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Interview-Page 2. "She's Still The One" By David Handelman
The love of her life
People have sniped at Twain's relationship with her husband from the
get-go, suspicious of the whirlwind romance, the age difference (at 50,
he's 16 years her senior), and the long separations, convinced she's merely
Lange's music puppet. Her marriage-slash-partnership with him has
become regular fodder for speculation in the supermarket tabloids.
Most recently, a "Shania Twain Divorce Shocker" cover story in the National
Enquirer reported that when she returned to her hometown of Timmins, Ontario,
this past summer and saw a man she'd dated for five years when she was
in her 20s, he fell back in love with her and suddenly deserted the mother
of his children--and that Twain's marriage was sure to end.
"What bothers me the most is that people take [tabloids] seriously,"
Twain says. She admits that she did briefly see an ex-boyfriend the
tabloid unearthed--and his girlfriend--when in Timmins and that the two
did split up afterward. "But it had nothing to do with me," she insists.
"It's not fair for innocent people to be exposed and harassed like that."
As for Lange, Twain says he doesn't care about the insinuations about their
marriage. "It's not new," she says. "I think people don't want it
to work, because we're so successful as a team, because of the age difference,
because of the fact that we work together."
Twain has never had a conventional love life. "Growing up, I
was serious about my career and my life," she says. "Men were always
secondary. I never put a man first, ever." She only met her husband
through what might be termed a very expensive video dating service:
Lange saw her 1993 video for "What Made You Say That" and called her from
England. During an extended phone courtship, he encouraged her to
record more of her own songs. When they finally met in person, it
didn't take long for them to fall in love. They spent their first six months
together traveling around Europe and collaborating on what would become
The Woman In Me, a sort of honeymoon album. They married in December
1993.
"We are definitely a good example of the saying 'opposites attract,'"
says Twain. "We're one of those couples where, if my inclination
is to turn right, his is to turn left. If we order water at a restaurant,
he'll say 'avec gas' [with bubbles] and I'll say 'sans gas' [without]."
But when they argue about, say, which single to release, "we just end up
talking it through."
"Because he's more experienced, a lot of people had the opinion he
was in control of the situation," says Danny Goldberg, former head of Mercury
Records Group. "But after meeting them, I realized she's very much
his equal. He's doing her bidding as much as she is doing his." "It's
a really healthy relationship," attests Luke Lewis, the president of Twain's
label, Mercury Nashville. "They're both very forceful, bright people,
and they respect each other." He believes Twain's biggest hit, "You're
Still The One," is a thinly veiled reaffirmation of their love the naysayers.
The key lyric about their relationship might be "I can't always be
the rock that you see," from "The Woman In Me." Lange, says Twain,
taught her how to be vulnerable. "There's something very settling
about finding the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with,"
she says. "I became much more relaxed. The challenge of finding
someone to understand me was over. When you're striving to become
something in life, you have to be this liberated, strong woman. Now
I don't have to be so independent to feel I'm worth something, and that's
a big change."
Twain says she didn't feel fully comfortable in her relationship with
Lange until she had achieved her own financial success. "There was
no way I was going to enjoy life beyond my own personal means," she says.
"He thought it was ridiculous. But I worked my butt off, and now
I'm independent financially. I can help my family with my money,
give to charity with my money." During her last tour, some of the proceeds
from every concert were donated to local charities that aid hungry kids.
The connection is intensely personal. "I was that hungry kid," she
explains. "My goal is to save kids the humiliation, the anguish of
feeling inferior." And backstage after every two-hour-plus performance,
Twain amiably worked her way through a line of dozens of well-wishers,
including an autistic child and a jaundiced, dying
man on a stretcher whose last wish was to meet her. "A lot of
artists
[wouldn't meet with a dying fan], and I can understand why," she says.
"But
I've been through enough in my life that I can relate to people very
well. I'm not tough. I'm strong. And I think there's a very
big difference."
From rags to riches
If Twain's life story were a TV movie no one would believe it.
"We had a fairly unstable upbringing," she says, adding, " 'fairly' is
probably a mild word." She was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on August
28, 1965, in Windsor, Ontario, the second of three daughters of Sharon
and Clarence Edwards, a railroad engineer. Her parents divorced when
Eilleen was a toddler; Sharon moved with her girls to Timmins, a woodsy
mining town 500 miles north of Toronto, and married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa
Indian who scratched out a living as a forester and prospector. He
adopted Eilleen and her sisters, and he and Sharon added two sons.
Twain grew up regarding Jerry as her father; even friends only learned
of the existence of her biological father after the Timmins newspaper exposed
it a few years ago. (The tabloids then implied she had kept her "real"
father a secret to exploit her adopted father's Indian heritage.)
