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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It was as if an atom bomb had gone off in Nashville. Wilbur, who had been seeing copies of LeAnn's credit card statements and invoices and was already boiling, got LeAnn on the phone and bellowed that he was not about to let outsiders look at the company's books. When LeAnn and Wilbur met at a concert she was scheduled to give in Las Vegas, he pushed her up against the wall of her dressing room and said, "I'm not letting Andrew and his lawyers get your money!" Wilbur then sent LeAnn a letter in May 1999 in which he ordered her to follow a midnight curfew and to pull back from Keegan. "I will not tolerate you and him [Keegan] having sex and living as if you were both adults," he wrote. He threatened to take "civil and criminal" action against Keegan if they slept together again. "Suffice it to say that I have ample evidence to ensure that he won't be taking sexual advantage of minor girls for a very long time," he wrote. He then added, "I also will not tolerate his participation or interference in your business or your financial situation. . . . frankly, as intelligent as I know you are, it surprises me that you don't at least question the motives behind his interest in your money."
Wilbur had just made a huge miscalculation. As he was about to find out, his daughter was as stubborn and strong-willed as he was. She sent her father a blunt letter saying she wanted a new management team, and she refused to agree to any new deals Wilbur or Walker brought to her. She even turned down a $1 million offer to be featured in advertisements for a new perfume. Wilbur sent her a flurry of desperate letters about her spending ("This company will be broke before your next tour if you don't control your spending"), her refusal to keep touring ("If you don't wake up, girl, you won't have a career"), and her association with Keegan and Lavetta ("a kid who doesn't know his butt from a hole in the ground [and] a fifty-year-old wanna-be").
But LeAnn would barely speak to him. Instead, she hired prominent Houston lawyer Cary Gray, who had been involved in several high-profile Texas family business disputes. He promptly launched a court fight to get access to the financial records of LeAnn Rimes Entertainment, and when the records finally landed on his desk in the spring of 2000, Gray realized that Wilbur and Walker had taken more of the money generated by LeAnn than LeAnn had received herself. From 1996 until the end of 1999, LeAnn Rimes Entertainment had received approximately $41 million in album royalties, concert tour revenues, promotions, fan club memberships, and merchandise sales. After expenses and taxes were taken out, Wilbur had paid himself around $11 million in producer, manager, and guardian fees. (He later gave $5.1 million of that total to Belinda to fulfill the terms of their divorce.) Walker received around $4 million as LeAnn's co-manager, and his studio received a $539,198 fee. That adds up to some $16 million. But only $8 million was paid to LeAnn or invested for her benefit. (There is another $2 million in corporate assets, says LeAnn's attorney, that she could also claim as her own.)
When other agents and managers heard about the percentages that Wilbur and Walker were taking, they told LeAnn she was being had. Wilbur's 30 percent producer fee, they informed her, is usually reserved for the finest and most experienced producers in the business. The 30 percent co-management fee was also extraordinarily high. Most managers of unknown recording artists start out taking 20 percent of an artist's gross, then they gradually lower their cut to about 10 percent or less once the artist begins to bring in significant earnings. What's more, it is not a common practice in the recording industry to pay producer and management fees to the same person. And Wilbur wasn't just double-dipping. With his parental guardian fee, he was triple-dipping from his daughter's income.
As for her Curb Records deal, they said, she unknowingly had stuck herself in a contract that might take her at least another ten years to fulfill, thus preventing her, in the prime of her career, from negotiating a new contract the way other successful recording artists are able to do. One lawyer who studied her contract and her company balance sheet said that Curb made more than $50 million in profits off her.
The war was on. Besides her lawsuit seeking to terminate her contract with Curb, LeAnn's lawsuit against Wilbur and Walker claims they should have collected $7.5 million less than they did. Walker agreed to a confidential, out-of-court settlement with LeAnn, but in his countersuit, Wilbur roared back that LeAnn was trying to crucify him "with venomous false and grossly misleading allegations orchestrated to receive national press attention and to destroy Wilbur's reputation." Yes, Wilbur wrote me, he was well compensated as her producer and manager, but those were fees that would have been paid to somebody else anyway. What really hurts, Wilbur said, is the fact that his daughter turned against the very person who had worked hardest for her: "I literally worked from the time the sun came up until late into the night every single day. I could never list all of the duties I performed for LeAnn, but I know it [would take] eight or nine people to replace me." Brad Rhorer, Wilbur's attorney, goes so far as to proclaim that LeAnn would be nothing without Wilbur. "Quite frankly," he wrote in one court filing, "I think that Wilbur Rimes is the only person who was conceivably capable of elevating LeAnn to the stardom she once had."
LeAnn and her supporters, of course, say it's the other way around—that she was the one with the talent, that her stardom was assured with her voice alone, and that her daddy was riding on her coattails. To them, Wilbur has turned into a rustic King Lear, raging against a daughter's impudence, terrified of losing control.
