No writer credited
The year 1990 marked the beginning of the end for Dottie West, and it was the prelude to the very dark months that lay ahead. The rapid down spiral was happening at an accelerated pace, as her personal life faced its most dismal reality.
When She was still playing Las Vegas, but unlike the other times she had performed in the glitzy city, during this time, she discovered that she was out of money and she was in serious financial trouble.
She had seen a certain car that caught her eye which she wished to purchase. She telephoned her accountant, and his response was, “you can’t buy it,” to which, in disbelief, she asked, “why not?”, and then she heard the devastating and shocking reply, “Because you don’t have any money!”
Dottie West, country music’s most glamorous star, who had worked so hard all her life to achieve unparalleled success, and who had made millions of dollars and who should have been financially set for life, realized at that moment that she was broke! She was 56 years old.
Although she was no longer making the huge sums of money she was bringing in at the peak of her profession, she felt assured that if worse came, she could sell her business assets, which included, she had been led to believe, Italian-built tuna boats, a diamond mine, and investments in tax shelters—among other things. Dottie soon learned that none of these business assets had even ever existed! As it turned out, the only thing she actually owned was her publishing company, First Generation Music, which she actually co-owned with Larry Gatlin.
It was a situation which Dottie could not understand and refused to actually accept.
Instead of the deductions from her tax shelters, Dottie West soon received a tax bill from the Internal Revenue Service for $3 million dollars, but it did not stop there. She owed the First American Bank $203,090.00, and various other banks, the total debt reaching beyond the $1 million dollar mark. Michael Brokaw of Personal Management Services, sued her for $110,294.00. Husband Alan Winters sued her for $7,500.00. Even her Nashville booking and management, Jim Haley Co., Inc., sued her for $5,015.00. In addition, she also owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to eleven other creditors.
Dottie simply did not have the money, and she declared bankruptcy which she hoped would relieve her of her immense debts and save her home. She was devastated that she had worked so hard and accomplished so much, and, all of a sudden to totally be broke, and to have everything soon to be taken from her. Her naïve trust in those individuals whom she had hired to take care of her money and her interests had been her downfall! She had been betrayed by those she fully trusted.
She told friends: “I am an entertainer; my job is to go out and sing all the time and to be in that part of the business. I am not a business person, that’s why I hired people to take care of my business. So, when I have somebody that I feel like is at home taking care of my business, that’s what I expect them to do.”
Nancy Westbrook, Dottie’s assistant in the 1990s, said, “she trusted everybody. . . there was never a question. Everybody she liked, she thought was a good person.”
Kenny Rogers said, “That’s the tragedy, if you spend your money foolishly, you have had the pleasure of spending it—but to have someone take it from you, that’s inexcusable, and it started her downfall.”
Her personal friend and former personal assistant, Becky Hiblet, noted that “. . .I think it literally killed her.”
After Dottie telephoned the bank and found out that she had no money left in her account, she asked Nancy to try to get to the bottom of the problem and try to straighten it out. The bank personnel were doing all they could to try to help her. As Nancy sat on the floor of a room in the First American Bank surrounded by checkbooks, receipts and everything trying to figure it out, Dottie announced to her that she was going to the shopping mall. “Red flags went up,” Nancy explained, “and I said ‘okay Dottie, do not write a check, you can pay cash, use your credit card, but don’t write a check because I’ve got to get this straightened out.’”
“Oh well,” was Dottie’s response, “I know I have money in there! I know it’s just a big mistake,” not allowing herself to face the harsh reality of her financial situation.
Nancy related how after about two hours, Dottie returned with numerous bags of items, including outfits for her grandchildren and for Nancy. When asked how she paid for it, Dottie answered that she wrote a check.
“She just didn’t have any sense of responsibility with money,” Nancy reiterated.
“Dottie could spend money faster than anybody I’ve seen. She was great that way,” Larry Gatlin wrote in his autobiography.
The idea of having to give up her mansion, which undoubtedly, was the principle symbol to her of her achievements in life and the music industry, was unthinkable. As the bills poured in and lawsuits piled up, Dottie became more and more determined that she would remain in her home at any cost.
Ricky Headley, former Sheriff of Williamson County, Tennessee developed a close relationship with Dottie during these last two troubled years of her life. As she became more and more in denial of what were the circumstances surrounding her life, she grew exceedingly paranoid, and “believed that everyone was out to get her”. After her divorce from Winters, she lived in fear at her mansion, and often called the sheriff’s office to request their help.
Headley’s initial encounter with Dottie occurred around 1:00 a.m. in the early hours on a Sunday after she returned to her home from a performance on the Grand Ole Opry and discovered her garage door in a open position. After calling Headley’s office to request help, the sheriff responded immediately and rushed to her home to investigate the situation. It was soon discovered that Dottie had made a mistake when she left earlier in the day and had left the garage door open.
