Reba: My Story (26 page)

The video came off beautifully.

Weeks later, when I was staying at a Holiday Inn somewhere, I turned on Home Box Office. In between the movies, an Aretha Franklin video came on, followed by my “New England” video. I was not only amazed to see that I was on HBO, rather than Country Music Television or on The Nashville Network, which had been on the air for three years by then, but by the fact that being on HBO meant that I’d really hit the big time.

That video was such a success that in August 1986, I filmed my second one, “What Am I Gonna Do About You.” Bill Carter got actor David Keith, who had gotten an Oscar nomination for his role in the Richard Gere/Debra Winger movie
An Officer and a Gentleman
, to play my love interest. Since David was shooting a film in Italy he could only spare one day to shoot my video, so I paid for him to fly round-trip from Milan to New York on the Concorde. It was worth it because his performance was terrific. We shot “What Am I Gonna Do About You” in New York City’s Central Park.

Since then I’ve had some big stars on my videos with me: Huey Lewis, whom I loved working with on “Is There Life Out There” and Bruce Boxleitner on “Cathy’s Clown.” I consider videos as much a part of my work as the records themselves. I usually do two videos for every album I release.

B
ESIDES VIDEOS, WE KEPT TRYING OUT NEW WAYS TO PROMOTE
my albums. Thanks to Carter’s negotiating skills, I had an unusual contract with MCA that gave me a certain amount of say in how my records were marketed. That kind of contract, Carter says, had never before been written in Nashville.

Bowen had strongly resisted my involvement in promotion
at first. At the time, MCA didn’t even have a marketing department in Nashville, and the last thing he wanted was some artist pressuring him with crazy ideas. So Charlie, Carter, and I had to go in and pitch him on our marketing game plan.

“Well, it looks like you know what you’re doing here,” Bowen finally said. “So I’ll tell you what. We’re going to eliminate all of your independent [promotional] efforts and you’re going to do it within our system.”

One of the first promotional ideas Bill Carter came up with was “Country in a Crate.” It worked very well. People could buy my album in a crate that held space for ten other cassettes. There was also a drawing for a Jeep Wagoneer.

“That promotion sold a lot of records for us and really established Reba as maybe the first significant-selling female,” Carter said. It also won a national retailing award for Carter.

We also found other ways to let retailers know who I was—I attended the Wal-Mart convention and others, and made dozens of promotional appearances in stores. My record sales began to explode.

D
ESPITE THE SUCCESS WE SEEMED TO BE HAVING, CHARLIE AND
Bill Carter seemed convinced that I had arrived, that I had done it, I had peaked. Their attitude depressed and confused me. It bothered Narvel too! As tour manager, he had to carry out all our conflicting directions. Years later he said it almost pulled him apart.

“In those days,” Narvel says, “I was a driven tour manager. I was pushing myself to the max, determined to be the best. And I became the pawn because there were times on the road when it was just Reba and us (the band) and I would be semi in charge. Reba would tell me she wanted things done a certain way.

“Then we would go home and Charlie would come
on our next trip and would say, ‘No, it ain’t going to happen like that. You need to do it this way.’ And then we’d go into Nashville and Bill Carter would pull me aside and say, ‘Is there any way you can pull this off? Try to make this happen? Try to get her to do this?’

“I was a diplomat. I got good at being a player between Reba, Charlie, and Bill Carter. The training at Prudential I had had years earlier helped a lot because it taught me to be a people person. I could hang out with Reba, I could hang out with Charlie, and I could hang out with Bill. But I couldn’t get them together. And I have to say those were the most stressful days of my life.”

I got so I couldn’t always cope with the lack of harmony among my career planners. One time, Narvel, who was always scheming ways to improve the show, came to me with a new idea. “You know,” he said, “we ought to find some little risers and get the band up on them, to make us look a little better.”

I liked the plan, and as Narvel remembers it, I asked him to present the idea to Charlie and Carter in Nashville.

“I’ll never forget this,” Narvel says. “We went to Ruth Chris’s Steak House and we sat down and everybody was in a good mood. It was like something you’d see in a movie. Then Reba says, ‘Narvel has got something he wants to talk to you all about.’ She left me hanging out there.

“The spotlight was on me,” Narvel went on. “So I laid it out there, and Bill Carter and Charlie thought that risers was the most stupid, goofy thing one could ever come up with. Ultimately, Reba came to the rescue, and we finally got risers.”

Narvel and the band had to set them up and take them down for each show, since at that point, we had no production crew. But they didn’t mind. After all, those guys had to set up the T-shirt concession and the bandstand and do all the rest of the manual labor anyway. The risers cost $1,700. I thought Charlie was gonna make the band pay for
them but he didn’t. Still, he never thought they were worth it.

Charlie’s lack of enthusiasm for new ideas wasn’t the only problem. For a long time, he had personally approved all of my personal engagements. George Mallard, my booking agent, would pick dates with concert promoters, then call Charlie to be sure I would play the dates for the agreed fee.

