Reba: My Story (31 page)

He was that sensitive and loyal, even then.

He never saw a motion picture until he was fourteen, when I guess he got a sense of why the church objected to
them! He was working one weekend with a gospel group. One of the guys, Ray Burdet, used to sing backup with Loretta Lynn. Well, Ray took Narvel to see
Carnal Knowledge
, the Jack Nicholson classic that was so controversial back then because it had a scene showing Ann-Margret’s breasts. Telling about it, Narvel would laugh and say, “I knew this was the life for me.”

And I loved to hear Narvel’s mother tell the story about his great-great-grandfather Isaac Shelby Hurst, who must have been about as eccentric as my Pap McEntire. Back then, few people had insurance of any kind, so Isaac was insulted when his children took out a burial policy on him. To prove that he could afford his own funeral, he went to the bank and withdrew all of his money, and bought himself a casket. He hid the money that was left over, but he told no one where.

As he lay dying, he called for Marion, his son, promising to tell him where he had hidden his money. But when Marion arrived Isaac announced that he had changed his mind. He then went to sleep, eased into a coma, and died.

The family searched everywhere for that money, even inside the lining of his casket, without success.

So, Mama Blackstock, Narvel’s great-grandmother, started seeking advice from fortune-tellers. One told her that the money was buried near a body of water, and the whole town set about combing the five bodies of water—a creek, a pond, and three wells—on the 200-acre farm.

Nothing.

A second fortune-teller told Mama Blackstock that the money was hidden inside the house and could be found in a wall so many boards up from the floor. Back home, Mama Blackstock checked the spot and spied a place where the boards were loose. Wedging her hand inside, sure enough, she touched paper. The money was hidden near a cistern, an aboveground well. So the first fortune-teller had been right after all.

Mama Blackstock pulled two grocery sacks full of cash
out of that wall, then walked them across a field to the bank. She just told the banker to count the money and deposit it, not even asking the amount. Narvel’s people were as trusting as they were trustworthy.

I could see where he got his traits.

T
HROUGHOUT THE UNHAPPY UNRAVELING OF MY MARRIAGE AND
into my early, unsure days of being alone, Narvel was my anchor, always there to say, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of this.” That dependability and devotion from him perhaps inevitably sparked some response in me. When you like and admire somebody like that, love starts growing in there too.

But it would take a long time for us to come together, and almost as long to recognize what was happening between us.

It’s funny, thinking about it now. In some ways I believe we went out of our way to keep our distance. For example, I’ve never been much of a fan of public displays of affection. I’m a lot like Daddy in that respect. Unless I know a person pretty well, a handshake will do just fine. But I’ll hug a buddy in a heartbeat. A lot of my old band members and I would give each other a hug, in greeting and good-bye, coming on and off the road, or maybe when a gig had gone especially well, but me and Narvel—never.

Narvel did hug me once, in 1986, when I won “Entertainer of the Year,” but that was completely platonic. I was there with Charlie, he was there with his wife Lisa, Mama and Daddy were there, and Pake and Katy—we were all just hugging with joy. So except for that one time, Narvel and I were totally unaffectionate with each other.

When we did finally connect, it was with a kiss, nothing more, and it was totally unplanned. We were on tour. As Narvel recalls, “I think we kissed a couple times, and everybody came back on the bus, and everything went back to the way it was before. And when we all went to bed,
Reba went to her stateroom and I went to my bunk. I was really nervous and confused. I was thinking, ‘Wait a minute, what happened? Did that really happen?’

“ ‘Why did we do that?’ I wondered first off. I was a very professional person, I didn’t believe in mixing business and pleasure. I thought, ‘Oh, God, I can’t believe this.’ And second of all, ‘What is she thinking back there now in that stateroom and what is she going to be like tomorrow?’ Is she going to be like, ‘I regret what I did’? And how is she going to treat me?”

At the time, I was in the process of my drawn-out breakup with Charlie, a few months away from actually filing for divorce. But I want to say right now that Narvel Blackstock didn’t break up my marriage and I didn’t break up his. Both marriages had been in trouble for a long time. His situation was equally sad, and the timing of our troubles was so regrettably and uncomfortably close, it was awkward. And for this reason, in fact, I made it a point to keep Narvel from finding out that I intended to leave Charlie for good. I knew that Narvel was very unhappy at home, and had told Lisa that he wanted to separate. He had even told her that he was going to move to Nashville to work with Bill Carter.

“Lisa and I had a major, major confrontation,” Narvel remembers. “I told her that I didn’t feel like I loved her, and that I wanted to do something different. She cried all day long.

“It wasn’t like I was leaving because of Reba, because in my mind the kissing was a thing that had happened for her because she was restless at home. I had been going through that for years, so I knew where my head was. But Reba had never gone through it. We had been on the road for three weeks, and it was such a little thing that happened. Once she got back home, she was going to get back to reality. Charlie always had such control over her. I just felt that’s what would happen.”

