Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [76]
My problem is that I’m too friendly. I adopt people. Whoever is singing with me at the time becomes a good friend of mine. Like Conway Twitty, my duet partner. Doo knows me and Conway are friends. I love people and I love to give a hug or a kiss now and then. I’m affectionate. But I don’t get that excited over being around other men. It’s mostly in their minds. I just mind my own business and stay out of trouble that way.
Still, once in a while some guy would get the wrong idea just because I’d call him at three in the morning. I thought he was my friend so I’d call him. Heck, I call the Johnson girls at three in the morning, or I’ll wake Lorene Allen, my secretary, at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, just to ask a question. So I don’t mean nothing by it. But a few singers have gotten the idea that I was falling in love with ’em. And in Nashville, it isn’t long before somebody will carry the rumor to your husband.
One time my tour was in Knoxville, and Doo heard some gossip about me and a singer. He drove all the way to Knoxville in a rage, but when he got to the hotel, he said, “I already felt like the damn fool I was.” So he waited in my room until I got back from the show—alone, I might add. The next day he went home again. Really, he knows better. That’s happened a few times.
Now jealousy works two ways. I know that Doo gets lonely if his woman’s not around. So if I’m on the road, I get all these visions of him having girl friends back home. I’ll get all worked up and call home at night—and find out that Doo fell asleep at eight o’clock, exhausted from working on the ranch all day. He barely had enough strength to take off his boots, the twins will tell me. So 90 percent of the stuff you hear about Doo ain’t true, either.
Whatever you want to say about him, he’s an outdoor man and a family man. He’s not thinking up ways to get off to Las Vegas to play the card tables and drink champagne with showgirls. He couldn’t care less. He’d rather be out setting feeders for his quail, or driving a bulldozer, or playing with his babies, than living it up.
In fact, I wished he liked the travel better than he does. Since we quit the Wilburns, Doo has had to travel more with me. He’s all right for a while, being cooped up in a motel room. And things run better when he’s around. The schedule is better, the shows are better, everyone does their job. But after a few days, Doo gets this panicked look on his face. He can’t let his feelings out the way I do, and he gets to feeling trapped on the road. He’ll take a long walk from the motel, try to find some country road, and just enjoy the sound of the birds and the wind and the farm machines. But usually we’re staying in one of those modern motels, surrounded by interstate highways and shopping centers, and there’s no place to walk. I know it’s hell on Doolittle.
And all those fans coming around. He’s polite to them, he’ll do favors for them, talk to them. But it’s like a car engine overheating. It’s painful to watch. The bad thing is, Doo handles it by drinking. He don’t like the boys to drink on the bus, but he’ll have a cup of bourbon and just try to relax himself, or he’ll hit the bottle in the afternoon just out of boredom, I think. And then we’ll get into an argument, which maybe I’ll start by criticizing him. Or he’ll tell me I did something stupid in the show, which I don’t like because I’m the performer. I’ve learned to live with it, but it hurts me when Doo drinks too much.
More than once, I’ve been up on a stage giving a show, or getting some award in Nashville, knowing that Doo was out sleeping in the bus. He knows it just tears me up inside and he says he’s going to lick it by himself. I know if we could just slow down our pace a little, he’d be better, because Doo is a very capable, intelligent man.
Really, we’re so entirely different, it’s a wonder