Reba: My Story (24 page)

At the show, Larry Jones was going to run the dry-ice machine from inside a little bitty room just offstage. He was supposed to place dry ice into a basket, then drop the basket into hot water to make the fog. The fog would leak out of hoses that ran from the machine all over the stage, making the entire floor “foggy.” Thus, a fog machine!

It didn’t work that way.

Dry ice, which is actually solidified carbon dioxide, is hot and must be handled with gloves. But Larry didn’t wear any, and when he picked up the ice, it burned his hands. So he quickly dumped the dry ice directly into the water, missing the basket. He also forgot to close the lid, which would have forced the fog to travel through the hoses.

In the small room, Larry was covered with “smoke.” And very soon, the fog started billowing out of the room onto the stage. We could see Larry and his predicament and got so tickled that we couldn’t finish the song. The audience had to be told what had happened. They didn’t catch our humor! So much for dramatic special effects!

Just last year I had another funny mishap. I had only seconds to make a costume change, onstage in the dark behind a screen. What the audience didn’t know is that in
the rush of getting me ready, Sandi handed me the wrong black suede boot. So I ended up with the left boot on my right foot and vice versa. I realized this too late to switch them before the lights came on, and I had to do my next two numbers with my boots on the wrong feet. I won’t tell you what I thought about doing to Sandi when I got my hands on her throat. But she didn’t realize I couldn’t see. Since her eyes were adjusted to the dark, she thought I knew which boot was which.

O
F COURSE, PLENTY OF THINGS THAT HAPPEN ON THE ROAD ARE
impossible to laugh off. One of the first things you learn about playing for pay is that not everybody pays. Such veteran entertainers as George Jones and the late Conway Twitty used to tell all kinds of horror stories about driving all night to play a show for a promoter who couldn’t pay them. Then they’d have to pay their bands out of their own pockets. In my time, professional promoters have made life easier, but there were a few times early in my career when people just didn’t want to pay.

It would fall to Narvel, as tour manager, to try to collect. One time, a promoter vanished after our show, so Narvel found a cop and went to the promoter’s house—something he says he’ll never do again. Lord knows, the officer and Narvel might have been shot going up to a man’s house so late at night! But the promoter never came to his door, and since we had to leave town to go to another show, I don’t think we ever got paid.

Another time, in 1984, we were more successful. We were playing a dinner theater in Minnesota for a second time, and since we’d gotten paid on the first trip, we trusted the owner. We took his personal check instead of a cashier’s check for our show. The personal check bounced.

Every time we called him about it, he gave us the runaround, claiming that he’d sent us a replacement check.
It never arrived. You know, the old “the check’s in the mail” story!

I considered taking legal action against the man, but Carter, my career manager, and Charlie said to forget it. They thought it would be a waste of time. So when we returned to the state to play a different venue, Narvel, my driver Larry Jones, Pake, who was opening the show for me, and I went out to the dinner theater.

A security guard carrying a walkie-talkie stopped us, and when Narvel insisted on talking to the owner, the guard said he’d radio him to come down to meet us in the lobby. We knew that the owner would try to slip out the back door if the guard did that, so we followed the guard to the owner’s office. It felt like a sting on “60 Minutes.” Even as we approached, we could see the owner turning off his office lights. When Narvel opened the door, we saw him and his wife in the dark, gathering up their personal things while getting ready to leave.

“What brings you back here?” he said to us. He was obviously embarrassed.

“We’re here to collect the money you owe us,” Narvel said. He was the spokesperson for the group. My presence was enough—I didn’t have to talk.

“Really?”

He told us that he had meant to pay us but had spent my money remodeling his dinner theater and would pay us when he got ahead. We told him we didn’t care to become his partners in the club business.

The man promised that he would pay up that night after his evening show, so Narvel and Larry were waiting at the theater when it ended. And they got our money—$5,000—in cash, much of it in one- and five-dollar bills. Sometimes in show business, it pays to persevere!

Larry thought I was pretty tough for going along on the collection mission. Well, that sure surprised me, because Larry is a pretty tough ole boy himself. He had been a bouncer in a bar before he became my driver, and once he
actually got into a kickboxing fight over my honor. A man said a sexually lewd thing about me and Larry knocked him out—or so he thought. The guy, who knew karate, surprised Larry by leaping off the floor and kicking the side of Larry’s face, taking off a good deal of his facial skin in the process.

All the way from Stringtown to Nashville, Larry drove with the injured side of his face held so I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t until the next morning at breakfast that I found out what happened. It looked like poor Larry had a giant rug burn. Yet he had been tough enough not to say a word about it to me for seven hundred miles.

Now, that’s tough!

On the way back from our collection episode in Minnesota, we plotted to play a joke on Charlie, who didn’t believe we’d ever succeed in getting that money. Somebody had given me a pair of cheap earrings, so we decided we’d tell Charlie the earrings were my past-due payment.

“Hey,” Narvel told Charlie, “the guy didn’t have the money, but he gave us his wife’s earrings. They’re worth $5,000, and I saw him take them off her ears myself.”

Charlie studied the earrings, but he wasn’t satisfied that they could possibly be worth $5,000. Finally, we had to tell him that we were kidding, that we had gotten the cash.

He was not amused.

