Kenny Rogers died at home on the night of March 20, 2020. He was 81, under hospice care, with his family around him. Because of the pandemic, the family could only hold a small private service and promised fans a public celebration of his life at a later date.
Two days later, a woman who had not been married to Kenny Rogers for 27 years spoke with Closer Weekly about him. Marianne Gordon, the actress many fans remember from Hee Haw, was 74. She told the magazine that it was very upsetting just to start talking about him, and she fought back tears as she did.
Nobody would have blamed her for keeping her distance. Their marriage began in 1977 and ended in 1993, and she admitted the ending had been devastating. Kenny Rogers remarried in 1997, to Wanda Miller, and stayed with her for the rest of his life. Yet Marianne Gordon used that interview to remember the man she had loved, not the divorce.
The Day She Walked Through the Room
To understand what Marianne Gordon meant to Kenny Rogers, it helps to go back to 1981. Kenny was riding high after “Lady,” the Lionel Richie song that had become one of the biggest records of its time. Lionel Richie was now producing Kenny’s next album, Share Your Love.
Songwriters Steve Dorff and Marty Panzer had a ballad called “Through the Years.” Dorff has said the two of them wrote it at his piano in about 15 minutes, while they waited for dinner. Marty Panzer wrote the words because he felt there were endless songs about falling in love and losing love, but almost none about the quiet joys of a long relationship.
The song did not find a home easily. According to Steve Dorff, Liberty Records president Jim Mazza had already pitched it to Kenny Rogers, and Kenny passed. Then Lionel Richie, who loved the song and was thinking of recording it himself, came to Kenny’s house for a song meeting. Kenny was not liking anything he heard. So Richie played the demo of “Through the Years” to show the kind of song he had in mind.
That was when Marianne Gordon walked through the room. She heard the chorus, went straight over to her husband, and told him, in Dorff’s telling, “You’re recording that one.”
He did. “Through the Years” went on Share Your Love, came out as a single in December 1981, and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. Kenny Rogers later counted it among the defining songs of his career. Dorff has admitted he has heard more than one version of how the song reached Kenny, and this is the one he chose to tell in his own book.
1981 was also the year Marianne and Kenny welcomed their son, Christopher Cody Rogers. A song about love that lasts arrived in the same year as their child.
“For 17 of 21 Years”
For 17 of 21 years, every day, he was so sweet.
That was how Marianne Gordon summed up her life with Kenny Rogers. She said she always felt his full attention was on her. When someone wanted something from him, he would look her in the eye and leave the decision to her.
She described him as easy to live with. He was nearly always in a good mood, he could laugh at things, and fame never changed who he was. She also said she had always trusted him, and that his famous onstage flirting with Dolly Parton never made her uncomfortable.
The Years That Were Harder
Marianne Gordon did not pretend the ending was easy. She said that after Kenny Rogers turned 50, she felt she no longer had his full attention, though he still seemed to want her there. He told her he felt like he was going through a midlife crisis, and that his career was fading.
She shared one detail fans rarely hear. Kenny Rogers had a recurring nightmare in which he walked out to perform and found nobody in the audience. For one of the most successful singers of his generation, it was a dream that kept coming back.
What She Chose to Keep
Still, Marianne Gordon said that while the end of a relationship like theirs can be devastating, there were many wonderful memories, and those were the ones she liked to think about. They had raised a sweet son together, she said. Christopher was 38 by then.
Her phone had been ringing, too. Friends kept calling to remind her of the kind things Kenny Rogers had quietly done for people they knew, including buying a car for a friend’s mother. She said she could not say enough good things about him.
A few weeks after his death, Rascal Flatts honored Kenny Rogers on a CMT tribute special and then released their own recording of one of his songs. Gary LeVox said it was the only song that felt right. It was “Through the Years.”
Steve Dorff has said fans still tell him what that song means to them. Once, after he performed it at an event, a woman told him it had been her late mother’s favorite song, one she sang to her children every day. A line from it is on her mother’s gravestone.
The marriage between Kenny Rogers and Marianne Gordon did not last. The song she heard from across a room in 1981 did, and so did the good years she chose to remember.
Do you remember where you were the first time you heard “Through the Years”? Who comes to mind when you hear it now?