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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Suddenly, as one magazine put it, LeAnn was "America's fastest-growing brand name." She was signing deals to star in advertisements for milk and cell phones. She was taking meetings with executives from the Creative Artists Agency to discuss the possibility of her landing starring roles in feature films and on Broadway. She "co-authored" a novel about a young country music singer titled Holiday in Your Heart, which then became an ABC movie starring herself and Bernadette Peters. She performed in front of the pope, and some of her fans thought the teenager, the chosen child of God, had spiritual abilities herself. A Nevada mother whose seven-year-old daughter had fallen into a coma after being thrown from a pickup begged LeAnn to come see her at the hospital. LeAnn arrived and sang a lullaby version of "Blue" to the comatose child. That very day, the girl began waking up.
When LeAnn was profiled in newspapers and popular magazines, she politely would pose for photos next to her smiling parents. What reporters never knew, however, was that Wilbur and Belinda's marriage was falling apart. Despite their dramatic teenage elopement, their marriage had never been a happy one. LeAnn once told Entertainment Weekly that she knew her parents "always lived for me more than for their relationship,"and LeAnn's success only exacerbated their problems. They began having heated arguments over LeAnn's breakneck schedule. Belinda pleaded for Wilbur to let her spend more time at home, where she could be around girls her own age. She said that LeAnn should not be spending her teenage life among adults, riding in the back of one of those Peterbuses, and occasionally having to take showers at truck stops. Wilbur replied that the only way for LeAnn to build her audience was to be on the road, and that's the way it was going to be. "I think Belinda was anxious that it was already becoming all business for Wilbur," says a longtime family friend. "LeAnn had stopped being the child for him and started becoming the source of the family income."
Such comments infuriate Wilbur, who in his letter to me said, "We all made every effort to keep the schedule bearable. She traveled in the lap of luxury, and she was surrounded by people there to wait on her hand and foot." But Tom Carter, a veteran Nashville writer and country music insider who has ghostwritten more than a dozen autobiographies of country music celebrities and who was hired to "co-write" LeAnn's novel, noticed as he traveled with her that she would often break into tears. "Wilbur was booking her to within an inch of her limits," Carter says. "She was doing concerts several nights a week, traveling five hundred to eight hundred miles between shows. She was a stressed-out little girl."
Her parents' battles only added to her stress. On more than one evening, when Belinda and Wilbur were shouting at each other, a hysterical LeAnn would step between them, screaming that she wished they would just be her mommy and daddy rather than her business managers. Belinda will speak only briefly about that period in her life, but she does say that she was so devastated over the end of her marriage that she felt as if she was becoming emotionally unhinged. Says the longtime friend: "Belinda thought she was losing not just her husband but her own daughter, who had to return to the road with Wilbur because of all the touring commitments that had been made." What also hurt Belinda was her discovery of Wilbur's romantic relationship with a younger woman, Catherine "Cat" Dickenson, whose father owned the motor coach company from which Wilbur bought LeAnn's touring buses. LeAnn has alleged that he had Catherine ride with him on his bus during LeAnn's concert tours, while Belinda and LeAnn were in another bus. Wilbur says it's a lie. He and Catherine say that they didn't begin their relationship until after Wilbur and Belinda separated, in March 1997.
By the summer of 1997 divorce proceedings were under way. LeAnn says that her father and Lyle Walker kept telling her that her mother was "very sick" and that if she started a protracted court fight, the publicity would ruin LeAnn's career. At LeAnn's urging, Belinda quickly agreed to a settlement. Wilbur would pay her 50 percent of the producer and manager fees he had received so far working with LeAnn, and he promised to pay 33 percent of the producer fees for any future albums. But according to LeAnn's lawyers, there was another result of that quick settlement: Belinda and her lawyers never discovered the full assets of LeAnn Rimes Entertainment, or learned how Wilbur was paying himself.
