Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 32



“Too Far Gone”

The Mall at Green Hills

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville’s Mall at Green Hills is pretty swanky—there’s a Tiffany and a Louis Vuitton and an Apple store. It’s so damn classy it doesn’t even have a food court, so I’ve been forced to write in a Cheesecake Factory. Not that I’d ever be so ridiculous as to resent having to order a coffee and a slice of Turtle Cheesecake. It’s being the sniveling pale Yankee weirdo—dining alone while scribbling in a notebook—that I don’t like.

I deserve to look like a creep, I suppose. I’ve come to the Mall at Green Hills because I’m rather a sick woman—because ever since I started being interested in these women’s lives, I’ve been obsessed with a particularly dark part of Tammy’s history—her “kidnapping,” which happened right here at this mall.

It occurs to me, as I sit here licking caramel off my spoon, watching all of these beautiful people eat Cobb salads, that I’m a shameless student of people’s worst moments: lies, violence, melodrama, fraud. I have been since I was a kid. I like to hold them up like baubles and examine them every which way. When I was young, I thought that would make me understand them and become immune to such moments myself. Now I’m older and smarter, and study them purely out of gratuitous habit.

It happened on October 4, 1978:

Tammy’s story went like this:

She’d gone shopping at the mall for a birthday gift for her daughter Georgette. When she returned to her unlocked car, there was a man inside, wearing panty hose over his head and wielding a gun. He told her simply, “Drive.” That was the only word he said to her during their sixty-plus minutes together in her yellow Cadillac. They headed down Highway 65 for a while. After about twenty minutes, he had her pull over and tied panty hose tight around her neck. Then he took the wheel, gesturing her onto the floor of the backseat, and drove for about forty more minutes.

Then he pulled to the side of the road near Pulaski, Tennessee, beat her up, and fled in another car, driven by a mysterious accomplice.

A few minutes later, a young man in a pickup truck saw Tammy stumbling along the highway, bruised and with panty hose tied tight around her neck. He didn’t recognize the unfortunate woman, but picked her up and brought her home to his stunned mother, who happened to be a Tammy Wynette fan. The family politely held back their questions and their disbelief, helping her cut off the panty hose, letting her rest on their couch, calling the police.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was perplexed by the case. The assailant hadn’t stolen anything from Tammy. There was no sexual assault, no ransom demand, no motive. Tammy herself didn’t seem that interested in cooperating with the investigation, or finding the culprit. Some claim that the bruises on her face appeared to be enhanced by makeup in the days immediately following the incident.

There are a number of theories about what really happened. Some thought George Jones (her third husband) hired a couple of thugs to frighten Tammy into submission over a $36,000 child support dispute they’d been having. Some thought it was just a media stunt, cooked up by Tammy for a little attention since, for the first time in almost a decade, she hadn’t been nominated for any awards at the upcoming CMAs. Still others thought her new (fifth and final) husband, George Richey, had beaten her, and the whole thing was a ploy to explain why Tammy, who had several concerts scheduled, was so bruised up.

Indeed, after Tammy’s death, one of her daughters claimed that her mother confessed this to her twelve years after the incident—that it was fabricated to cover up Richey’s violence. A couple of Tammy’s friends say she told them the same thing. While my gut tells me this is the closest thing to the truth that Tammy fans will ever get, there are a couple of reasons to doubt it. For one, Richey passed a lie detector test about the kidnapping, while Tammy refused to take one. Also, Tammy’s daughters hated Richey and he hated them, particularly after Tammy died. Richey managed to keep most of Tammy’s money from her daughters. While there is ample evidence that he was a controlling and temperamental man, it seems Tammy’s daughters also had every reason to demonize him after her death.

Some other confounding factors are these:

In the year preceding the incident, there were break-ins at Tammy’s mansion, in which people left threatening notes and words like slut and pig scrawled on her mirrors. There was also a mysterious fire in the house. After the kidnapping, more threatening notes were found—one stuffed into the gates of her house, another backstage at a concert. The latter notes were analyzed by a handwriting expert who said that they were written by someone who was trying to distort his or her handwriting, and could not say conclusively that they were not penned by Tammy or George Richey.

