doyle Three? Probably so.

My mom had two passions in life: traveling and fishing. I have never known a woman who loved to fish as much as she did. Everywhere that bus went, my mom carried along fishing equipment. It wasn’t a fancy rod and reel. It was a cane fishing pole with a bobber on the end.

Just so you have a visual image of my mother: she was very striking for her age. At that point she would have been between sixty-eight and seventy years old, and she stood about five feet, eight inches. Pretty tall for a woman. She had that beautiful silver hair that women her age like to have done once a week at the local beauty shop. She wore glasses and had a gold cap on one of her front teeth. Not for style, I think, but simply because gold was cheaper in those days than whatever the other option might have been.

I have no idea how many identical matching outfits she had, but her favorite was a pink pantsuit with a small plastic corsage that she pretty much wore all the time. There was also an orange jumpsuit on the bus that she could throw on over her pink pantsuit for emergency fishing opportunities along the road.

She didn’t need a formal invitation to go fishing. Alan said that time and again she would ask him to pull over as they were driving down a road in some strange town. She would sling her orange jumpsuit on over her pantsuit and corsage and climb the fence of some perfect stranger’s property. She’d go to a corner of his lake with her little portable chair she had underneath the bus and just start fishing like she owned the place. When she was finished, she’d lose the jumpsuit, return to her seat, and say, “That was fun. . . . We can go now.”

Alan said she looked like an escaped convict from a distance in that orange jumpsuit. He warned her over and over that someone was going to be upset if they ever caught her. No one ever said a word to her in the two years he drove for her. She fished some of the best lakes and small ponds in this country.

My mother began to take her bus and show up at my concerts almost every night with Alan. They would sit in front-row seats with “Alan and Lucille” written on them. It was great that I also had two of my brothers, Lelan and Roy, working with me at the time, so they were always around to take good care of her. This was what she wanted, and this was what she loved.

In 1986, my mom was at Beaver Dam Farms—my place in Athens, Georgia—visiting my family and had spent the day out fishing in one of our lakes. I was sitting in front of the TV in the den area when she walked by. She asked if I needed anything and I told her no. After a few minutes without seeing or hearing from her, I went to the kitchen. She was sitting at the table. She had a strange look . . . kind of glazed over. I asked if everything was okay, and she said something to the effect of “Bayou Bay.” I repeatedly asked her different questions but no matter what I asked, her answer was always the same: “Bayou Bay.”

She had apparently had a massive stroke between the time she walked by me and the time I went in the kitchen to her. She was rushed to the hospital, but the only thing she ever said for the rest of her life was “Bayou Bay.” No one in the family had any idea what she was referring to or if she even knew what she was saying.

My mom lived another six years in a hospital in Houston on life support with my sister Sandy by her side every day taking care of her. We just couldn’t pull the plug. It’s interesting to me that the last words she said to me were: “Do you need anything, Kenneth Ray?”

Chapter Sixteen

After the Gold Rush

Success is never everlasting,
and mine was no exception. At some point, inevitably, this parade of hits had to end, and that point came halfway through the 1980s. Except for the Barry Gibb album
Eyes That See in the Dark,
which included the duet “Islands in the Stream” with Dolly and sold more than five million albums, and the
Once Upon a Christmas
album, again with Dolly, also selling more than seven million albums, my success as a hit maker first gradually tapered off and then came to a standstill.

Actually the last No. 1 song I had for many years was a Grammy Award–winning duet with Ronnie Milsap in 1987 called “Make No Mistake, She’s Mine.” After that I couldn’t buy a hit.

I kept performing, of course, and people came out to hear my litany of hits. Remember, this is country music, where fans are much more loyal and long-lasting. But by the early ’90s, it was getting tougher and tougher to even get my songs played on the radio. Garth Brooks was starting to come into his own, and in his wake, a whole new generation of country performers emerged. “Young Country” was the new marketing phrase. At that point, I must not have been, in the eyes of the record executives or radio programmers, either country enough or young enough. Once again, just as in the days of the First Edition, I was “too old” to play in this young man’s game, and I couldn’t grow my hair long and put on rose-tinted glasses to solve this problem.

I have always been fortunate to have a presence on television, and during this very painful and drawn-out recording drought, TV is what saved me. It had started back in the First Edition days when we headlined the
Rollin’ on the River
show that we shot in Canada. Then in the ’80s, the
Gambler
movies came along and, together with
Coward of the County,
were network ratings successes and made a lasting impression with a whole generation of television execs.

