Tammy Wynette once sang Stand By Your Man at a barbecue for President Ronald Reagan, sitting on his knee. "I had goose bumps," Reagan confessed to The New York Times. But Stand By Your Man, as Craig Brown put it in The Mail on Sunday, "was always a case of do as I sing, not as I do". In practice, Tammy tended not to stand by her man.
According to Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough, she loved hot dogs, shopping and the colour pink. (She kept 300 pink cuddly toys on her pink bed in her pink bedroom.) Addicted to Valium and sleeping pills, she eventually began falling asleep between songs at her concerts.
Her third husband, and the only one who matched her in extravagance, was the country singer George Jones. If anything, Jones was even crazier than Tammy. He would get drunk and go shopping for things he didn't want. "You never knew what he'd do," says a friend. "He mighta bought two houses, or a motel. He'd do anything that come across his mind."He was vain and bad-tempered "a one-way ticket on the highway to hell", said a friend and in him Tammy finally met her match. To stop him going off drinking, she would hide the keys to all their cars, but George, undeterred, drove to the nearest bar on his lawnmower. In turn, says Craig Brown, he "once cut off all the heels of her shoes, so that she couldn't run away from him".
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After two more marriages, Wynette died aged 55 in 1998, in mysterious circumstances. Her fifth husband "as phoney as a two-dollar watch", in one description was the main beneficiary. Tammy's three daughters each got $5,000. One of them now works as a cleaner.
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