Away from prying eyes, though, the torment was predictably unpredictable. As Dr Jekyll, the sober Glen Campbell was kind and funny, humble and warm; as the soused Mr Hyde, however, he was much more than a handful. Rebutting his protestations that a photograph taken from the neck-down in which he could be seen fast asleep wearing trousers soaked with urine was in fact an image of some other unfortunate, the newish Mrs Campbell replied “well he was wearing your clothes, then”. The problem of her husband never remembering the horrors of the night before was overcome by secretly taping one of his many drunken tirades. Turns out that voice of liquid velvet wasn’t always so pleasing after all.
“Many nights after a show we’d return to our hotel room hand in hand and make love, only for Glen to leave the room claiming he needed to talk to the band,” Kim Campbell wrote in her memoir Gentle On My Mind. “He’d come back hours later, barely able to walk. I’d help him to the bathroom, undress him, and put him to bed. Other times he returned to the room and forced me to listen to him pontificate for hours. On those nights I knew that coke was talking, and, believe me, though it’s nonsense, coke has a lot to say.”
Elsewhere in her remarkably wise book, she writes that “I fell into the role of caregiver, a role that I maintained for the rest of our relationship. I am glad for that role, I am ambivalent about that role, but it is a role I came to accept. Early on, I saw that someone needed to save this man from himself.” This statement, I think, is as poignant as any issued in song from the lips of Glen Campbell himself.
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