Luck or Something Like It (20 page)

I would be out on tour and play a golf course, see something I like, and come back and build it. One of the problems was that part of the farm had no trees on it, so I bought a thing called a tree spade. It was a huge truck with a big claw on the back that could dig up a tree, roots and all, so that the tree could be replanted. And, boy, did I dig them up. I was going all over town and thinning out overcrowded trees from people’s homes and moving them to the farm. In fact, I even got the Athens Airport to give me some of their trees in exchange for some of my photographs! In all, I planted five thousand yaupons and transplanted three hundred trees. The golf course was really taking shape.

Some three years later, when National Amateur Left-Handed Championship winner and local golfer Stan Kanavage and I were playing, he cut across a dogleg hole that I had designed and hit straight at a green. That was not supposed to be the way the hole was played. I got my trusty tree spade and planted a few trees in that path. A few days later he came over and we played again. It was great to see the look on his face when he couldn’t take the shortcut. When he double-bogeyed the hole, I knew I had a golf course.

Chris loved the course, naturally, and at seven was just starting to drive a golf cart, usually recklessly. We were building a lake bridge one day and Chris came over the hill full speed; when he saw us, he slammed on the brakes and slid fifteen feet on the grass to the very edge of the lake. Frightened to death, he looked up and said, “Sorry, Daddy, I don’t think I was in complete control.” That struck me as all the punishment he needed.

Marianne had found her place in Athens. She had her mom, her brother, her girlfriends, and most important, she had Christopher living a free, country life.

My dad once told me, “If you have five friends when you grow up . . . even with no money . . . you are a very wealthy man. Be friendly to everyone, but friends with only a few.” I think I was finally getting old enough to understand what he meant. My friendships have always been very important to me . . . not a lot of friends, just enough that we could all be there for each other when we needed someone. I had my friends: Jim Mazza, Kelly Junkermann, Rob Pincus, Ken Kragen, and Steve Wynn. They were there for me, and I would be there for them.

I had gone to great lengths to learn as much about landscaping as I could while Joe and I were building the golf course. I will tell you I think Joe Gayle is one of the most creative people I have ever met. He has worked with me on every project I’ve done in the last twenty years, and I have been proud of everything we have done. We studied, to me, the Rolls-Royce of golf courses, the Masters course—the Augusta National Golf Club—in Augusta, Georgia, and did as much as we could to reach that standard of detail and beauty at Beaver Dam.

Having finished the course, we wondered not about the aesthetics, but about the degree of difficulty for an accomplished player. That’s the final test. Kelly and I were playing one day and we started talking about testing the course. I casually asked him, “How well do you think a professional golfer would enjoy this course?”

He said, “I don’t know. Let’s have a Gambler’s Invitational here and find out. We can invite a bunch of pros to play, sell tickets to the public, and give it to a local charity.”

I had held what we called a Gambler’s Invitational tennis tournament when I lived in Beverly Hills. That one was just for sport, but very competitive. I had built what Jimmy Connors called his favorite tennis court to play on because of the acoustics. The idea in the tournament was to invite six of my friends and their respective pros.

My friends the first year were Johnny Carson, who lived three houses down; Lionel Richie, who had played on the tennis team at Tuskegee University; Bert Convy, the game show host; actor Robert Duvall; Bruce Jenner, the world’s greatest athlete; and me. We all had about the same level of game, which made it really competitive.

Everyone put up $500. The winning celebrity’s pro got all the money. We had no trouble getting pros to play, and the competition was fierce and we had a lot of fun. So that was the premise we started with.

In Beaver Dam, I had also built two green clay tennis courts, and we realized the barn was big enough to have a half-court basketball court. So now we’re on the back nine and we have this grand scheme to invite a group of high-profile athletes to come and stay at my house and compete in both their own sport and other sports as well. We’d round up four professional golfers, four professional basketball players, four professional tennis players, and four well-known celebrities and create mixed teams. A pro golfer, for instance, wouldn’t just compete at golf. He’d have to compete at basketball and tennis as well.