So in a telephone conversation the week after I played
Lubbock, when Bill Carter told him that I had filed for divorce in Tulsa, Narvel was dumbfounded.

“It was a very difficult time for me from a couple of different standpoints,” Narvel recalls. “Number one, at that point, I was way more involved in a professional career than I ever had been before, because Charlie was not there anymore. Even though Bill Carter was still the manager, I was the major input to him. And Bill didn’t come out on the road, so Reba was my responsibility at that point, totally. And it was awkward because Charlie and I had been buddies.”

So I had to tell Narvel straight out, “This is what I wanted to do in my life, for myself. I didn’t divorce Charlie because of you.”

I certainly didn’t expect or want him to leave his wife for me. While some intense feelings had been ignited in us, if we were meant to get together, it would have to be a free choice, not some impossible rebound situation. And in the midst of my divorce, I could hardly imagine marrying again. Even if the thought of it had crossed my mind, I would never have considered marrying another man with children.

I had already been through that with Charlie.

For his part, Narvel in turn recalls, “At first I thought that my plan was to get a divorce and I thought that mine and Reba’s relationship would probably end. And I needed to be thinking in terms of going to Nashville and completely starting over with my own career. I felt real insecure about our relationship. I thought, ‘This is a suicide mission.’ That’s the best description for how I was feeling.”

So Narvel went to Lisa and told her he had changed his mind, that maybe they could work things out. But as he says, “I was living as an unhappy person,” and so the effort to make up didn’t work. Narvel wound up in divorce court himself four months later, in October 1987.

My own divorce was just about final, and there were folks who wanted to make something out of Narvel’s timing. Even as recently as the summer of 1993, a tabloid
newspaper carried a big interview with Lisa. The story strongly implied I was a home wrecker, something neither my heart nor the facts support. The truth is that once Narvel realized that he and Lisa weren’t going to be able to work things out, he delayed filing for divorce as long as possible. He wanted to avoid giving the impression that our divorces were related, when in fact both marriages had been dying for years. Their funerals just happened to come a few months apart.

I
T TOOK A FULL NINE MONTHS BEFORE NARVEL AND I DECIDED
that we truly wanted to be a couple. Looking back, I’m not sure there was any one thing that decided it. Our whole relationship had been a growth process. I think Narvel and I became fans of each other.

As he says, “We were both fighting for a goal, and anybody who really knew me, including my ex-wife, knew how hard I’d worked and how badly I wanted it. I think Reba was the only other person who wanted it that bad. I think over a period of time Reba changed, I changed, and we became real good business buddies. We never had any romantic involvement at all, but when it happened, it happened.”

We had a lot of great times together. One of those was on a trip to Wisconsin, when our whole group—band and crew—had some time off so we were gonna have a retreat in Oshkosh between dates. But on the way, Larry Jones started sweating and shaking so bad that I told Narvel to take over driving the bus. When Larry became delirious, we stopped and checked him into a hospital, where the doctors found that his appendix was inflamed and enlarged. He had to have emergency surgery. Sheri, Narvel, and I checked in to a hotel so we could stay close and check on Larry daily.

Right outside the hospital, there was this beautiful little lake. So the next day Narvel and I packed a picnic
basket, then drove the bus over and rented a small boat. We rowed across the lake—I was at one end of the boat and Narvel was at the other. I looked up and his face was just covered with sweat! It was about one hundred degrees that day, and here the sweat was running into his eyes. I just about died laughing—and Narvel just about died of heatstroke! Some little romantic moment that was!

But our romance did take off, and in May 1988, we bought a condominium together. It was there that we celebrated our first Christmas together, just the two of us, before we set off for our respective families’ homes in Texas and Oklahoma.

Back home in Oklahoma, we had always gone to the pasture and cut a cedar for our Christmas tree, which my family and I decorated with the same Christmas ornaments we’d had since we were babies. But for our first Christmas, Narvel and I bought a beautiful blue spruce tree, which we had flocked. I had never had a flocked Christmas tree before. Narvel wrapped the branches with lights, and we tied bows to hang on its branches, along with beautiful, clear glass balls. It was the most glorious tree I had ever helped create.

The night we trimmed the tree was very special. We had a glass of wine, a fire, and soft Christmas music, and we took turns opening our gifts. I couldn’t wait to give Narvel his presents, but he insisted, “You go first.” He handed me a big box. Inside it was an Igloo ice chest, and at the bottom there were a couple of telephone books. I was pretty confused until I saw the note that read: “This one isn’t it, go to the next one.”

Narvel opened my first gift to him, a cellular telephone, and then it was my turn again. I got another large box—and another note! We kept taking turns, until finally I opened a box that had a smaller box inside. Within that one was a smaller box. Then another. And another.

The smallest box held a beautiful marquise diamond engagement ring.

What a romantic way to propose! When that man wants to do a production, he does a production!