Too Weird for Ziggy (15 page)

LeeAnn was the oldest of seven girls. Judging by the photos they all looked like their mother, who looked like Tammy Bakker, all hairspray and thick black mascara and Jesus. Or, in LeeAnn's case, two out of three. Her mother loved God, and LeeAnn hated her mother. She married her first husband on her sixteenth birthday to get away.

“Tommy Moorhead was the cutest guy. Moorhead by name, Moorhead by nature. I was fourteen years old when we first did it. My mother would have killed me. The bad thing about having sex so young is you've got nothing to look forward to later. The
good
thing about having sex so young is it's
bad
. “She laughs out loud. “I was fourteen and Tommy Moorhead was eighteen and he could say ‘I love you' in more ways than a Barry White record. One night we were out walking in the woods and he stops and unzips and takes it out and asks me to touch it. Begs. Gets on his knees in the mud and the leaves and, tears in his eyes,
pleads
with me.” I'm suddenly aware that all this time, unconsciously, she has been running her middle finger and thumb up and down the tightly rolled magazine. Seeing me look at her hands, she misunderstands and says, laughing, “Oh I didn't have these nails back then, honey!

“Well, I could never stand to see a man cry, so—you're not going to print this, are you? The worst thing is I've always had a real strong sense of smell, and Tommy's thing smelled warm and damp, ammonia-y, kinda like a dishwashing cloth. Then, when he put the rubber on, it smelled more like dishwashing gloves. In the end I guess it was all so domesticated-smelling I figured I might as well marry him. It lasted, God help me, five years.”

He was a lineman for the county. He drank and he beat her, then he cried in his beer. He played around. Her dog died. Class-A, straight-down-the-line country material. She packed her bags and went back to her mother, and her mother prayed and beat her some more and sent her back to him again.

“Like I said, that's when I started writing country music, which I'd do of a night when my husband was out working, or whoring. Days, I waitressed in the diner. One day somebody left a magazine behind. There was an article in it about California and sunshine, and I was sick to death of the cold, so I was like, Right, where do I buy the ticket? I hocked my saxophone and I was outta there. It was tough in the beginning, sure it was—L.A.'s a hard town, looks soft on the outside, but inside it's as hard as steel. I saw an advertisement in a magazine that said, ‘Unusual extras wanted for film work,' and since I didn't look too much like the other folk in Los Angeles I figured maybe this was my break. Turns out they were looking for hunchbacks and Siamese twins.

“But their office was right next to this big bar in Encino, name of Cactus Joe's. Maybe you've heard of it? It got real famous; all the big country stars performed there.
And they were the first bar in California to install a mechanical bull, way before that whole big
Urban Cowboy
thing started happening. Come on, you've never seen a mechanical bull? You haven't lived, honey!” The way LeeAnn explains it, it's like a tailor's dummy you'd use if you needed to make a suit for a bison, that's stuck on pistons that jerk it about. You get on, and you try to stay on, and if you're a man and you turn the timer to ten and the grader to eleven you can banish any further thought of fatherhood.

“Though there was none of that back when I first went to Cactus Joe's. It was an old-fashioned, spit-on-the-floor, drink-two-bottles-and-piss-five kind of cowboy bar. But they had a job going, and a job is all I needed. I slept with the guy who ran the joint to make sure I got it, too, and then I wound up marrying him. Shit, I don't know, girl, I guess I'm just a serial wife.”

Cactus Joe's was the first place Mrs. Wayne B. Marvin ever sang her songs in. Mr. Marvin wasn't too hot on the idea at first, but his customers seemed to like it, and before long it was making him money and the place was getting a reputation. Dolly Parton put in a surprise appearance when she was playing in town and got up and sang with LeeAnn. After that, all sorts of musicians would show up. LeeAnn sang with them all.

“The thing about Los Angeles—which is something you would never even dream about back home—is you're meeting people all the time, and when you're not meeting people you're meeting
people's
people, and then all of a sudden someone's saying, ‘I'm gonna put you together with so-and-so,' or they write down a number and say, ‘Give
so-and-so a call and use my name.' Which is how I ended up in a recording studio with a hotshot producer, making my first record. I don't have the happiest memories of the experience. Wayne B. wasn't exactly being the supportive husband, you know what I'm saying? I'd come home from the studio, four
A.M.
, excited as a kid, and what would I get?” She jams her lips together. “The silent treatment. Maybe a grunt if his team had won. Have you ever felt like a severed leg, honey? Because that's how it feels lying there all night, hot and prickly, adrenaline running, staring at the back of your man's head.” I nod—sincerely, as it happens, making a mental note to deal with the unresolved issue that was sitting up smoking a cigarette in my bed when I left home an hour and a half ago.