By the end of the round, we had it almost all figured out. Our good friend Larry Levinson, another of the pros from the Gambler’s Invitational, joined us in fine-tuning the event. To pay for it, we turned to Steve Wynn. The Golden Nugget was the perfect sponsor for the Gambler’s Invitational and now this. Steve, as always, was quick to say yes and agreed to put up $500,000. So now we had the money, the place, and the concept, but no athletes.

Kelly and I decided if we could get Michael Jordan, whom we had already met, everyone else would fall into place. We first called Michael and told him we had John McEnroe set up, then we called John and told him we had Michael set. Now we had agreements from both. From there this event just took off.

In our first year, 1988, the basketball players were Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and Dominique Wilkins. Our tennis players were John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis, Jimmy Connors, and Mikael Pernfors. The golfers: Ray Floyd, Payne Stewart, Tim Simpson, and Lanny Wadkins. The celebs: Lorenzo Lamas, Kris Kristofferson, Mark Harmon, and me. I’m sure most of these pros came just for the opportunity to meet one another.

With the additional help of the production company Guber-Peters, we added two additional components to the contest, including fishing, and found just the right charity. We would take all the money and create an Athens Area Homeless Shelter. Guber-Peters agreed to produce the TV version and lined up a network immediately. The only hitch is that gambling had a bad connotation in sports TV, so we decided to call it what it was—“The Classic Weekend.”

What made the event unique was getting athletes to compete in something they did not excel in. Adding fishing may have seemed inconsequential at the time, but it became one of our favorite events. We had offered $5,000 to the person who caught the biggest fish and an additional $5,000 to the person catching the most fish.

What we didn’t know was Michael Jordan was deathly afraid of the water and really wanted no part of this. I explained to him that as tall as he was he could probably stand up anywhere in the lake. So after we agreed to have everyone wear life preservers so he wouldn’t look silly, he said yes.

Now picture, if you can, a ten-acre lake with three thousand people sitting on the banks watching sixteen of the most recognizable people in the world get in their boats with their partners and, at the sound of whistle, spread out over the lake and fish. Lines were going everywhere—on the shore, over other boats, and into the spectators. It was a mess, but a fun one.

The irony is that Michael, who didn’t want to do this at all, caught the biggest fish. After realizing he had just won $5,000 dollars, he offered his boat partner Ray Floyd $2,500 to take the fish off the line for him. That’s just the kind of event this was, pure fun from day one.

At the end of each day’s competition, everyone was exhausted and would retire to their rooms on the property for the night. That’s when the games really began. I don’t want to mention any names, but his initials are Isiah Thomas, and he was holding court in the corner, on the floor of the main guesthouse. It seems someone had inadvertently left a pair of dice and Isaiah had stumbled on to them. All I know is someone came up to the main house and told me to “Come quick, there is a game going on in the guesthouse and people are losing all their money.” By the time I got there it was obvious this was not Isiah’s first rodeo. He had literally cleaned everybody out. When I walked in it, I was fresh blood. Now I’ve never considered myself a real gambler, but I saw an opportunity to shine. I was going to ride in like a knight in shining armor and show him a thing or two about dice. I started with $1,000—and was broke in three minutes flat.

Yep . . . I showed him.

The third year, things got even more competitive. Larry Bird woke up every morning before everybody else to find the best fishing spots. Charles Barkley was bound and determined to master golf like his good pal Michael Jordan. Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and golf great Payne Stewart turned out to be excellent basketball players. When Woody Harrelson sank a five-foot putt on the final hole to win the golf event for his team, he and his teammates, including Michael Jordan, hugged and shouted and sprayed the champagne around like they had just won the NBA championship. Good pal Bruce Boxleitner’s team won one of the years as well.

It was a family event, too. I woke up one morning to find all the kids in Christopher’s room huddled around Michael Jordan as he played the Michael Jordan video game.

The next year JCPenney, with whom I had a clothing deal, stepped up for the next two years and put up $1,000,000 to keep the event alive. The entire event was put together in less than two months with a small staff, all under the command of tournament director Phil Kramer. The proceeds single-handedly built the Athens Area Homeless Shelter.

