Meeting her, you almost immediately put away all the Wanda Jackson-type questions, unwilling to risk a teenage girl's most powerful repellents: the uprolled eyes, the wrinkled nose, the long, disgusted "eeeeeeeww." It's best not to even think of father Wilbur whipping your ass in the parking lot after you cross some invisible line. The other questions bouncing around -- Don't you miss school? Your pals? What about the prom? -- seem ludicrous to the extreme. This cool creature doesn't miss school. If she did, she'd be there. "I really don't think I'm missing out on anything," she avers. "I don't think I will, either, because I'm achieving a lot right now. " She pauses. "It's really neat."
Here you run up against the streamlining effect fame often has on a story: Although they don't directly address it anymore, the family has been home-schooling LeAnn for years, way before Blue made it big. It turns out that worries about the psychic cost of not being in a warm, fuzzy public school environment are misguided: LeAnn doesn't miss it, because for her it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. When her fame grew beyond neighborhood status, a group of predatory girls decided she was a stuck-up little thing and instituted a campaign of harassment. Barbara Rice, Rimes's booking agent for 1995, remembers it well.
"It was a necessity," she says of removing Rimes from public schools. "They egged her locker. They even tried to fit her into her locker, and they threatened her. These weren't gang kids, either -- they were the children of professionals, and they did it out of sheer jealousy." It's not the kind of history that inspires a lot of retrospective mooning.
"Most of my friends are in the business," Rimes explains now, dropping a well-practiced line about how most of them are between the ages of 20 and 80. "I've basically grown up in the adult world all my life, and I really don't have any friends my age since I've gotten out of public schooling. I don't really mind," she says, perhaps thinking about how different your locker can appear when someone's trying to force your head into it.
And love, marriage, baby carriage, etc.? Rimes, although vulnerable to crushes, isn't missing, or planning, anything. "I can't really meet anybody right now," she says, looking just a touch embarrassed. "I don't have a boyfriend, and I'm probably too busy for anybody right now. Hopefully, in the next two or three years, it might come."
"I want to have everything a normal person would have, basically," she explains. "Hopefully, one day I'll be able to slow down and even start a family."
That might take a while, given the stylistic goals that Rimes has set for herself. Her first -- and perhaps greatest -- love is for Broadway. "Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand were probably the first two people I started listening to; Barbra Streisand has been a huge influence on me. Patsy Cline was the first country music I ever listened to," Rimes says, going down the list with practiced ease. "I love all kinds of music, but I consider myself country, [although] it's really neat that Blue actually crossed over to pop."
Her thinking is long term. "I love pop music," she admits, "but I want to stick with country as long as I can. That's what I've grown up on, and that's what I listen to. I'd like to be like Kenny Rogers -- do major Christmas shows, like a Broadway musical thing. Maybe even Broadway, when I'm in my forties or something. I've always wanted to act."
"Country fans -- at least originally -- have the most allegiance," says Bill Mack, a country DJ legend and the man who wrote "Blue" back in 1959, held onto it for three and a half decades, then passed it along to Rimes after hearing her sing. "But they'll drop you in a second if they think they're being snubbed. I've seen it."
Therein lies the danger, Mack warns: "The glamour goes fast because of the fatigue. People want to see you, and if you don't make time for them, they'll think you're stuck up, and that's fatal."
The physical toll exacted by constant performing was something Belinda and Wilbur Rimes had resolved would not fall on their daughter; almost everyone who's been around the Rimeses has mentioned Wilbur's constant reminders to LeAnn that none of this is necessary if she doesn't want to do it, that they can go home anytime. Unfortunately, Belinda and Wilbur seem to have been caught a bit flat-footed themselves. "It's taken off real fast," Wilbur says, denying that he would have preferred it to go more slowly. "That's good, it's what the superstars want. In the music business, everybody wants to be on top."