“Then Lee Starmountain came back into my life—the very same day, as it happens, that my third album went to number one in the country music charts. I hadn't seen Lee Starmountain—yes, Starmountain is my real name, my married name, the third one, he got my money and I kept his name—not since I left home and came out to L.A. I was crazy for him once, big-time, but seeing as how he was a friend of my husband's—my first husband, Tommy Moorhead, who didn't even need an excuse to give me a beating—and since he was also pretty tight with Doreen Swensen, who was more than a little psycho and would have taken my baby blues out with a nail file if she'd seen how I looked at him, I left him well alone. A smart move, since he told me Doreen did do some unofficial eye surgery on some other girl after I left town—which is why, when we met up again, Lee Starmountain was a single man and Doreen Swensen was in the crazy house, dribbling down her nightdress.

“Things had gone from bad to worse with Wayne B. I had no one to turn to, I was tired and worn out from the tour, it was hotter than hell, and I was feeling kind of homesick—I don't know, for the cold, for real life maybe. It's easy when you're at the top to forget that the bottom's full of shit, and you just start wanting to wallow in it again. I was in the limo coming back from the show when we drove past a truck stop. Lee Starmountain's truck was in the parking lot. I'd know that truck anywhere—a huge red semi with a charred chrome muffler sticking up at the front, and mud flaps with chrome cutouts of nude girls, and the bumper sticker, ‘My Truck Is Like My Woman: Touch Her and You're Dead.' I told my driver to drop me off.

“We slept in the truck that night with the radio playing and I swear, it was the most exciting night of my life. Better than being onstage and ten thousand people applauding. Better than the Grammy. Better than meeting the Queen of England. I know what they say about country men, but I'd rather have a man breathe tobacco on me than mouthwash. I like to smell a man sweat—shows he's a man. I'd had it with those music-business men who smell like they've had the fumigators in, and when you have sex the sperm come out with their hands up and little gas masks on. Anyhow, one thing led to another with Lee, and we got engaged and we got married, and then we got divorced. Why did we break up? Well, it's all in my hit song, honey: ‘He Wore Out His Wedding Ring on the Steering Wheel.' Lee was always off in his truck somewhere, and not always alone. And I've never been the kind of gal to chew my nails and wait for my man to come home.”

She married husband number four on the rebound. Another Wayne—E. Wayne Woolf, a tour promoter who promoted himself to her manager, robbed her blind, and beat her soundly. Her clippings file had pictures of LeeAnn and E. Wayne in the tabloids, huge dark glasses not quite covering her swollen cheeks and eyes. Then one night, driving home from the bar, E. Wayne spotted the license plate on the car in front of him. It read: ‘911 NOW.' Which E. Wayne took as a sign from Jesus that it was an emergency. That from this moment on he should give up drinking and music and all other godless things (though he negotiated an exclusion on the beatings) and follow the True Path of the Lord. When he came home, sober, clutching a Bible, LeeAnn left him. “I don't remember all the violence,” she tells me. “Just the greatest hits.”

By this time she'd recorded eight platinum albums. She'd won two Grammys and several CMA awards.
People
magazine put her on its cover. A writer and photographer went to her hometown to interview her family and her mother shouted at them through the screen door that her daughter was a whore. They had a picture of Tommy Moorhead, who was no longer the cutest guy—he'd lost most of his hair and some of his teeth and a beer gut was poking through his checkered shirt. His sentiments on his childhood sweetheart pretty much echoed those of his former mother-in-law. Wayne B. could not be interviewed, since he'd been shot dead in the Cactus Joe's parking lot by a crazy drunk last year, but the magazine ran that wedding photo too,
and
the one with E. Wayne, and a picture of Lee and LeeAnn, standing by a semitruck hung with streamers and
silver horseshoes and white flowers, smiling like two kids in love.