The amazing part is it all started with two friends walking around a golf course and wondering . . .

Chapter Fourteen

A Life of Photography

During this great bubble
of success in the 1980s, I indulged in one other grand passion that’s become grander by the year—photography. It was a big part of my life from early on, but it really became a preoccupation after Marianne and I moved to Beaver Dam Farms.

As I said, artists need outside interests to help balance the unreal lives they are living. There is no question that photography has been an extension of my creative self, but it has also offered me an escape from the scrutiny of the public eye and the craziness of a concert tour.

When my old mentor Kirby Stone saw that I was interested in photography, he introduced me to Milton Greene, the famous high-fashion photographer whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland. Kirby’s exact words: “Milton, give him some pointers. He wants to do photography.”

I had a whole bunch of equipment by then, so I started by listing off all my lenses. I don’t think Milton was too impressed. He told me, “Pick one and throw the rest away. All great photographers see in one plane. Some guys see landscapes wide, some people like to shoot on the table, but you have to figure out what your eye tends to compose.”

I thought it was a great piece of advice, but I still have twelve lenses and I’ve tried to learn how to use them all. I think Milton was talking about taking a certain type of picture where one lens will usually suffice. And he was certainly right that having only one lens teaches you to perfect a certain kind of composition.

During the early ’80s, I was doing 150 shows a year. It was a great opportunity to see the country and, as the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “capture a moment in time.” I had always built a darkroom for developing and printing in the house I was living in, and if I was shooting a movie, we would transform the bathroom in the hotel room into a darkroom.

One of the greatest gifts I have ever received was Marianne giving me a week in the darkroom with John Sexton, the assistant of famed photographer Ansel Adams. John came to my house in Beverly Hills and spent a week teaching me the style of Ansel Adams.

There was now so much more for me to do than just take a picture. I enlisted Kelly as my production and creative copartner and we went everywhere, including up in the air in planes and helicopters, which always made Kelly a little more nervous than me.

One time we were in British Columbia and had hired a couple of helicopter pilots to take us into the wild, where we might be able to catch a few unique photographic opportunities. We are flying through gorges, zooming in and out, and all at once, through an open mike, we hear our pilot talking to the copilot.

“Yeah, I used to be a Vietnam helicopter pilot.” Well, okay. That’s a good thing. Clearly a guy who knows his business. His next line: “Yeah, my wife left me and I don’t have that much to live for anymore.”

Right then we were starting up the steep side of a mountain. Kelly looked at me, took a deep breath, and said one word, dragging it out for about ten seconds. “Soooooooo . . .”

On another occasion that Kelly hasn’t forgotten, we chartered a little single-engine Cessna to take us over the Grand Canyon. Rob Pincus was with us, and it was a little harrowing. The turbulence over the Grand Canyon is always edgy. That day it went from bad to terribly bad. When we went over the lip of the canyon, the wind took us and just threw us sideways. I was still trying to take pictures from the window, but by now Kelly was flat on the floor, trying to get a few shots that way. I ordered the pilot to take us back, and when we landed, Kelly kissed the ground!

A day or two later, another single-engine plane crashed in the canyon, and they made a new ruling—no more single-engine planes would be allowed to fly over the canyon. I have to say that, judging from our ride that day, it was a good ruling.

Photography opened a whole new door for me, and I embraced it. My daily routine changed dramatically. I would fly into a city, get a rental car, and set off to find the treasure that city had to offer. I was armed with the same type of camera that Ansel had used, called a 4 x 5 camera. With Kelly and Rob as my sherpas, we’d often get lost looking for something interesting to shoot. I’d do my show, then fly back home to L.A. or the farm in Athens, and jump right into developing the film. To hurry things along I would dry the negative with a hair dryer, then make the print. This was not the digital age. Sometimes to get a print that I was satisfied with, I would spend hours printing and reprinting. A lot of those sessions went until the early hours of the morning.

The next morning would be more of the same: fly to the next concert, have an Egg McMuffin and a Diet Coke for breakfast, and be off in search of my next great photograph.

