Daddy's Little Girl
Six years after her stunning debut, LeAnn Rimes is battling her father for control of her career—and suddenly the life of America's country princess doesn't seem like a fairy tale anymore.
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"When LeAnn was a little girl, she wanted a show business career more than she wanted her next breath," says Marty Rendleman, who worked as LeAnn's manager when she was getting her start in Dallas. "She always used to talk about becoming a star. But I think what people don't know is how much her parents wanted her to be a star too." Her mother, Belinda, a chatty woman with a fondness for cream-colored pantsuits, was always hovering near LeAnn with a brush in her hand, refusing to let a single hair on LeAnn's head fall out of place. Wilbur took it upon himself to act as a kind of Colonel Parker to his little female Elvis. In the living room of the Rimeses' cramped two-bedroom apartment in the middle-class Dallas suburb of Garland, he set up a miniature studio for LeAnn with a Little Girlmicrophone and speakers, even a multitrack recorder and mixing board. Every evening he'd get out his guitar, strum the handful of chords he knew, and coach LeAnn through one song after another. On weekends he and Belinda would take her to sing at Johnny High's Country Music Revue, a Texas version of the Grand Ole Opry. They took her to Texas Rangers baseball games, where she sang the National Anthem. Wilbur took her to Los Angeles so that she could sing on Ed McMahon's Star Search, where she was named champion for two weeks in a row.As a young man, Wilbur was known to have an excellent country music singing voice, but he always said that he was too shy to go onstage. "I think, deep down, he would have loved to have had a career," says Rendleman. "And I'm sure, like so many parents, he started living vicariously through his daughter. But he wasn't the typical stage parent, who had to push his daughter onstage. She wanted to be there." Nor did the rough-around-the edges Wilbur, who often would stop whatever he was doing to shoot a stream of tobacco juice into a paper cup, pamper his daughter the way other stage parents did. LeAnn has told many people that he sometimes spanked her with a belt if she tried to avoid rehearsing with him. He heatedly denies this, telling me in his letter that he spanked LeAnn only "for mouthing off and being extremely disrespectful, mostly to her mother." He did admit that he made her work, but he insisted she didn't work any harder "than anyone else's teenagers who flip burgers at McDonald's every day after school." He was so serious about her work, in fact, that he withdrew her from school in seventh grade, saying that jealous classmates were diverting her from her career.
People warned him about going too fast. In 1994 Jimmy Bowen, then the head of Liberty Records and one of country music's most famous producers, agreed to let the Rimeses visit him in Nashville. After listening to LeAnn sing two songs, Bowen sighed and said to her, "Honey, you're not supposed to be able to do what you just did at eleven years old." But then he looked at Wilbur and said, "This talent is not going to go away. Take her home, let her be a child for a few years, and don't let this business screw up her life." It was an eerily prescient remark, and Wilbur ignored it. Yes, everyone knew about Tanya Tucker's personal wipeouts soon after her "Delta Dawn" fame: She battled liquor and cocaine and was involved in a tumultuous relationship with Glen Campbell. But Wilbur said he wasn't going to let his baby self-destruct. And he would ensure that by not letting some shady music promoter or producer control his daughter's burgeoning career.
In the spring of 1994 he met Lyle Walker, a Dallas lawyer who had suffered a run of bad luck (he had been forced to file for personal bankruptcy in 1991) but who did have, at least for Wilbur, one intriguing asset. Walker had a large ownership interest in a recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, that had once belonged to a former client, Norman Petty, the highly regarded producer for Buddy Holly. Although Walker had no professional musical background whatsoever, he had begun frequenting places like Johnny High's Country Music Revue, hoping to find undiscovered talent who would record an album in Clovis in return for a split of any profits. For Wilbur, it was the perfect setup. He could be in charge of LeAnn's recording sessions, hiring musicians and engineers, then sitting in the control room and determining how the songs would actually sound.
Whether Wilbur knew what he was doing is a matter of debate. One person who was there for LeAnn's recording sessions in Clovis said that Wilbur did have a good ear, but he didn't know the first thing about creating a good background sound for LeAnn's songs. Not that it mattered. When Nashville music executives heard LeAnn's voice on her first demo album, and when they saw her uncommonly poised performance in January 1995, they were falling all over themselves to sign her. Among those who came calling was Mike Curb, the head of Curb Records, a charming former musician and former California politician who, depending on whom you talked to, was either a shrewd or malicious dealmaker. Nashville insiders have jokingly referred to a Curb artist contract as "life plus fifty years." But Curb did know how to relate to a kid like LeAnn (he had two daughters close to her age), and he did have a proven record with such young talent as Donny and Marie Osmond and Debby Boone. He also knew exactly how to woo Wilbur. Curb allowed Wilbur to manage LeAnn's career (another record company reportedly had wanted Narvel Blackstock, the husband and manager of Reba McEntire, for the job). He also guaranteed in writing that Wilbur could remain as the producer on LeAnn's albums.