And so the war drags on, a classic case of hubris bringing down everyone. It's not clear that LeAnn is going to come away winning anything. Although her father's court claims about her immoral lifestyle are completely irrelevant to her lawsuit, and although he seemingly has gone off the deep end about Keegan and Lavetta—saying without a shred of proof that they are trying to become LeAnn's managers and that they're trying to get her money to finance films they want to be in—it's hard to imagine a jury at the upcoming trial (which could be held this summer) going along with LeAnn's demand that he pay back the entire $11 million he made working for her. For all his bullheaded posturing, the man did work hard.
Furthermore, it looks as though LeAnn is losing her battle with Curb. Mike Curb and LeAnn aren't speaking, but Curb's lawyers say they have always administered the contract leniently. They are insistent, however, that they are not going to let her out of her contract. The courts are agreeing with Curb's lawyers. At a hearing in mid-March in a Nashville court, a judge sided with the record company. LeAnn began shaking with sobs; then she turned around to her father, who was sitting a few rows behind her, giving her an I-told-you-so look, and blurted out, "I hate you." Wilbur told reporters after the hearing that he was hurt and confused by his daughter's remarks since he was only there as an observer. However, he could not help but toss out one more fatherly rebuke, saying, "I'm very pleased with the judge's decision because . . . she should be made to honor her word, rather than to be able to wriggle out of it simply because she has the star power."
On the day before leann's show at the Houston Rodeo, about a dozen of her friends and her mother have gathered at a home to see her and eat lunch. She hobbles into the living room, keeping weight off her right foot. "Sorry," she says with a sigh. "I sprained my ankle a couple of days ago walking to my car." Andrew Keegan is beside her, gingerly guiding her to a chair, propping her right leg onto an ottoman, and pulling off her right loafer so she can relax. "The life of the boyfriend," he says with a good-natured smile, and then he goes over to give a generous hug to Belinda and to shake the hand of Belinda's new husband, Ted Miller, a man she first met years ago at Johnny High's Country Music Revue, where he came with his then-wife to take photographs of performers like LeAnn.Since her marriage last September, Belinda has moved back to Garland. LeAnn, who will not turn nineteen until August, bought her new Los Angeles home in January and is now living there alone with Keegan. They seem utterly in love, teasing each other, finishing each other's stories about their recent trip to the beach in Mexico. "But there are plenty of nights," Keegan tells me, "when she lies in bed crying, torn up about, you know, the other stuff."
I notice a diamond ring on the ring finger of LeAnn's left hand, and I ask if she's engaged. "Well, Andrew gave it to me, but it's not an engagement ring. We're calling it a promise ring," she says, and she tosses back her head and laughs, a free and melodious laugh. It's one of the few times the entire afternoon that she seems cheerful. She also becomes animated when she talks about songs she has been privately writing and recording at Rosewood Studios in Tyler. The songs are more pop-oriented—she says Curb Records will not hear any of them until her fight with them is resolved—and her favorite new song that she has recorded, she notes, is titled "No Way Out." It's about a woman in an addictive romantic relationship, but the chorus could just as well describe her relationship with Wilbur:
I try to run, but I keep on falling.
And every time I turn around,
I hear your voice, and it keeps on calling.
I'm bound.
There's no way out.
"It's not like those inspirational songs you used to sing a few years back," I say.
"Tell me about it," she says.
We talk briefly about her father. She tries to put a good spin on the situation, saying that someday she and her father will become friends again. But she doesn't smile. She knows their relationship will only get worse. LeAnn's stepmother, Catherine, has now gotten involved, releasing to the news media a taped phone conversation in which LeAnn is supposedly praising the new album that she had denounced on her Web site. LeAnn's attorney, Cary Gray, countered in court that Catherine is engaged in a "smear campaign" and that LeAnn's taped remarks referred to an earlier album, one that was to be released in Europe. LeAnn does say she is still enjoying her sabbatical from the profession—"It's the first time in I don't know how many years that I've had time to myself"—but she is feeling the itch to perform again. "I know I'm meant to sing," she says. "I've got many years ahead of me. All this mess will be over soon."
One can only hope so—for the next night at the rodeo, her concert is listless. She comes onstage barefoot because of her sprained ankle, and then she tells the audience that she was afflicted with a virus earlier that morning and had to spend the day in the hospital. "The doctors say I'm not supposed to be out here tonight," she says. "But I'm not the type of person who cancels. So here I am."
Mechanically, she goes through some of her hit songs, including "Blue," and she ends with an a cappella version of "Amazing Grace." Before she finishes, I look around the Astrodome and realize that many of her fans who bought tickets long ago for this night are already heading toward the exits. Whether they are trying to beat the rest of the crowd out of the parking lot or whether they are simply disappointed in LeAnn, it is hard to say. LeAnn gamely finishes, then steps into the bed of a pickup truck that drives around the floor of the Astrodome while she waves at the fans who are left. There isn't much applause, and I wonder if LeAnn even notices. Her eyes are closed as she waves, and she is straining to smile.
Then the spotlight aimed at her is turned off, and she is gone.
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