Because of touring, I was always on location. I have come to know the sometimes haunting faces of men out of work, the homeless, sheepherders, and wealthy cattlemen, whose deeply lined faces indicate exactly how they attained their riches. I’ve seen the charm in an old tombstone or broken-down shed, a massive ridge of granite in the Sierra Nevada, a rushing mountain stream, or that old standard, the Maine lighthouse. Our country became alive for me in a way I had never known.

If you really want to see America, take up photography. You don’t have to start out with a fancy camera—just take what you have and start shooting. You will never regret it.

In 1986, I selected the best of my travel photos and published them in a book called
Kenny Rogers’ America.

It was during this time that the hours spent in the darkroom began to affect my throat. I was probably spending a minimum of four hours a night in the darkroom, and doctors advised this probably was not a good idea for a guy who had to depend on his throat to make a living.

My days on the road today are a lot like they were twenty years ago. My road manager, Gene Roy, is now my right-hand man, but the day starts the same.

One day, after
America
had come out in the ’80s, Ken Kragen stopped by my studio on Sunset Boulevard and noticed some of the portraits I had been shooting for several years and asked why I didn’t put out another book with only portraits. The idea started germinating. I came up with the idea of shooting well-known people, the ones who are familiar to all of us, and calling the book
Your Friends and Mine
.

My young son, Chris, was the one who actually got the ball rolling. He was a big Michael Jackson fan, and one night after I had hosted the Grammy Awards, Chris found Michael, introduced himself, and gave him a little plastic Grammy that had been attached to the flowers his mom, Marianne, had given me. The upshot of that meeting was Michael asking if I would like to take some pictures of him and Chris. By this time, most people knew I was heavily into photography. The day he came for those shots, I told Michael my idea for a book. He loved it.

“Why don’t you start with me?” he said. “I would love to do a photo shoot with my chimp, Bubbles.”

So Michael Jackson and Bubbles were my first subjects. They came and stayed eight hours. They changed clothes about six times. I have pictures of him that have never been seen. I took the first pictures of him in a hat he had brought with him. I think he was about to have plastic surgery and was trying to hide his face. I ended up with some really cool pictures of Michael and found him shy, thoughtful, and willing to give his best at anything he did.

Yousuf Karsh, arguably the most famous and accomplished portrait photographer of all time, came down from Canada and spent time teaching me portrait photography. Yousuf shot the famous, almost growling portrait of Winston Churchill that is said to be the most reproduced portrait in history. I was also honored when he wrote the foreword for my book
Kenny Rogers’ America.

When I was going through the photos of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Yousuf happened to be at my studio. He looked through them and announced: “That one!”

“Why?” I asked.

Yousuf said, “Because
this
is the star, and
this
is the monkey!”

And he was right. You want to see Michael first, then discover the chimpanzee.

With the idea now firmly fixed in my mind, I went back to Little, Brown and Company, the company that had published
Kenny Rogers’ America.
They loved the idea and gave me a year to complete the task. In the beginning, I thought that would be plenty of time. Toward the end, I wasn’t so sure.

Kelly wasn’t so sure I could pull it off at all. “Kenny,” he said, “you aren’t a celebrity type of guy. You eat breakfast every day at McDonald’s. You’re a jeans and warm-up suit type of guy and you drive a minivan! You’ve never even met half these celebrities—how are you going to get them in here?”

I started by calling people I knew to see if they would let me shoot them for the book. Two friends, Linda Evans and Linda Gray, agreed right away. Elizabeth Taylor knew me only in passing—from when Lionel Richie and I had sung at one of her birthday parties—yet she was so sweet about coming, didn’t hesitate for a minute. I think it was Ken Kragen who contacted her.

She was the only person who was two hours late, but it was more than worth it when she got there. Her photographs turned out beautifully, and I used one on the cover of the book. After I had photographed Michael, Linda, Linda, and Elizabeth, the word got out. People began to know what I wanted when I reached them on the phone. Or I should say when
someone
reached them. I discovered right away that if I knew someone who knew someone, it was better to have that person do the contacting.

