HORROR STORY TO FAIRY TALE
NAOMI JUDD OPENS UP ABOUT HER PAST AS SHE PREPARES FOR LOCAL FUNDRAISING GALA
It’s a life story ripped from the pages of a Hollywood script or, more aptly, the lyrics of an old-time country tune: poor small-town girl suffers some early hard knocks; she brushes herself off, picks herself up and goes on to become, with her eldest of two daughters, one of the hottest country music acts of the past few decades.
Talking to five-time Grammy winning Naomi Judd, though, is about as real as it gets.
“What is the biggest nut?” asks the 67-year-old country superstar with a whoop of ladylike laughter, when I ask her over the phone to describe, in a nutshell, her life today. “I’ve been up to just about everything — and the things I get asked to do cover a whole encyclopedic range.”
Two decades after she retired, for the most part, from the music business to successfully deal with a potentially deadly diagnosis of hepatitis C, the matriarch of the multitalented Judd family is busier than ever. She’s written three books, served as a judge on the country music talent show Can You Duet and in 2011 starred with her daughter and musical partner Wynonna Judd in a doc-series called The Judds.
Last month, she was back in front of the cameras, with actor Betty White at the American Humane Association’s Hero Dog Awards show, in which she also shared the stage with Beau, a Labrador retriever that had sniffed out more than 250 landmines as a military dog in Iraq.
“I’m pretty ornery,” she says of the fact she turns down the majority of offers that continue to come her way, including judging the Miss America pageant. “I have to be pretty jazzed up about something to say yes.”
One of those things she had no trouble saying yes to, says Judd, is the YWCA of Calgary. She didn’t hesitate when asked earlier this year to be the guest speaker at the third annual YWCA WhyWhisper fundraising gala, which is being held Thursday at the Telus Convention Centre (for info, go to wycaofcalgary.com).
“If there had been a place like the YWCA when I needed it,” she says, “it would have made all the dif- ference.”
While it’s hard to imagine such a highly successful woman ever being down and out, Judd has suffered her share of travails. It came early, too, when she was barely out of her teens.
“I was date raped the night before my senior year of high school,” she says matter-of-factly of how daughter Wynonna came into the world.
The boy responsible took off, leaving the pregnant 17-year-old the scandal of the small Kentucky town where she grew up.
More tragedy added to the demolition of what she describes as an idyllic, innocent childhood up to that point. Her brother Brian died not long after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease; the loss, she says, was a big factor in her parents’ subsequent divorce.
After her mother threw the five-months-pregnant teen out of the family home, Judd accepted a marriage proposal from another suitor.
“I had to marry this boy because he had a crush on me,” she says of the shortlived union that produced actress daughter Ashley, but was also marked by abuse.
Judd, who by now had learned the hard-won life lesson that “security is an illusion,” soon found herself a 22-year-old single mom with two children and few prospects, in Los Angeles, a city she calls “Hollyweird, La-La Land, a materialistic, phoney baloney, superficial culture.”
She held down two jobs, had no car — and so, when a handsome neighbour began to pay her attention, she succumbed to his charms.
“He turned out to be an excon on heroin that beat me and raped me.”
The Judd family’s fans worldwide know how the horror story would transform into a fairy tale: Judd got her kids out of that weird town and, when her daughters were eight and 12, spent a year on a mountaintop in her home state. She got a nursing degree, while her daughters explored their interests without the noise and chaos of their earlier years.
“That’s where Wynonna learned to play the guitar, where Ashley fell in love with reading,” she says of her two daughters, one a country star who still packs stadiums around the world, the other an actor and humanitarian activist with a master’s degree from Harvard University. “I could not be more proud of the people they’ve turned out to be.”
Sue Tomney, CEO of the YWCA of Calgary, says that Judd is the perfect choice of speaker at the organization’s annual premier fundraiser, one that brought in more than a half-million dollars last year.
“Naomi Judd is ageless, she speaks to everyone,” says Tomney of the living role model for her organization’s clients. “She can inspire so many, because she is living proof that even when life is overwhelming, all things are still possible.”
Today, Judd lives on a Tennessee acreage with her husband Larry Strickland, about an hour’s drive from Nashville. “I’m looking right now out my window at a hill behind me, where Wynonna lives,” she says.
Also nearby is the home of Ashley, who was estranged for a time from her mother but now, says Judd, is happily back in the fold.
“We call it Peaceful Valley,” she says of the sanctuary that for her is the crowning achievement of a life lived in the fullest. “I’m the Mother Emeritus — I’ve got tenure, although I can no longer teach.”