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The three-minute melodramas of Tammy Wynette's songs always seemed pretty tame compared with her life--one kidnapping, four divorces, dozens of hospitalizations for everything from addictive drugs to intestinal disorders. For the last two years of her life, she'd been fed through a catheter. But her death last spring took it to a whole other level. The night of April 5, she felt a burning in her leg; her husband, George Richey, called her doctor, Wallis Marsh, 500 miles away in Pittsburgh. Marsh urged him to take her to the emergency room. Richey didn't. The next afternoon she was dead, but even as rumors of her death leaked out, no one called 911. When middle daughter Tina Jones showed up at her mother's house at 7:30, people she didn't know were milling about to get a peek at her mother's body, on the couch under a blanket. "It was like they covered up a dog lying in the yard," she says.
But was that the only cover-up? Three of Wynette's four daughters think something's rotten in the city of Nashville, Tenn. Last week Jones, Georgette Smith and Jackie Daly--none fathered by Richey--filed a $50 million wrongful-death suit against Marsh and Richey. Marsh attributed the 55-year-old singer's death to blood clots in her lungs. But the suit alleges that her addiction to the narcotic painkillers he prescribed and Richey administered contributed to her death. Jones adds that Richey, Wynette's fifth husband and longtime manager, "promoted her use of drugs." Neither Marsh nor Richey will comment, but Richey's lawyer faxed a statement to NEWSWEEK saying his client "devoted his life to caring for Tammy... The medical care that she received... extended her life and permitted her to do what she loved." Marsh's lawyer says Wynette's pain medication was "not only appropriate but required by recognized standards of medical practice." The daughters, he adds, are "making a media circus out of their mother's memory."
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The night Wynette died, Marsh flew to Nashville, arrived at 2 a.m.--the body was still in the house--and signed her death certificate. "He obviously didn't want Tammy to be examined by another doctor," says the daughters' lawyer Edward Yarbrough. Marsh's lawyer says this is "inaccurate." Medical examiner Bruce Levy released Wynette's body to the funeral home without knowing about the painkillers. Had he known, Levy says, "we would at least have obtained a blood sample." In February, Levy refused the daughters' request for an exhumation, but he's now reconsidering.
Are the daughters just in it for the cash? They've gotten next to nothing from their mother's estate. Daly, a mother of four, works in a jewelry store; Smith, mother of two, is a nurse, and Jones stays home with her two kids. But Daly says it's not about the money: "You could fill a building with money and your mom still wouldn't walk through the door." And there's been bad blood between the daughters and their stepfather for years. "Richey isolated us from Mom," says Smith. "He wouldn't let us talk to her on the phone, and he wouldn't tell her we'd called." In 1989, says Smith, Wynette was addicted to painkillers and Richey asked the daughters to come to an intervention. But when it began, Richey told Wynette, " 'Sweetheart, I can't believe they would do this to you, and I can't be a party to it'," she recalled. "And he left."
The tragedy that's dogged this family could fill volumes--and it will. Daly now has a book contract that she got with a proposal titled "Tammy Wynette: The True Story of My Mother's Troubled Life and Senseless Death." Smith's father, singer George Jones, almost died in a car wreck last month. In the age of Garth Brooks, you can't make country songs out of this stuff anymore--morbid is for rappers. And anyway, Tammy's not around to sing it.
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