People - June 14, 1999

Against All Odds

Shania Twain has strange dreams. Sometimes the parents she lost in a car crash more than a decade ago, when she was still known by her given name, Eilleen, appear to guide or chide her. "I had a dream last night," Twain recounts, "where I was sleeping and my mother said, 'Okay, Eilleen, you have to get up now.' I pulled the covers off, and there was a video camera on my face. They were in my bedroom filming me, and I just couldn't believe that my mother would do this to me. I said, 'Mom, what's going on?' And she said, 'Did you forget? They're filming you today.'" Pondering the dream, Twain suggests, "sometimes you feel your career overruns your personal life."

"All I ever intended was to make a living at what I do," says Twain. "Everything I've achieved since then is above and beyond."

For the Grammy-grabbing singer known for her bare-belly-button wardrobe and relentless drive, the two might seem the same. Twain, whose childhood sleep often was disrupted by late-night club dates ("Eilleen," her mother would whisper as she awakened her, "you have to get up"), has been tirelessly touring the U.S. and Europe. Her third album, Come on Over, like her 1995 breakthrough CD, The Woman in Me, has sold more than 10 million copies and just spawned yet another Top 10 hit, "That Don't Impress Me Much." Those numbers put Twain, 33, in the same league as Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey -- and far above any previous country queen. "With Shania, I see progress," says June Carter Cash. "She has opened up a lot of space for future female country singers." Pivotal to Twain's crossover success is her husband and producer, Robert John "Mutt" Lange (for whom Twain wrote last year's smash single "You're Still the One").

A rock and roll veteran who has produced multiplatinum albums by Bryan Adams, Def Leppard and Michael Bolton, the South African Lange, 50, first spotted Twain in 1993 while watching one of her early videos. Smitten, he called her in Nashville from his London home, and the pair spent the next three months writing songs over the phone. By then the twice-divorced Lange was determined to stay single, but Twain turned him around. "I had never seen Mutt like that before," says Bolton. "He was as focused on Shania as he was on his work. He just had an instinct that she was it for him." The instinct was mutual. Recalls Twain's sister Carrie-Ann Brown, 31, who lives in Huntsville, Ont.: "She said to me, 'He's the one.' There wasn't a question in her mind from the beginning."

The couple, who married in December 1993, nine months after that first phone call, are rarely seen together. Lange is notoriously publicity-shy: In a recent preemptive strike against the press, he bought the rights to nearly every photograph ever taken of him. "He doesn't want to be a celebrity, he just wants to be a producer," says Twain, whose latest collaboration with Lange is the single "You've Got a Way" from the Notting Hill soundtrack. "So he avoids the spotlight. That's why people think he's a recluse." Her demanding touring schedule also keeps the couple out of the camera's way. "We're apart more than we're together," says Twain. "It's very, very difficult. Sometimes I think, in five to 10 years, when I'm not traveling as much, what's it going to be like then. It's that scenario when one or both of a couple retire, and then they don't know what to do with each other. They're together too much." But since Twain and Lange don't have that problem, people speculate. "I get a call every few days from someone who has heard they have broken up," says Mercury Records Nashville president Luke Lewis. "I would be totally shocked if it happened."

By now, Twain must be as accustomed to swirling gossip and sniping as she is to sold-out shows. Her revealing stage costumes and pop-rock bent make her a predictable target for the country establishment. "I draw my own lines of what I think is too extreme," says Twain of the sexy outfits that included this Grammy Awards shocker. The impoverished childhood she relates in interviews has been challenged by those who knew her then. Her claim to North American Indian heritage (in 1991 she changed her name to Shania, the Ojibwa word for "I'm on my way") has been mocked. And even the saddest and most courageous part of her story -- the real-life Party of Five that began when, at 22, she returned home to rear her younger siblings after her parents were killed in a traffic accident -- is disparaged by some.

The singer's complicated odyssey began in Windsor, Ont., in 1965, where she was born Eilleen Regina Edwards, the second of three children of Clarence Edwards and his wife, Sharon. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and Eilleen moved with her mother and two sisters -- Carrie-Ann and Jill -- to Timmins, a gold-mining town 500 miles north of Toronto. In 1971, Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa forester and mining prospector. Together the couple had two sons, Mark and Darryl, and Jerry adopted Eilleen and her sisters and later got them membership in his First Nation tribe. "My dad's side of the family was the side we grew up with," says Twain. "So it was the Indians that were really our family."

That made Twain's biological father the odd man out. "We maybe saw him three times," says Carrie-Ann. "We don't even know him." With Jerry at the head of the household and frequently between jobs, the family often lived on the brink of poverty. "As a girl, I would go snaring rabbits for food," says Twain. "I'd go hunting [for moose] with my dad in the bush. The basics in our lives were different from a lot of the basics in our white friends' lives." As an example, Twain, who moved with the family from Timmins to nearby Sudbury (pop. 92,000) at age 8, recalls a time when a friend slept over. "She went into the fridge the next morning, got the cereal out and started pouring herself a tall glass of milk plus milk in her cereal. It was such an indulgence in my eyes. So I grabbed the glass and said, 'You can't have that. We have to share.'"

written by -- Jeremy Helligar

-- Natasha Stoynoff in Timmins, Jennifer Longley in New York City, Beverly Keel in Nashville, Julie Jordan in Los Angeles, Helena Bachmann in Tour-de-Peilz and Josie Ballenger in Johannesburg

This is a shortened version of a story from the June 14, 1999 edition of People magazine.