When she was eventually offered a record deal, she decided to change her
name to make it more business-y. "Shania" is an Ojibwa name that
means "I'm on my way."
The road from Timmins to Nashville was, as a country singer might put
it, paved with heartache. Jerry was regularly out of work but too
proud to accept and form of public assistance; Sharon was often depressed.
"Most kids feel inferior if they don't have the right jeans on," says Twain.
'I was way beyond that. I was worried about what was in my lunch.
Nobody knew we were hungry, and I did everything I could to hide it," often
bringing a mustard sandwich to school. She remembers referring to
the rich as "roast beef families." (Ironically, now that she can
finally afford roast beef, turns out she's sworn off the stuff. Following
Lange's lead, she's become a vegetarian. "Spiritually," she says,
"I think there is something odd about eating another anything.")
Her older sister, Jill, left home at 14, making Eilleen, then 12, the
oldest by default. "We were probably in the heart of our difficult
times as a family," Twain recalls. "I had to take control and was
really an anchor in keeping the family together." Twain's talent proved
the family's salvation. At 3, she would sing along with the local
diner's jukebox. Her parents, especially her mother, encouraged her,
dragging her out to perform in community centers, senior citizen homes,
even local clubs. "Our mom had a lot of faith in her," saysTwain's
younger sister, Carrie-Ann Brown, 31. "She was always on the phone
trying to book things, taking her to talent contests, traveling out of
town to shows, getting her lessons. And Shania would always be singing--even
just walking down the street. I'd be embarrassed."
By 8, Eilleen was making money by performing; by 10, she was writing
her own songs. Her first two titles--"Is Love a Rose?" and "Just
Like the Storybooks"--are evocative of a girl wondering whether the promises
of songs could ever come true for her. She fantasized about being
kidnapped by Frank Sinatra, who to her epitomized showbiz wealth.
"I wanted to escape this life I had," Twain says, "and I knew the only
honest way of doing it would be to be kidnapped. Because I'd have
felt so guilty if I'd ever left my family willingly."
Since Sinatra never came, "I learned to be a survivor," she says.
"You learn that you cannot depend on anybody else to make things happen
for you." Through it all, she insists, she never resented her parents.
"It's not like they were never there. They wanted things to be right.
The fact that they sometimes couldn't feed us must have torn them to pieces."
On weekends during high school--where, she says, she was an average student
who spent a lot of time locked in a music cubicle writing songs--and after
graduation, she played in bar bands that covered top-40 and rock songs.
The audiences were full of drunks, but she didn't mind. "There's
something more moving about music than anything else in life for me," she
says. "It's like a drug. I spent my teen years being
high on music."
Music has seen her through hard times, and it remains a vital source
of inner strength. She calls it her therapy. "I've never seen
a shrink,"
(Continued on Page 146)
Twain says, "even at times when I think maybe I should have.
I don't want to
sound weird, but music can do more for me than any person ever could."
Her life changed forever in 1987, when the car her parents were
driving collided head-on with a logging truck. At first, 'I was kind
of numb," Twain says. Though not a religious person, she says what
helped keep her going was the belief that her parents "had gone to a better
place." Since she was 21, custody of Carrie-Ann, then 18, and half-brothers
Mark, 13, and Darryl, 14, fell to her. "I had practically raised
them anyway," she says, but still, "it was a lot for me to deal with.
It now seems like another lifetime--like I'm talking about another person."
There was some insurance money, and Twain landed a job performing regularly
at Deerhurst, an Ontario resort that staged Vegas-style shows. She
started earning about $ 30,000 a year, enough to buy a car and a small
house. The plumbing didn't always work, but it was a definite step up.
"We weren't starving," she says. "I actually look back at that time
very fondly."
One recent tabloid article suggested that the main who ran Deerhurst
paid for her teeth to be fixed and put her up in a condo. "It's completely
false if they're insinuating I had an affair with him," Twain says.
"What probably happened was that I needed a raise because I was getting
my teeth done. But I certainly paid my own dental bills.:"
As for the condo, she said, "My parents had just died, and until our house
was ready, I was allowed to keep my family in one of the units there for
a couple of weeks. [The tabloids] make it sound like I was the young
mistress locked away in the penthouse!"
It was at Deerhurst that Twain was discovered, thanks to an old family
friend who had a record business contact in Nashville. It's also
where she confronted her long-standing shyness about her body and bared
her navel for the first time: playing the Indian in the resort's
Village People tribute. "I went through a stage as a teenager where I resented
the fact that there was a difference between men and women," Twain says.
" I just wanted to be a person. I was very athletic, and I would
always strap my breasts down so that when I was on the football field,
the guys were watching me play, not watching me bounce. On a hot
summer day, I'd wear something over my bathing suit, and the when I'd get
into the lake up to my knees, I'd throw it off and dive in."