Also, in the early 1980s, Tammy mentioned offhand in interviews that she discovered later that her phone was being tapped in the days before the kidnapping, and that someone was doing surveillance on her house from the nearby woods. She said she knew who it was, but preferred to let the matter drop. She did not elaborate much on this claim or mention it again in subsequent interviews. And it does not appear to have been corroborated by the police, who hadn’t ultimately pursued the case at great length.

Friends and family all confirm that, kidnapping aside, Tammy had an unusual tendency to exaggerate stories and invite drama into her life. She apparently had a deep need for sympathetic attention.



So here I am at the scene of the crime, asking myself, How the hell did this happen? Love Tammy as I do, I don’t believe her version of the events of that October day. But if her daughter’s version is essentially true, how did Tammy come to this? How is it that desperation and dysfunction could converge so perfectly with absurdity to create such a cinematically pathetic incident in Tammy’s life?

It’s no secret that Tammy had a lot of hardships and made a number of very bad choices. But the kidnapping incident has a special kind of insanity to it. And it feels like a turning point for Tammy. It was a step away from the merely melodramatic and toward the sadly, scarily delusional. After this point, Tammy never had the kind of success she’d had in earlier years. Skeptical fans mocked her story, and this is where Tammy’s “pathetic drama queen” reputation really started to take shape. (In 1980, a punk band called the Maggots released a song called “Let’s Get Tammy Wynette!” mocking the kidnapping incident, singing from the point of view of the supposed kidnappers.) Her reliance on drugs grew steadily more serious, her relationship with her enabling, controlling husband more entrenched.

A clear, factual explanation of that day can’t be had. Tammy’s the only person who could have clarified it, and she’s gone. So all one can do now is try to understand it on some broad emotional level. And in order to do this, you need to resist the impulse to laugh at Tammy, to scoff at her fakery and her flailing recklessness. Like her music, understanding it requires—fancy this—a totally sympathetic heart, a total, if momentary, absence of irony.

Strip off the details that make it worthy of a punk-rock song: a whiny diva who trades in her sequins for painted-on bruises, kidnapping herself in her own yellow Cadillac. Take away the stardom and the fancy car (and the distraction of the silly panty-hose head), and you see a battered woman who didn’t know where to turn and who, sadly, had vowed never to get another divorce. Get a little closer, and she’s just a terribly confused individual who never had a clue how to pursue her own happiness. In the last analysis, she’s someone who so desperately needed love that she did things that brought her the very opposite. What exactly made her this way isn’t the point. The point is that everyone knows people who operate this way. And that most of us know that at our worst moments, that is how we operate.

Tammy’s life—like her music—conveys a vulnerability that I think many of us are not comfortable with. You can hear the “teardrop” in her voice, and think, That’s beautiful and honest. Or you can hear it and opt for the safer response: That’s pathetic and maudlin, to which I am too cool and self-assured to relate. And for that reason, Tammy will never be hip like Johnny Cash or Loretta Lynn have become.

There is nothing ironic or sassy about Tammy Wynette. There is nothing cool about being as desperate for love as she was. In the metaphor of American celebrity as high school, Johnny Cash is the badass with the motorcycle (and therefore acceptable in a hipster’s musical library), but Tammy’s that cheesy girl who tries way too hard. She wears too much clumpy mascara and the wrong color lipstick and f*cks a guy who doesn’t like her much on the off chance it’ll make her feel popular and loved. She cries easily and will do anything for attention. She downs five aspirin and tells everyone she attempted suicide. Really, nobody wants to be that girl.

In Tammy’s case, that girl has, in spite of all of her flaws, a disarmingly powerful, beautiful voice. To enjoy her voice, however, one must believe it. And to believe it, one must admit that it’s possible to be that vulnerable oneself. That, in fact, you could be that girl. That your worst moments could potentially be as sad and confused as hers. That you, too, have a tender, needy, crazy, and distinctly uncool heart.



—Tammyland