Dottie invited the sheriff into her house for a cup of coffee, “and we sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee and had a long conversation,” Hadley explained in an exclusive interview for this book. “She felt like somebody was in the house. She felt like that was Alan (who had come to her home while she was gone, and was in the house),” Headley explained. He stated that “she was extremely paranoid that night.”
Dottie was now divorced from her third husband, Alan Winters. She was now the sole occupant of the large Williamson County, Tennessee mansion which they had previously shared.
She grew afraid to stay alone in the house and would often telephone Headley who, with his wife, went a couple of times and stayed the night with her because she was so scared. Headley spoke of how she became more and more paranoid—about Alan whom she feared would come back to harm her or the house, and thinking that someone was lurking around wanting to harm her!
She also thought that all the phone calls from bill collectors and the mortgage company telling her that she was delinquent on her payments and that soon they would have to come to repossess her property if the payments were not made—all that was instigated by Alan and some other enemies who wanted to destroy her, Headley explained.
Headley was at her home the day the mortgage company telephoned and told her they had no choice but to repossess her home, “but Dottie never, ever recognized the phone calls as legitimate calls. She ignored those phone calls.”
Headley, acting in duel roles as official sheriff as well as her friend, attempted, on more than one occasion, to make her realize how real all these phone calls were, and that she had to face the reality of her situation: “Dottie, this is real, you’ve got to accept it,” he told her. “These people have used your money, and they’ve blown your money away. But she wouldn’t accept that.”
Headley and numerous other concerned individuals tried to advise Dottie to sell her beloved mansion to get herself out of the mess. Her children were also doing all they could to convince her to sell, to downsize and to start over again. She was told that she had enough equity in the home that she would actually come out all right. But Dottie would just argue with them and dispute the facts of her being without money. She would become angry with anyone who tried to dispute her own determined attitude, so eventually everyone gave up. “I think they (Shelly and Mo) finally got to the point where they said, ‘Well, okay, there’s nothing we can do because she is real hard-headed and headstrong, and she’s going to do what she’s going to do,’” Headley explained.
At this time, Dottie telephoned a number of friends who she felt would help her, but none came through for her. She was heartbroken, Headley stated, that those she thought were her true friends turned their backs on her in this great time of need.
“I was the only person standing on the courthouse steps with her, holding her hand, the day they auctioned off her home, and she was disappointed that more of her friends were not there with her,” Headley related. She felt abandoned by her friends of means, and her family that day.
“Dottie just could not face the fact that she was broke and everything was going to be taken away. She wouldn’t accept the fact that the people whom she loved and trusted would spend her money like this and not pay the bills, etc,” Headley exclaimed.
“This is not real,” Dottie told him, “there’s no way I can believe this is happening. I know I’m going to wake up and it’s going to be over. With the career I’ve had, there’s no possible way this could be happening to me.”
Dottie called the sheriff one day and asked him to come to her house as soon as possible. “There are people here stealing my cars,” she told him. He arrived to find her solid black and solid red shoveled corvettes being repossessed.
“We can’t stop these people; they are not stealing your cars; they are repossessing them; the payments have not been made, and there’s no way we can stop them,” he assured her. “She stood in that driveway that day and hugged me and just sobbed like a baby as she saw her two precious automobiles drive away.”
Now with no vehicle of her own after Nashville’s Third National Bank repossessed her cars, Dottie’s only means of transport was her tour bus which she was allowed to keep and use upon the payment of $806.00 each month. At this time, her friend Kenny Rogers came to her aid and gave her the use of a three-year-old car. “It’s not a new car, but it’s a new car to me,” Dottie explained.
She had assigned both her performance royalty income and BMI royalties to First American Bank, which was in the process of foreclosure on her $1.6 million dollar mansion in Williamson County.
Dottie’s bankruptcy trustee, John C. McLemore, said, “When the bank began foreclosing on her house, she panicked. Something seemed to snap inside of her. She had been cautioned by her lawyers not to file bankruptcy until a specific cutoff date had passed. She stopped listening to the tax lawyers who were advising her, and ran to a bankruptcy lawyer who knew nothing about her tax situation. If all the lawyers had known about one another and had met before the filing of the bankruptcy as they should have, Dottie’s case would have definitely been filed later,” he said.
“She thought the bankruptcy might help her keep the house, or recover the house. Of course, it didn’t,” McLemore explained.
In January of 1990, Dottie made a television appearance on the popular television show, Nashville Now. Dressed in typical Dottie fashion, wearing tight blue jeans and black spiked boots, she gave nobody the impression of the chaotic situation in her life. After performing Are You Happy Baby, she then went into a chilling rendition of Together Again during which daughter Shelly made an appearance on stage during the middle, and they finished the song as a duet.