It was around 1990 when we had finished our third year of the Classic Weekend and Kelly had written a treatment, which is basically a short story, for a new
Gambler
movie. There hadn’t been one since
The Gambler, Part III: The Legend Continues,
in 1987. Kelly, like the rest of us of that age, had grown up watching all the classic Western TV shows like
Bonanza, The Rifleman, Wyatt Earp,
and
Bat Masterson.
How clever would it be, he thought, if my character, Brady Hawkes from the
Gambler
series, knew all of them. After all, they had all lived during the same great Western era from the end of the Civil War until the early twentieth century. In a new movie, Brady Hawkes would travel across the Plains in search of the last great poker game in the Old West and run into all these classic Western heroes.

Ken Kragen got Kelly’s treatment to the networks on a Friday, and on the following Monday morning we had a deal. It kind of happened like that with the very first
Gambler
movie. For it to happen again—the instant network buy—was extremely rare. In the truest sense, we realized, you have to be careful what you wish for.

We wished, we received, and now we had to deliver. We had to find these actors from the old TV shows and talk them into reprising their youthful roles one more time. One of the great things about having success is you can cut through a lot of red tape to get to people. It became Kelly’s job to track these guys down. My theory was: your idea, your responsibility.

Interestingly enough, this task turned out to be easier than we thought. Written well, this was going back to the glory years for these legendary performers. They wanted to be a part of it. We quickly signed Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp and Gene Barry as Bat Masterson. They still had the wardrobe that they had worn in their original series. Sure, they were a bit older, but they were every bit the heroes they had portrayed in their original series. Kelly was like a bloodhound. He kept on tracking them down, one by one—
The Virginian,
the cast of
Wagon Train, Kung Fu,
and
The Rifleman
—all the big boys. It would be like a class reunion for Western stars, and they all agreed this was going to be a lot of fun.

They also wanted to stay as true to their characters as they could and bring their own sense of what their character might contribute to the scene. Brian Keith, for instance, had played a crusty old character in Sam Peckinpah’s television series
The Westerner.
He took a look at the script and gave Kelly a call back. “Sam Peckinpah would roll over in his grave if he saw this crap!” Brian’s language was a bit more Peckinpah-ish, so needless to say, Kelly used Brian’s guidance to rewrite the dialogue. Brian’s final line was: “The end of the West is near.” It was a perfect line to advance the concept of the dying days of a lifestyle that everyone knew was coming. The writing was on the wall for the Old West, and all these mythical TV characters had known it.

We ended up with pretty much everyone we went after, except for one we really wanted—James Garner, that is, Maverick. I had seen him playing golf at the Bel Air County Club almost daily with my friend Mac Davis, the writer of the First Edition song “Something’s Burning.”

Kelly suggested that maybe I could ask him one day while he was in the middle of his game. We thought he might just say yes to get rid of me, and we were not proud at this point. We wanted Maverick. I started with “You may not want to do this, but I have to ask anyway . . .” and laid out the entire scenario for him.

And surprisingly he said no. I make his response sound cold and disrespectful, but it really wasn’t. He just had his doubts we could pull it off. It was a concept he didn’t feel comfortable with, plus he was up about six shots over Mac in their golf game and that had to take precedence over our dream. We would later learn why he said no. He appeared as Mel Gibson’s father in the theatrical release of
Maverick
later the next year.

We didn’t get Brett Maverick, but we did get his brother Bart, Jack Kelly. He was more than happy to be part of it. He would represent the Maverick family at the final poker game in the Old West before gambling would be illegal.

The woman who cast our movie, Junie Lowry, had started out by casting the extras for the original
Gambler
movies. Her brother, Dick Lowry, had directed all my movies up to that point. He had a real love for the Old West. Dick, Kelly, and I had a great working relationship. He was pretty gracious about listening to my ideas and trying to work them into the story. Junie, his sister, has now become one of the top casting agents in Hollywood and has since won several Emmys. She suggested using Reba McEntire to play the female lead opposite me for this movie,
The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw.

Reba’s success in country music, her Oklahoma roots, and her great riding ability were a perfect fit for us. I had ridden a lot as a kid, but I had never been a particularly good rider.

That would all change as we started shooting and riding eight hours a day. I had learned there is a lot of riding in a Western. Reba was right at home in the saddle and welcomed the chance to show her ability. She had been a barrel rider in some Oklahoma rodeos when she was younger and still had all her skills.

What a trip through time it was. Every day on the set I was acting with some of television’s most iconic figures.

You could still sense the competition between Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. Twenty years ago they had battled each other for ratings. This was not about ratings for them. It was a bigger goal, keeping the story alive at the end of an era. The classic Old West was at stake. These were the guys who had laid the groundwork for the way Western television history had evolved.

Mark McCain, the kid from
The Rifleman,
was reunited with his father, Chuck Connors. They could still cock and fire their rifles just as they did on their show twenty years ago, and we were all counting on everyone else doing just that. And they all delivered. We had defied all the odds and done something original and exciting.

