The camera loved Glen Campbell. The audience adored him. On stage, he was country music’s golden boy, all charm and that flawless guitar picking. But behind closed doors, his life was falling apart in ways his fans never could have imagined.
. He grew up so poor in rural Arkansas that his family sometimes ate squirrel just to survive. There was no electricity in their house. But his father scraped together five dollars to buy a guitar from Sears, and handed it to his four-year-old son.
That moment set the course for everything that followed. . By the time he was six, Glen was playing guitar on local radio stations. He had no teacher, so he learned by listening.
He worked the farm by day and practiced the strings every spare minute. At fourteen, he quit school and joined his brothers in Houston, installing insulation and pumping gas, but none of that work ever mattered to him the way music did. His big break came at seventeen, when his uncle, who had a band in Albuquerque, brought him onto his radio show. That led to a children’s TV program, which led to something he wasn’t ready for at all.
. He met Diane Marie Kirk at the television station. She was sixteen, he was eighteen, and she was already pregnant. They married at the courthouse without any fuss.
Their son, Glen Travis Campbell Jr. , arrived two months early and lived only a few days. The grief nearly broke them, but they kept going and had a daughter, Deborah Kay, the next year. Still, Glen wasn’t about to let fatherhood slow down his music career.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1960 and became a session musician, playing alongside the Wrecking Crew. You can hear his guitar on recordings by the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Sammy Davis Jr. , and countless othersmaking six hundred recordings before he ever became famous. The irony was, he never learned to read music.
When he had to play with a large orchestra, he admitted the truth. They played the piece once through, and his ears were good enough to pick it up from there. . Working with Elvis Presley on the soundtrack for Viva Las Vegas brought him a kindred spirit.
Both men grew up picking cotton and living that simple rural life. But while their backgrounds were similar, their paths diverged wildly. His marriage to Diane ended in divorce within four years, and by September of that very yearhe had already married a beautician named Billie Jean Nunley. They’d go on to have three kids together, though that marriage wouldn’t survive either.
A running theme, it seemed, was that Glen Campbell excelled at everything except holding a family together. . . He formed his own band, called the GCs, which sounded uncomfortably close to the Bee Gees anda lot of people got confused, especially whenboth groups covered the same song.
It didn’t matter much, because the GCs never took off. What did take off was his reputationas a hired gun. He backed the Beach Boys on tour when Brian Wilson cracked under pressure, and filled in with bass guitar and that high falsetto flawlessly. As a thank you, Wilson offered him a song he’d co-written called Guess I’m Dumb, and produced it for him.
It flopped completely. But his first real hit wasn’t far behind}.. He recorded a cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier, which sounded like a strong anti-war statement. Everyone assumed it revealed his feelings about Vietnam.
Then a reporter asked him what he thought of young men burning their draft cards, and Glen answered flatly that their punishment should be hanging. The public was stunned. His record label was less stunned than furious. They stuck him with producer Al De Lory and told them to make a hit or else.
They came out with Burning Bridges, which became a top twenty country hit, and then Gentle on My Mind and By the Time I Get to Phoenix followedin quick succession. At the 1967 Grammys, he took home four trophies. The following year, his album beat the Beatles for Album of the Year. Everything had turned around,virtually overnight.
Then John Wayne came calling}.. Wayne and his daughter showed up backstage after a concert and asked Glen if he wanted to be in a movie. What Glen didn’t know wasthat the producers had originally wanted Elvis. Presley’s agent demanded top billing over Wayne,and that wasn’t going to happen.
So the part fell to him. True Grit made him a film actor almost by accident, and it was a miserable experience. Director Henry Hathaway thought Glen tensed up every time he yelled action, and later said his performance was wooden and that he was lazy. Glen agreed with him, actually.
He said his acting was so bad it made John Wayne look better, which helped the legend win his only Oscar. Still, the camera liked him,and that landed him his own variety show, The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour, with Steve Martin and Rob Reiner writing behind the scenes. Guests included everyone from the Beatles to Johnny Cash to Carol Burnett. TV worked, so he tried movies again.
The result was Norwood, with football star Joe Namath. The poster literally advertised: “It’s good time Glenn and Super Joe doing what they do best. ” Apparently, their best wasn’t good enough. Critics called it hokey, harmless, comparing his film career to Elvis’s, but not in a flattering way.
He never made another feature film. He needed to get back to music,and he needed a hit to do it}.. In 1974, he was in Australia when he heard a song on the radio about an aging musician looking back at his rise to fame. He could identify with it immediately.
When he got back to the States, he went straight to Capitol Records and told them about Rhinestone Cowboy, written by Larry Weiss. They gave him the green light. It hit number one on both country and pop charts,and it turned him into a massive crossover star. Someone got the idea for a movie version.
Glen turned it down. Rhinestone eventually came out in 1984 with Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton,and it was a disaster, earning nine Golden Raspberry nominations. But Glen had already moved on to problems of his own making}.. The fame was eating him alive.
He dealt with it by drinking too much. And by cheating on his wife. His marriage to Billie Jean ended in 1976. His lifestyle didn’t slow down.
Then the Rhinestone Cowboy money started going up his nose. He would later credit his third wife, Sarah Barg, ex-wife of singer Mac Davis, for getting him into drugs. He said he started freebasing in Las Vegas. He divorced her in 1980,and almost immediately fell into something even more volatile}..
He started dating Tanya Tucker, who was only twenty-two and already had her own serious problems with alcohol. He threw her a fifty-seven thousand dollar birthday party. They recorded together and got a Grammy nomination. But nobody would call their relationship sweet.
They fought loudly, publicly, sometimes violently. He allegedly threw chairs. She cracked his ribs. A fight at the Plaza Hotel in New York left the room destroyedand cost Glen twelve hundred dollars just to clean up.
When they finally ended things, she went public with a story that shocked everyone: she claimed Glen had knocked out her two front teeth. His golden boy image crumbled. He called their relationship a poisoned relationship and my insanity. She called him the love of her life.
Even after it was over, neither one could let go cleanly}.. To recover, he went on a blind date with Kim Woolen in 1981,sand married her the next year. She had no idea what she was walking into. When she saw him high, she called him a monster.
At one point, he pointed a pistol at her. She should have run, but instead she gave him an ultimatum: quit using, or she was gone. She offered him the church she attended. And she played him a tape recording of himself, drunk and incoherently rambling.
Hearing his own voice like that was enough to scare him straight. He got soberand stayed sober, but even sobriety didn’t protect him from everything}.. In 2003, he was driving in Phoenix when police pulled him over, certain he’d been drinking. When they asked his name, he said he was Glen Campbell, the Rhinestone Cowboy.
They weren’t impressed. He claimed he’d only had a Coke at the bar, called it being overserved. Then he tried to knee one of the officers. Even the Rhinestone Cowboy couldn’t talk his way out of that.
Witnesses said that as they took him to the station, he was singing By the Time I Get to Phoenix. The judge gave him ten days in prison. At age eighty-one, on August eighth, 2017, Glen Campbell passed away. But his story didn’t end quietly even then}..
Tanya Tucker, his old turbulent lover, wrote and performed Forever Loving You as a tribute. Glen’s widow was furious, accusing her of using his death for publicity. Even in death, the old conflicts kept burning. And then there was the will.
Glen had nine children, but three of them, all from his marriage to Billie Jean, were left out entirely. They fought to contest itand then, for unknown reasons, they let it go. Most people remembered him as a gentle soul. Alice Cooper called him a golden boy who could hang out with anyone.
But underneath that golden surface was a man who spent his whole life searching for peace, and only found it on a golf course, with an unlikely companion, too late to undo the damage along the way. . .