The early photo sessions were taking up to five or six hours, so I decided to go with only one setup per person, taking only six black-and-white photos and three in color. That became my selling point: in and out in thirty minutes, and if I don’t come up with a great photo, I won’t use it. And it worked.

Shooting with an 8 x 10 camera, I quickly learned that studio photography can be complex and complicated, with multiple types of lighting at variable levels. Through Mario Casilli, the famous
Playboy
photographer, I met and hired his assistant, Bernie Boudreau. Bernie has now been my friend and assistant for thirty years. He also has multiple levels of wisdom. Since he has it, I don’t need it.

The great comic Jonathan Winters came in wearing a Cincinnati Reds baseball outfit and a cap and wanted to mimic Babe Ruth pointing to the bleachers. I asked Ray Charles to sway like he was onstage. He refused. Then I told him the dirtiest joke I knew and at the punch line, he started swaying. It was perfect.

George Burns just walked in off the street with his cigar. I said: “Stand right over there.” I took two shots and said, “Thanks, George.”

“That’s it?” he asked. And that was it.

The best story came from President Reagan. He was at the Century Plaza Hotel, so I went there and got all set up. The Secret Service came into the room and asked what my plan was. I answered, “Well, I thought I’d shoot the president over by the window.”

“Find another word!” the agent said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take a
picture
of President Reagan over by the window.”

“Then give me two hours and let me move all my snipers,” he said. I quickly threw in the towel. “Let me sit him at the desk, take his picture, and we’ll be done.”

And that’s exactly what happened. But the president was so engaging. He really wanted to chitchat with me. I realized that perhaps a president doesn’t have anybody to just chitchat with very often. I started getting antsy because I was supposed to be on my way to Hawaii, but I also didn’t want to be rude to the president of the United States. Finally I said, “Mr. President, I really have to be going. My family is on the airplane waiting for me at the airport.”

“Well, just let me tell you this dirty joke,” he answered.

He gets about halfway through it and a lady walks in and he says, “I’ll tell you later, Kenny,” just like we see each other every other day. He was so sweet.

When I photographed celebrities, I tried to do one of two things. Shoot them as the public sees them or shoot them as they want to be known. Most were photographed in my studio, but I also went wherever I needed to go to get someone to shoot with me. I shot backstage at a Phil Collins concert, went up to get Hef at the Playboy Mansion, and went over to Bob Hope’s house. In typical Bob Hope fashion, he asked as he watched Bernie setting up the huge 8 x 10 camera, “Really, Kenny, how much money can you make going door to door with that thing?”

Another president I really enjoyed meeting was Gerald Ford. A friend of mine, Finn Moller, was having a party at his house and President Ford was coming. I asked Finn if the president would mind me taking his picture. Finn asked, and he said he wouldn’t. That evening I set President Ford up at the end of a long dining room table and took his photo. Very nice guy, but quiet. We mainly discussed golf. We even talked a little about getting together to play, but we both agreed that together we might put the spectators in real peril and cause a national scandal.

I managed to bring the book in on schedule, but I never worked so hard in my life. In all,
Your Friends and Mine
had eighty photographs of well-known people. Each one was a story, and I was touched by each and every individual in one way or another. The dedication was an easy choice. I made it to the person who was responsible for getting me started on this incredible journey, my son Chris.

I’ll round up my life in photography with a quick trip to the White House. I’ve been to the White House many times and it’s never the same. Every president puts his own stamp, his own feel on it during his stay. My first meeting with President Clinton was almost accidental. I was part of a TV special called
A Day in the Life of Country Music,
written and directed by Kelly. The premise of the show was to have different cameras follow country artists around for a day to see what their lives were like.

Thanks to Ken Kragen, again, I was to take a photograph of First Lady Hillary Clinton in the White House. At the same time, the president was doing what I learned were called “shuttle” interviews. He would do an interview at one end of the hall and then move to the other end of the hall for another interview, then back to the original end again, back and forth, on and on. As President Clinton passed the area where I was taking Hillary’s photo, he saw all the people and a lot of commotion and asked his Secret Service agent: “What’s going on in there?”