Although Westerns had been out of vogue for a while by then, the movie won, and won big, helping to win sweeps for NBC. That’s all the network executives asked. That’s all they needed and we delivered.

The network exposure kept me in front of the public. We had brought Westerns back to television and we were, if nothing else, opportunistic. Several of the actors got renewed series.

We had just helped win the sweeps for NBC, but I think they thought it was a lucky one-off for us. While we were shooting
The Gambler Returns,
Kelly had gotten his hands on another script that had been around for years. The main character was Quentin Leech, a bounty hunter. He was dirty, dusty, not particularly friendly, and would shoot first and ask questions later. He was the opposite of Brady Hawkes.

NBC said no thank you: “Nobody wants to see Kenny Rogers like that.”

Kelly, who refused to give up, believed this would not only be a different role for me, but a chance for me to grow as an actor, and he knew how much I loved the character. Undaunted, he marched directly over to CBS and ran it by the network guys there. Their reaction was what we had hoped for. They said, “Hell, yes. You kicked our asses with that damn
Gambler
movie, and we’d rather have you with us than against us.”

We now had a new home—the network where it all began with the first
Gambler
—for our next movie,
Rio Diablo.

Junie again cast it and put together an amazing cast. Ken Kragen was managing an up-and-coming country artist, Travis Tritt, and we fought to make him my sidekick. The chemistry really worked, as it wasn’t that much of a stretch to play the mentor to this emerging star. We looked to country music for another of my costars, casting Naomi Judd as my love interest. Naomi had actually started her career by auditioning as an actress and appearing in the Dick Lowry movie
The Hank Williams Story.

Naomi and I did have a romantic scene together. She was supposed to be giving me a bath after a long ride to her place. It all sounded good on paper, but sitting in a bathtub all day surrounded by the entire crew was not my idea of a romantic moment.

The movie was shot in the hottest place I have ever worked, and I’ve worked in Saudi Arabia. Terlingua, Texas, is a remote part of Texas on the Mexican border. The movie had a great authentic Western look and feel—it was as dirty and dusty as we were. The young production designer who was now working with us, Jerry Wanek, had helped on my photography book and would go on to get many Emmy nominations in his career. The whole thing just felt like we were living back in the Old West, bad teeth and all.

It was a great role for me and fun not to have to be a good guy all the time. Maybe it brought out my dark side, as I got to shoot people at the drop of a hat. It was also a lot of fun to be more authentic, grittier and nastier.

As we were finishing up the last days of the shoot, we realized we had apparently not thought through the ending of the movie. I was supposed to die, God forbid. What a shock that was going to be for the audience. The network said, “You can’t kill Kenny Rogers!”

“But what a great surprise ending,” we argued. We had already broken every other rule that we were told wouldn’t work. Why stop now? Why not, for the fun of it, stay with the script as written?

We found a compromise. I would get shot by Stacy Keach, fall off a cliff, and drop three hundred feet into a raging river. We had saved our shock ending yet left enough doubt about whether I was dead or alive.

It was genius. That way, in case the movie was a hit, I could have floated downriver and been rescued by Indians. But we had another problem. The network did not like the title. We shouldn’t call it
Rio Diablo,
they said. No one will know what that means. We should call it by its English translation,
Devil’s River.

That didn’t sound like the movie we had just made, so we argued for the purity of our trade. Like I knew what that was. The execs all finally decided to stay true to the original name and let people figure it out for themselves. It would be
Rio Diablo.

The headline in
Variety
read, “
Rio Diablo
wins sweeps for CBS!” I have to admit there was a certain satisfaction in doing something that had been totally against what was my norm and being successful.

It’s amazing what helping networks win a couple of sweeps will do. NBC was now calling and wanting to do a series of movies with me. At that point I actually thought,
Who needs music, anyway?

For as long as I
could remember I had been married. I have to admit I was pretty good at it, as I had been married four times. There are reasons marriages end, but I’m not sure what happened between Marianne and me. We were the American dream couple, or so
People
magazine and the Hollywood tabloids kept telling us. It was something we had never promoted or asked for. We were two people who had enjoyed making my career together and raising our young son, Christopher. I enjoyed the years spent with her family, and I believe she enjoyed the time spent with mine. During the early and mid-1980s Marianne and Christopher traveled everywhere with me. We were constantly put in the public eye. When we moved to Georgia to be closer to her family and to raise Christopher in a more stable environment, it seemed like the perfect move. Marianne was close to her Georgia roots, and I enjoyed building Beaver Dam Farms. As Christopher started school, they were able to travel on tour less and less; still, I was so busy at the farm with my photography and building that I flew in and out of Athens, Georgia, for most of my concerts. But something was changing—as I say, it’s hard to explain—and we were growing apart by 1992.

Did you ever do something in your life and look back on it later and say, “How could I have ever thought that would have ended well?”