C
HARLIE WASN
’
T ALL THAT AMUSING HIMSELF IN THOSE DAYS, I
sometimes thought that he felt demeaned by my becoming more successful, getting lots of attention, and making more money than he did.

So I let him take charge of things, but he didn’t always make the right decisions. As Narvel recalls, “Things could have been so much easier, but Charlie didn’t want anything to be easy.” For example, Charlie would insist that everyone get out of the buses when we would arrive at our hotels at 3 or 4
A.M.
and shut down the bus generators. I could
understand that he wanted to save money on diesel, but it was hard to get back to sleep after the move inside. Then Charlie was used to getting up early. So at 6
A.M.
, he’d get up and shower, waking me up in the process, and then go down to one of the guys’ rooms to wake them up. No one got much rest when he was out on the road.

Larry Jones, who drove my bus, couldn’t understand why Charlie was putting me in what Larry called “second or third class stuff” (buses) when he always bought himself brand-new four-wheel-drive vehicles just to feed cattle.

I knew some folks found Charlie distant and difficult to work with. At the time, I preferred to see his aloofness as a natural reserve, his occasional brusqueness with musicians as perfectionism—after all, he wanted things to be just so for us. But, after a while, Larry says, he never had to ask if Charlie was coming to a show with us—all he had to do was look at me. Charlie caused that much tension. And Larry remembers that Charlie used to call me a “wench” right in front of me when he was talking to the band.

I tried hard not to let our professional problems affect the personal life we shared. Charlie and I did as much as we could together, realizing that our marriage deserved the time and care all relationships need. But what I had once admired and loved best about Charlie—his protectiveness—now revealed itself as a domineering nature, and was starting to cause trouble between us.

I’m not saying that I was perfect myself. I can recall, for instance, when we were newly married feeling impatient and hurt by some of Charlie’s behavior after an afternoon performance at the rodeo in Louisville, Kentucky. We’d agreed to meet back at the trailer and I’d waited and waited and finally gone out to look for him—only to find him having a beer with the other cowboys and shooting the breeze. Maybe I should’ve been more understanding about
his needing time with the guys; maybe he shouldn’t have broken our plans or left me to worry if he was laid up in some hospital somewhere with a broken neck. I do know that when I walked into that bar and spotted him there, my relief at seeing he was all right turned into anger fast and I came on to him like some crazed gunslinger out of the Old West. It didn’t make either one of us look too good in front of his buddies, and I can’t blame him for being upset about that.

But there was one incident that still stands out in my mind as pretty unforgivable, sadly showing the spirit and balance of our marriage.

Charlie loved to trade. He’d buy something he didn’t need, and sell something he did, just to be trading. I’d come off the road and we’d have a new car. I’d come home a few days later and Charlie’d replaced the car with an orange Bronco. The next time I’d come in, he’d have traded that off too. Trading was his hobby, and sometimes I think it was an addiction. He enjoyed it, and usually I didn’t really mind.

But I had one special possession, a gentle sorrel horse named Legs. I was on the road so much that I rarely got to ride him, but I loved to. He wasn’t flighty, like a bulldogging or barrel-racing horse. I’d been around horses all my life, and Legs might have been my favorite horse of all.

He wasn’t valuable to anyone but me—I thought!

One day when I came in off a tour, I went out to the barn. Legs was gone.

When I asked Charlie about my horse, his answer was brief and mumbled, the way he usually talked.

“I sold him,” he said.

I was speechless.

“Why did you sell my horse?” I finally choked out, so mad I was almost crying.

“I got a good buy on him,” Charlie said.

All Charlie had considered was the deal, not the fact
that the horse was mine. He didn’t even think that he had to talk to me before selling him. I was upset at losing Legs—I would never have willingly parted with him—but what really shocked and pained me was Charlie’s failure even to think of my feelings.

N
INETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR BROUGHT ME THE TREMENDOUS
honor of being named “Female Vocalist of the Year” by the Country Music Association (CMA), the first of four times I would receive the award. The CMA trophy is a beautiful crystal-looking, pointed globe. Before that, they were made out of wood. Barbara Mandrell approached the CMA board about changing it to clear glass. She said after they changed that she never won another one. Thanks, Barbara, they’re beautiful!

Believe me, it is a tremendous thrill to receive the recognition of your peers. All artists have a certain amount of competitive drive—you have to, to keep touring and creating, to see your records fail yet keep the faith that they’ll succeed someday—so it’s especially meaningful to receive a sign of your fellow musicians’ regard. I will always feel grateful for that.

Up to that point, I had been nominated for major
awards, but I’d been the “always-a-bridesmaid” type. In 1981, for example, I had been nominated along with Terri Gibbs, Sylvia, Lacy J. Dalton, and Juice Newton for “New Female Vocalist” by the Academy of Country Music in Los Angeles. Terri won, and she deserved it for her huge hit “Somebody’s Knocking.”

In 1983, the CMA nominated me for “Female Vocalist of the Year.” Janie Fricke won. Maybe the association made the same mistake as the woman who spotted me in the Dallas airport one time when I was standing with Charlie and George Strait. She ran up to me, pointing and shouting, “I know who you are. I know who you are.”

I enjoyed the fact that she recognized me and not George Strait. I let it show.