For the Rimes family, it was too good to be true. Little LeAnn would sing, and her daddy would quit his job selling oil-field pipe and become a full-time music producer. They were so excited that they told Curb they wanted to record lots and lots of albums—not just mainstream country music albums, but inspirational-gospel albums as well. No problem, said Curb. Because LeAnn was legally a minor, the Curb lawyers had her go to courts in Dallas and Tennessee to get an order affirming the contract. The Tennessee court was asked to remove LeAnn's "disability of minority," which is a legal provision that allows a minor, upon turning eighteen, to disavow a contract he or she entered into as a child.
It was a savvy—and perfectly legal—move on the part of the Curb attorneys. With the disability of minority provision eliminated, LeAnn would belong to Curb for many, many years. Her deal would force her to make at least 14 albums and, according to one lawyer who later reviewed the contract, perhaps as many as 28 albums. (The typical contract for a new artist consists of 1 initial album and the record label's right to exercise options for 6 more.)
LeAnn tells me today that she was so thrilled to get a national recording deal that she had no idea what she was signing. (Curb's attorneys insist that the then-twelve-year-old girl had her own attorney and knew exactly what she was doing.) Nor, she says, did she have any questions about the company, LeAnn Rimes Entertainment, that had been set up by Wilbur and his partner, Lyle Walker. She does say she was somewhat disappointed that Marty Rendleman, the manager who had worked so hard for her since 1992, was let go, but her father had told her that she was no longer necessary. Wilbur and her mother and Walker, who was shutting down his law practice, would be with her day and night.
What Wilbur didn't mention, LeAnn's attorneys now say, was how well he planned to compensate himself and Walker for all that work. (LeAnn would not comment on the record about her lawsuit against her father.) As the president of LeAnn's company, Wilbur decided to pay himself a producer's fee of 31 percent of any album royalties that LeAnn received, and he reserved the right to pay a quarter of that to Walker's studio. He then decided to pay himself and Walker to be LeAnn's managers. As such, they would split an additional 30 percent of whatever album royalties were left, and they also would take 30 percent of any other earnings she received, from endorsements to concert revenues. Still, Wilbur wasn't finished. Because in many entertainment contracts with children there are provisions to compensate parents for the time they must devote to their children's careers, he decided to pay himself and Belinda a "guardian fee." Wilbur believed that he and Belinda should split another 10 percent of LeAnn's earnings, although he arranged for the entire 10 percent to go into an account in his name.
For Wilbur, there was nothing wrong with the arrangement. This, after all, was going to be a family business. He would take care of everything. All his daughter had to do was sing.
It is still hard to comprehend what happened next. Despite the industry buzz about her, LeAnn was still completely unknown to the American public in May 1996, when Curb released her first single, "Blue," written by longtime Dallas country music disc jockey and songwriter Bill Mack. Mack had originally pitched "Blue" to Patsy Cline in 1962, but she died in a plane crash before she got the chance to record the song. It mostly stayed in Mack's desk for thirty years before he heard LeAnn's voice. Country music disc jockeys, entranced with the story and even more entranced with the way a young girl could sing such a brokenhearted ballad, played "Blue" around the clock. When the album Blue was released in July, it sold more than 123,000 copies in its first week—the largest first week of album sales for a new country artist since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991—and LeAnn found herself knocking Shania Twain off the top of the country music charts. Blue became the best-selling debut album ever by a female country artist—selling 7 million copies—and country music fans clamored for more.Wilbur didn't disappoint them. He and Walker set up a tour that had the thirteen-year-old LeAnn crisscrossing the country, performing at concerts, holding autograph sessions at Kmarts, and doing interviews at radio stations. To get her and her entourage from one city to another, Wilbur, who despised the standard tour buses, spent more than $800,000 on what he called Peterbuses, high-horsepower Peterbilt truck cabs that were fused to the bodies of standard motor coaches. Following in the footsteps of his father, Wilbur drove one of the Peterbuses himself.
Meanwhile, Mike Curb and Wilbur were pushing to get out another album. Curb's motives were understandable: Why not get every cent he could out of his overnight sensation? There was no way to tell, after all, just how long her popularity would last. In February 1997 Curb released Unchained Melody: The Early Years, consisting of songs Rimes had recorded when she was eleven and twelve years old in Clovis. It debuted at number one on both the Billboard 200 and Billboard's Top Country Albums chart. In September 1997 came her third album, You Light Up My Life: Inspirational Songs, which debuted at number one simultaneously on Billboard's Top Country Albums, Top Contemporary Christian Albums, and the Billboard 200. Three Rimes albums in fourteen months—and they were all monster hits.
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