Part 2
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And then the best line in the whole interview, possibly the best line she's ever given in one: "I don't know if I'm supporting them or they're supporting me." A beat later: "We've worked out real well for each other through the years."
No defensiveness, no lecture about body image, no apology. Just a woman who has made peace with her own architecture.
"I'm comfortable with who I am and how I am." Then the self-diagnosis, delivered like a weather report: "I have a very outgoing personality and I just kind of can't get enough of anything, so I just kind of overdo everything."
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So Why Her, and Not the Rest of Them?
Quick context, in case you're fuzzy on the timeline: she graduated from high school in 1964, and by then the plan was already locked. She was going to be a star.
Musically, she came from somewhere real. The music runs on her mother's side of the family, and that's not a small thing. But a lot of people in that family had the gift — and only one of them got on the bus.
Her own explanation isn't talent, which is what makes it worth listening to. "Some of my brothers and sisters sing and write lots better than I do." What she had instead was personality. "I was never afraid of people. I'd just kind of get out there and hang myself if I had to. Just jump in the water."
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And the other half of it, which she says with zero ego attached: right place, right time.
Four Paper Bags From the Same Grocery Store
The detail I need you to hold onto is the luggage.
She graduated from high school in Sevier County, Tennessee, on a Friday night in 1964. The next morning she got on a Greyhound bus headed to Nashville.
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She'd taken all her clothes, some of them dirty. And here's how she describes the packing: "All my matching luggage — like four paper bags from the same grocery store."
Which brings us to the laundromat, and the laundromat is the part you're going to tell other people about. It had a name, and the name is flawless: the Wishy-Washy Laundromat. She went outside while her clothes were washing and stood around looking at the city she'd moved to less than a day earlier.
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Then a good-looking guy pulled over, and they started talking. Two years later they were married. Thirty-eight years together, thirty-six of them married — and she sums the entire thing up in five words: "It's been wishy-washy ever since."
The Secret, If You Want to Call It That
Naturally, he asks for the secret to a marriage that long in show business, where that basically doesn't happen. Her first answer is a joke, and it's a good one: "I stay gone." Long separations.
Then the real answer, and it's much less quotable and much more useful. "He's my best friend, and we're not in the same business."
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Just enough in common to genuinely enjoy each other's company. Different enough that it keeps being interesting. That's it. That's the whole trick, from a woman who has been married to the same man since the mid-sixties while living a life that eats most marriages for breakfast.
The Lines You'll Be Repeating
"No, just horny Baptist." "When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there." "It would amaze you to know how much it costs to make a person look this cheap." "I don't know if I'm supporting them or they're supporting me." "I'm a showgirl, but I don't go around talking about it." "It's been wishy-washy ever since."
That's the transcript. The transcript is not the interview.
What You're Really Getting Here
Strip out the wigs and the jokes and the aw-shucks delivery, and what you're left with is a woman who tells you exactly how she got here and doesn't sand off a single edge on the way. She was poor and says so without asking for sympathy. She was raised in a religion that told her she was damned and she says that too, with a hymn. She was fifteen and wanted to look like the woman everyone called trash, and she's still chasing that same idea of glamour, out loud, at full volume.
Every uncomfortable question in this interview is one she could dodge. The poverty. The religion. The face. The body. The marriage. She answers all of them plainly, and then she makes you laugh, and the laugh is not a shield. It's just how she talks.
You'll come away with a handful of quotes and one real takeaway: being fully known and fully artificial at the same time is not a contradiction. It's a discipline. She's been practicing it since she was fifteen, in a laundromat town, with peroxide from the drugstore and four paper bags from the same grocery store.
Watch it, then come find me and tell me you didn't rewind the trash-lady part twice.