But being backstage at the resort, "I just got used to seeing people
be so comfortable with themselves. Having to change in front of all
these girls, I got forced into just getting over it." To a point.
She may now be a video and photo-shoot sex kitten with a navel-barring,
leopard-print wardrobe (which recently helped land her on People e magazine's
worst-dressed list, alongside Mariah Carey and Madonna), but underneath,
she's still something of a prude. In the video for "Man! I
Feel Like A Woman!" she wore a short skirt--with bicycle shorts underneath.
"I'm still very conservative when I'm not performing," she insists.
"Like on the beach, I don't like people looking at my body."
Twain says she brings the same approach to her songwriting:
Her songs, she insists, are not deeply personal or autobiographical.
"I'm not that dramatic," she says. "I don't feel the nature to communicate
my innermost feelings--and they wouldn't get it, so what's the point.
I only want to release music that people relate to. That's my thrill."
It was Lange who extracted from her the most personal song she's recorded,
the brief "God Bless the Child," the royalties from which Twain has pledged
to children's charities. "Originally," she says, "that song was just
'Hallelujah, God bless the child who suffers.' I used to sing that
line all the time when I was alone. I'd take long walks and just
sing it out loud, let it echo. That pacified me." "One day I was
singing it, and Mutt heard it and said, 'That's such a beautiful melody,
what is that?' and I said, 'It's nothing.' But eventually he
convinced me to record it. After I did, I let go of it. I shared
it, so I don't get the same thing out of it anymore."
So, she says, she is keeping most her other personal song snippets
to herself. "There are some things I won't want to share."
SETTLING DOWN
Despite her unprecedented success, Twain seems remarkable clear-eyed,
devoid
of the extreme that tends to infect superstars. "I don't have
a lot of highs and lows," she says. "Even when wonderful things happen
in my career, I think to myself, 'What's the matter with you? You should
be doing cartwheels.' But it doesn't really get me excited.
I don't ever get into irrational states; I don't have angry explosions."
"She's so controlled and focused, it's spooky," says Mercury Nashville's
Lewis. "It's probably a throwback to being a hungry kid and not wanted
to ever be hungry again. It almost becomes a curse, because you don't
sit back and enjoy your success."
Twain may finally do just that, now making a home of her own in her
Swiss "freakin' château!" as she calls it. "I have privacy
there," she says. "No one seems that interested in other people's business.
I really like being normal, going to the grocery store. People know
who I am, but they aren't interested in autographs."
She positively burbles about her new home's mix of bucolic--there are
cows, sheep, and roosters nearby, and a stable she just fixed up for her
five horses--and worldly. "I think a lot of Europe is like a time
warp," she says. "They've managed to progress with the rest of the
world, yet they've maintained a culture that they fight for. Kids
still play freely in the streets her till dark."
Having all those rooms to fill in her new home has made her think about
starting a family of her own. "It's certainly something I'm considering,"
she says. "This is a beautiful place to raise a kids." But
it's not a decision that she's taking lightly. "I realize what's
involved," she says,"and that it isn't all fun. There's a lot of
heartache in having kids. You're lucky if they're healthy, first of all.
And who knows what is to come after that?" She's also concerned that
the demands of her career would
interfere. "It's challenging when you're not settled. I
know from my sisters how all-consuming having children is. They tell
me all the time: 'Hey--you can never wait too long!' "
Next year she hopes to release another album, plus a Christmas album.
"A lot of people think we have all these tricks up our sleeve," she says.
"You know what? The trick is hits! If you have a hit song,
then you have a career carpet to ride on. Without it, the carpet
is just not gonna float." Though she seems the most natural celebrity to
write an autobiography, she says, "I'm not sure I ever will. I can't
tell my story without revealing my family's, and I don't think that's really
fair. My career has exposed them so much already. We're just
so, I don't know if simple is the right word, but we're northern Ontario
people, and I don't think we'll ever be
accustomed to the Hollywood thing." Speaking of Hollywood, she's
been offered many movie scripts, but so far she has shied away. "I'm
kind of afraid to try acting," she admits, "because I don't know if I'd
be good at it, and I don't like doing anything I'm not good at."
But given her determination, she'll likely end up being good at anything
she sets her mind to. "She always knew what she wanted, and when
she wanted it," says her sister Carrie-Ann. "She's always driving
toward something, her mind is always going, it never stops. She's
always been that way." During her concert at the Winnipeg Arena in Manitoba,
a quiet section of the audience was sitting down in their seats.
Twain ran around the stage demanding they stand back up. "Come on!"
she hollered. "No lazy butts allowed!" And as with everything
else in her life, those 15,000 butts were soon doing exactly what Shania
Twain wanted.
Thanks to Carrie!
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