Perhaps to appease LeAnn for enduring the divorce, Wilbur presented to her for her fifteenth birthday in August 1997 a Dodge Viper, a sports car that could reach speeds over 175 miles per hour. Since she was too young to get her driver's license, she had to ride in the passenger seat. Then it was back to work. According to her booking schedule, she made almost five hundred appearances between early 1996 and late 1998, and she put out four albums. With each album, music critics were getting more impatient, claiming that she was being given mediocre mush to sing. (You Light Up My Life, for instance, featured "Amazing Grace," "God Bless America," and no kidding, the National Anthem.) Many critics laid the blame right at the feet of Mike Curb, saying he was exploiting her instead of working to help her develop a more personal, artistic style. The respected Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly ripped into Wilbur Rimes as LeAnn's producer, noting that he always stuck plodding arrangements and maudlin piano chords around LeAnn's songs. Tucker also called LeAnn "a pint-sized, country-fried version of Michael Bolton."
By 1998, Wilbur was living with Catherine at the horse farm he had bought outside Nashville. Belinda was living in a house back in Garland. LeAnn, of course, was still touring, chaperoned around the country either by Lyle Walker or by her father. She was a frustrated, lonely adolescent. The time had come, she began to say, for her to get a life.
In march 1998 leann flew to los angeles for a photo shoot, stopped by her publicist's office, and saw the face of actor Andrew Keegan on the cover of a teen magazine. LeAnn said he was cute, the publicist made a phone call, and that very night, nineteen-year-old Keegan picked up fifteen-year-old LeAnn at her hotel and took her to dinner. They liked each other immediately. On her next trip to L.A., several weeks later, Keegan took her on another dinner date and then to a Lakers game. Until that point, Wilbur had been fairly successful in keeping male suitors away from LeAnn. He says he stopped a fledgling relationship between LeAnn and country music heartthrob Bryan White (LeAnn says there was no relationship), and he had even fired an older member of LeAnn's band because he thought the musician was talking to her too suggestively. Yet he knew he couldn't keep LeAnn away from guys forever—and even Wilbur had to realize it was somewhat hypocritical for him to tell her she couldn't have a relationship when he was just starting a new one himself. His solution with Keegan was to make sure they were chaperoned whenever they were together (people close to LeAnn say he missed the couple of occasions Andrew sneaked onto LeAnn's tour bus at night). To Wilbur, the relationship seemed harmless, a lighthearted teen romance.
Then, in October 1998, when her tour commitments were finally over, LeAnn, who had just turned sixteen, told her father that she was not going to move to Nashville, as he had thought; she had persuaded her mother to rent a house in Los Angeles so that she could take acting lessons. A flabbergasted Wilbur saw what was happening. She was loading up the truck and moving to Beverly to be with that damned Andrew.
Off the road and away from her father, LeAnn did indeed let loose. She got a credit card, and she started hitting every trendy boutique in town, buying herself such items as a $5,000 blouse and dozens upon dozens of pairs of shoes, as well as Armani suits for Keegan. Because she couldn't legally purchase automobiles until she was eighteen, she got her mother to sign for them—a Bentley for LeAnn, which was rear-ended on Sunset Boulevard while she was driving it home from the dealership, and a Ferrari for Keegan, which he ended up wrecking too. Concluding that a Bentley was probably not right for her after all, she decided to drive a BMW and a Range Rover. Still, she felt, her life wasn't complete. After meeting 44-year-old personal trainer Robert Lavetta, who had been training Keegan, she hired him full-time to work for her as her trainer, chef, personal assistant, and bodyguard (her previous part-time bodyguard had been one of Lyle Walker's grown sons, who carried a water pistol). And it wasn't long before she was having Keegan spend the night at her house.
Andrew had grown up around show-business people and had listened to many conversations about contracts, net profits, and gross revenues. One day he asked LeAnn if she knew where her money was going. She said she knew she made a lot of money, but, no, she didn't know how much of that money actually went into accounts that she said her father and Walker had set up for her. Andrew kept asking more questions. How much was her father making off her? What about Lyle Walker? And what about Curb Records?
Soon, LeAnn was calling her father, saying that she wanted to know how much money she had actually made. She says that her father was resistant. He told me that he offered "many, many times" to let her and her mother sit down with the company's attorney and the company's accountants. Saying that she was going to need help understanding the information, she told her father that Keegan's Los Angeles attorney had agreed to come with her to review the contracts and the company's financial information. The attorney himself wrote Wilbur a letter asking for an appointment.
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