A Love So Fierce

Everyone told her to leave her husband, hard-living country star Waylon Jennings. Here’s why she didn’t

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IT WAS WAYLON'S LAST THANKS GIVING. He was in the hospital for more procedures, none of which helped stem the downward spiral. Diabetes, heart troubles, neuropathy— they’d all taken their toll. I kept thinking, Now is the moment I need to talk to him. To have the conversation I’d been wanting to have for years.

By the time he and I’d met in the sixties—at the outsize two-story Arizona nightclub JD’s—I had abandoned the faith of my childhood. I gravitated toward the materialist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Her books had no mention of God, a higher power or any mystical or spiritual force. Just the preeminence of human will. Such a contrast to the tent meetings my mother used to lead, where I’d played the piano and sung hymns.

Waylon had grown up in West Texas, the oldest of four boys in a dirt-poor family. Music was his escape. And music brought us together. At JD’s, he sang with an unrelenting force. The high-voltage energy of the crowd made me feel as if I were floating on air. I’d heard about his reputation, the long list of women he had supposedly seduced, the pills he popped, the failed marriages. But he was polite and gentlemanly with me.

On our first date, we drove through the Painted Desert, the unearthly scenery rolling past us. “A long drive like this will give us some time to chat,” he said. It was the first time we talked about religion.

“The gospel I heard preached was all fire and brimstone,” he said. “The certainty of going to hell if you didn’t walk the straight and narrow. It was the gospel of fear stuffed down my throat.” Not surprisingly, he didn’t go to church anymore.

“What about you?” he asked. “You said your mom was a preacher. Wouldn’t imagine being a preacher’s kid was much fun…”