“When Lee and I fell apart, it hit me like never before. Or since. I drank too much—I know I fucked too much, anyone who would buy me a drink. Not that I couldn't have afforded to buy my own—for Christ's sake, I bought a fucking bar, I bought Cactus Joe's and gave it to Wayne B., God rest his soul, to get him off my back—it's just, we don't do anything without a reward really, do we? A drink, a cigarette, even just a hug. It was not a good time for me at all; I was kind of drowning. E. Wayne Woolf
Enterprises
”—she scraped quote marks in the air with four scary red talons—“wasn't much of a life belt. Really it was getting that part in the Willie Nelson film that pulled me through.

“Yeah, that was the film where I got to kiss his nipple. I kissed Willie Nelson's nipple. That was weird. But Willie was a great guy, he really stuck up for me—I was giving everyone a hard time, turned up late on the set a coupla times, with the drinking and all. I didn't really know that I wanted to kiss Willie Nelson's nipple, but that film sure turned me around. What did it taste like? Hell, girl, you're crazy! I guess I didn't do it too well, because that was the first and last film part I got offered.”

“Excuse me?” A young man with a North London accent and an utterly nondescript appearance has come over and is hovering at a safe distance. LeeAnn looks up and gives him a radiant smile. He just goes on standing there; he doesn't appear to actually want to say anything else. She holds out her hand and says, “Hi, I'm LeeAnn.” “I know,” he says self-consciously. “I just wanted to say I'm a big fan
of yours and, er, well, that's it, actually, I just …” “Well, thank you,” says LeeAnn graciously. “Which is your favorite record?” The guy looks pinned to the spot. He says, like he's afraid to say it, “Well, actually,
Two's Country
, the album you did with your—” He stops short before the word “husband” and substitutes, “‘Big' Willie Bean.”

“Well, that's one of my favorite records as well,” says LeeAnn, beaming. “Thank you—what's your name? Gram? Oh,
Gra-ham
. Thank you, Graham. It was a pleasure meeting you.” Poor Graham looks like he's going to dissolve on the spot. He turns to go, remembers something, and thrusts a beer mat in front of her, then grunts something inaudible which LeeAnn, bless her, interprets correctly as an autograph request.

“Willie Nelson,” she says when we're alone again, “was the one who introduced me to Willie Bean. Like I said before, I figured one Willie was as good as another and a ‘Big' one better still, but”—she grabs my forearm again—“don't believe all you read, honey. Men
lie
. But Willie Bean came into my life right when I needed him. He'd been a hard-living man, a country singer of the old school, and he'd had problems with drinking and drugging of his own. He was cleaned up when I met him, and he cleaned me up too.

“It was kinda weird being with Willie Bean at first. Up to now I'd been the big star in my relationships, and I was getting kind of used to it, though it came with its own heartaches—men don't like you to do better than they do, it eats away at them and they can't get it up no more, and of course that's your fault. But with Willie Bean and me, we used to take it in turns. I'd go sit in the wings when he did a
show and watch the crowd go crazy for him, and he'd sit in the wings at my shows and do the same for me, and the audience would see him and they'd make me bring him out and sing with me, and he'd drag me out onstage to sing with him as well. And then we figured, Hell, we might as well just do our shows together, so that's what we did.

“He was a wonderful man, Willie Bean—a Capricorn, and Capricorns are real romantics. Never laid a hand on me. He was never mad at anyone, not as I know of; I guess I was the first. He used to say to me, ‘Women are such beautiful creatures. You can never figure out the way they think. I think that's why God put them here on earth, to make us men think all the time so we'd have something to do and stay out of trouble.' I guess in the end there were three things wrong with Willie Bean. He believed in God, he believed in me, and he wanted to stay out of trouble. I guess I should have met him while he was still a hard-living man.”

There's another young man standing at the table, even younger than the last one, maybe all of seventeen, but this one doesn't look shy at all, and he's gorgeous. A tall, thin, leather toothpick of a guy with an enormous blue-black quiff. He bends over; at first I think his neck and shoulders can't stand the weight of his hair, but he's bending down to kiss LeeAnn on the lips. “Can I get you something, darlin?” he drawls in a Southern accent. He has cheekbones you could shave your legs on, except he would have to shave mine first. Everyone in the pub is looking at his hairdo except me; I'm looking at the enormous stiffie straining to break out of his leather pants barely six inches from my face. I can't take my eyes off it. LeeAnn must have noticed; she grabs his butt.
“Meet Joe-Bob,” she says. “A couple more beers would be nice, angel.” “Sure thing,” he says, adding, “Nice to meet you,” although she hadn't told him my name.