One time Charlie approved my being booked into a 17,000-seat auditorium in Daytona Beach, Florida, during spring break, a time when the town disappears and the college kids—who didn’t want country music back then—come in. Both he and George should have known better. We sold only 1,700 tickets. The place was 90 percent empty! I could hear the echo of my voice floating across the hollow room.

How embarrassing!

So I called Charlie and told him that I didn’t want him approving the dates anymore. He wasn’t out on the road with me enough to understand the business. Needless to say, he wasn’t happy at being cut out of the action.

It seemed like nothing was going right between the two of us, professionally or personally. It was clear that some kind of blowup was bound to come. One day in 1984, after Charlie and I had gone to Colorado to shoot the album cover for
My Kind of Country
, we drove back to Denver to catch our plane in near silence. It seemed that by then we didn’t speak except to argue.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Charlie said, “What do you want, a divorce?”

It was the first time that word had been spoken between us.

“Absolutely not!” I snapped.

But I didn’t know for sure if I meant that.

T
WO YEARS LATER, WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN REJOICING OVER OUR
tenth wedding anniversary—and would have been, if there’d been any joy left in our marriage. So, instead of having a celebration, Charlie and I went to Hawaii to try to repair our relationship. We came back after three days.

In 1987, there was an incident in Dallas, when we were there shooting the video for “The Last One to Know,” that reveals just how estranged we had become. We were riding together on the bus between location shots—me back in the stateroom, and Charlie, Narvel, and Bill Carter up front.

The bus stopped for a red light at a corner where there were flower sellers, and Charlie said to the guys, “Watch this.” Opening the door of the bus, he leaned out and bought a rose. “This will make it better,” he told them. “This will fix everything.” He smirked as he carried the rose to the back of the bus, setting it beside me on the bed.

The gesture was, as the saying goes, “too little too late,” and Charlie’s self-satisfaction about making it could only infuriate me. How could he behave as if our problems were so minor that one small gesture could fix everything? It’s not that he didn’t care—he did, a lot—but he was so bullheaded about seeing things his way, so unable to even try to understand my feelings, that he kept on making the trouble worse.

Years later, Carter remembered that time. “With Charlie, you had a tremendous male ego and with Reba you had this proud, strong woman growing. She was growing, just like a kid growing up. And he was from another world, another era. It was just that male thing, ‘I got to be in charge.’ I could just look at them and see this wasn’t going to work.”

Carter had in fact originally asked Charlie not to attend the shoot because he could see Charlie was interfering in my performance. I needed to be able to concentrate on my scenes, not on the problems that my marriage was
having. Since Charlie had come anyway, I was an emotional wreck the whole time we were filming, though the video turned out okay. The next night I was booked for a show in Lubbock, Texas, and I knew that I just couldn’t do it with Charlie along.

When I asked him not to come, telling him that I simply needed some time alone, Charlie got furious.

“I’ll get my stuff out of the bus,” he fumed.

Trying to calm him down a little, I asked, “Do you need any money?”

“No,” Charlie said, “I got four hundred dollars out of your purse.”

All I could say was: “You did what?”

That set him off. I’d never before confronted Charlie about money, even while I was clearly the breadwinner. That was a big no-no. One thing led to another and for the first time in our life together, I thought Charlie was going to hit me, as he reared back with his shaving kit in his hand. I didn’t want to see what was gonna happen next, so I ran to the front of the bus. Carter started saying, “Charlie, stop! Stop it! Don’t do anything you’re going to regret later!”

“You get your ass out!” Charlie thundered to Carter.

As scared as I was of Charlie, I knew that Carter’s presence would only provoke him more. So I said, “Bill, go ahead and leave the bus. He’s not going to hit me.”

And he didn’t. Charlie had calmed down, and he just packed up all his things and left for Stringtown.

I felt relief that he was gone, and once again my gut feelings were reminding me it was time. Time to get out. His going through my purse without so much as telling me proved that, to him, my feelings didn’t matter at all, that I didn’t even deserve common courtesy. How could a man who was trying to save his marriage continue to abuse it so consistently?

I found it sort of fitting, I guess, that he’d threatened me with the shaving kit. I’d had it made for Charlie and
wrapped it, lovingly and carefully, to give to him one Christmas. I’d meant it as a special gift, but when I’d set it on his lap, he’d let his two young sons tear the wrapping to shreds. They were just little kids, of course, who didn’t know any better, but Charlie never tried to stop them; he just laughed. I was so hurt that he didn’t seem to notice all the care I’d taken—and that he didn’t seem to value a gift from his wife enough to want to open it himself.

That shaving kit was a symbol of all that had become unbearable to me about our marriage.

T
HROUGHOUT ALL THESE CONFLICTS, CHARLIE
, Carter, and I had been planning one of the most important shows of my career, a night at Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall is, of course, the foremost concert stage in America, the place that, when you play it, signals that you have “arrived” as a serious artist. At least that’s what I thought! It was like the Grand Ole Opry of the North. Nearly every major classical, contemporary, or pop musician of the past one hundred years has played it, but not all that many country-music artists.