In May 1990, John C. McLemore, Dottie’s bankruptcy trustee, filed with the court a trustee’s notice of proposed sale of all of her property, which included furniture and household items. The proceeds of the sale were to be distributed first to Ozburn-Hessey Storage Company, as a first liens holder, and then to Sovran Bank as a second lien holder. The remainder would go to the various other creditors.
The auction was scheduled to take place on June 13 and 14 at 10:00 a.m. at the Bill Colson Auction and Reality Warehouse on Elm Hill Pike. Remarkably, it was the week of Fan Fair, a spectacular country music festival in Nashville which thousands upon thousands of fans attended from all over the world to see hundreds of top artists perform concerts, and where they maintained booths for autograph sessions.
Dottie could not face the fact that all of her possessions were going to be seized. To her, they were not just things, they were treasures for which she had worked so hard all her life, and suddenly, they were going to be taken away! She felt helpless and dejected.
Out of desperation, she made the unfortunate and unwise decision to attempt to hide her personal property—at Stor-N-Lok on Trousdale Lane, and additional items at Ozburn-Hessey Moving Company on Powell Avenue. She had furniture from her mansion brought to her apartment on the second floor of Wessex Towers, and had stored and attempted to conceal additional pieces of furniture and boxes of personal property on the tenth floor at Wessex Towers.
First American Bank conducted a foreclosure sale at the Williamson County Courthouse on June 26, 1990, at which time First American, being the only bidder at the sale, bid in the sum of $800,000 as credit against Dottie’s massive debt. When she arrived at the courthouse to witness her beloved mansion auctioned off, Dottie was stylishly dressed in a low-cut, leopard-patterned tight bodice, covered with a bright tangerine-hued jacket. Large earrings peeked through her blond-tinted, natural hair teased to gently frame her face. She wore large, white-rimmed dark glasses which accented her face without makeup. As a camera crew filmed, Dottie stood among a group of lawyers and businessmen around the courthouse steps, as the auctioneer sang out the funeral knell for her beloved home: “Going once, going twice, and this property has been sold!”
With a voice cracking with emotion, Dottie told the news reporter, “This had taken a toll; it’s the weakest I’ve ever felt.”
Upon the conclusion of the foreclosure sale, First American agreed to allow Dottie five weeks to vacate her residence, with this period to officially expire on July 31, 1990.
On July 19, Dottie West announced on national television that she was financially broke. “I didn’t want to go on TV with this, but Entertainment Tonight kept calling and calling,” she told reporter Robert K. Oermann. It was a decision Dottie would soon regret.
“I was so embarrassed when the show came on,” she said, “I had some friends over, and I just started cooking. I cooked and cooked and cooked.”
She was filmed as she sat on the edge of the white couch in her living room, with boxes filled with her possessions setting throughout the house. She wore jeans and a black tee shirt with a blue, red and white design on the front. With her natural hair now blond and slightly teased, with no makeup, she wore extremely large black earrings which hung to her shoulders. She looked stunned and dejected, her eyes cast downward most of the time. There were framed photographs propped up against the cushions around her as she stared pensively at one of the pictures.
Dottie’s friend Stephanie Gastley was present during the filming. She spoke of the occasion during an interview for this book. She recalled how “bad” she looked that day. She remembered that she appeared very sad. “She had been crying. . .without her makeup on,” she recalled, “and she looked like she had been defeated. She just didn’t look like Dottie West...”
A few days after the television special aired, Dottie told writer Robert K. Oermann, “These are just material things. I don’t love things. I love people.”
She wanted to end the questioning. She concluded the interview with “I’m pretty much packed. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She was physically showing the excessive strains of her inner pain. She was alarmingly stunned and lonely, with her usual glowing smile and brightness missing from her face. She projected the image of an abandoned child.
With no longer the glamorous image and the steel magnolia attitude of the past, Dottie West was a broken woman. Her pride had been taken away, and she was at her weakest moment. She felt as though she had been abandoned by her close friends, as well as her family.
An entry in her diary at this time stated, “No calls on coda-a-phone after 5 days gone? Nell is the only one from my family that has called since losing my home. WHO REALLY CARES ABOUT YOU—D.W.???”
She continued, in her own handwriting, “MO & family have not been around since Mother’s day. Haven’t seen May--?? I’ve been by there several times—no one home—Dale is with his Dad—seems Happy—working at Krogers and weekends with Bill and Brenda—Opry—E.T. Record Shop.
“Shelly—nor Garey—has even called for 6 to 8 wks.??”
She was a loving, giving, and caring person who was in excessive emotional pain. She began to deal with those feelings by delving into the lurid, unfocused world of drugs and alcohol. Her world was to become even more dismal.
The Best Little Whorehouse
Dolly, Dolly, Dolly!